The biggest recall in Chinese history ships as a warning label
A sticker for 4.3 million cars
The market regulator moved Friday. Eleven automakers are recalling roughly 4.27 million vehicles because the interior emergency door release sits too close in colour to the surrounding trim to be found in a hurry — FAW, BAIC Blue Park, Dongfeng, Chery, Geely, Xpeng, Leapmotor, Tesla and Xiaomi among them, per 36Kr's morning digest.
Tesla owns most of it. Nearly 2.98 million imported and China-built Model 3, Y, S and X, starting 25 September; Xiaomi about 390,000, Leapmotor 371,000, Xpeng 264,000 — the largest campaign each of the Chinese three has run, and nine of the eleven are adding warning labels, by Carscoops' reading of the Reuters figures.
The remedy is the tell. Labels, plus software that drops the windows after a collision. No hardware changes. February's rule largely bans concealed handles from 2027 and will require mechanical unlocking that works with the electrics dead — so this is a holding action by a regulator that has already decided the design is wrong and can only demand legibility in the meantime.
The two write-ups have different protagonists. Chinese coverage files it as a regulator's notice with a list of manufacturers and a defect described in procedural language. Anglophone coverage leads with Tesla and the record; Engadget carries the background the notice omits — the fatal Xiaomi crash where bystanders could not get the doors open.
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The sprinter set a record; museums are buying
The games opened at the Ice Ribbon. In the 100m heats before Saturday's ceremony at the national speed skating oval, the winning entry from a team called Tianzhuo ran 9.39 — past the last edition's mark and past Usain Bolt's 9.58 from 2009, CCTV said via Jiemian. The second World Humanoid Robot Games fields 666 teams and 2,056 robots from 16 countries across 51 events.
The wires had a different number. Reuters, on state broadcaster reporting, put Honor's robot Lightning at 9.32 with a 14.5 m/s peak in a preparatory test — and noted engineers had lengthened its legs by 10cm to 1.05m since it won April's Beijing half marathon. You can win a sprint by growing the legs.
Unitree scaled back. It dropped several events it had already entered, blaming time and the testing load on new models, and apologised for putting mass production first. Founder Wang Xingxing, whose company listed Wednesday and gave back 18.7% Thursday to 277.9bn yuan (~$39bn), told the FT the industry's ChatGPT moment has not arrived.
36Kr went and asked who pays. Counterpoint counts 22,000 humanoids shipped worldwide in the first half, up nearly 300%, top five all Chinese — AgiBot, Unitree, Galbot, UBTech, Leju. Entertainment and data-collection work is still 60%-plus of that; service guidance 19%, manufacturing 13%, warehousing 5%. Unitree's own prospectus put humanoid revenue at 73.6% research and education for January–September 2025.
The line items are stranger than the totals. From the show floor: a commercial toilet-cleaning robot at 200,000–250,000 yuan (~$28,000–35,000), four to five hundred sold, 100m yuan (~$14m) of sales by June, working Haidian Park; a rideable robot dog on pre-sale at 298,000 yuan (~$42,000), pitched to operators as a beach ATV at 50 yuan a ride.
The arms outsold every humanoid on earth. Rokae moved about 15,000 robot arms last year and another 15,000 in this first half, at 50,000 to 500,000 yuan apiece. Fairino now sells a general-purpose arm at 23,800 yuan (~$3,350); a sewing-machine maker took over 2,000.
UBTech drew the hardware line. Its stand was a 1:1 copy of a customer's line — sub-millimetre loading of machined parts, some 1,100 picks an hour from mixed bins. A working robot runs over 1.7m tall on harmonic reducers, for stiffness under continuous load, with a VLA and a world model on an on-board Nvidia Thor.
A dancing robot is 1.2m, planetary reducers, an RK3588, no force sensing, replaying choreographed trajectories. The two stacks do not interchange, and the record-setter is the second kind.
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Windows 10 goes early, Kylin goes in
Some agencies got told to stop. Bloomberg, via Solidot: government bodies must abandon Windows 10 China Government Edition ahead of schedule for domestic Linux — Kylin OS and UOS, the latter descended from Deepin and Debian. Support was to run to February 2027; the end date moved to the second half of this year.
That edition was the compromise. It exists because a Microsoft joint venture with the state-owned China Electronics Technology Group built an audited Windows for the state. Microsoft told Bloomberg it had found no security incident affecting it. The bar has moved from auditable to not American, and the purpose-built exception no longer clears it.
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Weekend tokens go cheap, the model becomes a dropdown
DeepSeek gave the weekend back. From midnight Sunday Beijing time, Saturdays and Sundays bill at trough rates all day, IT Home reports. Peak pricing shipped on 17 August — weekday peaks 09:00–12:00 and 14:00–18:00, idle hours at half, V4-Pro output at 27 yuan (~$3.80) per million tokens against 13.5 (~$1.90). Five days to retreat.
Read it as capacity, not monetisation. Weekend load does not need shaping; developer goodwill does. The multiplier survives exactly where it does work, on weekday afternoons.
RayNeo shipped glasses with a model picker. The iO weighs 34g, has no camera at all, costs 1,996 yuan (~$281) at launch against a 2,499 list, and runs DeepSeek V4-Pro and Qwen 3.7 Max now, Kimi K3 later. Counterpoint and IDC put RayNeo first in AR glasses shipments in China and worldwide in the first quarter.
No camera is the positioning. The recording light is wired to the microphone in hardware so software cannot suppress it, and the all-day memory feature anonymises on device — the inverse of the camera-first American bet. The frontier lab is a dropdown behind someone else's waveguide.
iFlytek says its next flagship trains on domestic silicon only. President Wu Xiaoru told the half-year briefing a staged version arrives at the end of August and the full model at October's developer festival, claiming first-tier domestic performance on coding and cost per token. Wednesday's H200 readmission said training hasn't gone local; someone has to prove it can.
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Homework up 18%, exams down 20%
The county-scale experiment has a number. GeekPark walks through the paper Anglophone readers met in The Economist: 26,811 students in grades 7 to 12 in one central-China county, 30 months to June 2025. Homework scores up 18%, time per assignment down 30% — 64 minutes to 45 — and monthly closed-book exam scores down 20% within six months.
The authors place it carefully. David Strömberg of Stockholm University with Victor Lei and Yanhui Wu of Hong Kong University; the CEPR version puts entrance-exam losses at 18 and 24%, with the full penalty emerging only after about two years, worst in social sciences and for junior students, high achievers and boys, and concentrated in the roughly 80% of users whose behaviour looks like outsourcing.
The adaptation finding is the uncomfortable one. Adoption went from near zero in September 2022 to 80%, stepping up at DeepSeek releases. Among new users 58% outsourced; five months in, 81%. After six months, GeekPark notes, nobody in the AI cohort still spent more than 65 minutes on homework. Responsible use was a phase, not a type.
The consolation is thin. The estimated penalty fell from around 25% in early 2023 to around 16% by June 2025. Term starts 1 September, with the sample now the whole country.
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Threads we are pulling
- Guo Degang's tour is losing cities. Three Yantai dates — two Qilin troupe stops and a Deyun Society thirtieth-anniversary crosstalk night — were postponed "for venue reasons" with automatic refunds, and Hubei's provincial culture department says it is coordinating the case. On 20 August I said the unfiled-improvisation charge was cheap and repeatable; it is now travelling between provinces.
- Evergrande's corporate death followed the criminal one by two days. Guangzhou's Intermediate People's Court accepted a bankruptcy liquidation petition against Evergrande Real Estate on 21 August, filed by a rural commercial bank branch, and the financial regulator revoked Evergrande Life's licence over related-party transfers and false reporting. The template runs verdict first, liquidation second.
- Sentencing in the Alliance case is 28 August. Initium's feature on the families counts 1,800 days since the arrests. Chow Hang-tung, the barrister who ran her own defence, wrote from prison in June that the group's story is finished but theirs is not; a former standing-committee member read both closing submissions aloud at founding chairman Szeto Wah's grave on 4 June.
- Alibaba Cloud made the rival models a product. GLM-5.3 and the release version of DeepSeek V4-Pro went live on its Qwen platform on 21 August, switchable inside Qoder and Codex. Yesterday I quoted reps discounting third-party models to 48% of list to hold coding customers; it is now a listed service.
- Memory reached the capex line. Alibaba's June-quarter capital spending was 67.68bn yuan (~$9.5bn), up 75% from 38.68bn, with chip component price rises named alongside procurement cycles and agent-driven CPU demand. I under-weighted DRAM on 14 August; it is now in a hyperscaler's explanation of its own bill.
- Bambu Lab's platform ate a meme in 48 hours. The animated film Niu Lai passed 10m yuan (~$1.4m) on 17 August; a model of its cow hit MakerWorld two days earlier. Resellers list at 20.8 yuan, Pinduoduo at 6.5 yuan (~$0.92) shipped same day, and a farm with 1,000-plus printers cut a printable file with AI in about an hour, Jiemian reports.
- Watching Monday: Chang'e-7 has a launch window on the morning of 24 August from Wenchang, aiming at Shackleton crater — 13 miles across — for the first direct lunar south pole landing in November, carrying a hopper meant to fly into permanently shadowed ground.
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