Can everyone dial it down a little with the enthusiasm for humanoid robots that can’t even do anything useful yet? You’re scaring the Chinese economy.
On Thursday, three Bloomberg reporters based in Beijing reported on an usual government announcement from China’s economic central planning department, the National Development and Reform Commission (it has no U.S. equivalent, so don’t even ask): the commission had noticed a pattern of dozens upon dozens of Chinese firms pushing out humanoid robots that do essentially nothing, and do it in pretty much the same way.
Agency spokeswoman Li Chao, Bloomberg said, expressed worry that this wave of robots was in danger of steering smart people away from actual, valuable research.
China seems to be noticing what you’ve probably already noticed: news stories about flashy Chinese robots walking really far, competing in games, and insufficient hype about China’s incomparably vast army of factory worker robots.
China’s version of this trend apparently kicked off when the country watched an admittedly kickass dance performance by a squadron of Unitree bots at the 2025 Spring Festival Gala, a Chinese New Year broadcast that happens to be the single most watched TV event in the world.
Per Bloomberg’s quoting of Li, “Frontier industries have long grappled with the challenge of balancing the speed of growth against the risk of bubbles—an issue now confronting the humanoid robot sector as well.” It amounts to a not-so-veiled announcement that the state thinks you’re potentially jeopardizing stability if you’re making these things in China.
Bike-sharing apps formed an economic bubble in China, for instance. There were dozens of apps that all did the same thing. Then that bubble disastrously popped, creating embarrassing photo spreads of bike graveyards, serving forever as examples of economic speculation gone mad.
And China is famous for tossing its tech billionaires behind bars—each arrest serving as a potential object lesson to any humanoid robot company CEO thinking about flouting what the Chinese government now says it wants to see: fewer robo-firms.
Bloomberg summarized what Li said the remarkable next steps would be: the government will on one hand expand R&D, and build national infrastructure for testing and training robots, efforts apparently aimed at injecting some much-needed variety into the sector. But It will also apparently create formal rules for entering and exiting the robot market, apparently to tamp down uncreative knock-offs.
So the Chinese robots aren’t going away. But if your product is in the video below, maybe you should consider yourself on notice.
Read the full article here
