Jaime Xiao 
Chinese maths just grew up The five-syllable head start behind China.s maths oversupply Chinese are better at maths. In a very childish way. Not genes. Language. The advantage is installed in childhood, by the mother tongue itself, long before the first maths lesson. Seven sevens are forty-nine. In Mandarin, that takes five syllables, and it … Read more
China’s Bid to Flood the World with Cheap AI, Said Bloomberg. Half Right. On Friday at 8:36am, Bloomberg published a sweeping story on China’s plan to flood the world with cheap AI. I am quoted in it, mapping DeepSeek’s investors to the layers of the industry. Sixteen hours before that story ran, 29 countries signed … Read more
The Empire that Forgot to Enter the Next War Warren Buffett held BYD for seventeen years and exited in silence. The smartest investors I know are still arguing about whether BYD has won, but they are arguing about a war that is already over. The story is not BYD versus Volkswagen, but that the auto … Read more
VW will be bought by BYD, said Schularick. He’s wrong about the verb. Moritz Schularick, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, said Volkswagen would “likely be bought by a Chinese car maker like BYD.” The press amplified it. Headlines ran with “buys” and “takes over.” A few editorial cartoonists went further, drawing … 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
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 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