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Jeffrey Wu

On a humid Beijing track last month, the sprint to the future began. The athletes were not human; they were robots.
The inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games brought 280 teams from 16 countries to compete in 26 events, from sprints to gymnastics to football. China’s Unitree dominated the track, X-Humanoid excelled in industrial tasks, while Neotix and Booster Robotics won in gymnastics and football.
Triumphs were matched by mishaps: colliding, collapsing robots echoed earlier failures, when aeroplanes sputtered or self-driving cars stalled. Progress rarely begins with perfection.
In robotics, failures are not wasted. Each fall becomes training data. Analysts estimate humanoids need 10 million hours of real-world exposure to reach reliable autonomy. Simulations cannot replicate wind, terrain or collisions.
Chinese companies are pushing robots into unpredictable environments, from marathons to combat sports. Months earlier in Hangzhou, four Unitree robots donned gloves and helmets for a kickboxing match that looked like fiction. Roundhouse kicks may look entertaining, but they involve abilities robots must master to operate in factories, hospitals or homes.
Competitions accelerate development because they break the neat boundaries of labs. Rules had to be invented from scratch. It may seem trivial, but it marks the beginning of institutionalisation. Aviation only scaled up once regulators and standards gave it order. The internet only matured when governance bodies like ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) defined its protocols.


Robots are entering the same phase, where society writes frameworks around them as participants rather than tools. A World Humanoid Robotics Games Federation is being formed, with Beijing set to host a second Games next year.
Teams from the United States, Germany and Japan joined this year, but the medals were swept by Chinese firms. American companies like Tesla and Boston Dynamics capture global headlines, yet here they were spectators.
Leadership in technology has never been only about invention; it is also about staging and narrative. Beijing has seized that role. The Schneider Trophy seaplane races of the 1920s were less about leisure than national prestige, pushing aviation forward. The space race was theatre as much as science. The DARPA (US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) desert challenges in the early 2000s turned autonomous vehicles from curiosities into an industry.
China has learned this. It is not enough to innovate quietly – one must create a platform where innovation is performed and remembered. By hosting the humanoid games, Beijing is doing what Washington once excelled at: turning technical progress into cultural spectacle.
The arena itself is striking. Sports are uniquely human contests. To insert robots into sports is to redefine them as competitors rather than instruments. Today, most remain remotely controlled. Tomorrow, they will run autonomously. When they do, robots will not simply execute instructions; they will make decisions once reserved for us.

That is not a trivial shift. A robot on an assembly line replaces a worker. A robot sprinting 400 metres or throwing punches encroaches on human space. The Olympics celebrate the limits of human ability. Robot games celebrate the prospect of exceeding them.
This is why investors are watching closely. Beneath the performance is industrial preparation. Start-ups like AgiBot are preparing to mass-produce humanoid robots. It is one of six Chinese firms planning to manufacture more than a thousand units this year. UBTech Robotics has just secured up to US$1 billion to finance its expansion, including a joint venture in the Middle East, while Unitree Robotics is planning to file for an onshore initial public offering by year-end, signalling the sector’s readiness to tap public investors.
Meanwhile, Foshan city has launched two robotics funds worth at least 3.5 billion yuan (US$488 million) and pledged annual R&D grants for breakthroughs in key robotics components.
Markets are shifting from hype to early investment. The sight of competing robots reassures investors that commercialisation may arrive sooner than expected.

The exhibition also carries geopolitical weight. China’s rise rests on state direction – pushing adoption through state-owned enterprises and mass production – as well as advances in artificial intelligence and sensors enabling robots to “see” and “hear” with fidelity. Analysts project the global robotics market will reach US$400 billion by 2029, with China accounting for nearly half.
The absence of American medals is not an indictment of the US’ technical talent, but of its willingness to engage in this kind of public theatre. Beijing knows soft power in the 21st century lies not only in inventing the future but in staging it.
We are witnessing a pattern that recurs whenever technologies advance from laboratories to society. At first, they are fragile and experimental. Then they are institutionalised, given rules and standards. Finally, they become embedded, until we no longer think of them as extraordinary at all. Aviation was once the realm of daredevils; today it’s infrastructure. The internet was once a curiosity; today it underpins every economy.
IBM’s Deep Blue computer defeating chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 was a prelude, forcing us to confront the fact that a machine could outthink us.

Today, robots are entering tests of physicality. A sprint in Beijing is less about who wins than what it signals: no longer confined to factories, machines are being measured against our strength, speed and coordination.
When robots run, fall and rise again in this new arena, they are not merely prototypes. They are warming up for a future where humans and machines share a stage.
The question remains: will we treat them as tools, rivals or teammates?


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A pair of robots from Unitree Robotics compete in a kickboxing match at the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on August 15, 2025. Photo: Reuters

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By hosting the games, Beijing is doing what Washington once excelled at: turning technical progress into cultural spectacle


By hosting the games, Beijing is doing what Washington once excelled at: turning technical progress into cultural spectacle.


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Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


China just beat the US in soft power with the humanoid robot games

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}By hosting the games, Beijing is doing what Washington once excelled at: turning technical progress into cultural spectacle

By hosting the games, Beijing is doing what Washington once excelled at: turning technical progress into cultural spectacle