World Humanoid Robot Games demonstrates its traits.

A jamboree of humanoid events at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing was the manifestation of China’s latest technology event. The kickboxers, pint-sized humanoid robots entered by teams from leading Chinese technological universities in front of the spectators in the 12,000-seater National Speed Skating Oval, which was built for the 2022 Winter Olympics. After the Chinese National Anthem on Friday morning, the government-backed games began.

The games have displayed China’s prowess in humanoid robotics, a technological field that has been pushed to the forefront of the country’s artificial intelligence industry. The hype machine which was in full swing, however have faced different set of challenges, balance, battery life and a sense of philosophical purpose being among them.

As well as kickboxing, humanoids participated in athletics, football and dance competitions. One robot had to drop out of the 1500-metre 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 17 billion 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.

But, this social-media-friendly events reflected 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 1tn 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.

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 UB Tech 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.

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” – i.e., 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 375,000 cars a year. Now China is the world’s biggest automobile supplier, shipping nearly 6 million 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.

Team Maverick