During the 1996 Spring Festival Gala, skit actor Guo Da pushed onto the stage a cargo box with "ABCD" and the "Toyota" logo printed on it. Hidden in the box was an "imported robot" named "Quixin Nianzi". At that time, "robots" were a humorous imagination of the Chinese people about the future. In everyone's eyes, "robots" should be as mechanized as in Western science fiction movies, just like the robot played by Cai Ming back then. Not only does it have to act like a machine, but its thinking logic must also be linear and diode-like—either on or off; either obedient or frozen.
Cai Ming's performance also strengthens this characteristic. Her lines are stripped of all intonation fluctuations, and use a rational, cold, almost "electronic synthesized" monotonous frequency to simulate the stiffness and clumsiness of the machine to create jokes.
Who would have thought that 30 years later, Cai Ming would still be active on the "Spring Festival Gala" stage, but the partner standing next to her had turned into a real bionic humanoid robot driven by motors and AI. What's affixed to it is no longer an import label, but a genuine "Made in China Intelligent" product.
On New Year's Eve, the topic "Comprehensive invasion of the Spring Festival Gala by robots" quickly topped the list of hot searches on Weibo and dominated the list for more than an hour. On New Year's Day, half of the hot search list on Weibo was occupied by topics related to robots. On Xiaohongshu, young netizens were analyzing the smoothness of the robot's movements frame by frame and lamenting the speed of development of the technology behind it.
Looking back at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, the robot can only perform the Yangko dance stiffly wearing a Northeastern cotton-padded jacket, and its movements are slightly funny. In just one year, from "Yangko twisting" to "backflip", China's robotics technology has evolved at an astonishing speed.
On New Year's Eve this year, four companies, Yushu Technology, Songyan Power, Galaxy General, and Magic Atom, spent 500 million yuan and used a "national exposure" to announce that robots, just like smartphones back then, were trying to cross the threshold from the laboratory to ordinary households.
The "iron army" that breaks the limits
Not long after the 2026 "Spring Festival Gala" started, several robot-related programs attracted everyone's attention. Yushu Technology's humanoid robot phalanx completed the most difficult "road show" of the night through a series of difficult actions.
On the stage, Yushu's G1 and H2 robots cooperated with real actors. They not only completed backwards crossing obstacles and continuous backflips, but also performed martial arts performances with long sticks, nunchakus, and long swords. They even performed a decent drunken fist and then lay on the ground and pretended to be dead, making all "stock investors" and "basic citizens" take a breath.
"General somersaults are boring to us, so we challenged continuous somersaults, which require higher hardware and stability." Wang Xingxing, founder of Yushu Technology, revealed in an interview with CCTV that this year's robots changed formations while running, with an instantaneous maximum speed of more than three meters per second.
This highly dynamic and highly collaborative cluster control technology that enables interspersed formation changes and martial arts movements during fast running is the world's first appearance. Wang Xingxing said bluntly: "We challenged many limits on the stage, even actions that ordinary martial arts actors can't do."
For the audience in front of the TV, this is a visual feast. For the industry, this is the charge of the "mass production verification year".
On January 22, 2026, not long before the "Spring Festival Gala", Yushu Technology issued an announcement through official channels: the company's actual shipments of pure humanoid robots in 2025 exceeded 5,500 units, and the scale of mass production of the main body during the same period exceeded 6,500 units.
Prior to that, the authoritative organization Omdia had predicted that Yushu's shipments in 2025 would be approximately 4,200 units. The actual disclosed data not only greatly exceeded the predicted value, but also meant that the era of large-scale mass production of China's humanoid robot track has officially arrived. In terms of global market share, Yushu is further expanding its advantages, and the competitive landscape with the leading enterprise Zhiyuan has become increasingly clear.
Audience feedback was enthusiastic. According to JD.com data, just two hours after the "Spring Festival Gala" of the Year of the Horse started, the search volume of "robot" on JD.com platform increased by more than 300% month-on-month, the number of customer service inquiries increased by 460%, and the order volume increased by 150%.
The new orders cover more than 100 cities across the country, extending from first-tier cities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen to large and small counties. Many robots listed on the platform, including the "Spring Festival Gala Style", were all sold out that night. This shows that robots are changing from geek toys to mass consumer products.
The art of “creating people” within a small space
If Yushu shows the strength of his body, then what Song Yanli shows in the sketch is his extremely fine control of facial expressions.
In the skit with Cai Ming, Songyan Dynamics' bionic humanoid robot is not a simple "skin-covering" machine. According to public information, in order to appear on the Spring Festival Gala, this Beijing technology company completed the entire process from full-stack self-research to iterative version three in just over two months.
The logic of bionic faces and bipedal robots is completely different. The humanoid robot has a large torso space and is easy to layout. The bionic face requires that all mechanical and electronic components be stuffed into a very small head space, while simultaneously solving the problems of heat dissipation and complex facial muscle traction.
Songyan Dynamics finally put 32 motors into the square inch, including 12 in the mouth alone. In order to overcome the common problem of "mismatched mouth shape", they developed a high frame rate control board by themselves, increasing the expression control frequency from 10Hz to 60Hz. This means that the robot's lip movements are no longer simple opening and closing, but can keep up with subtle changes in human speech speed.
In order to break people's stereotype of "stiffness" in robots, the technical team also redesigned the neck structure with three degrees of freedom, so that the robot's neck and eyes can tilt and rotate naturally in line with the expression. The robot can even simulate the rising and falling of the chest when breathing, presenting an astonishing "sense of life".
In fact, in 2025, Songyan Dynamics' bionic face products have entered commercial navigation and other scenarios, and completed standardized mass production processes. The appearance of the Spring Festival Gala is actually a concentrated display of its commercial maturity.
Cai Ming's bionic robots, as well as the "iron buddies" from Galaxy Universal who fold clothes and skewer sausages in Shen Tengma Li's show, have also made the public curious, "How far are we from the era of one robot per person?"
The programs of the Spring Festival Gala robots have, to a certain extent, eliminated the alienation caused by technology and created a warm picture of family life. Robots are no longer cold exhibits, but family members who can wash clothes, hand out tissues, and chat about household matters.
This "life-oriented" narrative made countless viewers have the same impulse on New Year's Eve: open the e-commerce software and search for prices.
Take Yushu Technology as an example. Its G1 humanoid robot, which is targeted at education, scientific research and the entry-level market, currently has an official reference price of approximately RMB 99,000. The price of the H series, which has stronger performance and can complete heavy-load tasks, is as high as hundreds of thousands of yuan, which is almost the same as the price of a mid-to-high-end new energy vehicle.
However, with the strong rise of domestic supply chains, the costs of core components such as motors, reducers, and sensors are falling by more than 30% per year.
The robot that can help you wash dishes, do laundry, and take care of the elderly will probably appear in your living room in a few years.
Besides ratings, what else?
Whether it is Yushu Technology's algorithm for maintaining formations while running, Songyan Dynamics' process of implanting 32 motors in a square head, or AstraBrain, which can make decisions and work independently, they all point to a common trend: China's robot industry has passed the stage of "making demos and telling stories" and has entered the deep-water area of "competing on craftsmanship, mass production, and scenarios."
On February 17, the same robot G1 EDUU2 used in Yushu’s “Spring Festival Gala” was put on JD.com, priced at 208,850 yuan. During the live broadcast that day, the anchor also brought the robot into the live broadcast room to perform the actions that everyone wanted to see.
In the Tmall Yushu flagship store, although the "Spring Festival Gala Style" has not yet been officially put on the shelves, the number of customer service inquiries has been overwhelming. Customer service said that the new product will be officially released soon. Yushu founder Wang Xingxing gave a more bold prediction: in 2026, Yushu robot shipments are expected to reach 10,000 to 20,000 units.
After the Galaxy universal robot Galbot G1 became popular during the Spring Festival Gala, nearly 300 robots were snapped up overnight. The person in charge said in an interview that production capacity has been urgently allocated and working overtime to ensure delivery.
Several robotics companies invested a total of 500 million yuan in the Spring Festival Gala, and gained more than just hot searches that night. It is like a large-scale market education, telling hundreds of millions of families and businesses across the country that robots are no longer props in science fiction movies. They can run, jump, communicate with people through micro-expressions, and already have clear quotations and delivery dates.
As the shipments of leading companies such as Yushu increase, more possibilities are emerging in the industrial chain related to robots. For example, from the precision processing of core components to robot maintenance services, especially the secondary development of applications for specific scenarios such as catering, elderly care, companionship, medical care, etc., new business opportunities may be created.
The "highly dynamic cluster control" mentioned by Wang Xingxing in the interview has paved the way for large-scale dispatching of robots in logistics, inspection and other scenarios in the future; while Songyan Dynamics' bionic technology and Galaxy Universal's sausage-skewering robot provide the possibility for emotional interaction with service robots in homes and public places.
On New Year's Eve in 2026, what we see is not only the performance of robots, but also a group of Chinese entrepreneurs breaking through the technological blockade and market doubts. Not only did they allow the robot to learn anti-gravity mode, they also overcame the most difficult hill for commercialization.
The major robotics companies spent 500 million yuan on the Spring Festival Gala not only for one night's ratings, but also for the position of China's intelligent manufacturing in future global competition.