China Desk — 17 Aug 2026, 13:01 UTC

DeepSeek turns the agent harness itself into a plugin system

# Leiphone 4h

DeepSeek’s developer preview makes core runtime components, including model adapters, tool registries, session logs and the agent loop, replaceable plugins.

Also: V2EX

The design treats the runtime as a composition of components rather than a fixed core with optional extensions, enabling agents to inspect or alter their own execution environment.
Its Cordis framework tracks reversible side effects so a removed plugin can unregister listeners, timers and resource changes instead of leaving hidden state behind.
Reactive dependency handling lets components activate, deactivate or rebind when providers appear, disappear or change.
This is a software-architecture answer to self-evolving agents: modification is useful only if the system can roll it back and preserve dependency integrity.
The approach moves agent infrastructure closer to a dynamic operating system, but it also enlarges the attack surface and testing burden.
The project’s early GitHub attention shows developer interest, not proof that self-modifying harnesses are reliable in production.

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Chinese employees are turning IPO reviews into labor leverage

# Pekingnology 1d

Chinese workers are taking employment disputes to the Hong Kong exchange, reframing layoffs, benefits and options as disclosure and governance questions for listing applicants.

The RedNote case tests the tension between a mainland operating company and an offshore listing vehicle: separate entities for labor claims, but unified control when investors assess the business.
A second case involving Xingyu Automotive Lighting shows newly hired graduates alleging demotions or exits during a Hong Kong listing effort; those claims remain unproven.
The strategy is rational because Hong Kong’s exchange is both market operator and IPO gatekeeper, with channels for complaints about applicants.
This creates a new accountability surface for Chinese companies: labor practices can become material-risk questions even when the exchange is not a labor tribunal.
The development also exposes the governance limits of variable-interest-entity structures, where corporate separateness and operational control must be argued differently to workers and investors.
For executives, the lesson is that workforce restructuring during a listing is not only an HR event; it can become a disclosure, compliance and reputation problem.

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Chinese factories are moving from robot demos to closed-loop work

# Leiphone 9h

A Chinese robotics company is deploying multiple robots across an automotive logistics line, using an agentic runtime to verify outcomes, recover from errors and complete tasks rather than isolated motions.

The system coordinates two wheeled dual-arm robots, a robot dog and an AGV across sorting, loading, transport and container recovery.
Its Agentic OS separates high-level planning from real-time execution: a runtime monitors state and exceptions while device-specific controllers protect latency, precision and safety.
The design treats a successful command as insufficient; the system must verify the physical result, diagnose deviations and resume from an interruption.
The article argues that factories may need to redesign processes around robot strengths instead of forcing robots into human-designed workstations.
The reported domestic embodied-AI financing total of 93.5 billion yuan, roughly $13.2 billion, shows the funding pressure behind this shift, but commercial deployment remains much smaller.
The important test is sustained uptime and recovery across a complete workflow, not a single impressive manipulation clip.

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China’s July data show a sharper-than-expected economic slowdown

# SCMP 4h

China’s July retail sales rose just 0.6%, industrial output 4.5% and investment weakened, reinforcing Chinese coverage of a recovery that is losing momentum.

Retail growth missed the 1.3% economist estimate and slowed from June’s 1%, pointing to continued weakness in household demand.
Industrial output also missed expectations and decelerated from June, while falling investment added pressure to the growth mix.
The pattern matters more than any one release: manufacturing capacity remains strong, but domestic consumption and investment are not absorbing it fast enough.
A softer economy raises the stakes for export-led growth, industrial policy and efforts to stabilize consumer confidence.
The data complicate a simple AI or EV success narrative because even globally competitive sectors operate inside a weaker domestic demand environment.
Chinese financial coverage frames the figures as a policy and confidence problem, not merely a temporary statistical miss.

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Xi uses Jiang Zemin’s centenary to project party continuity

# SCMP 11h

Xi Jinping led a ceremony marking Jiang Zemin’s centenary, with Chinese coverage emphasizing Jiang’s contribution and political unity ahead of a major leadership reshuffle.

The event is a tightly scripted protocol ritual, but its selection of themes still shows how the current leadership manages succession-era memory.
Xi’s speech places Jiang’s legacy inside the Party’s longer institutional story rather than presenting the former leader as an independent political pole.
The timing matters because elite attention is already turning toward next year’s power transition and questions of continuity.
For foreign companies, the signal is not a policy change but a reaffirmation that legitimacy flows through Party unity and historical narrative.
The ceremony’s symbolism may matter more than any individual personnel speculation: retired leaders are being incorporated into the current political order.
Chinese coverage is respectful and collective, while the strategic reading is about controlled continuity rather than ideological opening.

Party writers use Jiang’s legacy to rally around Xi SCMP

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Chinese medical BCI startup raises more than $14 million

# 36Kr 12h

Weiling Medical raised more than 100 million yuan, roughly $14 million, to validate an implanted brain-computer interface for neurological rehabilitation and prepare device registration.

The company is prioritizing severe medical cases rather than consumer interaction, framing BCI as a tool for neural recovery and functional substitution.
Its platform combines implanted electronics, external control, stimulation and assistive devices, with flexible cortical electrodes about 10 micrometers thick.
A reported early patient with severe brainstem injury regained limited arm and wrist movement after implantation and training, but this is a single case, not clinical proof.
The system aims to use neuroplasticity: stimulation and feedback train surviving circuits to reorganize rather than revive dead tissue.
The path to value runs through clinical endpoints, safety, durability and regulatory approval, making this a slower but more credible route than consumer BCI demos.
The investment by a listed medical company also suggests Chinese capital is beginning to distinguish therapeutic evidence from speculative interfaces.

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Unitree is set to become China’s first humanoid-robot IPO

# IT Home 35m

Unitree will list on Shanghai’s STAR Market at a valuation near 61 billion yuan, roughly $8.6 billion, making it China’s first major humanoid-robot public offering.

The company plans to raise about 6.1 billion yuan, roughly $860 million, with nearly half earmarked for robot-model research.
Unitree’s revenue rose from 159 million yuan in 2023 to 1.699 billion yuan in 2025, while net profit reached 278 million yuan, according to the prospectus data cited.
Its issue price implies a 219-times earnings multiple, versus an industry average near 39 times, making the listing a test of how much future growth public markets will capitalize.
The business is unusual in the sector for reporting profitability, but first-quarter non-adjusted profit fell as research and selling costs rose.
The key execution test is whether model investment turns a hardware maker with strong early demand into a repeatable platform for general-purpose robotics.

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A Chinese team adds spatial audio to real-time world models

# AI QbitAI 5h

HelixWorld 1.0 generates interactive video at 24 frames per second alongside 48kHz stereo audio, aiming to make sound respond to movement and scene geometry.

The system uses a joint Transformer rather than adding an audio track after video generation, allowing the same action to update visual and acoustic state.
Training data combines first-person real-world footage with game-engine data that supplies exact positions, materials, occlusion and listener orientation.
The team built frame-level checks for whether sound direction and timing match visible events, an important engineering layer often missing from video datasets.
The project says its weights and code will be fully open-sourced, which could give researchers a common baseline for audio-visual interaction.
The reported frame rate and audio rate are promising, but long-horizon consistency, latency and compute cost will determine whether this is a usable world model rather than a polished demo.

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China’s EV industry grew through local deals, not just central planning

# Analysis ChinaTalk 2h

A ChinaTalk analysis argues that local officials, private capital, foreign technology and personal networks built China’s EV industry, while success created severe overcapacity and export pressure.

The account traces the sector from many small carmakers to globally competitive firms such as Chery and Geely through alliances between local governments and private investors.
Its central correction to the usual narrative is that Beijing did not simply design the winning firms from the center; local experimentation and political relationships mattered.
The same playbook can produce both rapid industrial capability and redundant capacity when regions compete to attract favored industries.
For robotics and AI, the lesson is that local support can accelerate commercialization while making demand discipline and exit mechanisms harder.
Chinese EV globalization therefore reflects a hybrid system: state-enabled, locally negotiated and commercially ruthless rather than purely state-owned.

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Two humanoid robots complete an autonomous table-tennis game

# AI QbitAI 3h

A Hong Kong University team says two humanoids autonomously completed an 11-point table-tennis game, using a closed loop of vision, trajectory prediction, planning and whole-body control.

The SMASH 2.0 system expands the reachable ball region and adds autonomous serving, moving beyond demonstrations where a person feeds predictable shots.
The team still uses preset strategies rather than learning an opponent online; match data is being collected for later real-robot reinforcement learning.
Human motion-capture data provides training examples, with coaches recording four to eight hours per day over one to two months.
The test matters because both robots must pursue a win, recognize outcomes and continue play without a human stabilizing the interaction.
The system is a staged research milestone, not evidence that humanoids can yet compete with skilled human players.

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A Chinese lab bets on latent-space world models for robots

# Analysis Leiphone 9h

BeingBeyond says it has accumulated more than 500,000 hours of first-person human video and is training a latent world-action model that predicts actions and state changes without rendering pixels.

The approach jointly models visual input, touch, action and future state in an embedding space, aiming for real-time control at about 1% of the training cost of video-generation routes.
Its founder argues that embodied AI lacks a settled scaling paradigm, unlike language models, so the field should not assume a single world-model architecture will win.
The company’s Being-H0.8 is described as an implicit tactile world-action model, but the source provides no independent task-success benchmark.
The choice is strategically notable because a visually unimpressive model can be cheaper and faster to control, while giving up the demo value of rendered video.
The central question is whether latent predictions transfer across bodies, objects and environments without a pixel-level simulator to expose failure modes.
The report also reflects China’s current funding environment, where founders are trying to match capital duration to a three-to-five-year technical horizon.

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China is building an autonomous school of international-relations theory

# Policy Pekingnology 40m

A Party-led academic agenda is pushing Chinese universities to develop an independent knowledge system, including theories of international relations rooted in Chinese concepts and diplomatic practice.

The initiative traces to Xi Jinping’s calls for disciplines with Chinese characteristics and has become a central organizing theme for the social sciences.
A Qiushi essay by Ren Xiao surveys relational theory, moral realism, Tianxia theory and symbiosis theory as possible building blocks for a Chinese approach.
The goal is not merely to add Chinese case studies to Western theory, but to redefine what counts as valid concepts, evidence and intellectual authority.
This matters for technology executives because the same state preference for conceptual autonomy appears in policy, standards and industrial strategy.
The project’s practical influence remains hard to measure, but its institutional reach is clear: Party journals, universities and policy schools are being aligned around it.

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China proposes an 800-passenger flying-wing aircraft

# Analysis SCMP 6h

A Chinese research team unveiled an aerodynamic concept for a flying-wing passenger aircraft wider than a B-2 bomber and designed to carry more than 800 people.

The design merges fuselage, wings and tail into one broad lifting body, potentially reducing drag but creating difficult problems in pressurization, evacuation, stability and airport compatibility.
The proposed aircraft is about 85 meters wide and 43 meters long, making it a research concept rather than a near-term commercial airliner.
Its inclusion in China’s large-aircraft program signals ambition to move beyond conventional derivatives into high-risk aerospace architectures.
The source gives no propulsion, certification or manufacturing plan, so the practical path from model to flight remains unclear.
The value is strategic: China is using state-backed aerospace research to explore platform classes that established commercial aircraft makers have largely avoided.

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Symbiosis Robotics tests whole-body intelligence with a racing robot

# AI QbitAI 3h

A second Chinese report on Symbiosis Robotics’ go-kart demo frames the test as a step from locomotion toward continuous physical task completion, not as a finished product.

Also: Leiphone

The robot must stabilize itself in a narrow seat while coordinating steering, throttle and braking, making the task harder than a fixed-position manipulation demo.
The company’s proposed end-to-end model route still depends on real-robot data, low-level controllers and reproducible evaluation.
The source is substantially the same event as item 36 and supplies no independent performance metric.

A Chinese startup uses a go-kart to test whole-body robot control Leiphone

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RoboScience launches a wheeled humanoid operator for real workplaces

# AI Leiphone 5h

RoboScience launched REX G1, a wheeled dual-arm robot with 22 degrees of freedom, 0.1mm repeatability and 2,070 TFLOPS of claimed edge compute for logistics and factories.

The design combines omnidirectional movement, adjustable height and dual-arm manipulation so the robot can travel, align and grasp without repeatedly stopping to reposition.
Its VLOA architecture links vision, language, object state and action, with a world-model engine for trajectory prediction and an operation model for low-level control.
The company claims a 540mm width, access to 0.75-meter aisles and a 10-kilogram bimanual payload, targeting existing facilities rather than redesigned workcells.
Edge inference is intended to reduce dependence on high-frequency cloud links in warehouses and factories, where latency and network reliability are operational constraints.
The launch is strategically interesting because it targets task continuity and site fit, but the source provides no independent uptime, success-rate or customer data.

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Huawei’s Atlas system embodies China’s push for a separate tech path

# Policy SCMP 3h

A Chinese policy scholar argues that Huawei’s Atlas 950 SuperPoD illustrates how China can build an independent technology path under sustained US export restrictions.

The argument is made in the preface to a book about Huawei’s computing system, so it is interpretation rather than a new Atlas product announcement.
The strategic objective is technological autonomy: replacing restricted foreign components, software and supply relationships with a domestic stack that can evolve on its own terms.
Huawei’s importance is institutional as well as commercial because its systems are treated in China as evidence that sanctions can catalyze indigenous capability.
The difficult question is whether autonomy means equivalent frontier performance, or a sufficiently capable and controllable system optimized for China’s own deployment environment.
This framing helps explain why Chinese policy treats compute infrastructure as industrial sovereignty rather than merely a procurement category.

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Waymo imports 3,200 Chinese Zeekr vehicles despite tariffs

# Policy Solidot 4h

Waymo has reportedly imported 3,200 Zeekr vehicles since 2024 because they remain cheaper than its US-built alternatives even after a 127.5% tariff.

The reported Zeekr vehicle cost is about $38,000 before tariffs and roughly $86,500 after them; autonomy hardware and software still leave the total below the reported $200,000-plus cost of a Jaguar I-Pace conversion.
This is a sharp demonstration that tariff protection does not erase China’s manufacturing cost advantage in EV platforms.
The transaction also exposes a strategic dependency: a US autonomous fleet can rely on Chinese vehicle supply even while policy treats Chinese connected cars as a security concern.
The source does not establish whether Waymo plans to expand the imports or how regulatory restrictions affect deployment.

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Pinduoduo’s village delivery loop cuts rural garlic shipping costs

# Culture Leiphone 9h

A Pinduoduo pilot uses delivery trucks returning from village drop-offs to collect garlic, cutting a local seller’s shipping cost from about 7 yuan to 3 yuan per five-pound parcel.

The system turns a previously empty return leg into agricultural logistics, linking village consumption to outbound commerce without building a separate route.
The reported 3-yuan saving is meaningful for small farmers because it changes whether low-value produce can reach national buyers profitably.
The pilot also creates packing and livestream jobs in the village, showing how platform logistics can reorganize rural work rather than merely move parcels faster.
Trust was an initial barrier: residents treated the new service as potentially fraudulent until standardized vehicles, uniforms and local stations made it legible.
This is a useful example of China’s platform economy operating as physical infrastructure, with a private platform subsidizing the missing middle-mile until volume becomes viable.

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China’s robot industry is being tested on reliability, not spectacle

# Analysis GeekPark 9h

A preview of Beijing’s World Robot Conference argues that the important questions are embodiment choice, long-horizon tasks, data collection, critical components and sustained operation.

The article contrasts Unitree’s roughly 61 billion yuan, about $8.6 billion, proposed valuation with a much smaller installed base and unresolved technical convergence.
It asks whether non-humanoid forms may commercialize sooner where wheels, specialized mechanisms or simpler bodies outperform human shape.
The useful benchmark is not a stage demo but whether a robot can complete a multi-step job for hours without human rescue.
The focus on tactile sensors, motors, hands and data tools reflects where manufacturing economics will be decided.

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A Zhejiang University study says VLMs should fine-tune vision cautiously

# AI Leiphone 8h

A Zhejiang University and Swansea team proposes an adaptive asymmetric adapter that preserves CLIP’s visual backbone on out-of-distribution data while tuning language more aggressively.

Experiments across 11 vision datasets reportedly found that text-side tuning often improves transfer more reliably, while aggressive image-side tuning can damage out-of-distribution performance.
The adapter uses a shared down-projection, multiple expert up-projections and a router that decides how much visual adaptation to apply.
The design effectively gives the pretrained image encoder a learned brake instead of forcing a fixed on-or-off choice for every input.
This is an engineering lesson for VLM deployment: in-domain accuracy gains can conceal damage to the broad visual representation that makes a foundation model useful.
The paper’s value lies in a concrete control mechanism for the familiar fine-tuning versus generalization tradeoff, though independent reproduction remains important.

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3D Gaussian splatting shifts from visual quality to robot-ready infrastructure

# AI Leiphone 8h

Chinese coverage of CVPR work argues that 3D Gaussian splatting is becoming a practical physical layer for robots through faster reconstruction, adaptive sparsity and collision-aware simulation.

EcoSplat uses an importance ranking to choose a top-K set of Gaussian primitives for a device’s compute budget, enabling one model to scale across hardware.
SparseSplat allocates more primitives to detailed regions and fewer to flat surfaces, reportedly matching baseline quality with about 22% as many Gaussians.
The work matters for embodied systems because scene reconstruction must meet latency, memory and robustness constraints rather than only produce attractive renderings.
Neural ODE collision reasoning and noise-resistant mapping are presented as steps toward digital twins that can support imitation learning and robot planning.
The article is a survey of research, so the industrial claims remain prospective until these systems survive real sensors, moving objects and long-running deployments.

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China’s AI shock exposes a debate over the real bottleneck

# Analysis SCMP 31m

A South China Morning Post analysis argues that markets reacted to Chinese model launches before auditable evidence arrived, shifting attention from model quality to verification and compute access.

The article discusses Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max, whose reported performance claims moved markets before full benchmark tables, model cards and licenses were available.
The gap between announcement and independently auditable evidence matters because investors and policymakers are treating model releases as signals about chip demand and national competitiveness.
The broader argument is that the United States may be debating export controls while underweighting evaluation, reproducibility and access to useful compute.
Chinese model developers gain strategic leverage when release speed and market attention outrun verification, even if later testing narrows the claims.
This is analysis rather than a new product report, but it captures how Chinese AI coverage frames the contest as an institutional and measurement problem.

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Chinese researchers develop a glucose-sensing probiotic

# Signal SCMP 1h

Researchers at East China Normal University engineered a bacterium that senses high blood sugar and releases a glucose-lowering hormone, matching Ozempic in animal tests.

The reported design turns a probiotic into a closed-loop delivery system: glucose is the input signal and hormone release is the therapeutic output.
The team has filed patents and is scaling production, but animal efficacy does not establish human safety, dosing or regulatory approval.
If the mechanism survives clinical testing, it could shift some diabetes treatment from repeated systemic dosing toward an orally delivered biological controller.
The source’s two-year US-market ambition is a development target, not evidence that regulators have accepted the product.

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Mifeng raises up to $60 million for physical-AI data

# AI Leiphone 9h

Chinese physical-AI data company Mifeng Technology raised several hundred million yuan, roughly $30 million to $60 million, led by China Telecom to scale real-world interaction data.

The company says its data-collection devices are already deployed in factories, logistics sites, stores, homes, hotels and care settings, capturing hand actions and environmental state.
Its platform combines collection, spatial reconstruction, multimodal labeling and evaluation, with reported processing gains above tenfold.
Mifeng claims a feedback loop in which each data cycle improves task success by 5% to 10% in some settings, but the source supplies no benchmark protocol.
China Telecom and Zhangjiang Group bring cloud, network, security and physical deployment sites, making this an example of state-linked infrastructure supporting an AI data layer.
The strategic bottleneck is not only data volume: quality, coverage, embodiment transfer and reliable evaluation determine whether the platform creates reusable model capability.

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China’s top Indonesian 3C seller faces a profit problem

# Analysis 36Kr 9h

Vivan owner Woke Beyond built Indonesia’s largest 3C accessory distribution network, but currency losses and rising platform fees are eroding profits ahead of a Hong Kong IPO.

The company reported 1.217 billion yuan of 2025 revenue, roughly $172 million, with 94% from Indonesia and most sales from its own brands.
More than 40,000 distributors, 42 local offices and nine warehouses are the real asset: an offline network that reaches stores missed by marketplace-first exporters.
First-half revenue rose 22% while operating profit was nearly flat; a 179 million yuan, roughly $25 million, foreign-exchange loss consumed about 72% of net profit.
The Indonesian rupiah’s decline exposes the structural mismatch between Chinese sourcing costs and local-currency sales, even after the company moved toward yuan settlement and hedging.
The case challenges the easy “brand overseas” narrative: distribution density can create a moat, but platform commissions, currency and low market share still limit returns.

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An anti-corruption probe rattles China’s securities sector

# Policy The Wire China 16h

The Wire China reports that a probe into an influential securities regulator has unsettled China’s financial community, but provides few details in the supplied text.

A regulator-focused investigation matters because it can affect listing approvals, enforcement expectations and institutional confidence.
The source does not identify the official, allegations or procedural status, so the implications remain uncertain.

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A children’s grammar question becomes a debate over how to live

# Culture 36Kr 3h

A Burger King promotion turned a simple savings-and-travel fill-in-the-blank question into a Chinese social-media argument over delayed gratification, security and enjoying life now.

Users accepted answers ranging from saving first, to saving while traveling, to rejecting saving altogether, turning a marketing prompt into a debate about financial anxiety.
The discussion cuts across age groups: younger workers describe savings as protection against uncertainty, while older users with more security defend spending on experiences.
Its importance is cultural rather than economic measurement; the argument shows how money, time and mobility are being renegotiated in an uncertain consumer environment.
The campaign succeeded because it left the blank open for personal identity rather than prescribing a single lifestyle.

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Kimi K3 launch triggered a US reckoning and Chinese regulatory debate

# Policy The Wire China 16h

The Wire China says Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 launch exposed US anxiety about China’s model progress and prompted a regulatory storm around competition and verification.

The item is analysis of a Chinese model launch rather than a fresh product report, and the supplied text gives few specific regulatory details.
Its significance lies in the feedback loop between Chinese releases, US market reaction and policy debate about AI restrictions.

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A rough Chinese animation becomes an unlikely box-office hit

# Culture SCMP 22h

A handmade Chinese animation criticized for rough visuals and a confusing plot has become a major online talking point despite competition from Hollywood releases.

The film’s appeal appears to come partly from its visibly nonstandard style, making the success a useful counterexample to polished, formulaic animation.
Chinese online discussion is central to the story: criticism itself helped turn the film into a social event.
The supplied text does not provide a box-office total or production details, so the scale of the hit remains unclear.

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A Chinese robotics incubator backs odd products with real prototypes

# Culture GeekPark 9h

Digut Robotics’ private DemoDay showcased early projects ranging from AI golf coaching and knee exoskeletons to companion toys and modular outdoor robots.

The incubator is explicitly looking for products ordinary families might take home, rather than only maximizing its own robot shipments or market share.
Several projects pair a physical object with an AI service, using hardware, privacy controls or tactile interaction to justify payment where software alone might not.
The examples show a broad Chinese maker and startup ecosystem, but most products are early and the source gives little evidence of repeatable sales.
The most promising pattern is engineering iteration: teams are moving from lab prototypes toward overseas pilots, crowdfunding or small-batch delivery.

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Fourteen years on, China’s virtual singer still fills arenas

# Culture 36Kr 12h

Luo Tianyi’s anniversary concert drew fans across age groups, showing how a Chinese virtual singer survives new AI companions through a long-running creator and music ecosystem.

The character’s identity was built less by a central script than by user-generated songs, fan remixes and a community of creators who continually expanded her personality.
That is structurally different from today’s AI companion products, which often begin with a closed character model and centralized interaction design.
Partnerships with cultural institutions, theme parks and traditional-art projects have moved the character beyond a narrow youth subculture.
The audience mix suggests durable cultural infrastructure can outlast the novelty cycle of a particular technology.
The case is a reminder that virtual characters gain longevity from creator ecosystems and repeated rituals, not only from better conversational AI.

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Wangwang calls weak sales a major operating crisis

# Culture Jiemian 8m

Wangwang’s founder blamed weak innovation and an aging channel for a 6% revenue and 38% profit drop, turning a childhood brand into a live debate about Chinese consumer change.

Also: 36Kr

The company’s first fiscal-quarter results were described internally as a major operating crisis, with management calling for cost control, new businesses and accountability.
The source says Wangwang relied on a handful of core products for nearly 30 years while its customer and distributor relationships failed to evolve.
The backlash is also a consumer signal: online discussion focused heavily on reducing sugar, suggesting that health concerns are colliding with nostalgia.
This is not simply a product problem; the company is confronting an aging brand, an old route to market and a generation whose spending and nutritional preferences differ from its legacy customers.
A successful turnaround would require new products and a younger distribution model without destroying the emotional value that made the brand durable.

Wangwang’s crisis becomes a debate about sugar and nostalgia 36Kr

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Geely lifts its export target to 920,000 vehicles

# Analysis IT Home 7m

Geely raised its 2026 export target from 640,000 to 920,000 vehicles as its electric models accelerate overseas; founder Li Shufu is also moving to an honorary role.

The company reported July sales of 250,161 vehicles, with new-energy models making up 64% of the total and new-energy exports growing 616% year on year.
The export target is a statement of intent, not a forecast backed here by orders; meeting it would require overseas distribution, service and regulatory execution at much greater scale.
The leadership change separates Li Shufu’s group-level chairmanship from Geely Auto’s board chair, with An Conghui taking the latter role.
Geely is presenting the transition as internal succession and stronger coordination across the group rather than a retreat from operating control.
The event combines two important signals for China’s auto industry: export growth is becoming a strategic outlet for domestic competition, while founder-led companies are formalizing professional management.

Geely founder endorses An Conghui as new auto board chair IT Home

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Shifang raises about $42 million for industrial coating printers

# Analysis 36Kr 8h

Chinese industrial-printing company Shifang Technology completed two rounds totaling nearly 300 million yuan, roughly $42 million, to scale precision coating systems for batteries and electronics.

Its UV inkjet engines print functional coatings with droplets from 3 to 160 picoliters and thickness from 1 to 120 micrometers, depending on the product line.
The company says production battery projects have processed more than five million cells with over 98% first-pass yield and over 99% material utilization.
The technical moat is systems integration: printheads, fluid delivery, control boards, software, materials and process validation must work together inside a narrow process window.
That makes the business closer to an industrial process platform than a printer-component vendor, with a laboratory used to qualify new materials and customer lines.
The reported second growth area is conformal coating for circuit boards, where digital patterning can eliminate masking and improve throughput.

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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	2/20
Ginger River Review	200	0/20
Sinocism	200	1/20
QbitAI	200	6/10
36Kr	200	8/30
Solidot	200	9/20
Leiphone	200	20/20
GeekPark	200	4/30
IT Home	200	12/60	+41 over cap
SCMP	200	10/50	+1 over cap
Initium	200	3/15
Jiemian	200	8/30	+11 over cap
China Digital Times	200	0/15
The Wire China	200	5/50
Techmeme	200	3/15
Hacker News	200	1/20
V2EX	200	8/50	+34 over cap

Xi took the nineties back this morning; the July data explains why he needed them

Forty minutes for Jiang, then a warning

Unitree lists Wednesday at 219 times earnings

DeepSeek starts charging peak rates today

Video models converge, only one opens the weights

Want Want's sugar problem, and a fill-in-the-blank

Waymo pays 127% and still saves money

Threads we are pulling