China’s Weiyi Bets on Profitable Industrial Embodied-AI Robots Ahead of Hong Kong IPO

At WAIC on 17 July, Weiyi showed up with a range of industrial embodied-AI robots, and the pitch was that these machines are already in volume production, running in top-tier factories for over a year. No lab demos. The financials make the case. Per the prospectus, revenue rose from 221 million yuan in 2022 to … Read more

Shenzhen Unveils ’20+8′ Industrial Cluster Plan 3.0, Doubling Down on AI and Robotics

Shenzhen has released version 3.0 of its 20+8 strategic emerging-industry and future-industry plan, laying out where the city’s manufacturing economy is headed through 2030. The plan sets a headline target: by 2030, strategic emerging industries should reach 2.3 trillion yuan in added value and account for 45 per cent of GDP. The 20 covers ten … Read more

China’s AgiBot Files for Hong Kong IPO as the Humanoid Race Hits the Capital Markets

The humanoid-robot sector has entered its capital-realisation phase. AgiBot has confirmed it has launched the process for a Hong Kong listing, and it timed the announcement to land on the very day the exchange’s new listing rules took effect. The message was not a surprise. Rumours of an IPO have circulated for half a year. … Read more

China Moves to Ban ADAS ‘Blue Lights’ on New Cars

A clear regulatory signal is circulating in China’s auto industry: the external ‘blue light’ that marks a car’s assisted-driving system as active will be banned on all passenger cars, because it fails the national standard GB4785 on the installation of exterior lighting and light-signal devices. The blue light is a recent add-on from many new-force … Read more

China’s ‘Cheap’ AI Models Are Quietly the Expensive Ones

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’s Hong Kong Debut Breaks Issue Price as AI-Infra Rally Cools

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

VW will be bought by BYD, said Schularick. He’s wrong about the verb.

Editorial conceptual cartoon illustrating BYD as a digital Pac-Man displacing the legacy Volkswagen mechanical gear emblem.

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

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