The anti-graft campaign is not winding down — it is being handed foreign jurisdiction
A 47-article draft gives the corruption hunt a passport
The National Supervisory Commission wrote itself a statute. China's top legislature took a first reading Tuesday of a draft Anti-Cross-Border Corruption Law — six chapters, 47 articles, text not yet public — at the 24th session of the 14th National People's Congress Standing Committee, which runs to Friday.
Xinhua's framing is about recovery. The law is meant to enrich the legal toolbox for fugitive repatriation, asset recovery and foreign-related cases, closing jurisdictional gaps on offshore offences. 963 fugitives were repatriated in 2025, per the discipline commission's own work report.
But the draft also sets out obligations for companies. Integrity and compliance duties, and the liabilities for breaching them. That is the part aimed at Chinese firms operating abroad rather than at absconded cadres — a compliance regime with Beijing as the enforcing jurisdiction, on top of whichever local one applies.
And the campaign being codified is speeding up, not settling. SCMP's data dive counts 65 probes into civilian officials of vice-ministerial grade or above last year against 19 in 2013, Xi's first year. The Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party's internal anti-graft body, has opened 46 investigations so far this year against 39 by this point last year.
The personnel move came first. The commission held an out-of-cycle Sixth Plenum on Saturday — these normally convene in January — naming Zhao Shiyong and Zhang Zhong deputy secretaries in place of Xiao Pei and Fu Kui, both associates of Wang Qishan, who ran the commission through Xi's first term. Sinocism reads it as preparation for the coming Fifth Plenum. Hard to disagree.
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Washington prices one H-1B at $103,265
The fee is back, by rulemaking this time. The Department of Homeland Security published a proposed rule establishing a $103,265 charge on every cap-subject H-1B petition, payable at filing, on top of every existing fee — more than a hundred times the base petition fee, and derived by dividing about $8.78bn of claimed annual government cost by 85,000 petitions. Universities and nonprofit research bodies are exempt. Comments close 24 September.
A federal judge struck down the earlier $100,000 version in June. Solidot's summary for Chinese readers pairs it with the other plan: revoking up to 200,000 business and tourist visas, which would be the largest single revocation in American history.
What that already costs showed up in Bremen. Leiphone's report from IJCAI, the big AI conference that closed Saturday: mainland authors submitted over 4,000 papers, more than 60% of the total, and had 541 accepted — a 13.3% rate against Austria's 32.8%.
Chinese registrations came first at 669. The hall did not match. Program vice-chair Bo An, who chairs the programme next year, told Leiphone that strict refusals at the Guangzhou consulate kept many attendees out. Organisers are already discussing scheduling accommodations for Kyoto next August. Note also that CCF downgraded the conference from A-class to B and submissions rose anyway.
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Thomson Reuters built its model on Qwen
Two Western legal-AI incumbents shipped on Chinese open weights this week. Leiphone leads with Alibaba: Thomson Reuters launched Thomson-1, built on Qwen3.5, to cut dependence on Anthropic's Claude, starting with table analysis and document review. Separately, Harvey — the American legal-AI company, valued around $11bn — post-trained Kimi K3, Moonshot's open-weight model, into a legal model called Tenet.
The Western write-ups bury the Chinese part. Thomson Reuters' own launch described only a strong open-source foundation and named its base model Snowdon, built with Imperial College London; the Qwen lineage came from the chief technology officer afterwards, with emphasis on months of realignment to be "ethically and politically de-biased". Cost: about $40m over two years.
Same fact, two stories. Chinese tech press treats it as a scoreboard entry — Alibaba claims 460-plus open models and three billion downloads, and cites Pinterest's chief executive putting Qwen's cost at under 8% of comparable closed models. American coverage treats the provenance as a risk to be managed, with Senator Tom Cotton warning about backdoors and Airbnb pushing back. Nobody disputes the mechanism: the cheapest good base weights are Chinese.
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Memory is now bigger than semiconductors were
THE NUMBER: Gartner puts the 2026 memory market at $837.3bn — larger than the entire semiconductor industry's 2025 revenue of $809bn. DRAM up 246.6% in a year, NAND up 371.9%, memory's share of chip revenue doubling from 27% to 54%.
The capex consequence is already booked. TrendForce has DRAM and NAND going from 47% of major cloud providers' capital spending this year to 68% in 2027, with server memory contract prices up 64% in the second half of 2025 and 270% again this year. Nvidia has told server makers its flagship AI systems cost about 17% more.
Which is why Xiaomi's second chip matters more than its first. The Xring O3 scored 5.22 million on AnTuTu and beat Apple's cores on single-thread — 917 points on Hacker News, all about CPU. GeekPark's read is better: the score is fireworks, the bandwidth is the signal.
The O100 stacks memory wafers onto the compute wafer. Two AI-memory layers bonded to an NPU die at a 1.4-micron pitch, yielding 1.22TB/s — sixteen times the 76.8GB/s of LPDDR5X in today's flagships — and 330 tokens a second locally with a five-value quantised MiMo model that saves another 30% of bandwidth. Lei Jun has spent 21bn yuan (~$2.96bn) over five years to get here.
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Everyone is a guest on somebody's show
China is arguing about interview surplus. Jiemian's essay opens on a video blogger posting on 21 August that he does not mind being interviewed, he minds living in an era of surplus meaning — everyone with a show, everyone a guest, everyone obliged to distil life into quotable lines.
The supply numbers explain the fatigue. Bilibili submissions of video podcasts over two hours are up nearly ninefold this year; single-day watch time passed 100 million minutes on 13 May; more than half run past 30 minutes. Veteran host Chen Luyu recorded six and a half hours with interviewer Jiang Sida and aired three hours fifty-five.
Meanwhile Douyin published its enforcement ledger. In one month it actioned 1.4534 million videos and 597,500 accounts for malicious commercial content — including 59 accounts compiling negative material on an unnamed famous technology brand, from accident footage to share-price moves, and 236 fabricating claims about a domestic beverage brand by wrapping them in nationalist sentiment.
The tell is the vocabulary. Rumour-mongering, commercial defamation, black-and-grey industry — a full taxonomy for protecting corporate reputation, deployed at a scale ByteDance has never announced for anything else.
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Threads we are pulling
- I gave the 1500m to the wrong robot, confirmed. IT Home now records the win for Beijing Humanoid's Tiangong Ultra at 2:21.63, not Honor's Lightning. Today the hundred metres fell twice: Lightning ran 8.94, then Tiangong ran 8.86. Scale of the event: 666 teams, 2,056 robots, 16 countries, 51 disciplines, 1,301 matches.
- Doubao Work shipped on schedule. Yesterday I noted ByteDance folding Trae and Coze into Doubao with a work suite due within the week. It launched Tuesday — desktop app, cloud PC for long-running jobs, 30 days free, inheriting the user's Feishu permissions. GeekPark names the trigger: Tencent's WorkBuddy reached million-scale daily users and 20.97 million desktop visits in June.
- Alibaba's management bought their own placement. After Sunday's HK$80bn raise, chairman Joe Tsai took 720,000 shares near HK$112 and chief executive Eddie Wu 350,000 near HK$111.6 — about HK$120m (~$15m) between them.
- Xpeng set the embodied-AI record. Its robotics arm raised over $900m at a post-money valuation above $6.3bn, IDG leading, Tencent and Alibaba strategic — with a seven-year IPO deadline or investors can force a buyback at 8% compound. Unitree meanwhile fell 10.31% to 243.9bn yuan (~$34bn), passed by Figure AI.
- The formaldehyde cabbage has a sequel. A pest-control firm in Xiamen allegedly sprayed dichlorvos, an organophosphate insecticide, in dozens of chain restaurants — on tableware and tables. A district joint investigation group seized its stock and closed its premises. Two food-poisoning scandals, two task forces, three days.
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