Thursday, April 24, 2025

China: There Might Be Something To This Humanoid Robot Stuff

From The Diplomat, April 21:

China’s Humanoid Marathon Signals a New Kind of AI Race
Beijing’s robot half-marathon wasn’t just spectacle – it reveals China’s intent to dominate the emerging humanoid robotics sector and lead on a global level.

On April 19, just months after Unitree’s dancing humanoid robots captured international headlines for their appearance in the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, Beijing hosted the world’s first-ever humanoid robot half marathon. The event drew thousands of live spectators along the course and millions more watching via the CCTV livestream and online platforms, quickly becoming the most widely viewed robotics competitions in history. 

Co-organized by Beijing municipal government bureaus, the Beijing Yizhuang Half Marathon and Humanoid Robot Half Marathon marked a milestone in China’s push to accelerate humanoid robot development. The event featured 1,200 human runners alongside 20 robot teams from private companies and state-backed projects, including industry leaders Unitree and X-Humanoid. While humans and robots raced on separate tracks, the event podium featured top finishers in both categories — symbolizing Beijing’s ambition to integrate humanoid robots into everyday life.

The results revealed that the performance gap between humans and robots remains substantial. While the men’s winner finished in 1:02:36 and the women’s champion in 1:11:07, Tiangong Ultra, the leading robot, completed the course in 2:40:27. Despite this gap, the event demonstrated the significant technological progress Chinese companies have made in relation to their U.S. counterparts. Tiangong Ultra maintained an average pace of 8.2 km/hr and reached speeds of up to 12 km/hr — surpassing the maximum 8 km/hr demonstrated by Tesla’s much-hyped Optimus. Meanwhile, although Boston Dynamics’ Atlas is faster than Tiangong Ultra, its battery life is much shorter when performing at maximum capacity. 

“This represents a technological and engineering milestone,” noted ZongZe Wu, a research associate at Tsinghua University’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence International Governance. “Although humanoid robots still have a long way to go, simply completing a course of this distance is a remarkable feat.” 

This sentiment resonated broadly across Chinese media and social platforms. Sam Zhu, a 16-year-old tech enthusiast from Wuhan, captured the public mood saying, “This feels like witnessing the start of something transformative — potentially as significant as the early stages of the Industrial Revolution.”

Although the event lasted only hours, its symbolism extends far beyond sport. For policymakers and technologists across China, the half-marathon represents a tangible demonstration of the country’s accelerating capabilities in “humanoid robotics” (人形机器人) and “embodied intelligence” (具身智能). It also marked a turning point in a field Beijing has explicitly prioritized as central to its vision of an AI-powered economic transformation – and the beginning of a new era in physical AI applications.

China’s Humanoid Robot National Strategy: From Policy to Execution

In November 2023, the Chinese government laid out its first official development plan for humanoid robots with ambitious two-stage targets. The initial phase, with a target date of this year, focuses on technical breakthroughs, industrial deployment, and cultivating globally competitive enterprises. So far, these goals that already appear to have been largely met. 

China has developed advanced movement control technology, and launched “Gewu,” an open-source platform that trains over a hundred robot variants with a single codebase. Additionally, according to Morgan Stanley’s 2025 Humanoid 100 Report, Chinese companies now represent 35 of the top 100 firms in the humanoid robotics value chain and nine of the 22 companies capable of producing fully integrated humanoid robots — compared to just five in the United States. 

The second stage aims to establish a secure industrial supply chain, integrate robotics throughout the economy, and achieve global technological leadership. This also seems to be largely on track with a 2024 analysis by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) reporting that Chinese firms already “cover the entire industrial chain” from components to systems integration.

The national strategy has triggered a cascade of regional initiatives. In March, Shenzhen released an ambitious 2027 action plan targeting 100-plus billion yuan ($13.7-plus billion) in robotics-related industries while expanding its embodied intelligence cluster to include over 1,200 companies. Beijing quickly followed by launching a dedicated humanoid robot data training center with project funding subsidies of up to 24 million yuan per company for qualified R&D initiatives. Within weeks, at least ten other provinces introduced similar policies supporting humanoid robot development, uniformly describing the sector as “a key driver for high-quality economic growth and industrial upgrading.”

This coordinated push reflects how Chinese policymakers view humanoid robotics not merely as a technological showcase but as a strategic solution to the country’s most pressing structural challenges. With youth unemployment hovering around 17 percent and the working-age population projected to contract significantly by 2030, Beijing is urgently seeking new engines of productivity and economic growth. Humanoid robotics offers a compelling two-pronged approach: simultaneously driving industrial modernization while addressing emerging labor shortages in elder care, logistics, manufacturing, and service sectors—areas critical to China’s economic stability as its demographic crisis deepens.

​​The Competitive Edge: Why China Could Lead in Real-World Robotics...

....MUCH MORE

Reuse of headline because here at Climateer Investing we recycle! (also, happy belated Earth Day):

August 2024 - In Addition To Nvidia, China Also Seems To Think There May Be Something To This Humanoid Robot Stuff 

Related:

While You Were Busy Living Your Life: "Nvidia Announces GR00T, a Foundation Model for Humanoids"

February 2025 - "Boston Dynamics Partners with Its Former CEO to Build a Humanoid Robot"
A lot of people seem to think that humanoid robots a a thing worth betting on

HSBC is staffing branches with humanoid robots that dance, take selfies and push credit cards
Now that's dystopia.