On Saturday, Beijing hosted the world’s first half-marathon in which humans competed alongside humanoid robots. Among the 21 robots to compete, six completed the race, and the winning robot required several battery changes to reach the finish line in two hours and 40 minutes, well behind the winner of the men’s race who finished in one hour and two minutes. Nonetheless, the groundbreaking event received glowing reports in Chinese media, and as Amy Hawkins reported for The Guardian, it is emblematic of China’s strides in the widespread deployment of robots and “embodied AI”:
It is not just drones that are promising – or threatening – to upend the tempo of urban life in China. Humanoid robots are particularly buzzy. The highlight of this year’s Spring festival gala, which was viewed nearly 17bn times, was a dance performed by a troupe of humanoid robots made by a company called Unitree. On Saturday, the world’s first humanoid v human race – a half marathon – took place on the outskirts of Beijing.
“Applying artificial intelligence to robots basically really kicked into high gear last year,” says Rui Ma, a China technology analyst and investor based in San Francisco. The shift could allow the industry to grow at a much faster rate in 2025 than in previous years. Reinforcement learning, which means training robots to learn from experience rather than relying on rigid models, allows humanoid robots to be trained in months rather than years, hastening the pace of innovation. Toy robot dogs are already part of daily life in China. At a wholesale market in Yiwu, a trading hub in east China’s Zhejiang province, a child plays with a robot dog while his mother haggles with exporters over the price of false eyelashes. On the streets of Shanghai, a woman walks her robot dog, which is helpfully carrying a basket of shopping on its back.
The development of China’s robotics industry is intimately linked to advances in AI. For years, China has been trying to catch up with the United States. Xi wants to drive economic growth through “new quality productive forces”, a concept that includes advanced technologies. [Source]
Some scientists and observers have tried to manage the public’s expectations of China’s AI rollout. Zeyi Yang at WIRED described the setbacks of the “stumbling and overheating” humanoid robots competing in the half marathon, and also noted that “by the end of the race, many people who tuned into the livestream started to comment on how exhausted the robots’ human operators looked.” At a meeting last Wednesday, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology ordered representatives from dozens of automakers to stop hyping up the capabilities of smart driving technology. (This followed a highly publicized incident last month, in which a Xiaomi electric car crashed and killed three passengers while the vehicle’s autopilot feature was engaged.) Similarly, leading AI scientist Zhu Songchun recently warned that AI hype and reality have become detached in China, partially because the media have fed the public “exaggerated” stories about AI. Alex Colville at China Media Project described how Zhu’s critical stance appears to have been ignored, if not overridden:
Zhu’s critique of the propaganda-driven approach appears to have fallen victim to precisely the dynamic of hype he described. While his remarks found outlets in more market-oriented publications like Tencent Technology, Caixin and The Paper, flagship state media organizations like Xinhua and the People’s Daily conspicuously omitted his warnings from their coverage. Instead, these Party organs continued to showcase a parade of applications and robots — the very surface-level achievements that Zhu suggested are distracting China from the deeper scientific work needed to truly lead in artificial intelligence. In a system where positive messaging trumps critical analysis, even warnings from one of the nation’s top AI scientists can be edited out of the narrative.
[...] This disconnect was illustrated once again over the weekend, as Beijing hosted a half marathon where Chinese-built robots raced alongside human competitors. The CCP’s official People’s Daily described the event as a “fierce competition” that had pushed the robots to their limits. Xinhua sang about “infinite possibilities,” and proclaimed in its headline that the racing event had “closed the distance between us and the future.” The less stellar reality, alluded to in a report by Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily that noted the “many problems” holding the race down, was that the robots had suffered constant failures and necessitated nearly constant repairs by the exhausted human crews running alongside them. In the end, only six of the 21 robot entries completed the race, and one quite literally lost its head.But in another sense, the race pointed the way toward the possibility of a healthier, more open and more self-critical attitude toward technology and progress — an alternative to the propaganda of constant rise. The Global Times, though in English-language coverage only, remarked somewhat disingenuously that “[behind] this ‘imperfect’ robot half-marathon is the mature atmosphere of tolerance, understanding and acceptance of failure that has developed in Chinese society from top to bottom toward the high-tech industry.” If that were true, of course, no public moderation of Zhu Songchun’s remarks behind closed doors would have been necessary. It would be perfectly acceptable to say: We are getting this wrong. But the Global Times was on to something. [Source]
China’s rapid deployment of embodied AI is at least partially fueled by its competition with the U.S. for technological superiority. Liu Gang, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin, stated, “We are picking a path where we lower the costs for innovation and industrialization,” adding, “When many can do things with a comparable quality, whoever makes it more cheaply will have a bigger chance to win.” This is evident in the significantly lower costs of Chinese robot dogs and humanoid robots compared to American ones, and in the free rollout of DeepSeek’s AI chatbot. A recent Foreign Affairs article titled “What America Gets Wrong About the AI Race” underlined this dynamic: “The real lesson of DeepSeek’s success is that AI competition is not simply about which country develops the most advanced models but also about which can adopt them faster across its economy and government.”
Indeed, China’s robotics industry is surging ahead. According to a recent industry report, China will likely produce over 10,000 humanoid robots this year, amounting to over half of global production. Late last month, Du Zhihang, Bao Hongyun, Liu Peilin, and Han Wei from Caixin Global provided a deep dive into China’s production of humanoid robots, underscoring the government’s major investments in this booming sector:
Embodied intelligence has become a buzzword in AI and investment circles in the past two years. Unlike traditional industrial robots, such as mechanical arms, embodied intelligence focuses on humanoid robots that can adaptively perceive and interact with their environments using human-like physical forms. These robots emphasize advanced motor coordination — akin to a cerebellum — and cognitive abilities in vision, language and movement, enabling more natural and versatile interactions. This shift represents a move beyond factory automation toward robots capable of more complex, human tasks.
[...] Since 2024, several Chinese regions have rolled out incentive policies to support AI and robotics industries as the country aims to lead the global tech race. Hangzhou in the eastern Zhejiang province offers up to 5 million yuan in rewards and 25% project funding subsidies, while Beijing has established a 100-billion-yuan government investment fund to support startups. Southern Guangdong province provides up to 50 million yuan for robotics companies and 10 million yuan for AI firms, and Shenzhen has set bold targets for embodied intelligence, aiming to cultivate more than 10 companies valued at more than 10 billion yuan and achieve an industry scale exceeding 100 billion yuan by 2027. Shanghai and the southwestern Sichuan province have also introduced supportive measures.
[...] While China and the United States are seen as equals in AI and robotics technology, China’s strengths in large-scale manufacturing and software optimization give it an edge in industrializing humanoid robots.
[...] As China’s governments increase support for AI and embodied intelligence, leading companies stand to benefit. In March 2025, embodied intelligence was named one of four future industries — alongside biomanufacturing, quantum technology and 6G — in the government work report. [Source]
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