China's Spring Gala Features Humanoid Robot Performances

China's annual CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the nation's most-watched television event, featured groundbreaking performances by humanoid robots from four leading tech companies, highlighting the country's push toward advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. Broadcast live on China Central Television during the 2026 Lunar New Year celebrations, the gala drew an estimated 677 million viewers across platforms, with clips garnering over 13.5 billion views afterward.

The event showcased robots from Unitree Robotics, Galbot, Noetix, and MagicLab in a series of interactive sketches and routines that blended technology with traditional cultural elements. Unitree's G1 and H2 models took center stage in a martial arts-themed performance called WuBOT, where more than a dozen robots executed complex movements alongside human actors and child performers. The robots demonstrated horse stances, flips, nunchaku routines, sword work, and elements of drunken boxing, emphasizing innovations in multirobot coordination, high-speed motion control, and fault recovery. In one segment, a robot appeared to fall and then autonomously recovered by spinning and jumping to its feet.