Box, run, crash: China's humanoid robot games show advances and limitations

The Guardian

9 hours ago

A quick left hook, a front kick to the chest, a few criss-cross jabs, and the crowd cheers. But it is not kickboxing prowess that concludes the match. It is an attempted roundhouse kick that squarely misses its target, sending the kickboxer from a top university team tumbling to the floor.
While traditional kickboxing comes with the risk of blood, sweat and serious head injuries, the competitors in Friday's match at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing faced a different set of challenges. Balance, battery life and a sense of philosophical purpose being among them.
The kickboxers, pint-sized humanoid robots entered by teams from leading Chinese technological universities, are part of a jamboree of humanoid events taking place at China's latest technology event. After spectators in the 12,000-seater National Speed Skating Oval, built for the 2022 Winter Olympics, stood for the Chinese national anthem on Friday morning, the government-backed games began.
'I came here out of curiosity,' said Hong Yun, a 58-year-old retired engineer, sat in the front row. Seeing the robots race was 'much more exciting than seeing real humans', Hong added.
The games put China's prowess in humanoid robotics, a technological field that has been pushed to the forefront of the country's artificial intelligence industry, on display. The hype machine is in full swing.
As well as kickboxing, humanoids participated in athletics, football and dance competitions. One robot had to drop out of the 1500m because its head flew off partway round the course. 'Keeping [the head] balanced while in movement is the biggest challenge for us,' said Wang Ziyi, a 19-year-old student from Beijing Union University, who was part of the team that entered the robot.
Ever since a troupe of humanoid dancing robots took the stage at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, a televised lunar new year's celebration viewed nearly 17bn times online, Beijing has been enthusiastically pushing the adoption of 'embodied AI' – an industry that was singled out in this year's government work report in March.
The social-media friendly events reflect a more serious geopolitical reality: an intensifying US-China technological competition that could reshape the frontiers of AI.
The technology has become a lightning rod for relations between the two countries. And while the US still has the lead on frontier research, owing in part to Washington's restrictions on the export of cutting-edge chips to China, Beijing is going all-in on real life applications, such as robotics.
Several cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have established 10bn yuan (£1bn) robotics industry funds. In January, the state-owned Bank of China announced plans for a 1trn yuan of financial support to the AI industry over the next five years.
'If there is an area where [Beijing] thinks that China is ahead, or could be positioned as a world leader, then they really want to draw attention to that area,' said Dr Kyle Chan, a researcher at Princeton University.
There is something strangely ominous about seeing jerky, human-like robots with two arms, two legs, and blank heads being dragged out of the ring to be recharged by their human handlers.
When it comes to humanoids, the Chinese industry has many advantages. Although US companies such as Tesla and Boston Dynamics are still seen as the overall market leaders, several Chinese firms such as UBTech and Unitree Robotics – which supplied the boxing robots in Friday's games – are catching up.
Tesla relies on China for many of the parts needed to build the company's physical humanoids. The US investment bank Morgan Stanley estimates that China-based supply chains produce robots at a third of the cost of non-China suppliers. 'It appears to be very difficult to entirely decouple from China in this space,' wrote Sheng Zhong, the bank's head of China industrials research, in a recent note.
As well as generating positive publicity on social media, China views humanoids as being part of the solution to the problems created by the country's ageing population and shrinking workforce. A recent article in People's Daily, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist party, said robots could offer practical and emotional support for older people. 'The vision of robot-assisted elderly care is not far away,' it said. Humanoid robots could also take the place of employees on factory lines as China tries to retrain and redeploy its workforce into more hi-tech jobs.
But for all the hype, there is a big gap between humanoids stumbling over footballs and reliably handling daily tasks. Safely interacting with vulnerable humans would be another leap. 'The home is probably one of the last places you'll ever find a humanoid robot because of safety,' said Chan. 'My general view on the whole humanoid explosion … is honestly a bit of scepticism.'
Two of the biggest barriers to the technology being useful outside of PR stunts are the complexity of the human-built environment and the hands needed to navigate it.
While other forms of AI, such as large language models, can be trained using reams of digital data, there are much smaller datasets available for training an algorithm on how to walk through crowded restaurants or up and down flights of stairs. Although China's efforts to get robots out into the real world can help companies to harvest more data, it is still a big bottleneck in the industry, Chan said.
Dr Jonathan Aitken, a robotics teacher at the University of Sheffield, agreed. 'The state of AI is nowhere near seeing humanoids operating out of uncontrolled environments,' he said.
And while robots jumping and kicking looks impressive, mundane daily tasks such as handling a kitchen knife or folding laundry requires dexterous hands, a skill technology companies have yet to crack. A human hand has about 27 'degrees of freedom' – ie, independent movements through space. Tesla's Optimus humanoid, one of the most advanced models on the market, has 22.
Still, China has beat the odds before when it comes to turbocharged advances. Just 10 years ago, the country exported fewer than 375,00 cars a year. Now China is the world's biggest automobile supplier, shipping nearly 6m vehicles annually. The European Union has increased tariffs on Chinese-built electric vehicles in an attempt to stem the flow.
In China, the political and public will is firmly behind the humanoids. Zhan Guangtao came to the humanoid games with her two daughters on Friday, after her elder child's school gave them free tickets. 'It's good to have my children in touch with the world's most advanced robotics,' Zhan said. 'Exposing them to hi-tech will broaden their horizons.'
Additional research by Lillian Yang