Unitree took $48 billion out of a falling market, and its earliest backer says most of this sector dies
Unitree up 460%, Baidu down 12%
Unitree opened at 1,100 yuan. The Hangzhou maker of the backflipping quadrupeds priced its Shanghai STAR Market listing at 150.80 yuan (~$21) and opened 629% above that, briefly worth over 400bn yuan. It closed at 845 yuan, up 460%, near 342bn yuan (~$48bn) — on 2025 revenue of 1.7bn yuan (~$239m).
The market it listed into fell. The Star Market Composite dropped 7.2% and the Shanghai Composite 2.4%; UBTech, the listed Hong Kong-quoted humanoid maker, fell more than 10%. Meituan's 8.7% post-listing stake was worth nearly 30bn yuan (~$4.2bn) at the close, about seventy times its original investment. One stock, not a sector.
Its first institutional backer is not celebrating. Huang Jinping, founding partner of Rongyi Capital and a fifteen-year ZTE veteran who led Unitree's 2021 A round, told 36Kr he walked twenty-odd friendly funds to Unitree back then and not one followed. Run twenty robot firms at a 500bn-yuan market, he says, and maybe three do well, seven get by, the rest die.
His sharper point is about money arriving too easily. Founders whose rounds close without friction overestimate themselves, and then carry a valuation they have to perform against — so they optimise for the quarter instead of the decade. Every stage of company-building, he argues, has to be lived through; capital cannot buy the skipped years.
Nobody is bidding for search. Baidu's ADR fell more than 12% in New York on Tuesday. A commentary account on Jiemian argues the fix is a break-up: search and models in one basket means the AI side can never be financed on its own terms. Second-quarter capex reached 11.4bn yuan (~$1.6bn) against Tencent's 58bn (~$8.2bn); return on invested capital fell from 7% to about 1%.
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LandSpace landed a steel booster on legs
Zhuque-3 came home at 7:41am. LandSpace launched the reusable Zhuque-3 Y2 at 7:35, put Honghu-3, an internet satellite, into orbit, and soft-landed the first stage at its pad in Minqin County, Gansu — 66 metres, nine methane-oxygen Tianque-12A engines, roughly 390km (242 miles) downrange. China's first land recovery of an orbital-class first stage, and its first on landing legs.
Two ledgers, same rocket. Solidot's Chinese write-up leads with rank: fourth flight-proven partly-reusable orbital rocket after Falcon 9, New Glenn and Long March 10B, and China now the only country to have recovered boosters two different ways — sea net and legs. It calls this simply the second Zhuque-3 flight.
What it leaves out is the first one. On the December 2025 debut the second stage made orbit and the first stage erupted in a fireball on final descent. Western coverage leads with that turnaround, and with steel: the first stainless-steel booster recovered after an orbital launch, while SpaceX's steel Super Heavy still awaits FAA clearance for orbital recovery. SpaceNews adds the fixes — fewer engines in the landing burn, a predicted landing point in the onboard safety logic, better thermal protection.
Cheap mass up does not mean cheap bits up. GeekPark's interview with Space Byte, a satellite data-centre startup co-founded by a Beidou veteran, has the number that matters: uploading an 800MB model to a satellite already in orbit takes close to four weeks. Command links run around 1Mbps, and a pass gives you eight to ten minutes.
Nobody built the uplink because nobody needed it. Satellites were designed to fire data down and receive instructions. Laser downlink records keep falling; laser uplink at low orbit fires through the turbulent air first, and remains a test-bench result everywhere. Thirty-odd Chinese firms now say they do orbital compute. The bottleneck is a fire hose pointing the wrong way.
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Nobody knows who runs the AI talks
Xi's Washington trip is weeks away and the AI dialogue has no shape. SCMP reports venue, participants and scope still unsettled, with the US side yet to decide which part of government leads and the two sides not agreed on whether technical experts and companies attend at all.
That asymmetry is the story. Beijing arrives with one interlocutor and one position. Washington arrives with an unresolved turf question, which means the first substantive negotiation is internal. Whoever wins it sets the agenda by default.
The provident fund got rewritten for consumption. Li Qiang signed amendments to the housing fund rules effective 20 September, per Sinocism: the rent-to-income threshold for withdrawals is gone, renovation and property-management fees become eligible, and gig and part-time workers may contribute voluntarily. Household stimulus that costs the budget nothing — households spend their own savings.
Jiang Zemin's centenary is being edited as it is celebrated. Cai Qi, the Standing Committee member who runs the Party's Central Committee General Office, spoke on the Three Represents and, in Sinocism's reading, used it to underwrite the 15th Five-Year Plan while leaving out market economy, ownership pluralism, private entrepreneurs and external integration — which is most of what the phrase originally licensed.
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DeepSeek's harness now ships whole agents
Five days, 149,000 stars. GeekPark's tally for DeepSeek Harness: 15,000 forks, 5,100 plugins, 3,500 authors. The community shipped desktop wrappers within 48 hours, one down to 18MB. DeepSeek then published a dozen of its own internal engineering Skills — code review, dead-code hunting, stripping leftover chain-of-thought from docs.
The new unit is the Preset. Not a skill, not a plugin: a bundle of plugins, skills, browsing, context policy and loop, packaged and distributed as a finished agent. Sites now exist to hand out research agents and video agents in one click. The harness stopped being the product; the agent is.
Meanwhile the layer commoditises. Plugins route to GLM, Kimi, Qwen, Claude and Gemini; one vision plugin covers fifteen-plus providers because V4-Pro still cannot see. DSH runs as a subagent inside Codex and Claude Code, and vice versa. WeChat Work opened its CLI and MCP to any agent, no company-size threshold.
And the man who argued this leaves MiniMax. Miao Yuhang, its head of engineering across M3.x, Code, Audio and the Hailuo consumer app, is marked as departed with no next stop announced. His public line was that a model is an F1 car and the harness is the driver — and that whatever the harness adds today, the model eventually swallows.
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A Qianmen travelogue got deleted anyway
The post described a security queue and nothing else. China Digital Times translated a WeChat account's account of visiting Zhengyangmen at the south end of Tiananmen Square: ID swipes, bag searches, book checks, hems lifted, shoes squeezed, in stifling heat. No criticism, no history, no complaint — just advice to avoid August.
It was removed for violating the Cybersecurity Law. Which is the tell. The threshold has moved from opinion to description: writing down what the queue is like is now sufficient. Keyword scanning may have done it automatically, which is worse — nobody decided.
Hong Kong is running out of adjectives. Initium reports 36.9°C on 9 August, the highest since 1884, and a night that stayed above 30.2°C, the warmest in 143 years. Three suspected heat deaths in a week: two men on hiking trails, a decorator found dead in a Tai Po flat after telling his wife he was exhausted.
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Threads we are pulling
- The grey market underpriced Unitree by half. Brokers bid 520 yuan (~$73) pre-listing and crypto perpetuals implied a 300% pop; it closed at 845 and touched 1,100. Founder Wang Xingxing is worth over $12bn on paper. The debut did not lift the rest of the sector, and DeepRobotics and LimX are next in the queue.
- Wang used the listing lunch to name his bet. GeekPark's account: a loop where AI reads papers, writes training code, runs simulation, deploys to real hardware, scores the result and retrains. The moat is the last step — 33,000 quadrupeds and 5,500 humanoids shipped. 2.02bn yuan (~$285m) of proceeds goes to robot models, the largest single line.
- Geely's handover is done. An Conghui took the chair on 18 August; H1 revenue 173.6bn yuan (~$24.5bn), exports up 158%, and no further combustion-engine development. The outgoing chief executive called the results "eye-catching but not amazing".
- New watch — Nokia's China exit. It plans to cut most of its China staff by year-end and close plants in phases, keeping after-sales; severance is N+3. It reported about 7,200 Greater China employees at end-2025, with a Beijing R&D centre dating to 1995.
- A broker put Qwen's harness first. Jefferies tested eight agents on five office tasks; Alibaba's Qwen Office scored above 90 on every dimension, ahead of Claude Cowork and Codex, with the highest implied harness score. Reported through a Chinese outlet, framed generously — but cost per task is the right metric.
- Entanglement reached 420km. USTC linked two cold-atom quantum memories over 420km of fibre and beat the no-repeater limit above 230km, up from 50km in 2020.
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