Name: The West is in Trouble
Uploaded: 2026-03-10T18:01:23.000Z
Duration: 15 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

China's kung fu robots are a wake up call for the west world terrified of humanoid Chinese robots.

Can the west recover from China's knockout blow?

What a load of rubbish Chinese robot propaganda nonsense.

It's not as if there's a massive weaponized sword wielding robot.

Well, I'll tell you what, beats a sword wielding, somersaulting robot battery life.

Oh, they can switch out their own batteries on the fly and load themselves into a crate for battle.

You know, when you're at school, there was always that one kid who made you look bad because they always did so much better, made it look so easy.

The teacher would always be like, oh, why can't you get good marks?

It made losers like me wonder why I ever bothered at all.

Now imagine that, but on a geopolitical scale.

And you get China here to make a mockery of us all.

the time it's taken for the UK to decide whether to connect its first and second biggest cities with 225km of high speed rail, a process that quite literally got held up by a bat in a tree.

China's gone and built 50,000 kilometers of high speed rail.

What about fusion energy, humanity's last hope?

In the south of France, dozens of nations, including China, have joined hands to build iter, a colossal facility expected to cost $50 billion that will hopefully crack open the secrets of fusion energy for us all.

Predictably, though, it's significantly behind schedule and over budget.

And in the next 10 years, there's a higher chance of me personally unlocking the secrets of the universe using this laser pen and this bag of dirt.

Meanwhile, China got a bit bored, demolished a mountain and built what can only be described as a gateway to another universe.

A building so spectacular in size and scale that in the UK it would have taken 8,000 years to get planning permission because it might get in the way of a blade of grass.

And while most developed nations are struggling with a housing crisis because they're not building enough houses, China accidentally Built too many cities to the point they've had to quite literally demolish them.

So seeing kung fu sword wielding robots is the fucking icing on the cake of geopolitical mockery.

The west outsourced the physical world long ago, and now we'll pay the price for that.

It also doesn't help that while videos of backflipping robots go viral and the skyline of Chongqing looks like a cyberpunk wet dream over here, I read daily news stories like friend did a line of asbestos.

But look, let's slam on the brakes here because we've gone a little bit too far.

Building and demolishing cities, after all, seems a little bit wasteful and somebody's got to pick up the tab.

Meanwhile, the mantra of move fast and break things doesn't really work when it comes to national infrastructure.

I was very impressed when I rode the bullet trains in China back in 2011.

And then several weeks later, that train tragically crashed, derailing and taking the lives of several dozen passengers.

Heck, five years ago at Christmas, I received the ultimate Christmas gift when I discovered that my beloved bath map was made out of asbestos because it had been made under rather devious circumstances in a Chinese factory.

I mean, really, I should have shipped it back home.

Could have chopped it up and let the masses snort it for fun.

It's clear the west looks upon China with a sense of fear, envy and awe.

And in a way, it feels like history is kind of repeating itself with the same techno Orientalist nonsense that Japan faced in the 1980s, back when there was a sense Japan was about to take over the world.

So, having outsourced all of our manufacturing to China, are we really about to take a back seat in the realms of science and technology?

Or is it all being grossly exaggerated by a fearful Western media?

humanoid robots is actually quite an interesting way into it because of the striking parallels almost 40 years apart.

Now you might be thinking, hang on, hang on.

What right have you got to discuss robots?

And the truth is this, not only are robots the secret reason that I moved to Japan in the first place, but

I'm actually an expert on the subject because I'm one of the few people in the world who have fought in a real life, actual robot war.

Robot wars was one of the biggest TV shows in the UK in which scruffy working class men took their children's inheritance and set fire to it on national television.

And unfortunately for me, my dad was at the front of the king.

When I was 10, he took all his earnings and built a 72 kilogram monstrosity using a dustbin lid and a pickaxe, like a sort of crappy TAMI stuff.

And somehow in series two, it actually came in fourth place in the entire competition.

To this day, I have no idea how that was achieved, but

as a kid, I got to control the axe on national television and gleefully smash it into another robot.

And in fact, the last time you can see me smiling in any photo was back then, in the year 2000, right before things reached their unfortunate and inevitable conclusion.

Because the truth was, the game was rigged from the start.

You see, while the working class contestants were building their robots with pocket money and duct tape, the BBC took license fee money and spent it on a series of terrifying, indestructible robots crafted with chainsaws and flamethrowers.

The most terrifying of which was Sir Killalot, a 750 kilogram robot so obscenely brash and bold, it had been knighted.

And in the heat of the battle, while our robot got hopelessly stuck, Sir Killal rolled over, picked it up as if it were a bag of feathers, and

roasted it over an open flame like a fucking chicken.

Do you know what it's like seeing your birthright flame roasted on national television?

As I watched that bright pink atrocity go up in flames, a piece of me died that day.

Since that day, I swore revenge on the BBC, infiltrating the organization at every level, befriending employees past and present, quietly biding my time.

And in my desperate quest to build my own killer robot, I turned my attention east to the land of robots.

From the ashes of World War II, Japan experienced an economic miracle that turned the country into a technological powerhouse.

Between the mid-1950s and the early 1970s, Japan's economy grew at an average rate of 10% every single year.

In 1964, the debut of the Shinkansen must have seemed like genuine witchcraft.

By 1980, Japan actually overtook the US to become the world's largest car manufacturer.

And soon, just about every household item was made in Japan.

I love looking back at 80s movies because that fear of Japan is baked into the films, Whether it's Weyland Yutani Corporation in Alien, Nakatomi Plaza in Die Hard or Back to the Future.

When Marty McFly is fired by his boss, a man known only as Mr. Fujitsu san.

It seemed like the future very much belonged to the East.

And amidst this backdrop of breakthroughs, Honda pioneered humanoid rogue robots as early as 1986.

By 1993, they built the Honda P1, which looks like something out of the Terminator.

Almost 20 years before Boston Dynamics started showcasing their own robot, called Petman.

Like, it's easy to forget just how impressively far Honda took this technology.

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The West is in Trouble

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