With one billion viewers each year, the biggest Chinese televisual feast is the Chinese New Year’s Eve Spring Festival Gala shown on Tuesday, January 28.
This year celebrated not the year of the snake, but the year of the robot with a performance usually reserved for human dancers, taken over by a troop of terrifying biped robots. While the traditional Chinese zodiac dictates that the new year will be the year of the snake, with the AI revolution and flood of state-of-the-art new technologies coming out of Beijing, it is really China’s year of the robot.
The gala performance of macho-looking mechanoids dancing synchronised with petite human female dancers was of a traditional northeastern Chinese folk tradition, with the robots donning fluffy little waistcoats and spinning fans, all choreographed by one of China’s best-known film directors.
While not hammering home the Communist propaganda too much, the show is still an important showcase for the regime, which mixes deeply unique cultural tradition with little touches of the avant-garde.
China’s AI robots have overtaken the West’s development
The ‘H1’ robots, as they are known, were built by Unitree, a world leader in the manufacturing of robot dogs, and were made specifically for the billion-viewer show. Now, the US and Europe are looking closely at China and their ever-evolving tech breakthroughs, what with DeepSeek trumping anything the rest of the world has to offer in AI, and Elon Musk’s Optimus robot gingerly walking like it was scared of tripping over, the AI-powered H1s danced nimbly and safely in unison and with the human dancers.
