ISTANBUL

China’s Spring Festival Gala featured a number of firsts this year as the world’s second-most populous country ushered in the Lunar New Year.

The annual gala, broadcast on Lunar New Year’s Eve, is China’s flagship celebration for the holiday and is watched by millions across the country.

This year, robots, including humanoids, performed the world’s first continuous freestyle table-vaulting parkour, the first aerial flip, continuous single-leg flips, a two-step wall-assisted backflip, and the first 7.5-rotation Airflare grand spin.

The performance marked a stark contrast with last year’s show, when robots twirled handkerchiefs and performed simple movements.

The segment, aired Monday on state broadcaster CGTN, has since gone viral, drawing nearly half a million views on YouTube.

Four firms — Unitree, Magiclab, Galbot, and Noetix — partnered with the gala in deals reportedly worth around 100 million yuan ($14 million), according to the South China Morning Post.

The first robots to appear were Noetix’s Bumi models, featured in a comedy sketch. Unitree’s robots later performed martial arts alongside child artists, including backflips and trampoline jumps, followed by Magiclab’s humanoids in a musical segment.

The performances highlighted China’s rapid progress in humanoid robotics, an area currently focused on entertainment applications before realizing its longer-term potential in industrial applications.

The event also underscored growing rivalries among Chinese tech firms.

ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, used the event to showcase its artificial intelligence capabilities, unveiling its Seedance 2.0 video-generation model and updated Doubao-Seed 2.0 systems.

The company also announced plans to distribute over 100,000 products—including drones, EVs, robots, and 3D printers—and digital red envelopes worth up to 8,888 yuan ($1,286) through lucky draws.

The gesture competed with Tencent’s Yuanbao and Alibaba’s Qwen AI apps, which, before the holiday, rolled out giveaways worth 1 billion yuan and 3 billion yuan, respectively, in cash and vouchers.

Excluded from the CCTV–ByteDance partnership, Alibaba sponsored galas organized by local broadcasters in Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and Henan.

Three Chinese astronauts also joined New Year celebrations from space. Crew members aboard Shenzhou-21 marked the holiday by decorating the space station with red lanterns, eating dumplings, and sharing a freshly baked cake prepared using the station’s space oven.

Chinese New Year, also known as the Lunar New Year, marks the start of the Year of the Horse and begins Feb. 17.