Technology & Demographics The Automaton Dividend The population of China has begun to shrink. But does it matter? By Jaime Xiao • January 30, 2026 IF DEMOGRAPHY IS DESTINY, then the recent headlines from Beijing read like a eulogy. China’s population has fallen for two consecutive years, shedding millions of citizens in a statistical retreat … Read more
Giving the CCP’s dialect a total free pass while policing ancestral roots reveals the bizarre logic of defensive policymaking. Mind Your Tongue Giving the CCP’s dialect a total free pass while policing ancestral roots reveals the bizarre logic of defensive policymaking. Singapore’s biggest newspaper says a Teochew film is dangerous. Meanwhile, Mandarin, literally Beijing dialect, … Read more
The Oversupply of AI Talent: How China turned mathematical conditioning into a grassroots industrial workforce Those poor Chinese kids are building the most advanced AI in the world. If you look at the CVs of the researchers and entrepreneurs catching up to Anthropic and ChatGPT at a fraction of the token cost, the old playbook … Read more
Lululemon’s China Sales Grew 30%. Then They Put a Japanese War Drum on the Great Wall Lululemon on placed a Japanese taiko drum on a beacon tower of the Great Wall of China. Not a metaphor. This happened on May 30. The company flew in Chinese TV star Zhu Yilong to beat the drum on … Read more
The Wuhan-Paris Axis: How Stellantis Rewrites the Transatlantic EV Playbook Part I Three Things to Know • Stellantis is turning its Wuhan joint venture into an engineering classroom — European engineers are learning Chinese EV platform development firsthand. • The deal repurposes idle European factories (Rennes, Zaragoza) to assemble Dongfeng-derived models, bypassing EU anti-subsidy duties. … Read more
Trump, the Nation Builder: How an Accidental Architect Built the Nation of Engineers As Air Force One touches down in a self-assured Beijing this May 14th, 2026, a curious moniker echoes across the Chinese internet: Chuan Jianguo (川建国)—or “Trump, the Nation Builder”. It is a title born of exquisite geopolitical irony. To the Chinese public, … Read more
The Robot Belt Weekly: China’s Top 10 Tech Stories May 3–10, 2026 | The Intelligence Briefing from Shenzhen #1 DeepSeek’s \$45B Gambit: China’s AI Crown Jewel Finally Opens Its Doors Source: TechCrunch | TechNode | The Silicon Review DeepSeek is reportedly shifting from its “maverick” roots to a mainstream powerhouse, eyeing a staggering $45 billion … Read more
The AI Dove of East Asia Make love(AI), not war. 🕊️ Did you know that in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, the pronunciation of the word for “love” is “ai”? It is a poetic coincidence that this shared linguistic heritage perfectly mirrors the acronym for Artificial Intelligence. Perhaps this is a sign that AI could be … Read more
Fast Food, Stale Analysis: The Truth Behind Why China’s KFC Tastes Better It is genuinely amusing to read recent coverage in The Economist detailing the rapid expansion of Western fast-food giants like McDonald’s and KFC into China’s rural towns and lower-tier cities. The prevailing narrative spun by featured financial analysts and market observers is one … Read more
Back in 2014, while studying in Sydney, I was fascinated by the “road zipper” trucks that shifted barriers to optimise tidal traffic during peak hours. It was a brilliant system that several cities in China adopted shortly after. However, we are now seeing an even more elegant solution: robotic road barriers. Instead of requiring a … Read more
It is not outsourcing. How open weight Chinese AI is silently rewriting the US job market. There is a popular narrative that the recent wave of tech layoffs in the US is simply a cycle of overhiring. However, looking closely at the data from API aggregators like OpenRouter tells a much more structural story. I … Read more