by Tan Aik Keong (AK)
The Spring Festival Gala is never just the Gala. It's the nation's year-end emotional wrap-up, and its biggest shared stage — getting a few minutes on the show on New Year's Eve means getting etched into the collective memory of an entire country. It used to be song, dance and comedy sketches carrying the show. Now, robots have learned to steal the spotlight too.
The 2025 Gala's "Yangko Bot" segment read like a love letter to popular science. Director Zhang Yimou mixed the boisterous energy of yangko folk dance with the cool precision of machines, having humanoid robots twist through the dance steps and twirl handkerchiefs. Audiences realised, for the first time at scale, that a robot isn't just something that repeats a motion in a factory — it can hit its mark, move in formation, and turn a folk tradition into a piece of cyber theatre. The robots used were Unitree's H1 ("Fuxi") — a statement, in effect, that the first priority was simply making a robot move like a person: nail the gait, the joint control, the stability, before attempting anything more complex.
By the 2026 Gala's "Kung Fu Bot" segment, the storyline had turned distinctly harder-edged — from dancing yangko to practising martial arts. Where 2025 still carried a sense of "look, robots performing," 2026 read more like a demonstration of industrial capability: a group of robots sprinting into position at speed, weaving through formation changes, hitting a top ad-hoc movement speed of roughly 4 metres per second, with an emphasis on fully autonomous swarm control — no external positioning assist, relying instead on onboard sensors to perceive the environment, plan their own paths, and dynamically adjust formation. What audiences were watching wasn't a party trick — it was replicable engineering capability, on display.
Underneath it, Unitree's product-line logic is coming into focus. The H1 was essentially "get a humanoid standing and running" as a base skill. The G1 leans more toward being a scalable platform for R&D and education — its official spec sheet highlights 23-43 joint motors, dexterous hands, and hybrid force-position control; it may not be the most human-like of the lineup, but it's plausibly the easiest for developers to actually build on.
Media coverage has also written pricing pressure into the story: reports note Unitree launched a lower-cost humanoid, the R1, in 2025, compared against the G1's early starting price of roughly RMB 99,000. Once humanoid robots start competing on price, that's a sign they've moved from "exhibit" toward "product."
What's more interesting is what the Gala's shift across these two years maps out: a path for China's embodied-intelligence industry — use the cultural stage first to run society through an "acceptance training" phase, then quietly ratchet up the engineering benchmarks behind it. From "looks great" in 2025 to "fast, precise, stable, and able to coordinate" in 2026, the technical progress isn't really about one backflip — it's about something harder and far more engineering-heavy: the reliability of multi-robot coordination.
Of course, alongside the spectacle, a dose of realism: media reports and company clarifications put Unitree's 2025 humanoid deliveries at over 5,500 units, with production above 6,500 — numbers that sound impressive, but the real challenge is moving these machines off the stage and into the real world: factories, warehouses, campuses, hospitals, homes, none of which come with stage lighting or actors hitting their marks alongside you.
The Gala puts "the future" on the family reunion dinner table, but the future eventually has to get up and go to work. In 2025 we watched a robot dance yangko; in 2026, we watched it practise kung fu. Next year, maybe it's time for it to prove something in the real world — that it isn't just a steel body that can perform, but a social tool that can actually solve problems. When that happens, the most moving "performance" may not be on a stage at all — it'll be happening quietly inside ordinary households.
Part of the AK AI Corner column. Originally published in Oriental Daily (东方日报) on Feb 17, 2026.