China

In March 2025, China’s military researchers published a concept describing how to rapidly capture and subdue the city of Taipei. Distributed in restricted military channels, this approach argues Beijing can achieve victory “by blocking the city’s ability to receive external assistance, restricting its ability to enable operations, breaking its operational system, collapsing cognitive cohesion, and eliminating its ability to recover.” Its objective is to break the Taiwan people’s will to fight.Wh

Fast-growing Chinese robot maker AgiBot is pursuing an initial public offering in Hong Kong and has hired Citic Securities as a sponsor, according to two people familiar with the matter. Additionally, China International Capital Corporation (CICC) and Morgan Stanley have also been tapped as joint sponsors, one of the people said. Shanghai-based AgiBot had shown signs that it was looking to list following its restructuring from a limited liability company to a joint-stock limited firm last year,.

Chinese artificial intelligence unicorn Moonshot AI, whose release of its Kimi K3 model last week sparked talk of another “DeepSeek moment”, has accelerated its fundraising ahead of a planned initial public offering (IPO) in Hong Kong, eyeing a new financing round as early as next month, a source says. The Beijing-based company was set to close its current funding round at a US$30 billion valuation later this month or early next month, according to a person familiar with the matter. It planned..

Global biotech firms are increasingly being drawn to Hong Kong for its growing investor base and proximity to Chinese pharmaceutical partners.

Most of the world’s garlic is grown in China. But this year, unusual weather conditions this past fall, winter, and spring challenged the country’s farmers.

Disposal of Chinese agentic AI start-up has left the Facebook owner better off than it might seem

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Tuesday the Trump administration could sanction China over intellectual property (IP) theft amid concerns about whether Beijing is relying on American AI to develop its own advanced models. "We've seen a lot of talk about you know open-source models coming and threatening the large language models in the U.S." Bessent...

Google’s AI struggles scream trouble as new Chinese models (again) throw US tech dominance into question Hello, I’m Blake Montgomery, writing to you after a double-header feature of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the World Cup final. What a great Sunday. Today in tech, we’re discussing how China is chipping away at the US’s lead in the AI race and how Silicon Valley’s workers are taking action to protect their jobs from AI. New York becomes first state to impose one-year pause on new AI dat

Daimler-Truck-Chefin rechnet bei Elektro-Lkw mit kräftiger Konkurrenz aus China. Um wettbewerbsfähiger zu werden, sollen in Deutschland 5000 Jobs wegfallen.

Model supremacy in a token-efficient macro environment plagued by HBM, energy and datacenter compute bottlenecks. The 2026 story of AI is getting geopolitical.

China’s rapid move to stem a rout in its stock markets – through direct state buying and pledges of more stabilising measures – underscores the resolve of policymakers to protect the country’s high-stakes push for technology innovation and safeguard more than 200 million individual investors. Beijing’s intervention signals a regulatory intention to engineer a more durable and sustainable bull run on the nation’s US$15 trillion stock market, which is now counted on to support strategic tech...

Z.ai, the developer of the GLM family of AI models, has completed construction of a 1GW-class AI data center using only Chinese-made AI chips, with part of the facility already operating. The site is intended to support training and development of the company’s frontier models. Z.ai also operates several computing clusters containing more than 10,000 […]

Ant International, the affiliate of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has raised about US$1.2 billion in a Series A funding round to fuel its global expansion, the company said on Tuesday. Existing backers Ant Group and Alibaba Group Holding joined the equity financing alongside several international institutional investors, whose identities were not disclosed. The fresh capital would be used to accelerate the firm’s international growth and drive innovation in merchant payments, account...

This year, China’s biggest AI conference showed an industry racing to cut computing costs, put AI agents to work, manage new risks, and find business models that can last.

Long before China imported soybeans from Brazil and the United States, the crop powered the country’s economy in the northeast, shaping industry, empire, and the fate of many small towns.

The country’s first regulations on AI companion services also set new limits on chatbots designed to simulate emotional bonds with users.

Chinese robotics companies lack both sufficient data and a good “brain” to improve the interaction of their products with the physical world, according to industry insiders at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), which concluded on Monday in Shanghai. The most critical challenge for the embodied AI industry was to “link hardware, data, models and real-world scenarios into a closed-loop iterative system”, said Wang Xiaogang, co-founder of SenseTime and chairman of its robotics...

Amid accelerating digital health transformation, China has developed a centrally coordinated data-driven healthy China pathway. This viewpoint conceptualizes this pathway as a hybrid continuous planning framework (HCPF) that links long-term strategic direction with short-cycle tactical adaptation. China’s strategy has progressed through 3 overlapping periods: infrastructure-oriented periodic planning (2015-2018), emergency-driven digital acceleration (2019-2021), and institutionalized continuous

Kai-Fu Lee’s 01.ai is raising a pre-IPO round ahead of a planned Hong Kong listing in 2027, the former Google China chief told Bloomberg at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. The company is unwinding its offshore holding structure, the same prerequisite that Moonshot dismantled in May to clear its own path to a Hong […] This story continues at The Next Web

Who’s Afraid of Chinese Models? Interesting proposal from Ben Thompson that both addresses the hypocrisy of labs outlawing distillation against their models despite training on unlicensed data, and could help US open models compete more effectively with their Chinese counterparts: The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation —

The global threat environment in 2026 is the darkest since the Cold War—active conflicts on three continents, an aggressive Russia, and a rapidly modernizing Chinese military. Yet the exhaustion of ...

The commercialisation of artificial intelligence is poised to transition from a “token economy” to a “task economy” as token prices decline in the coming years, according to Chinese AI company SenseTime. “The pricing of tokens will inevitably drop, much like the cost of telecoms data did two decades ago,” SenseTime CEO Xu Li said in an interview with the South China Morning Post. After foundational models and computing power become basic infrastructure, the true commercial value will shift...

Greetings from a world where…

The release of Kimi K3, an artificial intelligence model created by a former computer science graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, has rocked parts of social media and the AI commentariat. The model, developed by Moonshot AI—a Chinese lab cofounded by that ex-student, Yang Zhilin—has wowed many observers with its capabilities. “Kimi K3 demonstrates the U.S. moat in building frontier AI software is not as durable as many of us had hoped,” says Ryan Fedasiuk, a fellow at the American En

A humanoid robot combat event organized by a Shenzhen robotics company has gone viral, even catching the attention of Tesla CEO Elon Musk. On July 19, Musk reposted a video from the event on social media, writing, “Robot fights are fun.” The footage features two EngineAI T800 full-size humanoid robots trading punches and kicks inside […]

Yimu Tech, a Chinese developer of tactile sensing hardware and software for embodied-intelligence systems, has completed a Series E financing round of more than RMB1 billion, bringing its valuation above RMB10 billion. The financing was jointly backed by multiple leading RMB funds, USD funds and industrial investors. The company is developing tactile sensing materials, chips, […]

Inside the ‘Culture of Fear’ at One American-Chinese University Emma Whitford Mon, 07/20/2026 - 03:00 AM Faculty at Wenzhou-Kean have accused their employer of obfuscatory employment agreements, wrongful termination, discrimination, retaliation and lack of shared governance. University officials dispute the charges. Byline(s) Emma Whitford

China has developed more than 400 humanoid robot products, accounting for more than half of the global total, according to data released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on July 20. The ministry also said Chinese quadruped robots accounted for close to 70% of global sales. [Xinhua, in Chinese]

Bilibili showcased its open-source “Catgirl Plan” AI digital-life ecosystem at WAIC 2026 in Shanghai on July 18. Its core product, Project N.E.K.O., is a proactive multimodal AI companion that can continuously observe a computer environment, interpret desktop content and initiate conversations. The system separates its front-end interface, AgentAI system and memory layer, while allowing users […]

4th IEEE International Conference on Medical Artificial Intelligence [Zhengzhou, China] [Nov 20, 2026 - Nov 22, 2026]

China’s market regulator is poised to announce the outcome of its months-long antitrust investigation into Trip.com Group, the country’s largest online travel services provider, as soon as this week, according to three people familiar with the matter. The probes, launched in January by the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), could be concluded as early as Monday, one of the people said. The company could face a fine of between 2 billion yuan (US$295 million) and 6 billion yuan,...

The deal size will exceed Luxshare Precision's $3.1 billion IPO earlier this month, making it the largest listing in Hong Kong this ​year.

At Shanghai’s World Artificial Intelligence Conference, tech companies showcased phones designed to understand user intent and coordinate tasks across services.

Kevin O’Leary is being sued for defamation by a group fighting data center construction in Utah after the “Shark Tank” star went on Fox News and claimed some of the individuals involved with the opposition have ties to China, according to The Hill. The suit, which was also against Fox News, was filed on Wednesday […]

Alibaba Group Holding has previewed its next-generation artificial intelligence model Qwen3.8, which the company says is “second only” to Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. Qwen3.8-Max-Preview, the preview version of the strongest model of the Qwen family, had been made available on Alibaba’s Token Plan subscription service, as well as its Qoder and QoderWork agentic platforms, the Chinese tech giant said on an official X post on Sunday. With 2.4 trillion parameters, it was “one of the most powerful...

Chinese tech giants are doubling down on enterprise artificial intelligence agents with new products unveiled at the country’s top AI summit, signalling heightened domestic rivalry to win over business clients as agent-based AI adoption accelerates. At the four-day World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai which concludes on Monday, major tech companies including Ant Group, Tencent Holdings, Alibaba Group Holding and Baidu launched or showcased offerings designed to integrate..

Chinese state-owned capital operators China Reform Holdings Corp (CRHC) and China Chengtong Holdings Group on Sunday announced ​fresh purchases of Chinese equities, according to separate ‌statements, ...

The Chinese city of Changzhou is building what it claims will be the country’s first city-level “green token factory”, as local governments race to answer Beijing’s call to power massive artificial intelligence computing demands with clean energy. The project would be powered by green energy and could produce 60 trillion tokens per year once completed, the municipal government said in a statement on Sunday during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. The city in the eastern..

Why it matters: Chipmakers are the picks-and-shovels of the AI gold rush, and they are now looking shaky. A recent selloff, combined with new stress over competition from Chinese open-source AI models ...

Social Media + Society, Volume 12, Issue 3, July-September 2026. We employed the framework of mass customization to investigate how the Soul app, a leading interest-based social platform, is reshaping sociality among Chinese Generation Z. Six months of participatory observation, from December 2024 to June 2025, in Soul’...