This past month Silicon Valley shipped GPT-5.6, Fable 5 and Grok-4.5, and China’s developer community lit up with benchmarks and debates. Yet for all the buzz, the country’s homegrown large models remain in a strange state: critically acclaimed, commercially cold. The usage-versus-revenue gap is widening. OpenRouter data for 22-28 June shows Chinese models handled 20.39 … Read more
Zhongji Innolight (stock code 03308) listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on 30 July. The company priced at HK$980 per share, sold 54.5 million shares and raised HK$53.4 billion; after listing fees of RMB 519 million, net proceeds came to HK$52.89 billion. With a board lot of 50 shares, a single allocation cost nearly … Read more
ByteDance’s AI push just took its most concrete organisational turn yet. On 30 July, according to Phoenix Tech, the company sent an internal memo announcing that its Feishu (Lark) product team and its Doubao model product team will be merged into a new Doubao product unit, led by Doubao head Zhao Qi, with Feishu head … 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
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
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
Before Xi Jinping became China’s president, his fellow Tsinghua University alumni were certainly successful, but they weren’t exactly the undisputed kings of the billionaire rankings. Recently, however, the narrative has shifted dramatically. A highly concentrated group of nine companies, all originating from Tsinghua’s alumni networks and faculties, have either achieved unicorn status or gone public. … Read more
The Yangtze’s new motor city How Wuhan, a metropolis nearly 1,000 kilometres from the ocean, is reshaping the global trade in automobiles. To gaze upon the muddy waters of the Yangtze as it winds through Wuhan is to look at the undisputed industrial heartland of inland China. Located roughly 1,000 kilometres from the nearest coastline, … Read more
The Mathematical Illusion of “Aiming Higher”: Why China’s Sub-5% Growth is a Structural Certainty The shift from demographic dividend to intelligent capital: Automation is the necessary macroeconomic response to a shrinking workforce. The Economist recently published a critique of the Chinese government’s 2026 Government Work Report, arguing that policymakers are “dangerously rooted in the past” … Read more
If you want to understand the shifting tectonic plates of the global economy, you could read the latest policy white papers out of Washington, or you could simply look at the photograph of Friedrich Merz in Hangzhou. There stood the German Chancellor—a politician whose brand is practically forged from stern Atlanticist rigour and conservative economic … Read more