China’s Spring Festival Gala delivers rock ’n’ roll, robots and political messages

Annual Lunar New Year programme features AI-powered folk dance, hi-tech effects and US band OneRepublic while reinforcing national identity

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Robots share the stage with human dancers during CCTV’s Lunar New Year gala performance on Tuesday. Photo: Unitree

Published: 10:01pm, 29 Jan 2025Updated: 10:18pm, 29 Jan 2025

China’s Spring Festival Gala on Tuesday evening featured a robot dance performance, an American rock band and hi-tech visual effects, while delivering political messages that reinforced a unified national identity and criticised bureaucratic inefficiency.

The annual variety show first aired in 1983 on state broadcaster CCTV. It remains a key cultural event in China during Lunar New Year, also known as Spring Festival.

Recognised by Guinness World Records as the world’s most-watched annual TV programme, this year’s five-hour live broadcast drew a record 2.8 billion views – 690 million more than last year, according to preliminary statistics.

One of the most striking performances of the night was an AI-driven dance segment called “Yangge Bot”.

Directed by filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the segment featured 16 humanoid robots from Unitree Robotics joined by dancers from Xinjiang Arts University. They performed a synchronised yangge dance, a folk dance popular across northern China.

Dressed in floral cotton jackets, the robots twirled handkerchiefs – tossing them and catching them mid-air – and spun in perfect sync with the music and their human counterparts.