China’s state-run Global Times on Thursday marveled at the high-tech entertainments on display for this year’s Spring Festival, praising a troupe of dancing robots as evidence the Communist nation has become the world’s leading tech power.
No expense was spared on the robot dance party, which eclipsed the usual 3,000-drone aerial light show as the marquee event at the festival:
In the performance directed by renowned Chinese director Zhang Yimou, 16 robots produced by Chinese robotics company Unitree, dressing in northeastern Chinese style floral padded jackets, performed together with dancers from China’s Xinjiang Art Institute. The humanoid robots can not only smoothly twist their waists and mimic human leg-kicking movements, but also spin handkerchiefs, displaying extremely dexterous actions.
The company told the Global Times on Tuesday night that the robots use AI-driven full-body motion control technology, capable of achieving a maximum joint torque of 360 Newton-meter. Coupled with 360° panoramic depth perception technology, they can precisely grasp every movement in their surroundings. Moreover, through advanced AI algorithms, they can perfectly “understand” music, adjusting movements in real-time according to the music.
You have to hand it to Unitree: their robots can already dance better than some of our pop stars.
Another Global Times article on Thursday hyperventilated over Western media coverage of the robot review – coupled with the keen attention paid to the launch of China’s DeepSeek A.I. chatbot – as a sign that America knows it is losing the global dance-off for technological supremacy:
A Spain-based media Euro Weekly News said in a piece on Wednesday that “now, the US and Europe are looking closely at China and their ever-evolving tech breakthroughs, what with DeepSeek trumping anything the rest of the world has to offer in AI, and Elon Musk’s Optimus robot gingerly walking like it was scared of tripping over, the AI-powered H1s danced nimbly and safely in unison and with the human dancers.”
Indian media India Today, similarly, said that the release of DeepSeek and H1 robotics show “China’s growing presence in the global AI and robotics space.” The media called this China’s growing presence in AI is likely “a threat to the US market.”
US journalist Ben Norton posted on X with the robotics dancing video, saying “China now has dancing robots – in addition to producing better AI than US Big Tech corporations, for much cheaper, and open source. This is why the US is waging an economic war and tech war on China. The US doesn’t want any competition to its monopolies.”
The Global Times could not actually come up with many examples of U.S. media fawning over the robot dancers but plowed ahead with its narrative that “China has surpassed the U.S. in certain technological areas.”
The article went on to imply that President Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs are just a sore-loser attempt to “hinder China’s technological advancements.”
Although far less glamorous than the dancing droids or drone light show, the two-ton electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) V2000CG aircraft displayed at the Spring Festival in Chongqing might have been the more interesting technological and social development.
The V2000CG is, for all intents and purposes, a very large drone that could carry either cargo or a few passengers. It was developed as part of China’s “Low Altitude Economy” initiative, which envisions the first 3,000 feet of airspace over major cities becoming a Star Wars-style hive of drones carrying people and packages, while a second band of drone space extends out over farmland to permit autonomous crop spraying and other maintenance tasks.
China’s central planning authority, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), created a Low Altitude Economy Division at the beginning of 2025. The commission envisioned a $500 billion economy developing in low altitude urban airspace over the next ten years.
Xie Jia, senior vice president of V2000CG developer AutoFlight, compared the Low Altitude Economy to discovering “a new blue ocean” filled with “fresh opportunities for economic growth.” With artificial intelligence (A.I.) coordinating traffic patterns, large numbers of short-distance hops at low altitudes should be possible with eVTOL craft – essentially smaller, quieter, more nimble helicopters that use electric motors.
Luo Jun, executive director of the China Low Altitude Economic Alliance, told the Global Times in early January that the Low Altitude Economy is “poised for significant expansion” in areas such as “logistics, express delivery, emergency response, disaster relief, urban management, and power line inspections.”
“Millions of drones have already changed the way we live and work. In the future, drones will evolve into flying robots, driven not only by advanced hardware but also by AI serving as their brain,” said Luo.
The Low Altitude Economy concept could run into significant cultural and social barriers in countries other than China, where urban residents are not necessarily thrilled to look up at a sky filled with buzzing mechanical bees around the clock. Low-altitude airspace also happens to be a fraught subject in the United States at the moment. Still, if China does manage to sift half a trillion dollars of gold from its new low-altitude ocean, resistance to heavy drone usage in other countries might weaken.
