China Desk — 20 Aug 2026, 04:47 UTC

Unitree’s next robot advantage may be a self-improving engineering loop

# GeekPark 16h

At its IPO celebration, Unitree founder Wang Xingxing outlined a system that uses AI to search research, write training code, simulate skills, test real robots, and feed evaluations back into development.

The proposed loop is search, code generation, simulation, physical testing, scoring, and retraining; it treats AI as a robotics engineering system rather than only as a policy model.
The bottleneck is not code generation but access to many reliable physical bodies that can produce real-world feedback, where Unitree has an advantage from reported sales of more than 30,000 quadrupeds and 5,500 humanoids in 2025.
If the loop works, every successful skill could become reusable training and control knowledge across a fleet, shortening iteration cycles without requiring a proportionate increase in human engineers.
The company still needs user permission, standardized telemetry, and a way to distinguish useful feedback from unsafe or distribution-shifted behavior in customer deployments.
This is a strategic proposal from the founder, not a demonstrated autonomous development system; the key test is whether generated policies survive unscripted physical evaluation.
Unitree’s vertical control of motors, joints, motion control, and integration would let it modify hardware and software together, an advantage over robotics companies dependent on separate suppliers.

Unitree’s long road from garage robot to public company GeekPark

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A deleted post describes extreme security around Beijing’s Qianmen

# China Digital Times 23h

A deleted Chinese post describing identity scans, searches, and intrusive checks at Beijing’s Qianmen was removed under cybersecurity rules, showing how censorship can reach mundane travel advice.

The original account reportedly described ordinary visitor procedures without overt political criticism, yet the post was deleted and replaced by a notice citing China’s Cybersecurity Law.
The significance is collateral censorship: automated or complaint-driven enforcement can suppress neutral descriptions of state security practices even when they contain no sensitive historical discussion.
The checks included identity verification, bag and book searches, pat-downs, and inspection of clothing and shoes, according to the archived translation.
This is a useful example of how security around politically symbolic sites becomes normalized in daily life while public discussion of the experience remains risky.
The source is an archived translation of deleted material, so the exact enforcement trigger—human complaint, keyword matching, or both—is unclear.
The broader governance pattern is that content moderation protects not only political secrets but also the unremarkable visibility of state security.

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Zhu Rongji’s rules for China’s investigative state press

# Pekingnology 10h

A translated 1998 speech by former premier Zhu Rongji reveals how senior leaders wanted state television’s investigative program to expose local abuses while remaining inside Party control.

Zhu praised the program for exposing corruption and bureaucratic misconduct, presenting media scrutiny as a tool for correcting lower-level administration rather than challenging the political system.
The speech captures a recurring Chinese governance model: controlled criticism can improve state legitimacy by punishing local failures without opening the question of central authority.
Its publication after Zhu’s death also functions as a retrospective frame for his reform-era image, especially his reputation for bluntness and administrative discipline.
The source is a translation of an archival speech, not a current policy directive, so it should not be read as evidence that the same media latitude exists today.
The item helps explain why investigative exposure and censorship can coexist in China: journalism is tolerated when it serves supervision, stability, and central accountability.

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Beijing blocks Chinese firms from helping the EU probe JD.com

# SCMP 15h

China’s Justice Ministry has barred Chinese entities from assisting an EU foreign-subsidy investigation into JD.com, turning a competition inquiry into a direct sovereignty dispute.

The order says no organization or individual may execute or assist the EU investigation, which is an unusually explicit attempt to limit the reach of foreign regulatory authority inside China.
The EU probe concerns JD.com’s proposed takeover of a European electronics retailer, so the conflict sits at the intersection of subsidies, merger control, and cross-border state power.
For multinational companies, the practical signal is that evidence requests and regulatory cooperation can become a matter of Chinese national authority rather than ordinary compliance.
The move raises the risk of reciprocal non-cooperation: European regulators may have less access to Chinese records while Chinese agencies may retaliate against firms that comply.
The supplied report says the Ministry called the EU action undue extraterritorial jurisdiction; it does not describe any final EU finding against JD.com.
This is more than a company-specific dispute because it establishes a precedent for Beijing’s response to foreign-subsidy investigations of Chinese firms.

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Chinese team entangles quantum memories across 420 kilometers

# Solidot 18h

Chinese researchers report entanglement between two cold-atom quantum memories over 420 kilometers of fiber, exceeding the stated 230-kilometer limit for direct distribution without a repeater.

The result extends the team’s earlier 50-kilometer demonstration and supports the longer-term architecture of repeater-based quantum networks.
The system connects matter-based quantum memories rather than merely sending entangled photons, which is important because memories are needed to synchronize probabilistic links across a network.
Potential applications include distributed quantum computing, sensing, and quantum-secure communications, but the item does not provide fidelity, rate, or memory-lifetime figures for the 420-kilometer result.
The achievement is a network primitive, not a usable quantum internet: repeater deployment, error correction, interfaces, and operational rates remain unresolved.
China’s repeated progress in metropolitan and intercity quantum networking shows a sustained national research program rather than a one-off laboratory result.

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China completes its first land recovery of an orbital rocket stage

# Solidot 21h

Landspace’s Zhuque-3 successfully placed a satellite into orbit and soft-landed its first stage, marking China’s first leg-based land recovery of an orbital-class rocket stage.

The launch used a 66-meter rocket with nine engines on the first stage and one on the second; the first stage landed about six minutes after liftoff, according to the supplied report.
The flight is described as the second for Zhuque-3 and the fourth flight-proven partially reusable orbital rocket type after Falcon 9, New Glenn, and China’s Long March 10B.
The distinction between land and sea recovery matters: China had already demonstrated a net-based sea recovery, but this mission adds a more conventional landing profile closer to Falcon 9 operations.
A single successful recovery does not establish rapid refurbishment, repeated reuse, or competitive launch economics; those are the next engineering tests.

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A Chinese chip foundry says a shareholder seized its corporate seals

# IT Home 52m

Chengdu HiWafer says employees and unidentified people linked to its second-largest shareholder forced entry and took company seals, amid a wider control dispute over the compound-semiconductor foundry.

The company says the group removed its Party committee seal, corporate seal, contract seal, and an executive signature stamp after breaking open a safe; it says actions taken with the seals are unauthorized.
HiWafer is a domestic foundry for gallium arsenide, gallium nitride, silicon carbide, and optical chips, so control of the legal entity directly affects customer contracts and production governance.
The two largest shareholders hold almost equal stakes, and the supplied account says their dispute goes back to a 2021 capital increase that diluted the former controlling shareholder.
The competing side says its shareholder rights were infringed and that a court ruled against the other shareholder, which allegedly did not comply; the source presents claims from both sides, not a final resolution.
The episode shows how Chinese private-company control battles can become operationally dangerous when seals, legal representation, and board authority are contested.

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Jefferies ranks Alibaba’s Qwen Office first in agent test

# AI QbitAI 3h

A Jefferies test of eight office agents ranked Alibaba’s Qwen Office first, with Chinese coverage emphasizing harness engineering and lower task cost rather than model size alone.

Also: Leiphone

The test used five tasks spanning document summarization, web research, browser control, English slide creation, and image-based marketing work; the article says Qwen was the only system above 90 on every dimension.
The report separates the base model from the harness: prompts, context handling, tool calls, boundaries, feedback, correction, and governance determine whether intelligence becomes a reliable task result.
Qwen’s advantage is strategically important if it reflects lower cost per completed task, because enterprise agents spend tokens across repeated planning and tool calls rather than a single response.
The benchmark was reported through Chinese tech media and the supplied item gives no test protocol, sample outputs, or independent replication.

Qwen Office tops a Wall Street test of eight AI agents Leiphone

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MORPHI demonstrates a 15-minute household robot task

# AI QbitAI 3h

MORPHI’s KINO robot performed a multi-room household sequence involving cleaning, fridge restocking, laundry handling, and folding, highlighting the shift from isolated demos to long-horizon execution.

The robot combines a mobile base, two arms, vision, and force sensing to operate doors, appliances, and loose household objects in a constrained mock home.
MORPHI’s MoRA architecture puts goal maintenance, multi-scale memory, and progress-aware closed-loop control closer to the action policy instead of leaving all persistence to a high-level planner.
That division addresses a real weakness of hierarchical robot stacks: a high-level model can plan a task, but a short-horizon low-level policy may lose the goal, state, or recovery strategy during execution.
The demonstration is company-produced and does not establish reliability outside the staged environment.

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A Tencent recommendation contest tests a unified architecture

# AI QbitAI 21h

A Tencent-backed KDD Cup challenge drew 13,913 participants and tested whether one recommendation block could replace separate sequence and feature-interaction pipelines.

The problem is technically consequential because recommender systems must combine long user histories and heterogeneous features under millisecond-scale latency, unlike many generative workloads.
The winning industrial design reportedly improved AUC by 0.0048 while reducing per-sample compute by 18%, a small-looking change that compounds at billion-scale request volumes.
The academic winner used an intent token as a persistent interest state updated across layers, while the industrial winner used candidate-item tokens as an interaction hub.
The event shows Chinese internet firms opening real, anonymized production problems to global researchers instead of treating recommendation architecture as a closed internal discipline.

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Wang Yi urges Washington to change its North Korea policy

# Policy SCMP 3h

China’s foreign minister called for peaceful coexistence on the Korean peninsula and urged Washington to drop its “hostile policy” toward Pyongyang during talks in Seoul.

The Chinese readout frames Beijing as a constructive stabilizing actor while directing the main criticism at US policy toward North Korea.
The meeting also fits a broader Chinese effort to deepen ties with South Korea and present regional diplomacy as a three-way balance rather than a US-led security order.
The supplied account says Wang avoided a reporter’s question about a specific issue, leaving the practical scope of the appeal unclear.
For technology and policy executives, the relevant signal is that peninsula security remains linked to China’s wider competition over regional alignment.

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Xiaomi’s revenue and margins rebound as it spends into AI and cars

# AI Leiphone 15h

Xiaomi reported second-quarter revenue of 108.9 billion yuan (roughly $15.3B), operating profit of 10.87 billion yuan (roughly $1.53B), and 104,199 vehicle deliveries.

Phone average selling price reached 1,351 yuan (roughly $190), up 25.9%, while mainland sales of models above 3,000 yuan (roughly $423) reached 32.1%, indicating a deliberate move upmarket.
Automotive and other new businesses generated 24.9 billion yuan (roughly $3.5B), up 17.1%, while the company says cumulative SU7 deliveries passed 500,000.
Research spending reached 9.2 billion yuan (roughly $1.3B) in the quarter, with the company directing investment toward AI, operating systems, chips, robotics, and cars.
The company is using product mix and ecosystem breadth to offset memory-cost inflation and a slow handset cycle, but the supplied article is company-favorable and does not give comparable competitor margins.

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Why Chinese viewers flocked to a film they seemed to dislike

# Culture SCMP 3h

An animated film that earned just 3,420 yuan on opening day later surged past 11 million yuan, showing how online controversy and collective viewing can manufacture a hit in China.

The report describes a delayed box-office spike roughly ten days after release, with daily revenue jumping to hundreds of thousands and then more than 11 million yuan.
The unusual pattern suggests that audience behavior was driven less by conventional advertising than by curiosity, mockery, and online discussion turning the film into an event.
It is a useful window into China’s platform-mediated consumer culture, where negative attention can still generate coordinated theater demand.
The supplied excerpt does not establish the precise trigger for the surge or whether the result will persist.

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Alipay wants agents to take a cut of commerce

# AI GeekPark 1h

Alipay is positioning its agent as a new distribution layer that interprets intent and calls merchant services, shifting competition from buying visibility to being selected by the agent.

The company’s agent reportedly connects travel, food, delivery, and government services through natural-language requests, turning merchant functions into callable interfaces behind a conversational surface.
This is a platform-control story: if the agent decides which service satisfies an underspecified request, it controls discovery, ranking, and potentially the economics of customer acquisition.
Alipay says more than 10,000 services have been connected in two months across eight categories, but the supplied article is company-centered and provides no transaction or conversion data.
The architecture depends on persistent user preferences, service connectors, intent resolution, and execution safeguards; the model alone is not the moat.

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China’s bargain-home buyers missed the market bottom

# Culture Initium 5h

A feature examines Chinese buyers who waited for cheaper homes and found that prices kept falling, capturing the psychological damage of a prolonged property downturn.

The headline points to a familiar household strategy—delay a purchase until prices bottom—but the supplied excerpt contains no transaction data or named cities.
The story matters because housing expectations shape Chinese household wealth, mobility, marriage, and willingness to spend, not just developer balance sheets.
It also shows how a market downturn changes the meaning of “bargain”: buyers who thought they were timing the cycle may instead be absorbing years of uncertainty.

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Space-computing startups face a four-week upload bottleneck

# Analysis GeekPark 1d

Chinese space-computing startups say uploading an 800MB model to an orbiting satellite can take nearly four weeks, exposing the communications bottleneck behind the sector’s grand AI narrative.

The constraint is the uplink: legacy spacecraft links are designed for small commands, not large model files, and ground-station visibility arrives in short windows on each orbit.
Downlink capacity has improved because satellites send data to large ground receivers, while the reverse direction still lacks an operational high-throughput laser network.
The company Space Byte is reportedly pursuing “ground-to-space storage” before full computation, a pragmatic way to build the missing upload capability and a business case around it.
This is a valuable engineering reality check for orbital data centers: cheap energy and cooling do not matter if models, updates, and workloads cannot be moved to the spacecraft.
The sector map and startup count are interview claims, while the four-week figure is presented as a current practical estimate rather than a standardized benchmark.

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Chinese fighter designers warn about military AI hallucinations

# Policy SCMP 14h

Engineers tied to China’s J-20 and J-36 fighter programs warn that language models can invent aircraft specifications and mislead military analysis, highlighting a hard limit on defense AI.

The engineers’ warning concerns fabricated technical facts in intelligence and weapons-performance analysis, where a plausible falsehood can contaminate downstream decisions.
The source places the warning inside China’s military-industrial research system, making it more consequential than a generic consumer-AI hallucination discussion.
The strategic implication is that defense AI will need provenance, retrieval, uncertainty reporting, and human validation rather than simple access to a larger model.
The supplied account does not say whether the paper reflects a formal procurement rule or only the authors’ technical judgment.

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Neutral-atom quantum startup raises nearly $141 million in a year

# AI 36Kr 2h

MatriQ says it raised several hundred million yuan (roughly $30-70M) in an A-plus round, bringing four rounds in a year to nearly 1 billion yuan (roughly $141M).

The company reports a 2,310-defect-free-atom array, single-qubit fidelity above 99.9%, two-qubit fidelity above 99.2%, and state-preparation fidelity above 99.7%.
Its architecture separates storage and entanglement zones, moving atoms with optical tweezers to reduce unwanted illumination and support future error-correction layouts.
The strategic claim is engineering rather than a single laboratory record: MatriQ says it has packaged vacuum, optics, control, and cooling into a deployable system and has customer orders.
Its roadmap targets 30-plus logical qubits by 2027 and 100-plus later, but those targets are company projections, not demonstrated capability.
Neutral atoms avoid the cryogenic requirements of superconducting systems and offer strong connectivity, while control complexity and fault tolerance remain the central unknowns.

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Perfect World says new game revenue will arrive in the second half

# Culture QbitAI 3h

Perfect World reported a first-half net loss of 118 million yuan (roughly $16.6M), while its new game generated more than 2 billion yuan (roughly $282M) in global player spending by August 18.

The company attributes the loss to marketing costs being recognized immediately while player payments are recognized over the game’s user lifetime.
The game launched across more than 180 countries and regions and six device categories, with official channels accounting for nearly 60% of reported spending.
This is a reminder that live-service game accounting can make early financial statements look weak even when a launch is commercially strong.
The revenue claims come from the company, and the item gives no player retention, regional split, or net bookings after platform fees.

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Chinese humanoid robot plays a full autonomous table-tennis match

# AI QbitAI 18h

Chaowei Dynamics says its humanoid robot completed a full autonomous table-tennis exchange, combining millisecond-scale perception, trajectory prediction, planning, and whole-body control.

The SMASH system must coordinate vision, shoulder, elbow, wrist, torso, and legs under rapidly changing ball spin and placement, making this a meaningful integration test rather than a single-arm demo.
The company says the same algorithm can transfer across robot bodies, while its world model generates virtual worlds, evaluates actions, and supports reinforcement learning before real deployment.
The robot’s 117 degrees of freedom and 37-degree-of-freedom hand are company specifications; no repeatability, win rate, or failure data is provided.
Table tennis is a useful benchmark for high-speed closed-loop control, but it does not by itself establish general household or industrial autonomy.

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Chinese researchers warn against defense contractors dominating policy

# Policy SCMP 3h

A study from Shanghai Jiao Tong University warns Beijing about the political influence of defense contractors, using the US military-industrial complex as a cautionary example.

The paper reportedly describes an American “iron triangle” linking the Defense Department, private contractors, and congressional committees, framing profit-driven expansion as a policy risk.
The choice of target is revealing: Chinese strategic research is not simply advocating military buildup, but also warning that state-industry ties can distort national priorities.
This is an analysis paper, not evidence of a new Chinese policy; its value lies in how it defines a governance problem for domestic defense commercialization.
The supplied excerpt does not identify the study’s recommendations or whether officials have adopted them.

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DDR5 memory prices have risen as much as 500% in a year

# Signal Solidot 22h

A report says some DDR5 kits rose 500% in 12 months as suppliers shifted capacity toward HBM, with a 128GB kit reaching $3,399 and DDR4 also rising sharply.

Also: IT Home

The cited examples put a 64GB DDR5-5600 kit above $1,100 versus under $200 a year earlier, while DDR4 prices rose roughly 120% to 180%.
The supply shock is a direct consequence of AI infrastructure demand competing for wafer capacity, meaning consumer and enterprise buyers of older memory are exposed to the same allocation decision.
The report also says hard-drive and SSD prices rose about 125%, but gives no index methodology or distinction between retail and contract prices.
For hardware planners, the signal is to treat memory as a strategic input with lead-time and substitution risk, not a commodity that can always be purchased at spot.

Morgan Stanley sees DDR4 prices rising 50% in the third quarter IT Home

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Game Science shows 15 minutes of Black Myth: Zhong Kui

# Culture 36Kr 1h

Game Science released its first substantial gameplay footage of Black Myth: Zhong Kui, giving China’s most prominent new 3A project a clearer shape two years after Black Myth: Wukong.

The demonstration shows combat and narrative material from an early development build; the studio warns that final content may change.
The sequel shifts from Wukong’s staff to Zhong Kui’s sword and centers on life and death, while retaining the studio’s realistic visual direction.
The first game has sold more than 30 million copies and generated more than $1 billion, according to the supplied report, creating an unusually high commercial bar for a Chinese studio’s follow-up.
The rapid move from short teaser material to a 15-minute gameplay reel suggests a more mature production pipeline, though no release date is confirmed.

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China watch: youth unemployment, Unitree’s IPO, and H200 imports

# Analysis Sinocism 5h

A China-focused newsletter highlights Wang Yi’s Korea diplomacy, Unitree’s IPO, a clash with the EU over JD.com, youth unemployment, and reported approval of Nvidia H200 purchases.

The item is a newsletter digest, so its list is evidence of what a China watcher considers salient rather than one independently reported event.
Its strongest signal is the coexistence of domestic economic strain, high-end AI hardware access, and sharper regulatory conflict with Europe in the same news cycle.
The listed July youth unemployment rate of 17.9% is a hard social indicator, but the supplied excerpt does not provide methodology or the underlying statistical release.
The digest is useful for agenda mapping because it places technology procurement alongside diplomacy, law, and labor rather than isolating AI from governance.

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China needs a more persuasive security offer to win middle powers

# Policy SCMP 6h

An analysis argues that China must offer middle powers a more credible security proposition as Washington presses allies to spend more and align with US priorities.

The strategic contrast is between Washington’s demand for partners that carry more defense burden and Beijing’s attempt to present itself as a less coercive regional alternative.
The argument implies that trade and infrastructure alone may not secure political alignment when governments are weighing military risk, alliance guarantees, and domestic legitimacy.
The item is analysis rather than a new policy announcement, and the supplied excerpt does not specify what a Chinese security offer would contain.

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China’s commercial space sector enters the scaling phase

# Signal 36Kr 20h

A 36Kr research report says China’s commercial space industry is shifting from technical validation to repeatable operations, with 2025 market size estimated at 2.83 trillion yuan (roughly $399B).

The report forecasts more than 3.5 trillion yuan (roughly $493B) in 2026 and cites 50 commercial launches in 2025, while acknowledging that these market figures depend on the report’s definitions.
Reusable launchers, flexible satellite production, and growing remote-sensing and satellite-connectivity applications are the report’s main pillars of scale.
It also says state-owned capital’s share of first-half 2026 financing rose to 59.8%, showing that China’s commercial-space market remains closely tied to public industrial policy.
The report identifies bottlenecks in launch cadence, core-component localization, orbital slots, and frequency resources; those constraints matter more than headline funding growth.
The next phase is likely to be decided by manufacturing throughput and repeat flights, not by isolated recovery demonstrations.

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MiniMax’s head of engineering reportedly leaves

# Signal QbitAI 20h

MiniMax engineering leader Yuhang Miao has reportedly left the company, removing a public-facing technical figure associated with its models, agents, coding tools, audio, and multimodal products.

The report relies on a change in an internal collaboration profile and says no next destination has been announced, so the departure itself is not independently explained.
Miao’s reported remit crossed foundation models, agent infrastructure, harness design, coding, and audio, reflecting how Chinese AI companies increasingly organize around productized model systems rather than a single research team.

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Nokia plans a major retreat from its China operations

# Policy Solidot 21h

Nokia reportedly plans to cut most China staff and close factories by year-end, retaining mainly after-sales service after maintaining a full local network business for decades.

The company had about 7,200 employees across mainland China and Hong Kong at the end of 2025, according to its annual report, though the affected number is not given.
The retreat would unwind a long-standing local footprint spanning research, supply, delivery, services, and markets, including a Beijing research center founded in 1995.
The item illustrates how foreign technology companies can move from localization to a thin support presence as market structure, security concerns, and competitive economics change.
The report relies partly on a former employee and gives no official Nokia announcement or explanation, so the scale and timing remain uncertain.

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What Chinese readers are arguing about online

# Culture Initium 5h

A reader-feedback digest surfaces concerns about Chinese mapping apps and privacy, flood infrastructure, news avoidance in Hong Kong, and how media channels mediate public complaints.

The material is reader reaction, not verification of the underlying stories; its value is the range of concerns that readers choose to debate and the skepticism they apply to institutions.
Comments about a Hong Kong television program frame it as a possible state-friendly grievance channel that redirects attention from structural causes toward individual wrongdoing.
Other responses show a more trusting relationship with investigative reporting, suggesting that Chinese-language audiences are not politically uniform even within constrained information environments.
The digest is a useful mood sample, but it cannot support prevalence claims about public opinion.

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WeChat targets users recruited as fraud ‘tools’

# Policy IT Home 44m

WeChat says fraud rings are recruiting ordinary users to add contacts, create groups, and relay leads, and will permanently restrict accounts involved in the funnel.

The platform describes a layered, project-managed fraud model in which real users provide the trust and distribution that conceal the operators behind the scam.
WeChat says accounts used for contact recruitment, group diversion, or forwarding victim information may face permanent login restrictions, with associated recruiters and organizers also traced.
The announcement invokes Chinese criminal liability for knowingly providing assistance to online fraud, extending risk beyond the person who directly steals money.
This is platform enforcement rather than a new law, but it shows how Chinese platforms increasingly combine account governance, evidence collection, and cooperation with police.

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Experts say the US Golden Dome may fuel an arms race

# Policy SCMP 7h

Experts cited by a Chinese outlet say the US missile-defense plan may not provide full protection and could prompt countermeasures from China, Russia, and North Korea.

The argument is that expanding defensive systems changes adversaries’ incentives rather than ending the offense-defense competition; the article cites a US academic warning that further defenses will generate responses.
This is foreign policy analysis, not a Chinese government position, but its China relevance is direct because Beijing is included among the systems likely to adapt.
The supplied account does not quantify the plan, its technical architecture, or China’s likely response.

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The collapse of China’s Barbie brand

# Culture Jiemian 19m

A once-influential Chinese doll maker is reportedly near collapse, with its design team gone and its molds and equipment sold, prompting a wave of nostalgia among longtime collectors.

The report says the company remains registered but faces more than 18 million yuan (roughly $2.5M) in enforcement claims, while a related figure puts total debt at 24.65 million yuan (roughly $3.5M).
Collectors remember the brand’s early quality and its role in building China’s doll community, while its once-important online forum has become largely inactive.
The failure illustrates how a domestic niche brand can lose its community, design capability, and production assets even while its cultural memory remains strong.

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Microsoft ends personal Teams access in mainland China

# Policy IT Home 39m

Microsoft has stopped personal Teams access in mainland China while preserving work, school, guest, and some Skype-related access, underscoring the sharp boundary around consumer cloud services.

The supplied notice says personal Teams became unavailable on Chinese mobile devices and on desktop and web access from August 17, 2026.
Work and school accounts remain available under organizational policies, so this is a consumer-service withdrawal rather than a blanket Teams exit.
The distinction reflects how foreign platforms can retain enterprise or institutionally governed channels while discontinuing consumer features that face different distribution and compliance economics.
The notice gives no reason, so attributing the change directly to censorship or a specific regulator would go beyond the source.

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Chery’s first-half profit fell despite higher margins

# Signal IT Home 43m

Chery reported 143.28 billion yuan (roughly $20.2B) in first-half revenue and 85.67 billion yuan (roughly $12.1B) in attributable profit, with revenue up 1.2% but profit down 11.7%.

Also: Jiemian

The supplied filing reports gross profit of 23.044 billion yuan (roughly $3.25B) and a 16.1% gross margin, up 3.1 percentage points.
The combination of higher gross margin and lower net profit suggests that operating expenses, investment, financing, or other below-gross-profit items absorbed the improvement; the report does not identify which.
Overseas sales represented 69.8% of revenue and electric-vehicle revenue rose 59.3% to 59.284 billion yuan (roughly $8.35B), according to the supplied account.
This is a useful counterpoint to a simple China auto growth story: international mix and electrification are improving, but scale alone is not translating into net-profit growth.

Chery reports flat first-half revenue but sharply higher gross profit Jiemian

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ChinAI	403	0/0		HTTPError: 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url: https://chinai.substack.com/feed
ChinaTalk	200	1/20
Pekingnology	200	1/20
Ginger River Review	200	0/20
Sinocism	200	1/20
QbitAI	200	10/10
36Kr	200	9/30
Solidot	200	11/20
Leiphone	200	16/20
GeekPark	200	5/30
IT Home	200	12/60	+42 over cap
SCMP	200	10/50	+6 over cap
Initium	200	3/15
Jiemian	200	8/30	+14 over cap
China Digital Times	200	1/15
The Wire China	200	0/50
Techmeme	200	1/15
Hacker News	200	0/20
V2EX	200	8/50	+34 over cap

Unitree took $48 billion out of a falling market, and its earliest backer says most of this sector dies

Unitree up 460%, Baidu down 12%

LandSpace landed a steel booster on legs

Nobody knows who runs the AI talks

DeepSeek's harness now ships whole agents

A Qianmen travelogue got deleted anyway

Threads we are pulling