China’s annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the most-watched television broadcast in the world with 79 percent of China’s live TV audience last year, became a stage for the country’s humanoid robotics industry to demonstrate its rapid advance. Four startups — Unitree Robotics, Galbot, Noetix, and MagicLab — showcased their robots across the programme’s opening sketches, making the Lunar New Year celebration as much an industrial policy statement as a cultural event.
The performances ranged from technically demanding to deliberately crowd-pleasing. Over a dozen Unitree humanoids executed sophisticated martial arts sequences involving swords, poles, and nunchucks alongside child performers — including a striking imitation of China’s “drunken boxing” style, where robots replicated the intentionally unsteady, falling-and-recovering movements of the art form. This segment demonstrated advances in multi-robot coordination and fault recovery, the ability for a robot to rise independently after a fall.
Noetix’s four humanoids appeared in a comedy sketch alongside human actors, while MagicLab robots performed a synchronised dance with human performers during a number titled We Are Made in China — a title that left little ambiguity about the performance’s industrial subtext.
This use of robotics is far from accidental. China has positioned humanoid robots at the centre of its AI-plus manufacturing strategy, betting that automation-driven productivity gains will counterbalance demographic pressures from an ageing workforce. The CCTV broadcast has historically served as a platform to highlight national technological milestones — space achievements, drones, and now robotics.
