I spent a day at a robot “carnival” in Shanghai. Here’s what I saw.

An R&D hub on the outskirts of Shanghai held a public robot "carnival" this month, drawing families to watch humanoids perform drunken boxing, robotic dogs attempt handstands, and pairs of remote-controlled bots fight in a water-bead arena. The dispatch, reported by MIT Technology Review, offers a ground-level look at China's push to normalize embodied AI in public life.

The event was hosted by an R&D center that houses more than 100 companies researching, developing, manufacturing, and marketing robotic technologies. Exhibitors included DexForce, whose humanoid demonstrated making coffee at the show. Nearby, a pair of robotic arms attempted to fold a basket of T-shirts. Staffers ran interactive demos teaching children how to make quadrupedal robots climb stairs, and mini robotic dogs were on sale — at least one leaving the premises in the arms of an 11-year-old who immediately showed it off to strangers.

The carnival is part of a broader, coordinated campaign. As the Shanghai event ran, shopping malls and tourist attractions in several other Chinese cities hosted humanoids performing for crowds, and in Beijing, bipedal robots were running half-marathons, per MIT Technology Review. The public-relations effort reflects explicit government priorities: embodied AI was a key facet of China's latest five-year plan, and a MERICS report describes it as central to the country's strategy to bring AI into daily life.

The scale of China's humanoid output underlies the showmanship. Forbes reported that nearly 90% of the more than 13,000 two-armed, two-legged robots delivered globally last year were made in China, making Chinese firms the world leaders in humanoid shipments by a wide margin.

Despite the pageantry, real obstacles persist. Progress on humanoids elsewhere has been slow, hampered by safety challenges tied to their weight and the difficulty of balancing on two legs, high prices, and short battery life, MIT Technology Review notes. A vocal segment of the robotics community remains skeptical that a humanoid form factor is even the right shape for practical robots. Yang Duan, a product manager at DexForce, framed the optimistic case at the carnival: humanoids "can free people from physical work and mundane chores," he told the reporter.

Whether the showcase changes attitudes beyond a single weekend remains an open question, but the crowd's reaction — chanting "more, more, more" as a humanoid in a blinged-out top finished a martial arts routine and a second performed a front flip — suggests the PR campaign is at least landing in Shanghai.