China’s humanoid-robot pipeline is moving from prototype to volume faster than the headline numbers suggest. At a State Council Information Office briefing on 19 October, Wei Wei, director of the science and technology department at the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), said the country had more than 400 whole-machine humanoid-robot products in the first half of 2026, with output above 40,000 units and a full-year total now expected to exceed 100,000 units.
MIIT will push the sector along four lines. First, attack core technologies through an open-call mechanism aimed at typical scenarios, clearing shared bottlenecks and building solutions for different tasks. Second, widen deployment with on-site training, mining demand in industry, special operations and public services, and encouraging trading firms to open scenarios for benchmark demonstration projects. Third, complete the industrial ecosystem by issuing the 2026 edition of the National Humanoid Robot Industry Standards System Guidelines, accelerating urgently needed standards and standing up an open-source community. Fourth, hold the safety line with an industry monitoring system, product-quality and data-security testing, and with ethical governance.
The push dovetails with a nine-department opinion on accelerating technology-enabled commerce, which calls for cultivating commercial-agent formats, building intelligent shopping guides, operations and logistics agents, and pushing embodied intelligence into retail and home-service settings. Humanoid robotics is shifting from R&D prototypes toward commercial deployment, and the policy mix of technology breakthroughs, scenario opening and standards-plus-safety is meant to open a scaled commercial window.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.gasgoo.com/robot/news/70475306-%E5%B7%A5%E4%BF%A1%E9%83%A8-%E4%BA%BA%E5%BD%A2%E6%9C%BA%E5%99%A8%E4%BA%BA%E6%95%B4%E6%9C%BA%E4%BA%A7%E5%93%81%E8%B6%85400%E6%AC%BE/.