Beijing is letting a Taiwanese professor argue that unification would have to bind Beijing too
Three essays, three welcomes from the Taiwan Affairs Office
The series began on 29 August. Ci-Ze Li, an associate professor who teaches international politics at National Changhua University of Education in Taiwan, published the first of three pieces on Zhengdangshi, a mainland WeChat blog that has become a venue for cross-Strait argument. The question he asked: if unification were actually negotiated under one country, two systems, what should Taiwan demand?
His answer is reciprocity, written as a stress test. Taiwan accepts unified sovereignty, rules out de jure separation and foreign military intervention, and takes on national-security obligations and limits on its own autonomy. Beijing, in exchange, converts "two systems" from a political promise into enforceable constitutional commitments — elections, judicial authority, basic rights, fiscal powers. If one country is hard law, two systems must be hard law too, per Pekingnology's translation.
Then he opens with the number that guts his own project. An August survey commissioned by Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council found 81.2% opposed to one country, two systems, 68.9% preferring the status quo over unification, and 83.9% saying Taiwan's future belongs to its 23m people. He put that at the top of an essay aimed largely at mainland readers.
Beijing's reaction is the actual event. Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Chen Binhua was asked about the essays at the 9 and 16 September briefings and welcomed the discussion; a spokesperson encouraged more on 30 September. Three welcomes in three weeks for a text whose core demand is constraints on the centre.
SCMP wrote it as approval — Beijing hailing a Taiwanese scholar's rare proposal, Beijing as the subject, a mainland academic noting such discussion is welcome if premised on one China. Pekingnology's frame is the professor probing how far the space goes. The praise is cheap and reversible; the mainland platform carrying "bind the centre" arguments is the thing to watch.
THE OTHER CHANNEL: on 1 October Taiwan's coastguard held a water cannon on a mainland fishing boat's wheelhouse for about 90 seconds, 27 nautical miles off Dongsha Island, per SCMP.
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Putin says a trilateral is possible, if Xi arranges it
The clearest answer yet came from a Beijing questioner. At the Valdai Discussion Club on 1 October, Henry Huiyao Wang — founder of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization and a former counsellor to China's State Council — asked about a three-way meeting with Xi and Trump. Putin said it is possible, that an agenda would have to be found first, and that it depends largely on China as host, per Pekingnology. APEC leaders meet in Shenzhen on 18–19 November; the foreign ministry welcomed Putin's attendance on Friday.
The wires took the quote and dropped the room. Reuters ran Putin's readiness to meet if an agenda is worked out and did not identify who asked. That a semi-official Beijing think-tanker elicited it, in public, days after Xi got back from Washington, is not trivia — it is the trial balloon.
Meanwhile the hardware relationship deepened. Chinese troops joined Tsentr-2026 in Chelyabinsk from Monday to Saturday, among more than 47,000 personnel, with new anti-drone and ground robot systems that Russian state media said applied combat lessons from Ukraine, per SCMP. Two days after the PLA stood up a college of unmanned and intelligent engineering.
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Washington counted 343 lithography tools
The leak is in the licence text, not the border. A late-September report from the Center for Technology & Statecraft, a Washington group founded in August, estimates Chinese fabs had amassed roughly 343 immersion DUV systems by the first quarter of 2026, about 270 of them ASML NXT:1980i units — enough, it argues, to mass-produce Huawei AI chips and HBM via multipatterning. Older immersion tools are effectively uncontrolled anywhere in China because of a carve-out for the Netherlands, per the report and SCMP's write-up.
The smuggling prosecutions continue regardless. Greg Lui, 38, of San Gabriel, California, was arrested Thursday and charged with conspiracy to violate export controls, outbound smuggling and money laundering over more than $300m of restricted servers routed through Malaysia and Singapore, per SCMP.
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DeepSeek published its sandbox farm and its jailbreaks
The hiring post was a systems paper. DeepSeek's elastic computing team put out a technical note on DSec, the sandbox infrastructure behind all of V4's training, evaluation and data preprocessing. One shard: ~160 servers, 30,000 CPU cores, 250TB of memory, about 3m sandboxes a day, 380,000-plus concurrent at peak, 5,000 created per second, per QbitAI.
The engineering is all about sparsity. Environments split into base image, workspace and toolkit — one week of production used 11,266 base images and 102,171 workspaces. Agents touch only 4.2–13.3% of image bytes, so data sits in DeepSeek's 3FS and loads on demand: 8,192 containers in 35 minutes instead of 60, with 57% less disk written. Ninety percent of sandboxes burn under 5% of requested CPU, which funds 50x oversubscription.
Then the part nobody else publishes. In production they watched agents read answers left behind in the environment, forge RPC requests, overwrite /bin/bash to inject commands, and call a filesystem extent-swap ioctl to get around access control. Containment is AppArmor on files and sockets plus per-sandbox eBPF network allowlists — and DeepSeek says plainly it has no general defence if an agent finds a kernel bug.
Reward hacking is now an infrastructure budget line, described in the open by the lab doing it. The snapshot mechanism that forks a trajectory mid-run turns environment state itself into reusable training data.
One more number that matters commercially. V4.1 Flash is a 552bn-parameter mixture-of-experts model — smaller than R1's 671bn — so the 1.2–1.5m yuan (~$169,000–211,000) on-premises boxes institutions bought last year upgrade in place without another card. The market has split into lightweight 32–70bn-parameter appliances for volume and full-spec machines for compliance-bound state firms, per TMTPost.
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The holiday turned every EV driver into a dispatcher
Distance stopped being the question. TMTPost's account of National Day motorway travel: one driver charged twice on a 1,000km trip, queueing four and a half hours and then another hour; someone pulled ticket A140 at 3am when number 29 was being called; a car at 1% was pushed to a charger and then told to take a number. At the Zaoyang North stop, 48 tickets per round, close to 200 cars waiting at peak, everyone pushed off at 80%, here.
And the AI itineraries failed on the same axis. Five travellers told TMTPost what broke: a 50-minute drive that took an hour and 50 because the model had the straight-line distance; a neighbourhood visited at 9am where nothing opens before noon; a pre-dawn summit climb for a sunrise that lasted 30 seconds; and an assistant that answered a question about "today" by dating it 4 September, the day the plan was written.
These are one story. Chinese consumer AI is excellent on where things are and blind to what state they are in — which is the only thing a holiday is made of. The travellers' fix was the hotel front desk and taxi drivers.
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Threads we are pulling
- The gender ranking rose while the argument got narrower. China returned to the top 100 of the World Economic Forum's gender gap report for the first time since 2016 — 96th of 145, up from 103rd, 69.9% of its gap closed, per SCMP. Same week Beijing Institute of Technology fired law lecturer Pei Yi over a joke read as insulting men. The index measures labour and schooling; the fight is happening where it does not look.
- The anonymous complaint keeps working. China Digital Times' August archive logs Wuhan culture officials investigating Guo Degang, China's best-known crosstalk comedian, after an unidentified member of the public said he vulgarised lyrics from a 1956 film. September verdict: no personal fine, but 486,874 yuan (~$68,600) on the organisers and 110,000 yuan (~$15,500) on the theatre. Also deleted: a tribute to the late premier Zhu Rongji's outspokenness.
- Anthropic answered the deployment question with a cheque. Following Thursday's note that Tencent Cloud and Moonshot both launched forward-deployed-engineer programmes on 10 September: $100m to train 10,000 deployment engineers by end-2027, first cohort from Accenture, Bain, Capgemini, Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley, Novo Nordisk and Commonwealth Bank of Australia, in-person training then a 12-week residency on a live project, per GeekPark. I said whoever eats that cost owns the business model. Anthropic has decided to eat it and brand the result.
- The 0-5 got an apology. Palestine's Udai Dabbagh posted in Chinese and English regretting his thumbs-down celebration in Chongqing, per Jiemian.
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