Last night’s Spring Festival Gala was half fireworks, half steel.

Songyan Power built a 1:1 highly realistic robot modeled on Cai Ming; Unitree robots staged an advanced martial arts performance; Galbot interacted with Shen Teng while demonstrating clothes-folding and walnut-rolling skills; and more than 100 “robot pandas” from Magic Atom danced alongside Jackson Yee.

Four companies paid a 400 million yuan entry fee for a national-level showcase.

Such high-density, industry-level exposure is extremely rare in the entire history of the Spring Festival Gala.

What exactly does this mean?

01 Performance at the Spring Festival Gala

“Cool, slick, and explosive” was how most online users described the humanoid robots’ performance on stage.

A Unitree Robotics robot used a catapult to complete a 3-meter-high backflip, a clip that spread widely on overseas websites and left foreign viewers stunned.

During a bit of banter with Shen Teng, the bank’s general-purpose robot unexpectedly started rolling walnuts in its hand, just like an old Beijing man.

It is said this was not preprogrammed or remotely controlled, but emerged through model training and simulation.

Magic Atom’s robot also completed the first Thomas 360° rotation by a robot.

At the same time, news about all kinds of robots flooded the trending charts. But the other side of the story was full of complaints.

Cai Ming Sharing the Stage With a Bionic Robot Triggers a Strong “Uncanny Valley” Reaction: The robot recreated “Grandma Cai Ming,” but its movements still looked stiff, prompting users to say it “sent chills down my back” and “felt like the opening of a horror movie.”

Among the four robotics companies, Unitree currently has the strongest reputation.

Songyan Power’s replica was criticized as falling into the “uncanny valley”; Magic Atom was mocked as having “wasted its money,” with its robot serving as little more than a backdrop.

Galbot’s collaboration with Shen Teng feels too customized: no laughs, just advertising.

Some viewers said the 2026 Spring Festival Gala felt like “a tech company’s annual meeting”: “Am I watching the gala, or a product launch?”

Viewers joked that “the first three acts were all robots” and that they had been “held captive by silicon-based life forms all night.”

Despite the mixed reactions, the robots undeniably brought the house down at the Spring Festival Gala.

JD.com’s official data showed that during the Spring Festival Gala livestream, searches for “robots” rose more than 300% from the previous period. At the same time, customer service inquiries related to robots increased by about 460%, while order volume grew by roughly 150%.

Many investment managers are also betting that on the first trading day after the Spring Festival holiday, a range of robotics-themed stocks could rise in response. Everyone knows the Spring Festival Gala is never just a television show.

Anything that makes it onto the Spring Festival Gala has, in essence, already passed a round of “symbolic screening.”

This shows that robotics has become part of a national-level grand narrative, one that is expected to succeed and cannot be allowed to fail.

Of course, there is also a capital story behind it. One detail many people do not know is that these robotics companies each paid 100 million yuan in “sponsorship fees” to get onto the Spring Festival Gala stage.

This 100-million-yuan bet is, at its core, a national-level roadshow aimed at the entire country.

02 The National Narrative

It is exceedingly rare for any industry to receive such concentrated exposure during the Spring Festival Gala.

It has appeared three times in the history of the Spring Festival Gala.

The first was mobile payments. In 2015, WeChat became the exclusive interactive platform, letting viewers grab red packets by using its “Shake” feature.

So that night, a surreal scene played out in homes everywhere: people frantically shook their phones, racing to grab red packets.

Official data showed peak interactions topped 800 million per minute, while hundreds of millions of users linked bank cards for the first time, driving explosive growth in WeChat Pay’s user base.

That night, mobile payments broke fully into the mainstream, and China truly entered a cashless society.

The second was China’s high-speed rail. Around 2010, the country’s high-speed rail network was expanding rapidly. At the Spring Festival Gala, a 1:10 scale model of the “Harmony” train slowly rolled to center stage, striking a powerful emotional chord with viewers who had just lived through the Lunar New Year travel rush.

But it is worth noting that high-speed rail at that point was not the product of a single company, but a symbol of national industrial achievement.

The third was aerospace. From Yang Liwei’s launch aboard Shenzhou-5 in 2003, to Shenzhou-10 astronaut Wang Yaping’s space lecture in 2013, and then to Chang’e-3’s soft landing on the lunar surface in 2015.

Every breakthrough in China’s space program has left a vivid mark on the Spring Festival Gala.

From that moment on, the dream of spaceflight was no longer the preserve of scientists. It took root in children’s textbooks and in the everyday conversations of older generations, becoming a shared national expectation.

Like high-speed rail, these showcases have become a kind of national symbol.

03 How Robots Differ

But this year’s showcase of the robotics industry was fundamentally different from the industry appearances in the previous three Spring Festival Galas.

First, aerospace and high-speed rail are more symbols of national strength than products.

Robots, by contrast, are actual products for sale from real commercial companies.

Second, the presence of multiple companies on the same stage made it feel like an “industry showcase.” This was not about a single company, but an industrial cluster.

Third, it is not a state project, but market-driven technology.

The robotics industry is not a state-led sector, but a fully market-driven one. That shows the industry carries both a national narrative and a capital-market narrative.

Across the more than 40-year history of the Spring Festival Gala, this level of concentrated representation from a single industry is, in fact, almost unprecedented.

When an industry is folded into a national-level narrative, it means there is only one acceptable outcome: success.

Just as China did with spaceflight and high-speed rail, when the whole nation mobilizes behind a goal, there is no reason it should fail.

For the robotics industry, this is undoubtedly a powerful shot in the arm.

“It is foreseeable that capital will keep placing bets in this field in 2026, because the Spring Festival Gala remains a marketing venue with exceptionally high exposure. For now, that narrative is unlikely to break.”

Cheng Yuan, an investor focused on embodied AI, said.

But there are also concerns. “These stage tricks are just simple programmed operations for robots, like a doll in a music box spinning and dancing,” Cheng Yuan said. The real test for robots is whether they can work in factories, labor in fields, and mine underground, not perform purely entertainment-driven “commercial shows.”

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This year’s Spring Festival Gala will move from a “symbolic filter” to a “survival filter” for the industry.

Once the applause fades, the market will judge these “100 million yuan players” by a simpler test: whether they can actually deliver.