It was early evening as they were changing the guard outside one of the embassies and after the two sentries saluted one another, they each clutched their right fist in their left palm in front of their chest and gave a slight bow. It was the first day of the year of the fire horse and the People’s Armed Police soldiers, dressed in green greatcoats, white Sam Browne Belts and brown Lei Feng fur hats like Russian ushankas, were exchanging the baoquan, a new year greeting.
Most shops, offices and restaurants were closed but the streets near Beijing’s main temples were crowded with people lining up to burn incense and pray for good fortune or milling around the stalls at temple fairs outside. I was on my way to meet a friend who had abruptly postponed a dinner two days earlier because he had to get his hair cut.
“If I do it after new year it will be bad luck and my mother’s brother could die,” he said.
The danger was so specific that I was sceptical but when I asked another friend the following evening at a new year’s eve dinner he said it was true that if you get a haircut in the first month of the new year, your uncle might die.
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“It doesn’t affect me. I only have aunts,” he said.
We were about to make dumplings and his mother came out of the kitchen with a column of dough a couple of centimetres in diameter, green outside and cream-coloured on the inside. She started cutting coin-shaped slices and tossing them to her husband who used a narrow rolling pin the size of a policeman’s baton to flatten them into thin discs.
A thick, glutinous pork and vegetable filling was in a glass bowl with two pairs of chopsticks and the idea was to put some of it into each disc before fashioning it into a crescent-shaped dumpling. My friend’s mother said the key lay in emphatic thumb action but when it came to my turn, the finished product looked like a limp snail with the filling oozing from its back.
After dinner, we all sat down to watch the Spring Festival Gala, known as Chunwan, a five-hour variety show first broadcast in 1983 which is the most-watched annual television programme in the world. International performers included Lionel Richie who sang We Are the World with Jackie Chan, and after the chimes of midnight, Westlife, who performed My Love.
But the real stars of the show were humanoid robots, which appeared in everything from comedy sketches to dance sequences and most spectacularly in a martial arts display.
Robots made by Hangzhou-based Unitree performed simple movements in a folk dance routine in last year’s gala but on Monday night they ran at 14km per hour, performed three-feet high trampoline somersaults, climbed walls and executed backflips.
Some analysts outside China saw this display as a projection by the Communist Party of China’s technological progress in the context of its strategic competition with the United States. But it was primarily a showcase for robots that are available for sale in China, with manufacturers bidding for prime time slots in the gala.
Four robot firms were reported to have negotiated deals worth RMB100 million (€12.3m) each, although some said the top package cost five times that sum. Robot companies that took part in previous galas did not have to pay at all.
The money seems to have been well spent because tens of thousands of people checked the product page for the Unitree robot in the kung fu routine, which retails for about €11,000 and is sold out until April. Noetix Robotics’s Bumi, a child-sized “companion robot” priced at just RMB10,000 (€12,300) was also selling fast in China, although it is not yet available internationally.
[ Mass exodus from Beijing marks onset of Chinese New Year feverOpens in new window ]
AI tools were also planted everywhere in the gala, with Doubao, a chatbot from TikTok parent company ByteDance, interacting with the hosts between acts. The Doubao app logged 1.9 billion interactions during the gala but it is in competition with AI products from other Chinese tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba.
During Chinese New Year, people traditionally give presents of money in red envelopes and the tech giants offered digital red envelopes and other subsidies to encourage people to use their AI apps. They were especially interested in targeting older people and those in provincial cities who are traditionally slow in adopting technology to use platforms that use AI for everything from shopping and ordering food to booking holidays.
