Notebook

Jaime Xiao shares his latest take on LinkedIn, this time on China’s smart-car sector and Voyah. The full post is embedded below.

Jaime Xiao argues the Western press misread Zhu Rongji’s legacy. The real inheritance is not the economic-Tsar narrative but the STEM-driven human-capital machine built across three decades that now runs China’s AI race. Embedded below.

Jaime Xiao on why every Chinese VC makes the founder sign a personal liability clause if the company fails to return capital within six to eight years, and how that single term explains the absence of an M&A market, the rise of financial-advisor middlemen, and the death of cold outreach in Chinese fundraising.

Jaime Xiao argues that China’s totalising state can build semiconductor fabs, EVs, and high-speed rail, but it suffocates the one industry that needs unplanned space: football. He uses the 1927 Lee Wai-Tong tour of Australia as proof that a fractured China once fielded a competitive team, then explains why today’s tracked-and-funnelled middle class can never … Read more

Jaime Xiao argues that Toyota’s deepening use of Huawei’s cockpit and ADAS stack shows the world has already answered whether it trusts Huawei — and that the smart car is becoming a Chinese-brain platform wrapped in sheet metal buyers already trust.

Jaime Xiao on why Hong Kong, not the old neutral entrepôt, has become the pricing centre for the smart-car revolution: from CATL’s cells to Hesai’s lidar to Momenta’s driving brain, the EV supply chain has chosen one exchange, and Stephen Roach’s “made in China” lament reads as an indictment he should plead guilty to. Embedded … Read more

Jaime Xiao on why ByteDance’s new Seedance 2.5 video model is less a film studio than a generative stand-in for Nvidia’s digital twin, with its first customers being excavator makers and robot labs rather than filmmakers. Embedded below.

Jaime Xiao on the letter NVIDIA, Microsoft and Meta just signed — titled “Open Weights and American AI Leadership”, a lobbying front to keep Chinese open-weight models legal in America. The real split isn’t US versus China; it’s closed-model rentiers versus the open-weight industrial base. Full post below.

Jaime Xiao on the four-minute AI film that just went viral on Douyin — every frame generated, live-action quality 99% of the way to cinema, no studio and no credits. His guess: an AI video lab quietly testing its newest model on 700 million scrollers. Full post below.

Jaime Xiao on Splay — the Tsinghua computer-science rock band whose members now run Moonshot AI (Kimi) and SenseTime. The drummer just shipped a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model instead of an album. Full post below.