Removing the army's number two is now a procedural item
Zhang Youxia's seat, vacated by a standing committee
The vote took minutes. The National People's Congress Standing Committee met Friday and formally stripped Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli of their seats on the Central Military Commission, the body that runs the Chinese military and is chaired by Xi Jinping. Zhang was the CMC's senior vice-chairman — the highest-ranking uniformed officer in the country. Liu was chief of the Joint Staff Department, per SCMP.
Seven months, start to finish. The defence ministry announced on 24 January that the Party Central Committee had opened an investigation into both men for suspected serious violations of discipline and law. Zhang is 75, a ground-forces general, a Politburo member, one of the few serving officers with combat experience, and had been read for a decade as Xi's closest military ally.
The charge was never really corruption. A PLA Daily editorial in January said the two had trampled and undermined "the system of ultimate responsibility resting with the CMC chairman" — that is, on Xi himself. Background: He Weidong, the other vice-chairman, was expelled last October and replaced by Zhang Shengmin. Both vice-chairmen gone inside ten months.
THE TELL: there was no crisis around it. A legislative committee cleared the paperwork on an ordinary Friday, four weeks before Xi flies to Washington on 24 September. The purge that reached the top of the army has been absorbed into the calendar, which is a more remarkable claim about this system than any of the individual falls.
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Beijing wires 17 provinces, Washington fences Thailand
MIIT published the node list. The ministry named 17 provinces and municipalities — Beijing, Shanghai, Hebei, Shanxi among them — as regional nodes in the national compute interconnection system. The architecture is one national service node, M regional nodes handling registration, resource pooling and scheduling, N industry nodes on top. One node per province, unified identifiers and rules.
The carriers are doing the building. China Telecom's scheduling platform already manages over 118 EFLOPS; China Mobile claims the largest single-cluster AI data centre of any operator. This is the state treating scattered provincial GPU halls as one addressable grid — the plumbing that makes "domestic compute" a thing you can rent rather than a thing you own.
Washington moved the other way. The Information reports the US is drafting a rule to close the loophole that lets Chinese firms reach AI chips through data centres in third countries like Thailand. Renting offshore was the last easy path; if the rule lands, the grid above stops being a preference and becomes the only option.
And the small countries are hedging openly. Uzbekistan asked to join Pax Silica, Washington's AI supply-chain initiative, a month after signing up for China's World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization; its ambassador said Tashkent notified the State Department by diplomatic note last week, SCMP reports. Both blocs, no apology.
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China's most valuable company sells DRAM
CXMT reported, and the number is absurd. First-half revenue of 150.3bn yuan (~$22.4bn), more than double everything it sold in all of 2025, and a profit of 77.6bn yuan (~$10.9bn) against a loss a year earlier — up 873.64% year on year. The results came a month after China's second-biggest Shanghai IPO, which raised 66.6bn yuan.
Read the two write-ups side by side. Bloomberg led with sales leaping tenfold and the memory maker becoming China's most valuable business. IT Home led with the guidance buried in the filing: global DRAM supply stays short through the second half, and three foreign firms still hold most of the market while domestic players have room to run. One story is an earnings beat. The other is an import-substitution scoreboard.
Then the smallest detail of the day. CXMT opened a Weibo account and the first account it followed was Xiaomi's phone division — its reported LPDDR6 partner for the Xuanjie O3, the in-house flagship SoC launched 24 August as the industry's first with LPDDR6 support. A follow button as a supply-chain announcement.
I have been under-weighting this since 14 August. Two days ago the memory squeeze took Konka, a 1980-vintage reform-era TV maker, off the Shenzhen exchange. Today the same cycle produced the most valuable listed company in the country. Same shortage, opposite ends.
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Tencent's Hy4 optimised its own inference stack
The preview is open-weights. Hy4 preview: 770B total parameters, 49B active, 1M context, out today on Hugging Face and GitHub and priced at 6 yuan (~$0.85) per million input tokens, 18 (~$2.54) out, 0.3 (~$0.04) on a cache hit — per InfoQ. Two weeks free in Tencent's WorkBuddy and CodeBuddy.
The claim worth checking is the loop. Tencent says the model participated in its own development — proposing training methods, data strategies, evaluation schemes and low-level operator optimisations, running the experiments, then feeding the logs back into the next round. It analysed inference bottlenecks itself, worked on operator fusion and communication, and lifted end-to-end throughput 31.8% over baseline.
Then InfoQ gave it a procurement task and it failed on arithmetic. The agent caught genuinely obscure policy changes, then used Cursor's monthly rather than annual seat price, and separately reported a $10,800 total where the multiplication gives $10,440. A model that can tune its own kernels still cannot be trusted to cross-check a spreadsheet before signing.
Meituan drew the opposite line the same day. Chief executive Wang Xing told the earnings call that fully domestic training and inference gives long-term cost and infrastructure control, then said flatly that Meituan will not become a "token factory" — models exist to serve the core business. Its LongCat-2.0, 1.6T parameters with ~48B active, was trained end-to-end on a 50,000-card domestic cluster. Two giants, same silicon, opposite business models.
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The worst film of the year is winning
"The Cow Comes" is the box-office story of the summer. A shoestring animated film five years in the making by a mother-and-son team, Sun Lifang and Xin Yumeng, it sold fewer than 300 tickets nationwide in its first ten days — about 7,000 yuan ($1,040). Clips of its astonishingly bad animation circulated, and it has now passed 40m yuan (~$5.6m), with projections above 100m.
Screenings have become events. Audiences recite the dialogue back at the screen and film themselves doing it; theatres caught without official posters drew their own by hand, which then became their own genre of online joke. China Digital Times has the translations.
The backlash is the interesting part. CCTV-affiliated outlets criticised it, The Beijing News called it nonsensical, Dalian officials reportedly worried about the city's reputation, and there are rumours the film could simply be pulled. One Xiaohongshu user put the asymmetry cleanly: "'Ne Zha' was called 'a blockbuster,' but 'The Cow Comes' is being called 'an anomaly.'"
The same afternoon, the industrial hit crossed 1.8bn yuan. "Welcome to Dragon Restaurant" passed 1.8bn yuan (~$254m) at 9:57pm. Nobody is arguing about that one. The film people are arguing about cost nothing to make and was funny by accident, which is exactly why it cannot be permitted to be the story of the summer.
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Threads we are pulling
- The Alliance sentencing landed where I said it would. On 22 August I flagged 28 August. Today: Lee Cheuk-yan and Ho Chun-yan, former leaders of the group behind Hong Kong's annual Tiananmen vigil, argued in mitigation for lighter terms; Chow Hang-tung, the barrister who ran her own defence, refused to plead inside a criminal framework at all, saying she should not serve a single day.
- Gyirong now has video of the cause. Drone footage posted to RedNote and verified by the BBC shows the Langtang Lirung glacier collapsing at about 23,600 feet. Nepal reports 547 dead and 575 foreign tourists missing; Tibet still reports 5 dead and 558 missing, 260 of them foreign. The barrier lake remains a live breach risk.
- A Beijing satellite firm redirected six radar birds within hours, imaging the collapse site through cloud — the same information vacuum that produced a wave of posts blaming Chinese-built infrastructure for a glacier failure on the Nepali side.
- MiniMax's $800m ARR is now on the record. I cited it Wednesday off the results call; the half-year report confirms August ARR past $800m, B-side revenue up 703% to 80% of the mix, and July token consumption 20x January. Next up: M3 Pro at roughly 3T parameters. Zhidx has the framing — minimise inference cost to maximise intelligence.
- AgiBot's actual boss surfaced on a US list. Time's 100 AI names 11 Chinese figures, including Deng Taihua — 20-plus years at Huawei running wireless then the computing line, who recruited the Bilibili-famous engineer Peng Zhihui and then spent two years letting him take the cameras. AgiBot shipped 5,100 robots last year.
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