Hilarity, unease and relief: games show China is not over the finish line in humanoid robot race

With exploding pelvises, enough comic pratfalls for a Buster Keaton show reel and the odd moment of ruthless violence, the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing gripped the world this week with an unsettling mixture of hilarity, trepidation and relief. The five-day showcase staked out China’s claim to undisputed leadership in humanoid robotics as android martial artists landed knockout roundhouse kicks and robot teams marched into the arena heralded by flag-waving captains astride giant robotic dogs. The games’ blue-riband event, the 100m, did not disappoint when the robot-sprinters ran quicker than Usain Bolt before slamming mindlessly into a padded wall in a blaze of sparks, flames and flying mechanical limbs.

There, in a 10-second clip perfect for the games’ global online audience, was proof of what onlooking international experts described as the superpower’s “staggering” engineering progress, combined with comfort that the disintegrating robots might not yet be ready to become humanity’s overlords. Others caught themselves experiencing unexpected empathy. One captioned a robot struggling through the 400m obstacle race: “after drinking 4 bottles of wine at 2 a.m”.

Another found a weightlifting contest “way more emotional than I expected” as the bots strained to achieve their sporting goals. If the games had a slogan it might be: faster, higher, funnier. The obstacle course involving humanoids scrambling under nets, down stairs and over stepping stones reminded the comedian Charlie Higson of Monty Python’s Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch: “It’s only lacking ‘taking the bra off the debs’ and ‘shooting themselves’.” He came back the next day for more.

But the games were not intended to only entertain. Involving over 2,000 humanoids built by more than 660 mostly domestic tech companies, it was a propaganda flex of China’s robotics muscle just weeks before its president, Xi Jinping, lands in Washington DC for a summit with Donald Trump, where the superpowers’ race to tech supremacy will be high on the agenda. Only last month Trump banned imports of Chinese humanoids and four-legged robot dogs, citing cyber and national security concerns.

The event was also a billboard to boost global sales of Chinese robots as US rivals prepare their own launches, notably Elon Musk’s long-hyped Optimus humanoid which is reported to have finally gone into production this month. Last year China produced 12,800 humanoids, about 90% of the global total, according to the Mercator Institute for Chinese Studies, a dominance which perhaps gave China the confidence to candidly broadcast so many comic failures, which surprised some onlookers. The event reflected the fact that, for the Chinese Communist party, humanoids are a high priority, offering solutions to a looming demographic crunch in the labour market, rising military ambitions and, as they walk more widely among the people, the state’s desire to tighten its surveillance web.

Beijing is fuelling an intensely competitive robot industry by seeding hundreds of companies to create an evolutionary survival of the fittest dynamic, with the games creating a hard deadline for competitors to deliver measurable progress. Xi’s latest five-year plan, approved in March, was studded with pledges to boost robotics industries; accelerate the “practical application of … humanoid robots” and explore “embodied AI in roles experiencing labour shortages or high-risk environments” which likely include war. The military potential of the humanoids on display worried some onlookers.