China built nearly 90% of the more than 13,000 two-armed, two-legged humanoid robots delivered globally last year, and this weekend Shanghai turned that industrial lead into a public spectacle. On a public holiday outside the city, an R&D hub hosted a robot carnival where families queued to buy robotic dogs, remote-controlled machines dueled in a water-bead ring, and humanoids performed drunken boxing on a main stage. The event, staged at the Intelligent Manufacturing & Robotics Global Co-Innovation Center, doubles as a soft-power campaign for a technology that has struggled to win over consumers elsewhere.
The Co-Innovation Center houses more than 100 companies working on robotic hardware, software, and applications — from sewage-pipe inspection bots to load-hauling quadrupeds. Embedding AI into physical systems, a category Chinese planners call embodied AI, is a named priority in the country's latest five-year plan. That policy backing has translated into a manufacturing base that ships humanoids at a pace no other country currently matches.
Public exposure is the point. Roboticists in the US and Europe still debate whether the human form is even the right shape for a general-purpose machine, and progress abroad has been slowed by heavy chassis, short battery life, and the balance problem inherent to two legs. Chinese companies are answering those doubts by putting the machines in front of crowds and letting the crowds decide.
“Look, it is trying to do a handstand!”— Unnamed attendee, 11-year-old visitor at the Shanghai robot carnival
Key facts
- 01Chinese firms produced nearly 90% of the more than 13,000 two-armed, two-legged humanoid robots delivered globally in 2025.
- 02The Intelligent Manufacturing & Robotics Global Co-Innovation Center outside Shanghai houses more than 100 robotics companies.
- 03Embodied AI — putting models into physical systems — is a named priority in China's latest five-year plan.
- 04DexForce showed a humanoid making coffee at the carnival; other exhibits included robots folding T-shirts and climbing stairs.
- 05Bipedal robots are running half-marathons in Beijing as part of a broader public-facing rollout.
At the carnival, an 11-year-old boy showed off a mini robotic dog his mother had just bought him, narrating each stunt to strangers as it attempted a handstand. Nearby, staffers walked children through the controls of a quadruped climbing a flight of stairs. Two remote-controlled bots fired water beads at each other while a crowd of kids cheered from around a makeshift ring. A staffer called the duel a draw.
The commercial pitch sat one aisle over. DexForce, one of the exhibitors, showed a humanoid capable of making coffee. Product manager Yang Duan framed the value proposition in the terms Chinese firms have settled on for the domestic market — freeing people from physical work and mundane chores. A few booths down, a pair of robotic arms worked through a basket of T-shirts, folding them one at a time.
“can free people from physical work and mundane chores”— Yang Duan, Product manager at DexForce
The broader rollout extends past the carnival gates. Shopping malls and tourist attractions in several Chinese cities are staging humanoid performances the same weekend. In Beijing, bipedal robots are running half-marathons — a public stress test for the balance and endurance issues that have kept humanoids out of Western homes and workplaces.
The design bet behind all of this is that humanoids are worth building not because they are the most efficient form factor, but because the physical world is already shaped for humans. Doorways, stairs, coffee machines, laundry baskets — every task the carnival demonstrated is a task designed around a human body. A robot that can navigate that environment without retrofitting it is worth more to a factory or a household than one that cannot, even if the underlying hardware is harder to build.
The skepticism is not going away. Humanoids remain expensive, batteries remain short, and no carnival demonstration answers the question of what happens when a 150-pound bipedal machine loses its balance next to a child. Many roboticists outside China continue to argue that wheeled or specialized designs will win the commercial race, and the 13,000-unit global figure — while a milestone — is still a rounding error against the installed base of industrial robots worldwide. Yang Duan's framing of humanoids freeing people from chores is a promise, not a shipped product.
Still, the audience response inside the main tent was telling. After a humanoid in a blinged-out top performed drunken boxing and another executed a front flip, with a squad of small robotic lions waiting their turn, the crowd chanted for more. That reaction — from paying families on a public holiday, not investors at a demo day — is the data point Chinese firms wanted.
The strategic read is that China is treating humanoids the way it treated electric vehicles a decade ago: subsidize the industrial base, seed hundreds of competitors, drive down unit costs through volume, and let public familiarity do the marketing work. Whether or not the human form turns out to be the right answer, the country building 90% of the world's supply gets to shape what the answer looks like — and Western robotics firms are increasingly competing against a manufacturing curve, not just a technical one.
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