China Desk

China News, Summarized 09 Oct 2026, 05:57 UTC 34 stories 22/23 sources

Today's brief

China's toughest car safety regulator this week was a ByteDance app

Three brake pedals snapped on camera

Dongchedi broke the story and the stock. ByteDance's auto platform — more than 10m daily users, reportedly weighing a Hong Kong listing — published video on 8 October of three Zunjie V800 people-carriers losing their brake-pedal brackets during repeated 100km/h-to-zero stops. JAC, the Anhui carmaker that builds the brand with Huawei, hit its 10% limit down at 24.72 yuan ($3.48), shedding roughly 6.2bn yuan (~$873m) in a day, per TMTPost.

The forces involved were not heroic. On the third car, tested 4 October, the first stop logged a peak pedal force of 1,596 newtons over 38.44m; the bracket failed on the second stop at 1,612N, Jiemian reports. The viral "4,589N" screenshot was an artefact — a high-speed camera catching an LCD readout mid-refresh.

For scale, Qiu Jincao, deputy secretary-general of the advanced powertrain branch at the China Society of Automotive Engineers, posted the GM internal spec: 2,700N along pedal travel, 440N lateral, sustained, with no fracture and no deformation affecting return. An engineer told Jiemian the V800 bracket looks hand-built — reinforcement patched in here and there, a narrowed section near the pivot. Dongchedi says the fracture zone shows a suspected injection weld line.

Zunjie's statement is the interesting document. It claims development above the national braking standards and the industry pedal spec, reports no field failures, and calls the test "non-standard extreme conditions" — then promises to redesign the part and offer free upgrades to delivered owners, via IT Home. Conceding the fix while denying the defect. On a car priced 766,000 to 1,016,000 yuan ($108,000–143,000) that Yu Chengdong, Huawei's consumer chief, personally handed to a Hong Kong tycoon over the holiday.

WHY IT MATTERS: JAC booked 22.13bn yuan (~$3.1bn) of first-half revenue, up 14.31%, and still lost 749m yuan (~$105m). The stock had run up more than 40% in six sessions on the Huawei partnership. A third-party video repriced that in one session, and no regulator has said anything.

The day's other limit-down was a p-value. Allist Pharmaceuticals fell the full 20% to 89.26 yuan, losing over 10bn yuan (~$1.4bn) across the break, after its partner disclosed that furmonertinib missed first-line progression-free survival in exon-20-insertion lung cancer: hazard ratio 0.75, confidence interval crossing 1.02, p=0.0654, per TMTPost. The drug is 94.52% of Allist's revenue. The licence-out story was the other half of the valuation.

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Sefcovic lands in Beijing with nothing to sign

Beijing published its terms before he arrived. The CCTV-linked account Yuyuan Tantian set out four things existing consultations could handle — joint monitoring of plug-in hybrid and chemical trade flows, price undertakings on the EV dispute, Chinese investment into Europe, steadier critical-mineral supply — and warned that staying ready to escalate mid-talks "cannot be called meeting each other halfway," translated by Sinocism.

The one thing Brussels wanted, it did not get. Trade commissioner Maroš Šefčovič opened two days of talks today having asked China to cap hybrid exports at roughly 15% of the EU market, against more than a third now. China refused before he landed. My read, following Monday's Macron–Merz letter: Beijing has decided Europe is bluffing. I am less sure than it is.

Meanwhile China put a name forward for the WHO. Beijing has nominated the health official Song Li for director general, which would make him the first person from the mainland to run the agency — as it absorbs the funding hole left by the US withdrawal, per SCMP. Vacancies at underfunded institutions are the cheapest influence on the market.

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The West's open-weight comeback is scored in Chinese

Two Western labs shipped, and both chose Chinese yardsticks. Reflection's Beam — 501bn parameters, 23bn active, 23.8tn training tokens, four weeks of reinforcement learning on 10,500 GB300s — lands at 44.4 on an agentic coding benchmark against GLM-5.2's 44.0, but GLM-5.3 scores 61.0, Kimi K3 68.0 and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 74.2, InfoQ reports. Mistral's Large 4 beats DeepSeek V4 Pro and loses to Kimi K3.

The pitch has shifted from best to cheapest-per-unit-of-smart. Reflection concedes Kimi K3 leads outright and sells inference efficiency instead — which is DeepSeek's own 2025 argument, made with American capital and Nvidia's newest silicon. Chinese models now account for about 41% of Hugging Face downloads, and open weights handled 56% of Vercel's gateway tokens in August against under 10% last December.

Huawei's Eric Xu offered the mirror image. The rotating chairman argues American labs feel AI risk more acutely because they have far more compute and may have seen capabilities Chinese developers have not; China "still needs to accelerate," and may come to share those concerns later, per Pekingnology. Risk perception as a function of FLOPs.

Manus came home with half a billion dollars. Butterfly Effect, which moved to Singapore in May last year and cut its roughly 120-person China team in July, has raised over $500m led by Boyu and IDG, and is hiring 17 roles in Beijing — Agent harness, Agent evaluation, LLM algorithms, per QbitAI. Founder Xiao Hong got the company back from a blocked Meta sale in September. Whether engineers he laid off fifteen months ago take the call is the actual story.

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Two service-labour stories landed on the same day

An airline association sided with its own cabin crew. After video spread of an Eastern Airlines flight attendant kneeling to apologise, the China Air Transport Association said a meal cart brushed a passenger, the crew apologised repeatedly, and the passenger kept up verbal attacks and threats — the airline has preserved evidence and filed a police report, per 36Kr's roundup. The association called the conduct a suspected offence, not a service failure.

Then a writer described two weeks inside Sam's Club. The first-person account in TMTPost: 27.7 yuan (~$3.90) an hour in Beijing, four-hour shifts, 40 to 50 members an hour through a single exit on a weekday afternoon, bathroom breaks by group-chat permission, meal breaks clocked to exactly 45 minutes, two weeks' notice for any leave.

The retention mechanism is the tell. Health-certificate costs are only reimbursed after three months; quitting early means a permanent blacklist covering Walmart too, the essay says. Against 10.7m paying members and a wall motto about happy employees that the writer says nobody quotes internally any more. Both stories are about the same thing: who absorbs the cost of Chinese service standards.

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Everyone led with a different half of the Korean bank hack

The breadcrumb was a résumé. Seven South Korean financial groups were breached. Solidot's account foregrounds the self-own: the attacker used Claude Code to write himself a security-researcher CV showcasing his intrusions, typing in his initials, Telegram handle, education and city — and stresses that CrowdStrike's identification of a 26-year-old in Guangdong is inference, not established.

Western coverage led with the nationality. The Register's headline on the same report puts "suspected Chinese speaker" and the Chinese-built ARTEX pentest agent up front.

Both buried the stack. The ARTEX instance ran DeepSeek V4.1-Flash as its primary model, with Zhipu's GLM-5.3 and Grok 4.6 in other sessions, per the report. Claude Code was the console. Chinese open weights were the engine — which is precisely the diffusion risk Anthropic's own misuse report described, demonstrated against it.

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Threads we are pulling

  • The game studios were DeepSeek's quiet LPs. Following Monday's piece on the round now nearing 100bn yuan (~$14bn): fifteen listed Chinese game companies put over 87.2bn yuan (~$12.3bn) into 72 deals since early 2025, under 1% of it in entertainment. NetEase wrote about 3bn yuan and Tencent about 10bn into DeepSeek's June round, per TMTPost. 37 Interactive's 0.27% of Zhipu booked 1.016bn yuan (~$143m) of first-half investment income — 45.22% of total profit.
  • The Claude access thread keeps cutting both ways. Yesterday I noted payment failures; today V2EX posters report the $20 Pro tier banned outright and renewals blocked after 8 November. Sentiment, not data — but the same week Claude Code became a forensic exhibit.
  • The holiday conversion gap has a physical cap. Following the tourism numbers: Shandong's "follow the commander and storm the county town" reenactment seats 1,200 people at a site that took 75,000 visitors a day last National Day, TMTPost reports. Datong's rebuilt Ming prince's mansion did 640,000 visitors and 33.9m yuan (~$4.8m) last year throwing foam rocks. Scarcity is the product.
  • The slop thread got a second failure mode. Leiphone ran four more instalments of that anonymous 188-volume AI-governance codex plus a full table of contents. QbitAI, meanwhile, published a page reading only "hacked by trenggalek6etar". One masthead is filling with machine output; the other cannot hold its CMS.

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The river · 34

A Chinese luxury EV faces scrutiny after brake-pedal failures

# QbitAI 3h

JAC's Luxeed V800 says its brake system met standards and calls a test extreme, while the testing outlet says three similar breaks reveal a safety risk and reports a 1,612-newton peak force.

More
  • The company says it will redesign the relevant part and provide a free upgrade to delivered vehicles without conceding a defect in ordinary use.
  • The testing outlet disputes the characterization of emergency braking as inherently extreme and says the same failure appeared across three vehicles.
  • The reported 1,612-newton load is close to, but not directly equivalent to, the 1,500-newton bench test cited for a different standard and setup.
  • That distinction matters: compliance with a prescribed test does not establish a component's real-world failure threshold under dynamic loading, direction changes and repeated braking.
  • The controversy exposes a familiar Chinese consumer-safety pattern in which a company can reject the tester's framing while still quietly adding engineering margin through a service action.
  • The source reports that other tested vehicles survived comparable loads, but the methodology and vehicle differences prevent a clean causal ranking.
  • The meaningful next evidence is failure analysis, material and geometry disclosure, and whether the regulator orders a formal recall rather than a voluntary upgrade.
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DiffuSpace's diffusion-model bet draws Huawei and Xiaomi-founder capital

# Zhidx 4h

Chinese coverage presents DiffuSpace's several-hundred-million-yuan financing as the largest global dLLM round, with Huawei and Horizon joining investors around a planned larger open model.

Also: InfoQ China, TMTPost

More
  • The company says it is building a foundation model around parallel diffusion generation, global context and iterative correction instead of conventional left-to-right decoding.
  • The report claims Dream 7B surpassed similarly sized autoregressive models and approached a much larger DeepSeek model on planning, though those comparisons are not independently substantiated here.
  • DiffuSpace is targeting edge PCs, phones, cars, robots and home devices, where latency, privacy and power constraints make a different decoding profile valuable.
  • The reported 5x edge-agent speedup from an Acrab collaboration is an integration claim, not a general benchmark for diffusion language models.
  • The financing matters because domestic industrial capital is funding an architectural alternative while the mainstream still assumes autoregressive models will dominate.
  • The most important future evidence will be the open release, reproducible inference costs and performance under long-horizon agent workloads.
  • Until then, the round is a strong signal of Chinese strategic interest, not proof that dLLMs have solved training stability or production tooling.
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Huawei says China may confront AI risk as its capabilities catch up

# Pekingnology 23h

Huawei chairman Eric Xu says China must accelerate AI now but may share US developers' safety concerns once its capability frontier reaches the same point.

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  • Xu's framing is unusually explicit: perceived risk is partly a function of how far a country's models and compute have advanced, not simply a matter of abstract principle.
  • He couples acceleration with risk management, arguing that China should develop AI while ensuring it is used for beneficial rather than harmful purposes.
  • The same discussion reportedly covered Huawei's interconnect and computing architecture, reflecting the company's attempt to build a full stack under advanced-chip restrictions.
  • The political implication is that Chinese AI policy may remain expansionary until domestic systems encounter risks that US frontier labs already describe, rather than adopting a matching slowdown now.
  • The statement also reveals how Chinese technology leaders interpret US safety rhetoric: partly as a genuine capability response and partly as a condition China has not yet fully experienced.
  • For executives, the practical signal is continued Chinese investment in compute efficiency, networking and domestic alternatives despite export controls.
  • The report is based on a Chinese media transcript and offers Huawei's position, not an official national policy statement.
  • Whether this posture changes will depend on domestic capability milestones, incident experience and how Beijing balances safety with strategic competition.
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Alibaba signals a larger, cheaper next generation of Qwen

# Leiphone 22h

At its cloud conference, Alibaba said future Qwen models may scale toward 5T to 10T parameters while using sparse attention, memory and selective activation to control inference cost.

More
  • The reported Qwen3.8 model has 2.4T total parameters but activates about 6B per inference in the Flash variant, illustrating scale without dense compute at every token.
  • Alibaba says the architecture cut training cost to one-ninth, input pricing to one-quarter and long-context prefill time by 8.6 times versus its predecessor.
  • The company is also using models to design chips and optimize infrastructure; one reported NoC experiment ran for more than 60 hours and cut estimated area 42% and power 59.5%.
  • This is a concrete Chinese version of recursive self-improvement: the model assists engineering inside a human-defined workflow, rather than independently choosing the company's goals.
  • The strategic bet is that China can offset hardware constraints through architecture, compiler and systems co-design while continuing to scale foundation models.
  • The figures are Alibaba disclosures and need independent reproduction, but they show the competitive frontier moving from parameter counts toward active compute and engineering loops.
  • The next Qwen releases will reveal whether sparse architectures preserve quality at very large scale and whether Alibaba can turn internal optimization into a durable cloud advantage.
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Xi Jinping's September foreign-trip agenda

# SCMP 3h

The tracker highlights Xi Jinping's reported meetings with US and Indian leaders before China hosts the November APEC summit, showing diplomacy concentrated around major-power ties.

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  • The item says Xi made a state visit to the United States and met Narendra Modi on the margins of the BRICS summit, though the provided extract is incomplete.
  • It places the November APEC meeting, where Xi is expected to meet Donald Trump, in the context of repeated leader-level contact this year.
  • A travel tracker is useful for mapping the cadence and symbolism of top-level diplomacy, but it does not by itself establish policy concessions or a change in strategic relations.
  • The concentration on Washington, New Delhi and multilateral economic forums suggests that China's leadership is managing rivalry through leader-to-leader channels alongside institutional diplomacy.
  • The missing remainder of the article limits what can safely be inferred about the substance of the meetings.
  • For a technology executive, the relevance is indirect but real: these encounters frame the political environment for trade, technology controls and supply-chain decisions.
  • The next signal to watch is whether summit scheduling produces concrete agreements or merely maintains communication during strategic competition.
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Chinese workers earn about $17 a day teaching robots household tasks

# TMTPost 2h

A field report follows Chinese robot-data workers doing repetitive teleoperation and household demonstrations, exposing the low-paid labor layer behind embodied-AI training.

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  • One worker reports 120 yuan (roughly $17) per day on a day shift and 135 yuan (about $19) at night, with pay tied to approved recording time and accuracy.
  • The collection methods include VR teleoperation, handheld grippers that capture trajectories without a full robot, and first-person video worn on the body.
  • Workers repeat folding clothes, making beds, washing dishes and labeling parcels; rejected clips do not count, while many tasks require long periods with arms raised.
  • The labor resembles piecework: employers seek varied scenes and motions, and a worker's small inconsistency can make hundreds of hours of data unusable.
  • Turnover is high, training is being shortened and some workers report never seeing the robot that uses their data, separating data production from the eventual system.
  • This complicates the usual story that embodied AI is mostly a model-and-hardware problem: the supply of diverse, clean demonstrations is being created through low-wage human repetition.
  • If robots improve enough to reduce this labor, the training pipeline may become cheaper; until then, data collection is an industrial labor market with its own fatigue, quality-control and bargaining issues.
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China's storage-safety bar rises after a 64MWh fire test

# TMTPost 2h

Envision says a 64MWh battery site burned for nine hours without propagating to adjacent cabinets, as North American standards turn large-scale fire testing into a market gate.

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  • The reported test used four 16MWh systems, 700-plus amp-hour cells, five-centimeter spacing and full charge while warning, detection, control and suppression systems were disabled.
  • The main cabinet reportedly suffered no deformation or burn-through, while adjacent cells stayed below 50 degrees Celsius despite peak fire temperatures above 1,200 degrees Celsius.
  • UL 9540A and the 2026 NFPA 855 update are described as moving large-scale fire tests from an optional selling point toward a prerequisite for North American projects.
  • That changes industry economics: a test estimated at $500,000 to $2M can exclude smaller vendors even as it exposes safety shortcuts hidden by price competition.
  • China's storage market is expanding rapidly, but the article argues that capital, grid access and operational competence—not just cell capacity—will determine which developers survive.
  • The test is still a vendor-controlled demonstration, so independent certification, field incident data and full-life maintenance performance matter more than the headline scale.
  • The broader signal is regulatory convergence around system-level propagation risk as batteries grow from 280Ah cells to 700-plus-Ah formats and from small cabinets to grid-scale sites.
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A provincial Chinese tourism group prepares to sell more luxury hotels

# TMTPost 2h

Yunnan Kanglv is assessing the sale of two hotel subsidiaries, a sign that local state-linked tourism groups are shrinking debt-heavy hospitality portfolios after the property downturn.

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  • The assets include the Xishuangbanna InterContinental and Beijing New Yunnan Crowne Plaza; selling them would reduce the group's hotel holdings from 16 at its peak to about 10.
  • The group once ranked as InterContinental's largest single owner globally, showing how local-government development strategies used branded hotels as tourism and land-development infrastructure.
  • The model depended on rising land values and open financing; when property and tourism weakened, hotel operating cash flow could not cover construction debt and interest.
  • The proposed transaction evaluates both equity and associated debt, underscoring that the problem is a balance-sheet package rather than simply weak room operations.
  • The report cites 2025 revenue of 17.54B yuan (roughly $2.47B) and a 2.85B yuan (about $401M) net loss, though these figures are group-level and not a hotel-by-hotel diagnosis.
  • This is part of a wider shift in Chinese local-government ownership from building prestige assets to disposing of capital-intensive projects.
  • The key question is whether buyers can operate the hotels profitably after debt transfer; brand fees and management contracts often leave owners carrying most asset and demand risk.
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Chinese world-action model tops RoboDojo simulation rankings

# AI QbitAI 2h

Xingdong Yuan's VPP2 reportedly leads RoboDojo and beats several major embodied models without extra data or agent-based enhancement, then transfers to zero-shot robot tasks.

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  • VPP2 recorded a 32.26% average success rate and 39.26 average score in RoboDojo's 42 two-arm simulation tasks, ahead of the reported GPT-6 Astra baseline.
  • The benchmark stresses environment changes, precision manipulation, long-horizon memory and open-vocabulary instructions rather than memorized trajectories.
  • On a real ALOHA dual-arm robot, the model reportedly achieved 58.5% average success across ten zero-shot tasks and led on nine.
  • The technical choice is to train video prediction and action learning in stages, using stronger world prediction as a basis for action generalization rather than blending everything in one objective.
  • The result is notable because the same model is presented as competitive both in simulation and on physical manipulation, though the article provides no independent reproduction.
  • RoboDojo remains a simulation benchmark and the real-robot test is small, so the evidence does not yet establish factory robustness.
  • The strategic question is whether decoupled world modeling can lower the data and post-training burden that currently makes each new robot deployment bespoke.
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Sharpa builds a tactile humanoid stack from skin to data glove

# AI QbitAI 1h

Chinese robotics startup Sharpa unveiled a humanoid, a compact tactile hand and a haptic data glove, turning contact sensing into a closed-loop manipulation strategy.

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  • The D01 humanoid reportedly combines full-body electronic skin, 100Hz tactile sampling, 0.1 to 20 newton force sensing and 0.2 newton resolution with a 0.2 millimeter repeatability claim.
  • Its W02 hand reduces active degrees of freedom from 22 to 21 while shrinking the package about 30%, arguing that useful dexterity depends on placement and sensing quality, not a raw freedom count.
  • A fingertip visual-tactile sensor covers 5 millinewtons to 30 newtons with 1 millimeter spatial resolution, while the palm uses broader electronic skin.
  • The AE01 glove captures natural hand motion through 22 encoders and returns contact feedback, making human teleoperation a data-generation and control loop rather than a one-way demonstration.
  • Sharpa's proposed control hierarchy assigns long-horizon planning, pre-contact motion and high-frequency contact response to different timescales.
  • The important architectural bet is that touch becomes part of action control, not merely an alarm channel after vision has failed.
  • Commercial value will depend on whether the tactile stack improves success rates in messy workspaces enough to offset cost, calibration and data requirements.
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Manus secures a record domestic agent round

# AI Zhidx 1d

Chinese coverage says Manus raised more than $500M, or about 3.35B yuan (roughly $470M), at a reported $4B valuation after resuming independent operations.

Also: Solidot

More
  • The round is described as the largest single financing for a Chinese agent startup, with Boyu and IDG leading and Tencent, Sequoia China and ZhenFund following.
  • Manus 2.0 uses its Cascade framework, which reportedly reduced token use 23.2%, task time 28.2% and operating cost 32% in one test.
  • The financing follows the blocked Meta acquisition and the company's return to independent operation, making ownership and geopolitical constraints part of the business story.
  • The capital arrives as global model providers and open-source projects push agents down into platforms, so Manus must defend a product and distribution layer rather than merely demonstrate autonomy.
  • The valuation is based on investor financing, not public revenue or retention, and the report gives no evidence that Cascade's test improvements generalize across customers.
  • The event shows Chinese capital treating execution-oriented agents as a strategic category even after regulators redirected the company's cross-border path.
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AgentGarten gives agents a code-built world to explore

# AI QbitAI 3h

A Chinese research team built AgentGarten by coupling deterministic code physics with a neural renderer, letting agents act, see consequences and accumulate written strategies at more than 30 frames per second.

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  • The environment computes collisions and state transitions in code, then renders the next first-person view from geometry and surface information through a neural model.
  • This split avoids asking a video model to serve as both a visually rich world and a queryable physics engine.
  • In a hide-and-seek recreation, agents reportedly learned to move barriers and use ramps within a few rounds by maintaining experiment manuals between trials.
  • The comparison with earlier reinforcement-learning experiments is suggestive but not apples-to-apples: the newer agents use language-model planning and explicit written memory rather than learning solely from millions of episodes.
  • The architecture could reduce the cost of creating visually rich training worlds because new scenes require code-defined geometry rather than full manual art production.
  • The real test is transfer: visually convincing, deterministic simulation is useful only if the learned policies survive sensor noise, contact dynamics and real-world embodiment.
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Huawei-backed openJiuwen releases an enterprise AgentOS

# AI QbitAI 3h

The openJiuwen project released an open-source enterprise AgentOS that combines multi-agent workflows, memory, hardware-aware scheduling and security controls for private deployment.

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  • The system uses task decomposition, role assignment and parallel execution while allowing humans to intervene at selected decision points.
  • Its self-improvement layer stores execution traces, feedback and reusable skills, aiming to reduce repeated exploration rather than merely adding more agents.
  • The runtime includes multi-tenant isolation, sandboxes, permissions and tool-call guardrails, addressing the operational gap between a demo and a private enterprise deployment.
  • A plugin architecture exposes models, tools and memory through reusable skills, connectors and expert groups that can be shared through an agent hub.
  • Huawei also describes an appliance form that can connect local business systems and knowledge bases, with deployment measured in hours rather than months.
  • The important strategic move is to package the model-independent control plane and the hardware stack together, which could help Chinese enterprises that prefer private or sovereign deployments.
  • The claims come from the project and conference materials; adoption, failure recovery and security under adversarial workloads remain unverified.
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Shanghai HiSilicon says edge AI will win through developer ecosystems

# Analysis Zhidx 18h

Shanghai HiSilicon argues that China's next AI wave will be built into everyday devices, and that chip vendors must provide tools, models and hardware support rather than silicon alone.

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  • The company frames edge AI around latency, sensor access, privacy and offline operation, with cloud and device models forming a reinforcing loop.
  • Its central commercial insight is that small firms can buy compute but still lack the embedded engineering needed to balance memory, power, cost, quantization and device-specific kernels.
  • That makes SDKs, BSPs, demos, debugging tools and developer communities strategic infrastructure, not marketing extras.
  • The article's examples of smart toothbrushes and hair dryers are illustrative rather than deployed products, but they show the breadth of the proposed light-intelligence category.
  • The strategy reflects China's fragmented IoT market, where a chip supplier needs to reduce integration work across many small manufacturers.
  • The real test will be whether HiSpark converts developers into repeat production deployments rather than isolated demos.
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A Chinese startup pitches 24/7 robot-staffed convenience stores

# AI QbitAI 17h

Zhengxing Innovation unveiled humanoid and wheeled-arm robots plus a management platform for stocking, inspection and transport in open convenience-store environments.

More
  • The system is designed for zero store remodeling, using a narrow omnidirectional base for aisles and a humanoid for customer-facing work.
  • Its M1 platform assigns tasks, monitors state and supports human takeover across multiple robot types, making fleet operations as important as the bodies.
  • The company claims 99% autonomous task completion, 98.6% success on LIBERO and a 24-times inference-speed advantage for its lightweight world-action model.
  • The planned 2027 business model includes direct sales and robotics-as-a-service, with hardware, software, maintenance and upgrades bundled together.
  • Retail is a harder deployment environment than a warehouse because customers, shelves, SKUs and layouts change continuously.
  • The figures are company claims and the announced commercial partnership is still a validation program, so labor savings and incident rates remain unknown.
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A Chinese robot learns precision CNC handling with 600 trajectories

# AI Leiphone 23h

Simplexity Robotics reports using 600 real robot trajectories to handle CNC loading with only a 0.5-millimeter clearance, targeting the gap between lab benchmarks and factory tolerances.

More
  • The system must handle reflective metal, weak visual texture, similar parts and contact interfaces that are not always visible while tending two CNC machines.
  • Its architecture combines a world-action model for candidate motion, a fixed-size recurrent memory for long context and a separate evaluator that scores candidate action chunks.
  • Training reconstructs future video, 3D state and actions, but inference predicts actions directly without rendering the future, reducing the runtime path.
  • The report cites 15 successful trials for the fused method versus zero for one comparison and eight for a supervised baseline, though the sample is small.
  • The engineering lesson is that factory deployment needs memory, action selection and contact-aware perception in addition to a multimodal backbone.
  • A 0.5-millimeter gap makes tolerance, cycle time and yield first-class metrics; a polished demo that ignores these constraints would not translate to manufacturing.
  • The claimed robot-making-robots feedback loop is strategically attractive, but sustained multi-shift operation and quality control remain unproven.
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China is studying Ukraine's drone tactics on a fast but cautious cycle

# Analysis SCMP 4h

A new analysis says Chinese military and defense researchers usually write up lessons from Ukraine's drone war within about four months, but PLA training and equipment changes appear roughly a year later.

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  • The reported cycle suggests China has institutionalized external battlefield observation through a large network of military and industrial analysts.
  • The gap between analysis and visible force changes may reflect testing, procurement and political approval rather than a lack of interest.
  • The distinction matters: reading about a tactic quickly does not mean China can reproduce its software, supply chain, operators or battlefield conditions at the same speed.
  • Ukraine's war therefore functions as a live laboratory for Chinese drone doctrine, counter-drone systems and training design even when public evidence lags internal work.
  • The source is an analysis rather than a disclosed Chinese government program, so the timing estimates should be treated as an analytical claim.
  • For technology companies, the signal is that commercial drone and autonomy developments are being evaluated inside a broader military learning system.
  • The key uncertainty is whether lessons transfer into force structure and production at scale or remain episodic commentary.
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A Tang dynasty calligraphy scroll sells for $22.6M

# Culture SCMP 3h

A calligraphy work believed lost since 1945 resurfaced and sold in Hong Kong for HK$177.45M (US$22.6M), underscoring the market power of authenticated Chinese cultural heritage.

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  • The work, attributed to early Tang calligrapher Yu Shinan, fetched HK$155M at the hammer before fees.
  • Its reappearance after 81 years gives the auction cultural significance beyond the price: provenance and survival history are part of the object being bought.
  • The sale shows Hong Kong's continuing role as a venue for Chinese art that connects mainland history, international collectors and global pricing.
  • The report does not establish the scroll's full ownership chain or scholarly dispute, so the provenance claim should be treated as the auction account's framing.
  • The item is a useful culture signal because it shows how scarce historical works become financial, national and scholarly assets at once.
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A Chinese startup raises $56M to image the brain through the skull

# Analysis GeekPark 1h

Shenzhen-based Kunwei says its low-frequency ultrasound and neural reconstruction system can render brain structures and blood flow through the skull in real time.

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  • The company claims its system uses lower-frequency ultrasound plus learned reconstruction rather than simply increasing frequency, addressing the usual penetration-versus-resolution tradeoff.
  • Its reported pipeline handles roughly 10GB per second of raw echo data and renders thousands of frames per second, implying a high-throughput edge inference problem rather than a large language model.
  • Kunwei says it has shipped tens of millions of yuan worth of orders and wants to become infrastructure for brain-computer-interface and NeuroAI labs through hardware and its kOS software platform.
  • The new financing totals 400M yuan (roughly $56M), with XVC and Sequoia China joining existing investors Sherpa and Tencent.
  • Clinical claims about stroke triage and brain-computer interfaces remain company aspirations; regulatory validation and prospective clinical evidence are the real gating factors.
  • The strategic opportunity is a Chinese hardware company trying to turn a specialized sensor into a reusable data and model platform.
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A Chinese state-property group absorbs a troubled Minmetals developer

# Policy 36Kr 20h

MCC Property is acquiring 100% of Minmetals Real Estate within the China Minmetals system, consolidating assets while taking on a target with negative net assets and 125% leverage.

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  • The transaction is an internal state-owned-enterprise restructuring rather than a market takeover, designed to centralize property management and professionalize operations.
  • Minmetals Real Estate reportedly had 19.87B yuan (about $2.8B) of assets, 24.86B yuan (roughly $3.5B) of liabilities and negative net assets of 4.99B yuan (about $703M) at midyear.
  • The transfer follows a 2026 delisting and an 8.8B yuan (about $1.24B) capital injection used to repay overseas borrowing, showing how the group is cleaning up the vehicle before or during consolidation.
  • A separate urban-renewal unit has positive net assets and 31 projects across 20-plus cities, so the deal mixes distressed liabilities with potentially useful operating assets.
  • The transaction illustrates how central state-owned groups use internal transfers to contain property-sector stress without a conventional bankruptcy or open-market sale.
  • The forecast combined balance sheet still shows a 74.94% debt ratio and a projected 624M yuan (about $88M) net loss, so ownership change is not the same as economic repair.
  • The important question is whether the parent can extract assets and talent while ring-fencing legacy debt, rather than merely moving the liabilities on paper.
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Qi Anxin leads China's cybersecurity market for a seventh year

# Signal Leiphone 23h

A CCID report puts China's cybersecurity market at 93.08B yuan (roughly $13.1B) in 2025 and ranks Qi Anxin first overall, with 43.9B yuan (about $6.2B) in revenue.

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  • Qi Anxin reportedly held 17.5% of endpoint security and 18.3% of security-management platforms, while also ranking first in security services.
  • The market is shifting from new construction toward optimization, platform integration and managed services, making a broad product stack more valuable than isolated appliances.
  • The company's AISOC combines a security model with a data-correlation engine; it claims sub-nine-second alert triage and over 93% accuracy in one luxury-automaker deployment.
  • Qi Anxin also reports more than 95% alert-noise reduction and AI-assisted automation across much of its penetration-testing workflow, but these are vendor metrics.
  • The report is useful as a market-structure signal: Chinese buyers are consolidating endpoint, network, data and service operations into integrated domestic platforms.
  • The missing information is methodology—market definitions, competitor shares, contract concentration and independent validation of the AI metrics.
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Chinese researchers claim a cheaper route to sustainable aviation fuel

# Signal SCMP 7h

A Chinese team says a cobalt-manganese catalyst converted biomass-derived synthesis gas into jet fuel in a 1,000-ton pilot, with modeled gross margins above 50%.

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  • The process combines syngas from woody biomass with a catalyst designed for efficient jet-fuel synthesis, linking a chemical route to lower-carbon aviation fuel.
  • A thousand-ton pilot is more meaningful than a lab result, but it is still far below commercial plant scale and does not establish lifecycle emissions.
  • The claimed economics depend on biomass cost, syngas preparation, catalyst life, product separation and carbon accounting, none of which are detailed in the supplied report.
  • If reproducible, the advance could be strategically important for China because it connects domestic biomass and chemical-engineering capability to an aviation fuel bottleneck.
  • The item is a hard technical and economic signal, but independent process data and a full techno-economic model are needed before treating the 50% margin as investable.
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Hong Kong rejects a US trafficking downgrade

# Policy SCMP 8h

Washington moved Hong Kong to the lowest tier in its trafficking report, while the Hong Kong government called the assessment unfounded and defended its enforcement record.

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  • The US report cites shortcomings in prosecutions and victim identification, placing Hong Kong alongside mainland China and Macau in the lowest category.
  • Hong Kong's rejection shows how external human-rights and governance metrics can become another point of friction in the territory's relationship with Washington.
  • The item does not provide the underlying case statistics or explain whether the downgrade carries direct sanctions or only reputational consequences.
  • Its importance lies in the widening set of international indicators through which Hong Kong's autonomy and governance are judged.
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Former US officials warn that transactional Taiwan policy raises risk

# Policy SCMP 14h

Former US officials argue that Washington's Taiwan policy is becoming too dependent on its relationship with Beijing while other conflicts strain American readiness.

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  • The story is about US strategic choices, but China is a substantive counterpart because Taiwan policy is inseparable from Beijing's military and diplomatic calculations.
  • The warning suggests that ambiguity and alliance credibility may be affected by broader US resource allocation and transactional diplomacy.
  • The supplied report does not present a new Chinese policy or military action, so it is an analysis of risk rather than an event in China.
  • For technology executives, the practical relevance lies in the possibility that Taiwan tensions could rapidly affect semiconductor supply chains and export controls.
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Anta buys 29% of Puma without taking operating control

# Analysis TMTPost 2h

Anta completed a 1.5055B euro (roughly $1.64B) purchase of 29.06% of Puma, making it the largest shareholder while leaving day-to-day management and the German two-tier board intact.

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  • The structure gives Anta a prospective supervisory-board seat but not unilateral control of Puma's management board or operations.
  • That is materially different from Anta's earlier brand and consortium deals, where it held operating rights or board control and could directly change systems and suppliers.
  • Employee representatives occupy a significant role in German co-determination, constraining any attempt to impose layoffs or cost cuts through the supervisory board.
  • Potential back-end cooperation in sourcing, retail technology or China distribution must navigate related-party transactions, GDPR, antitrust review and Puma management incentives.
  • Anta's China retail and brand-rebuilding expertise may help Puma in selected markets, but it does not automatically solve Puma's global positioning, wholesale weakness or brand fatigue.
  • The transaction is a test of whether a Chinese consumer company can create value through influence and shared capability rather than acquisition control.
  • The missing shareholder agreement means the actual vetoes, information rights and coordination mechanisms remain uncertain.
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Delta Force passes 58 million daily active users in China

# Culture 36Kr 18h

Tencent's Delta Force reports more than 58 million daily active users in its Chinese service after two years, illustrating how mature games now grow through community ecology rather than one fixed competitive path.

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  • The game is adding a 5v5 bomb mode, an Unreal Engine 5 upgrade, new maps and longer-form narrative while trying to serve both serious shooter players and casual social users.
  • China's game market is increasingly stock-led: the source cites 683 million users in 2025 and says older titles account for 94.8% of top-100 mobile revenue.
  • The product strategy treats maps and modes as platforms for different player identities, including collecting, exploration, role-play and social interaction rather than only kill-death ratios.
  • The developers say they incorporate player memes, performances and community stories into official events, turning user culture into durable IP.
  • The 58 million figure is a company disclosure and does not clarify average session time, monetization or whether bots and regional definitions affect the count.
  • The cultural lesson is that China's largest games are becoming social spaces where the operator supplies conditions and players define what success means.
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China's memory prices surge as AI crowds out consumer supply

# Signal TMTPost 2h

Chinese retailers report memory prices up as much as 300%, but the article argues that AI-driven capacity reallocation and channel speculation—not imminent physical shortage alone—are driving the shock.

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  • The report cites 16GB DDR4 rising from roughly 100 yuan (about $14) to more than 600 yuan (about $85), and DDR5 from about 200 yuan (about $28) to over 1,400 yuan (about $197).
  • HBM uses substantially more wafer area and offers higher margins, encouraging Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron to divert capacity away from conventional DRAM.
  • The article says DRAM contract prices rose sharply in early 2026 while large cloud buyers locked supply through long-term commitments and premiums.
  • It also identifies a second layer of distortion: wholesalers hoarded inventory, creating a spot-market bubble that can diverge from manufacturers' contract pricing.
  • The consequence reaches Chinese consumers through more expensive phones and PCs, but the article's company price examples and market forecasts are not independently verified here.
  • The strategic lesson is that AI infrastructure absorbs not only accelerators but also memory, and the bottleneck propagates through consumer electronics even when consumer inventory remains available.
  • Whether prices stay elevated depends on new wafer allocation, HBM yields and the unwinding of channel inventories; a temporary retail spike is not the same as permanent supply destruction.
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China expands quasi-fiscal capital support for wind projects

# Policy TMTPost 2h

A new Chinese policy-finance vehicle provided 229.32M yuan (roughly $32M) of equity-like capital to five wind projects, showing how Beijing is filling renewable developers' capital gaps without simply adding bank debt.

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  • The capital supports five Tian Shun wind projects and follows more than 500M yuan (about $70M) received from the same program over two years.
  • The policy vehicle grew from 5T yuan (roughly $704B) in 2025 to 8T yuan (about $1.13T) in 2026, with officials expecting it to mobilize 80T to 110T yuan (about $11.3T to $15.5T) of investment.
  • Equity-like funding solves a gating problem: without project capital, developers may not qualify for the larger bank loans needed to build.
  • It does not solve weak power prices, curtailment or the long-term profitability of projects, and Tian Shun's reported guarantees equal about 173% of audited net assets.
  • The mechanism shows policy banks moving from cheap project loans toward quasi-fiscal balance-sheet support as local government finances come under pressure.
  • The investment multiplier will be real only if projects are built, connected and paid for by the power system rather than remaining approved projects on a capital-allocation list.
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US probes nine universities over alleged visa fraud with China concerns

# Policy SCMP 10h

The Trump administration opened a probe into nine US universities over alleged J-1 visa fraud, explicitly raising concerns about Chinese scholars and state influence.

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  • The J-1 program covers researchers, scholars and students, so the investigation could affect academic mobility well beyond ordinary student visas.
  • The China focus reflects a broader shift from individual compliance questions toward scrutiny of research ties and the Chinese government's role.
  • The supplied report does not establish wrongdoing at any named university or quantify the number of affected Chinese researchers.
  • For US technology firms and labs, the policy signal is higher uncertainty around recruiting, visiting appointments and international research collaboration.
  • The investigation may become a precedent for treating visa administration as part of technology and research security rather than a separate immigration function.
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China policy watch: trade, currency, gig work and AI safety

# Analysis Sinocism 8h

A China-focused briefing flags quiet trade talks, a central-bank position on the renminbi, gig-worker protections, holiday spending and domestic AI-safety debate.

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  • The briefing says the European trade and economic-security commissioner met China's commerce minister, with limited detail released by the Chinese side.
  • It also points to policy attention on renminbi internationalization and protections for platform and gig workers, two areas where state priorities meet business models.
  • The inclusion of holiday spending and AI safety shows how economic demand, labor governance and technology control are being tracked as one policy system.
  • Because the supplied item is a newsletter index rather than full reporting, the individual claims need separate verification.
  • Its value is agenda-setting: it identifies the governance topics likely to matter more than the day's product launches.
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The MSRA alumni network behind a generation of Chinese AI

# Analysis Leiphone 1d

A long Chinese profile traces how Microsoft Research Asia's early engineering culture and mentorship helped seed later Chinese AI leaders and companies.

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  • The account centers on Zhang Lei's early work across hardware, robotics, vision and speech, and on a formative lesson to understand a problem completely rather than chase fashionable metrics.
  • It portrays MSRA as a talent network where research, engineering and managerial habits moved into Alibaba, SenseTime and other Chinese technology institutions.
  • The historical value is institutional: China's AI ecosystem was built not only by isolated founders but by repeated transfers of people, methods and trust among labs and companies.
  • The article is anecdotal and celebratory, so claims about who shaped half of Chinese AI should not be read as a measured network analysis.
  • For readers trying to understand how Chinese technical organizations work, the profile highlights mentorship, internal competition and alumni circulation as infrastructure.
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Xiaohongshu turns game fandom into a physical island

# Culture 36Kr 23h

Xiaohongshu expanded its RED LAND festival to 150,000 square meters and more than 160 game and anime IPs, showing how Chinese platforms are designing fandom as a lifestyle community.

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  • The event grew from 50 IPs and three days to more than 160 IPs and five days, with cosplay, parades and platform-curated public spaces.
  • Its distinctive strategy is to translate game worlds into familiar life scenes—restaurants, karaoke, holiday resorts and cafes—so nonplayers can enter through culture rather than game mechanics.
  • The platform treats gaming and anime audiences as many separate interest graphs, then creates shared physical space where those communities can mix without erasing their differences.
  • The heavy travel, weather and queue costs show that participants are paying with time and effort for belonging, not simply attending a product launch.
  • For game companies, the event is a community infrastructure play: the platform helps convert user-generated affection into durable IP recognition and offline spending.
  • The scale claims come from organizers, but the underlying behavior reveals how Chinese consumer platforms increasingly mediate fandom, commerce and identity together.
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China issues roughly $1.24T in local government bonds in nine months

# Signal Jiemian 29m

Chinese local governments issued about 8.8T yuan (roughly $1.24T) of bonds in the first three quarters, with September issuance above 1T yuan.

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  • The reported total grew about 3% year over year, while refinancing bonds rose about 10% and new bonds fell about 4%.
  • The mix suggests that a substantial share of issuance is managing existing obligations rather than financing entirely new projects.
  • The article links heavy bond demand to expectations of slower government-bond supply and lower long-term yields, but those are market views rather than confirmed outcomes.
  • The scale matters because local governments remain a key transmission channel for Chinese infrastructure policy despite fiscal stress.
  • The hard numbers are more useful than the accompanying fund promotion: they show continued reliance on debt issuance to stabilize local investment.
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AI-assisted hackers target seven South Korean banks

# Analysis Solidot 22h

CrowdStrike says attackers used an open-source penetration-testing tool and Claude Code, with a possible Guangdong connection that remains unconfirmed.

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  • The reported victims include Shinhan, KB Kookmin and Hana banks, suggesting a campaign rather than an isolated intrusion.
  • The suspected operator's location is inferred from personal information accidentally included while using Claude Code to generate a security-research resume, not established through a conviction or public attribution.
  • The case illustrates how generative coding tools can leave operational and identity traces while lowering the cost of adapting offensive tooling.
  • The alleged use of an autonomous penetration-testing console matters because defenders may face agents that iterate across reconnaissance and exploitation rather than a fixed malware sample.
  • The China dimension is substantive but uncertain: a possible Guangdong-based individual is not evidence of state involvement or a broader Chinese campaign.
  • The next useful evidence would be forensic attribution, victim impact, and whether the open tool was modified or merely used as published.
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Source ledger
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 11/15
Leiphone 200 19/20
GeekPark 200 3/30
IT Home 200 12/60 +36 over cap
SCMP 200 10/50 +11 over cap
Initium 200 2/15
Jiemian 200 8/30 +3 over cap
China Digital Times 200 0/15
The Wire China 200 0/50
Techmeme 200 3/15
Hacker News 200 0/20
V2EX 200 8/50 +34 over cap
Zhidx 200 8/20
InfoQ China 200 8/20 +8 over cap
New Wisdom 200 8/15
TMTPost 200 8/18 +10 over cap