Humanoid robotics: China's robots join the dance

On February 17, 2026, in front of more than 700 million viewers, some thirty Unitree humanoid robots perform backflips, wield nunchucks and string together parkour moves on the stage of the Chinese New Year Gala, the largest television broadcast in the world. The show, named "WuBot" (武BOT), stages G1 and H2 robots fighting alongside students from the Tagou martial arts school, in a millimeter-precise ballet blending staff, sword and "drunken boxing." A year earlier, at the 2025 Gala, the same robots stuck to a measured choreography, dancing the yangko with handkerchiefs.

The contrast is striking. What looks like New Year's entertainment is in reality a demonstration of technological power addressed to the entire world. Behind the acrobatics lies a message: China is no longer content to manufacture the robots. It wants to prove that it has mastered them.

In one year, everything changed.

In 2025, the Gala's robots performed a cautious folk dance. In 2026, they sprint at 4 meters per second, execute aerial backflips 3 meters high, and clash with staffs live on air, a few centimeters from children. For robotics specialists, the leap is spectacular. Going from a traditional choreography to freestyle parkour with real-time object manipulation means clearing several technological tiers in twelve months: dynamic balance control, fine grasping with new articulated hands, coordinating clusters of robots in open environments.

But the most telling part is the choice of showcase. It is not a private lab unveiling these advances, it is state television, in front of half the country. The signal is political. Xi Jinping personally visited Fourier Intelligence in December 2023, then AgiBot in April 2025. No American president has done anything comparable for a humanoid robotics company. In China, robots are not a research topic: they are a matter of state.

An existential necessity: when economic survival runs through robots

Why this urgency? Because China is aging at a dizzying pace. In 2022, for the first time since 1961, the country recorded more deaths than births. The UN's projections are unforgiving: by 2050, China's population will fall to 1.26 billion people, 40% of whom will be over 60. By 2100, it will be halved, at 633 million, with only 8% under the age of 15 and more than half seniors.

So China is not investing in robotics out of technological fascination. It is doing so out of vital necessity. Without robots, China's productive apparatus collapses. The humanoid robot is not a gadget: it is an existential answer to demographic decline, on the same footing as electric vehicles or semiconductors. And the playbook is the same: massive state support, a multiplication of players, price wars, dominance through volume.

The world's robot factory: the numbers that make your head spin

China already accounts for 90% of humanoid robots sold worldwide. In 2025, Unitree moved 5,500 units and now aims for 20,000 in 2026, with an IPO targeted at 7 billion dollars on Shanghai's STAR market. AgiBot, founded by a former Huawei "genius engineer," follows with 5,168 units and a targeted valuation of 6.4 billion. Fourier, backed by the SoftBank Vision Fund, focuses on healthcare and rehabilitation. And behind them, Galbot, Noetix, MagicLab and more than 150 other Chinese companies are developing humanoids.

Above all, China knows how to slash prices. A Unitree G1 robot costs 16,000 dollars. The price of a Citroën C3. On the very evening of the Gala, some models went on sale on the e-commerce platform JD.com: they sold out in minutes. More than 82% of the 300 global investment deals in robotics in 2025 took place in China.

Market estimates give a sense of the stakes. According to Goldman Sachs, the global market for humanoid robots could reach 38 billion dollars by 2035, compared with roughly 1.5 billion in 2024 according to Grand View Research. Morgan Stanley goes further: 5 trillion dollars by 2050, including the maintenance and services ecosystems. Figures that make your head spin and that echo the projections from the early days of the electric vehicle market, projections that reality has since surpassed.

The American brain, the Chinese body

Meanwhile, in the United States, Elon Musk promises "legions" of Optimus robots. But the facts are stubborn: Tesla did not reach its target of 5,000 units in 2025, a figure that each of the two Chinese leaders exceeded on its own. Musk himself acknowledged at the World Economic Forum that "China is very strong in AI, very strong in manufacturing, and will definitely be the toughest competition for Tesla," adding that he saw "no significant competitor outside of China."

The market is splitting into two hemispheres. On one side, the United States dominates the software intelligence: NVIDIA supplies the chips, Google DeepMind and OpenAI the AI models, and startups like Figure AI (valued at 39 billion dollars) lead the race for funding. On the other, China controls 63% of the humanoid hardware supply chain and crushes the competition in production. That is the paradox of this new industry: the brain is American, but the body is Chinese. And without the body, the brain is useless.

This pattern recalls that of electric vehicles, solar panels, batteries. Each time, the same sequence: the West invents the concept, China industrializes it and grabs the market. Except that this time, the stakes are of a different nature. A humanoid robot is not a car. It is a worker, a caregiver, potentially a soldier.

And where does Europe stand in all this?

Europe has neither China's industrial might nor America's war chests. But it would be wrong to think itself doomed to the role of spectator. Recent history offers grounds for hope. Neura Robotics, a German gem, develops cognitive humanoids intended for European industry. Medical and surgical robotics remains a field where Europe excels. The AI Act could offer a framework of trust that neither China nor the United States can claim. Indeed, a "Europe-certified" robot, designed in compliance with demanding safety and ethics standards, would naturally find its place in healthcare, personal assistance, sensitive environments.

This does, however, require shifting from defensive regulation to an offensive industrial strategy. Investing massively and quickly in research and industry, uniting the continent's players, attracting talent. The building blocks are there, but they remain scattered. If Europe wants to matter in this race, it will have to learn to assemble its strengths with the same determination and concentration of resources that once allowed France to create the CEA in its day. Time is short, but the window is not closed.

The cultural gap: why Asia embraces robots when the West fears them

There is a deeper factor, often overlooked, that explains the speed of adoption in Asia: culture. Studies published in Computers in Human Behavior and by Oxford Academic show that attitudes toward robots are radically different in East Asia and in the West. In Japan, steeped in Shintoism and animism, objects have a soul. Astro Boy and Doraemon are friends, not threats. In China, Buddhist and Confucian traditions integrate non-human entities into a single cosmic moral order. The idea that a machine could be a companion offends no one.

In the West, it is the opposite. The word "robot" itself was coined in 1921 in a Czech play where the machines end up rebelling and killing their masters. Ever since, Terminator, HAL 9000, The Matrix: the Western imagination is saturated with hostile machines. Cross-cultural psychology research confirms this divide: increasing a robot's human likeness lowers the comfort of Americans, but not that of the Japanese. The West sees the machine as a threat to human uniqueness; Asia sees it as a natural partner.

This difference is not trivial. It shapes the speed of regulation, adoption, investment. On the evening of the Gala, robots were put on sale online and bought within minutes by ordinary people. Imagine the same scene during the Super Bowl... Would the enthusiasm be the same, or would it be tempered by a diffuse unease, that of a culture which, deep down, has never trusted the machines it creates?

Creating in one's own image: the old anxiety and the Chinese mirror

This cultural divide is not merely a market factor. It reveals something far more fundamental about our relationship with creation. The West, heir to Genesis, conceives of creation in a vertical way: a single God fashions man in his image, and any imitation of that gesture amounts to sacrilege or Promethean defiance. The Golem, Frankenstein, Terminator: each time man creates a being in his likeness, punishment follows. To create in one's own image is to defy God. It is hubris.

Asian traditions tell a different story. In a cosmos where the vital breath circulates among all beings, animate and inanimate, the boundary between creature and creator does not have the same rigidity. The craftsman who shapes an automaton usurps nothing. He extends a natural order. Perhaps that is why 700 million Chinese watched robots do kung-fu with wonder, where a Western audience would probably have mixed fascination with apprehension.

This philosophical difference may well become a decisive geopolitical factor. Because to build a robotics industry, engineers and capital are not enough. You also need a society that accepts, that even desires, the presence of these new entities in its daily life. And on that invisible terrain, that of the collective imagination, China perhaps holds a lead that neither Silicon Valley's billions nor Brussels' regulations will be able to close.