CCTV demonstrates advanced movements such as martial arts and parkour at the Lunar New Year event… ‘DeepSeek‘ followed by robot shock
Unitree, etc. expected to ship 20,000 humanoids in 2026… Transformation into an ‘AI factory’ surpassing the US and Japan
China’s ‘AI robot’ takes over the Lunar New Year stage and shakes the world… “Accelerating hardware innovation beyond software”
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Just a year after China surprised the world with its domestically produced AI model ‘DeepSeek’, it once again proved its technological leap forward, this time with a humanoid robot.
According to Nikkei Asia on the 27th (local time), the high-level martial arts and acrobatics performed by Chinese robots at the ‘CCTV Lunar New Year Gala’, China’s largest holiday event held on the 16th, went beyond simple entertainment and became a signal to the world that China’s ‘hardware innovation’ was on track.
A humanoid who does martial arts… ‘Motion control’ threatens Boston Dynamics
Table of Contents
- A humanoid who does martial arts… ‘Motion control’ threatens Boston Dynamics
- Xi Jinping’s ‘AI factory’ strategy comes to fruition… Surpassing Japan’s Pioneer Status
- Establishing an independent ecosystem by overcoming US sanctions… Accelerating ‘Technological Independence’
- The crossroads of ‘K-Robot’: How to survive between China’s volume offensive and America’s original technology
China’s leading robotics startups took center stage at this year’s Lunar New Year Gala. Unitree Robotics’ G1 and H1 models showed a 7.5 rotation ‘air flare’ motion and a rapid large change of 4 meters per second based on 3D lidar detection technology and advanced algorithms.
In particular, the ‘self-recovery’ function, which wakes up on its own in real time after a fall, drew praise from experts around the world.
Unitree founder Wang Xingxing predicted shipments of up to 20,000 humanoid units this year, suggesting that China has entered the era of mass-produced robots.
Other companies, such as Magic Lab and Galbot, are also threatening the stronghold of Boston Dynamics in the United States by demonstrating everything from delicate movements like cracking a walnut to parkour.
Xi Jinping’s ‘AI factory’ strategy comes to fruition… Surpassing Japan’s Pioneer Status
Behind this rapid growth lies President Xi Jinping’s strong national will. Last year, President Xi met in person with robot startup founders, including Deepseek founder Liang Wenfeng, and declared that he would transform China from the “world’s factory” to the “AI factory” of the future.
Japan, which reigned as a robot powerhouse in the 1980s and 1990s with Honda’s ‘Asimo’ and Sony’s ‘Aibo’, has slowed its momentum due to its cautious corporate culture and aging population, while China is churning out mass-market products at a pace that traditional Japanese companies have difficulty keeping up with, through huge capital, aggressive state investment, and rapid private sector iterative experiments.
Establishing an independent ecosystem by overcoming US sanctions… Accelerating ‘Technological Independence’
China’s rise in robots is attracting even more attention because it is an achievement achieved under the Trump administration’s controls on exports of cutting-edge AI chips.
Although there is still dependence on foreign countries for some key components such as high-precision actuators and advanced sensors, the Chinese leadership is urging national champions such as Huawei and SMIC to develop chips comparable to NVIDIA H200 by 2030, and is putting its life and death on ‘technological independence’.
Meanwhile, on American social media (X), experts such as Howie Choset, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University, are sending warning messages, saying, “China’s humanoid platform is maturing much faster than expected.”
The crossroads of ‘K-Robot’: How to survive between China’s volume offensive and America’s original technology
The incredible growth rate shown by China’s humanoid robots poses an urgent task to the Korean robot industry: ‘securing manufacturing competitiveness and dominating the high value-added service market’.
The fact that Unitree has established a mass production system of 20,000 units per year foreshadows that low-priced Chinese humanoids will soon be pouring into the global housekeeping, logistics, and elderly care markets.
Korean robot companies must go beyond simple hardware manufacturing and differentiate themselves by dramatically lowering production costs by utilizing Korea’s excellent smart factory infrastructure, or by establishing a ‘high quality’ image with fewer failures and higher precision.
Just as China combines DeepSeek (soft) and Unitree (hard), Korea must also urgently build a ‘Korean robot standard operating system (OS)’ that organically connects the large-scale language models of Naver and Kakao with the robot hardware of Hyundai Motor Company (Boston Dynamics) and Samsung.
Strong software competitiveness is essential for robots to communicate with humans and perform complex tasks, and this is the most reliable weapon against China’s volume offensive.
China’s rapid development is accompanied by ethical concerns such as privacy violations and robot malfunctions. Korea must cooperate with countries that share democratic values to preemptively present ‘trustworthy AI robot guidelines’ and market robots equipped with strong security solutions that cannot be hacked.
This will be an opportunity to establish ourselves as an ‘irreplaceable partner’ by digging into the security concerns that Western countries may have about Chinese-made robots.
Shin Min-cheol, Global Economics Reporter shincm@g-enews.com
