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Greetings from Beijing, and happy Chinese New Year to those celebrating. Wishing you and your loved ones a healthy, happy and successful Year of the Horse.
On 16 Feb., the Chinese New Year Eve, the CCTV Spring Festival Gala — the world's most-watched TV show each year — amazed an audience of 1.4 billion viewers. One of the night's most talked-about moments was a martial arts performance featuring humanoid robots developed by a leading Chinese tech startup Unitree Robotics. Performing alongside young Kung Fu masters, the robots executed deliberately off-balance, stumbling movements while maintaining flawless stability — a striking demonstration of physics, balance control and artificial intelligence precision.
The gala was also a landmark event for AI interaction. Viewers across China and around the world used Doubao, ByteDance's popular AI platform, to generate Chinese New Year greetings, collect digital red packets and create AI-generated festive images, all in real time. Official figures released by ByteDance 17 Feb. revealed the scale of engagement: during the almost five-hour broadcast, Doubao recorded over 1.9 billion interactions, helped users compose more than 100 million greetings, and generated more than 50 million images. At peak load, Doubao's large language models processed an extraordinary 63.3 billion tokens per minute, highlighting the immense computing power behind the AI systems.
Since the launch of China's AI Plus national initiative in August 2025, the country has accelerated investment in humanoid robotics and AI technologies. Adoption is expanding rapidly across industries and use cases. At the same time, a critical challenge remains in relation to balancing innovation with data protection, privacy, cybersecurity and AI governance.
With China's mandatory regulations on AI labeling coming into force as of 1 Sept. 2025, all AI-generated content must carry clear AI labeling. The Cyberspace Administration of China has stepped up enforcement, requiring internet platforms to strengthen content review and compliance. Violations already caught include unlabeled AI-generated videos, celebrity face-swapping for commercial promotion, AI-driven defamation and rumor-spreading, and the creation of illegal or unethical content. Thousands of accounts have been penalized, and Chinese regulators have signaled continued strict oversight throughout the year.
2026 is shaping up to be a breakout year for AI deployment in China. The Spring Festival Gala has long served as a stage for emerging technologies. As early as 2015, Tencent's "WeChat Shake for Red Packets" helped accelerate China's shift toward mobile payments and a cashless economy. In subsequent years, innovations such as drones, autonomous vehicles, 5G, digital humans and robots took the spotlight.
The 2026 gala sends an even stronger message that AI is evolving from a novelty technology into core infrastructure in the world's second largest economy.
Barbara Li, CIPP/E, is a partner at Reed Smith.
This article originally appeared in the Asia-Pacific Dashboard Digest, a free weekly IAPP newsletter. Subscriptions to this and other IAPP newsletters can be found here.