Article by Andrew Stokols: “In April 2025, twenty-one humanoid robots lined up beside human runners in Beijing’s Yizhuang district for what organizers billed as the world’s first humanoid half marathon.1 Most didn’t finish. Several fell over at the start. The coverage abroad ranged from hyperbolic to dismissive: evidence of Chinese technological mastery or a performative spectacle designed to impress the world.
China’s technology landscape is indeed layered with infrastructures and buildings built primarily to be seen: exhibition halls, demonstration zones, nighttime drone shows, smart-city command centers with wall-sized screens. Chinese has a term for the tendency, 面子工程 (mianzi gongcheng), “face engineering,” and in 2025 Xi Jinping himself criticized wasteful vanity projects.2 But to stop there misses what these projects do. A robot race on a closed urban course is also a test: of locomotion over real pavement, of battery endurance, of how machines behave among crowds. Yizhuang, not coincidentally, is also where Beijing’s autonomous vehicle testing zone has spent five years accumulating edge cases on public roads.
Chinese policymakers have a word for what connects these things, and it has become one of the most important concepts in the country’s industrial policy for artificial intelligence: 场景, changjing, or “scenario.”
In Chinese policy vocabulary, a scenario is a bounded, real-world environment in which an emerging technology can be deployed, observed, and improved before it is commercially viable. “Scenario innovation” (场景创新) and “scenario opening” (场景开放) entered official usage in the late 2010s, and in July 2022 six central agencies, led by the Ministry of Science and Technology and including the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, issued the Guiding Opinions on Accelerating Scenario Innovation to Promote High-Quality Economic Development through High-Level AI Application..(More)”.
