The Chinese Embassy in America couldn’t help but boast about the new generation of “kung fu robots” after a jaw-dropping broadcast took over state television during China’s Spring Festival Gala, the Lunar New Year’s Eve show. The robotics feat in Beijing featured about two dozen humanoids created by Unitree performing martial arts, parkour and breakdancing.
Washington’s Chinese Embassy hailed the Asian country’s mighty high tech demonstration a combination of “precision, power and perfect balance,” as per the Telegraph UK.
The larger-than-life spectacle at the Lunar new year celebration in Beijing left the Internet awestruck. While the amplification of the big holiday TV event by officials helped seal the deal around the spectacle’s credibility, some bewildered social media users couldn’t help but wonder if it was all AI-generated.
Netizens couldn’t believe their eyes as they watched clips of robots back-flipping, punching and kicking in unison, while attempting to match the energy of Chinese children performing alongside them on stage. The robots were even seen wielding nunchucks and swords during the live performance.
Chinese Embassy in US boasts about ‘Kung Fu robots’
Beaming with pride, the Chinese Embassy in the US also wrote on Facebook, “You can’t imagine how fast Chinese humanoid robots are evolving.” And the statement especially made a resounding impact, considering the same company’s robotics showcase last year showed Unitree’s humanoids awkwardly dancing on the stage and waving red handkerchiefs.
In a follow-up Facebook update, the Chinese Embassy also unveiled the humanoid robots-creator Unitree’s “behind-the-scenes training” of the “Kung Fu robots.”
Remember the robot dancers at the Spring Festival Gala last year? This year, they've evolved into Kung Fu masters! 😎 pic.twitter.com/m3G5vZGs6V
— Xie Feng 谢锋 (@AmbXieFeng) February 17, 2026
The official account particularly spoke highly of the multiple “world’s firsts” achieved with the Spring Festival spectacle.
It wrote, “Many world’s first high-difficult movements by Chinese robots:
- World’s first continuous freestyle table-flipping parkour
- World’s first catapult somersault, reaching over 3 metres in height
- World’s first 7.5 full Airflare rotations
- World’s first rapid group positioning.”
Even Xie Feng, the Chinese Ambassador to the US, took to his official X account to happily declare, “Remember the robot dancers at the Spring Festival Gala last year? This year, they’ve evolved into Kung Fu masters!”
Unitree robots vs Elon Musk’s Optimus
At a time like this, comparisons of Unitree’s robots with Elon Musk‘s Optimus, a general-purpose humanoid currently under development by his company Tesla, are inevitable. The Tesla boss’ robot has also gone viral on the Internet one too many times for similar theatrics.
@grok is this real or it’s Ai
— Icy (@Icy95772897651) February 17, 2026
Numerous videos of Tesla’s Optimus robot showing off dance moves have previously emerged on social media this past year. And then at the October 2025 Los Angeles world premiere of the movie Tron:ARES, Musk’s robot even tried to “start a fight” with the Hollywood flick’s leading and controversial star Jared Leto.
During the Q4 2025 earnings call, the richest man in the world particularly sharply turned the attention to his robot production line, foregrounding a long-term goal “of having 1 million units a year of Optimus robots.”
Last month, the Tesla CEO said that the Optimus robots could go up for sale to the public by the end of 2027, when the company hopes to achieve the robot army’s “high reliability, very high safety, and the range of functionality.”
Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he said, “Humanoid robotics will advance very quickly. We do have some of the Tesla Optimus robots doing simple tasks in the factory. Probably later this year, by the end of this year, I think they’ll be doing more complex tasks and still deployed in an industrial environment.”
Numerous videos of Tesla’s Optimus robot showing off dance moves have previously emerged on social media. And then at the October 2025 Los Angeles world premiere of the movie Tron:ARES, Musk’s robot even tried to “start a fight” with the Hollywood flick’s leading and controversial star Jared Leto.
Contrary to the current pace of robotics push by US companies, their Chinese counterparts are charging ahead at a much faster speed.
According to the Unitree’s chief executive Wang Xingxing, the company sold around 5,500 robots last year, and is planning to build between 10,000 and 20,000 this year, the Telegraph reported. As of now, these bots are being sold for tasks like working in car factories.
Moreover, Beijing’s ministry of industry and information technology had even said three years ago that it wanted to see thousands of humanoids in farms, factories and houses as soon as 2025. It also maintained they would be “significantly improved” by 2027.
In 2024, a US government report also pointed out that China was “deploying significant government support for the humanoid robot industry in the form of subsidies, tax breaks, and development zones.”
Consequently, the US think tank Rand warned last year that as the Asian nation takes the lead in this sector it could result in “dependence on Chinese robotics firms for this critical dual-use technology.”