Responses on Chinese social media to state broadcaster CCTV’s annual Spring Festival Gala last week were less than uniformly rapturous. A deleted post from WeChat public account Selling Apricot Blossoms described the broadcast as a brain-pulverizing ideological blender, and encouraged others to ignore it rather than watch it merely to fuel online snark. When CCTV reminded viewers that it owns the IP rights to the show, a comment on Douyin likened this to putting a lock on a septic tank.

Some criticism focused on the Gala’s centerpiece: a showcase of PRC-produced humanoid robots performing kung fu and Peking opera. The "Super Bowl-like" demo prompted triumphalism from CCTV itself, and some consternation in the West at the possibility of a new "DeepSeek moment". At the For the Select Few WeChat public account, Deng Xinhua argued that humanoid robots are inefficient for most practical tasks, apart from sex and companionship.

Another critique came from legal blogger Li Yuchen, who dismissed the Gala’s flashy robot acrobatics as little more than a series of very expensive ads. "Every New Year’s Eve, the Spring Festival shows you how awesome we are," he wrote. "What they don’t show you is what any of this progress has to do with you." (Selling Apricot Blossoms expressed a similar sense of disconnection, writing that "the year’s most-watched chive parade" merely showed "the daily lives of Chinese people pounded and pinched into shape like festive New Year dumplings.") Li compared the situations of China’s robots and its humans, concluding that robots are honored as flagbearers for China’s economic output while living "huminerals" are treated like expendable resources to fuel the machine.

Li made veiled references to trafficking of women in rural areas—"x县的她们，被tie L"—and workers with pneumoconiosis—"尘f病"—replacing characters with pinyin or initials in an effort to evade scans for sensitive keywords. The post was censored, however.

On this year’s Chinese New Year’s Eve, four robotics companies made a joint appearance as part of CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala.

Magic Atom, Galaxy General, Unitree Technology, and Songyan Power had dozens of robots turning somersaults, doing kung fu, and striking horse stances on the main stage in Beijing. At the satellite venue in Hefei, iFlytek androids performed tangma [a stylized operatic representation of horseriding], and struck dramatic poses with sleeves flying. In Shenyang, Siasun’s heavy-duty robotic [camera] arms held steady in the sub-zero temperatures with sub-millimetre precision.

Cai Ming performed a skit with a robot, 30 years on [from a 1996 Gala performance in which she played a custom-made robot wife].

The bullet comments flooded in: “Amazing!” “I could watch these robots all night!”

The price of entry for a partnership spot for robots at the Spring Festival Gala can amount to tens or even hundreds of millions of yuan. These four companies clamored to appear onstage because Unitree “broke out” at last year’s Gala, multiplying its valuation several times over.

This isn’t a gala; it’s a product launch.

I’ve tried to think about the Spring Festival Gala robots in terms of the predicaments facing ordinary people:

Robots can do somersaults because their joint movements are controlled down to the millimeter; food delivery workers have their pay docked if they’re a few minutes late.

Robots don’t mind the cold, and can work in the most frigid temperatures; elderly Hebei villagers can’t afford to heat their homes this winter.

Robots can be freely bought and sold at clearly marked prices; in x county, women are put in ir0n ch@!ns and “sheltered.”

When robots break down, there are engineers on call to repair them; when a miner’s lungs fail due to pneumoc**iosis, there’s no one to fix that.

A robot’s spot in the Spring Festival Gala costs 100 million yuan or more; every year, there are special enforcement campaigns to address the issue of unpaid wages to migrant workers, but the problem never gets solved.

Robots come with owners’ certificates, safety manuals, and after-sales service; for 84 million gig workers, even an employment contract is beyond reach.

Galaxy General’s robots in the Gala were equipped with embodied AI models so they could interact with people in real time. Magic Atom’s MagicBot Z1 has 24 degrees of freedom, 130 Newton-meters (Nm) of torque, and 320º of joint motion, and can repeatedly recover from falls and do backflips.

They have emotion recognition systems that can distinguish human emotions such as happiness, anger, sorrow, and joy.

[…] There are more than 84 million gig workers across the country: food delivery riders, package couriers, and rideshare drivers. Many of them spend long periods exposed to traffic hazards and physical strain. One food-delivery rider told an interviewer: “I don’t dare set my phone to silent, day or night, in case I miss an order and get a bad review. Even when I fall asleep, I have nightmares about rushing to make deliveries in time.”

There’s no system to recognize their emotions, only to detect if they run late.

Riders have reported pay deductions after being a few minutes late, and heavier ones if someone files a complaint. In the event of a traffic accident, the platform’s first response is to check whether the order was delivered.

Most gig workers don’t have employment contracts. Social insurance is a luxury. They’re not “employees,” they’re “partners,” so the platforms don’t have to assume the responsibilities of an employer.

[…] At the start of every winter, there’s another round of “special winter campaigns to tackle unpaid wages.” Last November, it was the “November 2025-Spring Festival 2026 Comprehensive Campaign to Rectify Wage Arrears.”

The cycle continues, year after year: a crackdown, more wage theft, then another crackdown …

This last campaign ran right up until the start of the Spring Festival Gala, with its backflipping robots.

Then it’s: “Unpaid wages? Lighten up, it’s New Year! Money or no money, it’s time to go home and eat your dumplings.”

The flow of migrant workers between provinces fell from 78.67 million in 2014 to 68.40 million in 2024—down 10 million in 10 years.

It’s not that they don’t want to migrate in search of work. It’s that it doesn’t make sense now. The pay-off from working in another province has fallen, but the costs and dangers have not. Even in smaller towns, there are meals to be delivered and gigs to be worked. It might not be a dream job, but at least you don’t have to uproot yourself from your hometown for the sake of a paycheck that could evaporate at any moment.

Moving a robot is easy: box it up, ship it off, roll it out. It won’t get homesick, or worry about people and things it left behind, or have kids waiting for it back home.

How many left-behind children do we even have now? It’s a long time since anyone’s bothered to update the number.

Every New Year’s Eve, the Spring Festival shows you how awesome we are. We’ve got 5G, AI, quantum computing, and humanoid robots. The core technologies are homegrown and under domestic control.

What they don’t show you is what any of this progress has to do with you.

Robots are becoming more agile, while workers are becoming more oppressed by algorithms. Technology gallops forward, while ordinary people get left behind.

Onstage, man and machine dance together; offstage, the humans are worse off than the robots.

The amount that a place is willing to spend on backflipping robots reflects the amount of thought it will spare for real people.

At this year’s Gala, the robots were more lifelike than ever.

They can dance, speak, and recognize emotions … they’ll be well looked after.

And the people?

They can run, they can carry, and when they break, they’ll be replaced, and no one will care.

So in the end, are robots becoming more human, or are humans becoming more like draft animals?

Or to put it another way: Who’s treated with care in this country, and who’s an expendable resource? [Chinese]