The scene did the rounds of every news feed: at the opening ceremony of the Global Developer Conference on Embodied AI (GDPS) 2025, on 13 December in Shanghai, the humanoid robot G1 from Unitree, kitted out in a white Tai Chi outfit, ran through a series of moves – an opening stance, Wild Horse Parts Mane, White Crane Spreads Wings – alongside human martial artists, according to Yicai Global. Moments earlier, the Lingxi X2 from AgiBot (Zhiyuan), dressed up as a lion, mimicked a lion-dance troupe, picking its way across plum-blossom stakes to the beat of the drums. And for the first time, two manufacturers billed as direct rivals took the stage together, their very first joint humanoid turn, as DigiTimes noted.

The instinctive take was the same everywhere: here, surely, was dazzling proof of how clever China's humanoids have become. And that is precisely where the folklore clouds the view. Because the summit staging the show is, in the very same breath, selling the thing that explains it away.

The choreography isn't a feat, it's a spec sheet

At that same GDPS, Unitree launched its developer platform. According to Interesting Engineering, the platform lets you steer the humanoid robots remotely from a smartphone, using the phone's camera to guide the movements. The same outlet reports that it ships with pre-loaded action routines: martial arts, a The Twist dance and ballet sequences.

In other words, the Tai Chi paraded as a demonstration of autonomy is precisely what Unitree sells: scripted playback and/or teleoperation, dressed up in white robes. So the right question isn't "can the robots do Tai Chi?", but rather: does the choreography prove anything that a pre-loaded routine couldn't churn out anyway? Putting a humanoid through a sequence of martial-arts postures is the very use the maker itself touts in its app store. The show doesn't demonstrate intelligence; it demonstrates that the product does what it's sold to do.

Two "rivals" on stage, one and the same state timetable

That leaves the question of why two competitors would pick this particular summit for their first joint outing. The clue is in the programme. AgiBot and Unitree's first shared turn on stage falls on the very day Shanghai announces, at the GDPS, the start of construction on the Zhangjiang AI Innovation Town, according to Futunn.

The timing is anything but accidental. According to Yicai Global, the city is aiming to push the core of its embodied-AI industry past 50 billion yuan by 2027. Seen from that angle, the "rivalry" between the two brands melts away in favour of another picture altogether: that of a national supply chain being staged. The competition becomes scenery; the snapshot of the two champions side by side serves a public-policy narrative, timed to a foundation stone and a budget target.

Real leadership isn't danced, it's counted

If you want hard proof of China's lead, you won't find it in the dancing but in the volumes. According to the research firm Omdia, as reported by Fox News, AgiBot topped global humanoid shipments in 2025 with 5,168 units out of roughly 13,000 shipped worldwide that year. That figure, not some white-crane pose, is what actually says something concrete about the industrial balance of power.

The contrast captures the whole gap between staging and capability. A shipments figure measures an industry that builds things and moves them; a piece of choreography measures, above all, how good a pre-loaded routine and a bit of stage management are. The two can coexist, but they aren't saying the same thing — and only the latter got beamed out under the drums.

What remains unproven

The GDPS also hosted a contest meant to put robots through industrial-assembly tasks, emergency rescue and domestic chores. Until the actual success rates for these trials are published, there is no way to tell a genuinely autonomous capability from a scripted or remote-controlled demo — the very trick that Unitree's platform makes utterly routine.

So cultural folklore isn't the story: it's the screen. Behind the Tai Chi and the lion dance plays out a tale of industry and public policy, one in which humanoid autonomy remains a promise yet to be verified. The real news out of Shanghai wasn't that robots can dance. It was that a state knew how to make the narrative dance.