Apr 7 2024
Threads is giving Taiwanese users a safe space to talk about politics

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Like most reporters, I have accounts on every social media platform you can think of. But for the longest time, I was not on Threads, the rival to X (formerly Twitter) released by Meta last year. The way it has to be tied to your Instagram account didn’t sit well with me, and as its popularity dwindled, I felt maybe it was not necessary to use it.

But I finally joined Threads last week after I discovered that the app has unexpectedly blown up among Taiwanese users. For months, Threads has been the most downloaded app in Taiwan, as users flock to the platform to talk about politics and more. I talked to academics and Taiwanese Threads users about why the Meta-owned platform got a redemption arc in Taiwan this year. You can read what I discovered here.

I first noticed the trend on Instagram, which occasionally shows you a few trending Threads posts to try to entice you to join. After seeing them a few times, I realized there was a pattern: most of these were written by Taiwanese people talking about Taiwan.

That was a rare experience for me, since I come from China and write primarily about China. Social media algorithms have always shown me accounts similar to mine. Although people from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan all write in Chinese, the characters we use and the expressions we choose are quite different, making it easy to spot your own people. And on most platforms that are truly global, the conversations in Chinese are mostly dominated by people in or from mainland China, since its population far outnumbers the rest. 

As I dug into the phenomenon, it soon turned out that Threads’ popularity has been surging at an unparalleled pace in Taiwan. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, publicly acknowledged that Threads has been doing “exceptionally well in Taiwan, of all places.” Data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm, shows that Threads has been the most downloaded social network app on iPhone and Android in Taiwan almost every single day of 2024. On the platform itself, Taiwanese users are also belatedly realizing their influence when they see that comments under popular accounts, like a K-pop group, come mostly from fellow Taiwanese users. 

But why did Threads succeed in Taiwan when it has failed in so many other places? My interviews with users and scholars revealed a few reasons.

First, Taiwanese people never really adopted Twitter. Only 1% to 5% of them regularly use the platform, now called X, estimates Austin Wang, a political science professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The mainstream population uses Facebook and Instagram, but still yearns for a platform for short text posts. The global launch of Threads basically gave these users a good reason to try out a Twitter-like product.

But more important, Taiwan’s presidential election earlier this year means there was a lot to talk, debate, and commiserate about. Starting in November, many supporters of Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) “gathered to Threads and used it as a mobilization tool,” Wang says. “Even DPP presidential candidate Lai received more interaction on Threads than Instagram and Facebook.” 

It turns out that even though Meta has tried to position Threads as a less political version of X, what actually underpinned its success in Taiwan was still the universal desire to talk about politics.

“Taiwanese people gather on Threads because of the freedom to talk about politics [here],” Liu, a designer in Taipei who joined in January because of the elections, tells me. “For Threads to depoliticize would be shooting itself in the foot.” 

The fact that there are an exceptionally large number of Taiwanese users on Threads also makes it a better place to talk about internal politics, she says, because it won’t easily be overshadowed or hijacked by people outside Taiwan. The more established platforms like Facebook and X are rife with bots, disinformation campaigns, and controversial content moderation policies. On Threads there’s minimal interference with what the Taiwanese users are saying. That feels like a fresh breeze to Liu.

But I can’t help feeling that Threads’ popularity in Taiwan could easily go awry. Meta’s decision to keep Threads distanced from political content is one factor that could derail Taiwanese users’ experience; an influx of non-Taiwanese users, if the platform actually manages to become more successful and popular in other parts of the world, could also introduce heated disagreements and all the additional reasons why other platforms have deteriorated. 

These are some tough questions to answer for Meta, because users will simply flow to the next trendy, experimental platform if Threads doesn’t feel right anymore. Its success in Taiwan so far is a rare win for the company, but preserving that success and replicating it elsewhere will require a lot more work.

Do you believe Threads stands a chance of rivaling X (Twitter) in places other than Taiwan? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. Morris Chang, who founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company at the age of 55, is an outlier in today’s tech industry, where startup founders usually start in their 20s. (Wall Street Journal $)

2. A group of Chinese researchers used the technology behind hypersonic missiles to make high-speed trains safer. (South China Morning Post $)

3. The US government is considering cutting the so-called de minimis exemption from import duties, which makes it cheap for Temu and Shein to send packages to the US. But lots of US companies also benefit from the exemption now. (The Information $)

4. The Chinese commerce minister will visit Europe soon to plead his country’s case amid the European Commission’s investigation into Chinese electric vehicles. (Reuters $)

5. After three years of unsuccessful competition with WhatsApp, ByteDance’s messaging app designed for the African market finally shut down last month. (Rest of World)

6. The rapid progress of AI makes it seem less necessary to learn a foreign language. But there are still things AI loses in translation. (The Atlantic $)

7. This is the incredible story of a Chinese man who takes his piano to play outdoors at places of public grief: in front of the covid quarantine barriers in Wuhan, at the epicenter of an earthquake, on a river that submerged villages. And he plays the same song—the only song he knows, composed by the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. (NPR)

Lost in translation

With Netflix’s March release of The Three Body Problem, a series adapted from the global hit sci-fi novel by Chinese author Liu Cixin, Western audiences are also learning about a movie-like real-life drama behind the adaptation. In 2021, the Chinese publication Caixin first investigated the mysterious death of Lin Qi, a successful businessman who bought the movie rights to the book. In 2017, he hired Xu Yao, a prominent attorney, to work on legal affairs and government relations.

In December 2020, Lin died after he was poisoned by a mysterious mix of toxins. According to Caixin, Xu is a fan of the TV series Breaking Bad and had his own plant in Shanghai where he made poisons. He would order hundreds of different toxins through the dark web, mix them, and use them on pets to experiment. A week before Lin’s death, Xu gave him a bottle of pills that were supposedly prebiotics, but he had replaced them with poison. 

Xu was arrested soon after Lin died, and he was sentenced to death on March 22 this year.

One more thing

Taobao, China’s leading e-commerce platform, announced it’s experimenting with delivering packages by rockets. Yes, rockets. Made by a Chinese startup, Taobao’s pilot rockets will be able to deliver something as big as a car or a truck, and the rockets can be reused for the next delivery. To be honest, I still can’t believe this wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

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Mar 30 2024
Four things you need to know about China’s AI talent pool 

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

In 2019, MIT Technology Review covered a report that shined a light on how fast China’s AI talent pool was growing. Its main finding was pretty interesting: the number of elite AI scholars with Chinese origins had multiplied by 10 in the previous decade, but relatively few of them stayed in China for their work. The majority moved to the US. 

Now the think tank behind the report has published an updated analysis, showing how the makeup of global AI talent has changed since—during a critical period when the industry has shifted significantly and become the hottest technology sector. 

The team at MacroPolo, the think tank of the Paulson Institute, an organization that focuses on US-China relations, studied the national origin, educational background, and current work affiliation of top researchers who gave presentations and had papers accepted at NeurIPS, a top academic conference on AI. Their analysis of the 2019 conference resulted in the first iteration of the Global AI Talent Tracker. They’ve analyzed the December 2022 NeurIPS conference for an update three years later.

I recommend you read the original report, which has a very well-designed infographic that shows the talent flow across countries. But to save you some time, I also talked to the authors and highlighted what I think are the most surprising or important takeaways from the new report. Here are the four main things you need to know about the global AI talent landscape today. 

1.  China has become an even more important country for training AI talent.

Even in 2019, Chinese researchers were already a significant part of the global AI community, making up one-tenth of the most elite AI researchers. In 2022, they accounted for 26%, almost dethroning the US (American researchers accounted for 28%). 

Two pie charts showing the countries of origin of AI researchers in 2019 and 2022.

“Timing matters,” says Ruihan Huang, senior research associate at MacroPolo and one of the lead authors. “The last three years have seen China dramatically expand AI programs across its university system—now there are some 2,000 AI majors—because it was also building an AI industry to absorb that talent.” 

As a result of these university and industry efforts, many more students in computer science or other STEM majors have joined the AI industry, making Chinese researchers the backbone of cutting-edge AI research.

2. AI researchers now tend to stay in the country where they receive their graduate degree. 

This is perhaps intuitive, but the numbers are still surprisingly high: 80% of AI researchers who went to a graduate school in the US stayed to work in the US, while 90% of their peers who went to a graduate school in China stayed in China.

In a world where major countries are competing with each other to take the lead in AI development, this finding suggests a trick they could use to expand their research capacity: invest in graduate-level institutions and attract overseas students to come. 

This is particularly important in the US-China context, where the souring of the relationship between the two countries has affected the academic field. According to news reports, quite a few Chinese graduate students have been interrogated at the US border or even denied entry in recent years, as a Trump-era policy persisted. Along with the border restrictions imposed during the pandemic years, this hostility could have prevented more Chinese AI experts from coming to the US to learn and work. 

3. The US still overwhelmingly attracts the most AI talent, but China is catching up.

In both 2019 and 2022, the United States topped the rankings in terms of where elite AI researchers work. But it’s also clear that the distance between the US and other countries, particularly China, has shortened. In 2019, almost three-fifths of top AI researchers worked in the US; only two-fifths worked here in 2022. 

“The thing about elite talent is that they generally want to work at the most cutting-edge and dynamic places. They want to do incredible work and be rewarded for it,” says AJ Cortese, a senior research associate at MacroPolo and another of the main authors. “So far, the United States still leads the way in having that AI ecosystem—from leading institutions to companies—that appeals to top talent.”

Two pie charts showing the leading countries where AI researchers work in 2019 and 2022.

In 2022, 28% of the top AI researchers were working in China. This significant portion speaks to the growth of the domestic AI sector in China and the job opportunities it has created. Compared with 2019, three more Chinese universities and one company (Huawei) made it into the top tier of institutions that produce AI research. 

It’s true that most Chinese AI companies are still considered to lag behind their US peers—for example, China usually trails the US by a few months in releasing comparable generative AI models. However, it seems like they have started catching up.

4. Top-tier AI researchers now are more willing to work in their home countries.

This is perhaps the biggest and also most surprising change in the data, in my opinion. Like their Chinese peers, more Indian AI researchers ended up staying in their home country for work.

In fact, this seems to be a broader pattern across the board: it used to be that more than half of AI researchers worked in a country different from their home. Now, the balance has tipped in favor of working in their own countries. 

Two pie charts showing the portion of AI researchers choosing to work abroad vs. at home in 2019 and 2022.

This is good news for countries trying to catch up with the US research lead in AI. “It goes without saying most countries would prefer ‘brain gain’ over ‘brain drain’—especially when it comes to a highly complex and technical discipline like AI,” Cortese says. 

It’s not easy to create an environment and culture that not only retains its own talents but manages to pull scholars from other countries, but lots of countries are now working on it. I can only begin to imagine what the report might look like in a few years.  

Did anything else stand out to you in the report? Let me know your thoughts by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. The Dutch prime minister will visit China this week to discuss with Chinese president Xi Jinping whether the Dutch chipmaking equipment company ASML can keep servicing Chinese clients. (Reuters $)

  • Here’s an inside look into ASML’s factory and how it managed to dominate advanced chipmaking. (MIT Technology Review)

2. Hong Kong passed a tough national security law that makes it more dangerous to protest Beijing’s rule. (BBC)

3. A new bill in France suggests imposing hefty fines on Shein and similar ultrafast-fashion companies for their negative environmental impact—as much as $11 per item that they sell in France. (Nikkei Asia)

4. Huawei filed a patent to make more advanced chips with a low-tech workaround. (Bloomberg $)

  • Meanwhile, a US official accused the Chinese chip foundry SMIC of breaking US law by making a chip for Huawei. (South China Morning Post $)

5. Instead of the usual six and a half days a week, Tesla has instructed its Shanghai factory to reduce production to five days a week. The slowdown of EV sales in China could be the reason. (Bloomberg $)

6. TikTok is still having plenty of troubles. A new political TV ad (paid for by a mysterious new nonprofit), playing in three US swing states, attacks Zhang Fuping, a ByteDance vice president that very few people have heard of. (Punchbowl News)

  • As TikTok still hasn’t reached a licensing deal with Universal Music Group, users have had to get creative to find alternative soundtracks for their videos. (Billboard)

7. China launched a communications satellite that will help relay signals for missions to explore the dark side of the moon. (Reuters $)

Lost in translation

The most-hyped generative AI app in China these days is Kimi, according to the Chinese publication Sina Tech. Released by Moonshot AI, a Chinese “unicorn” startup, Kimi made headlines last week when it announced it had started supporting inputting text using over 2 million Chinese characters. (For comparison, OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo currently supports inputting 100,000 Chinese characters, while Claude3-200K supports about 160,000 characters.)

While some of the app’s virality can be credited to a marketing push that intensified recently. Chinese users are now busy feeding popular and classic books to the model and testing how well it can understand the context. Feeling threatened, other Chinese AI apps owned by tech giants like Baidu and Alibaba have followed suit, announcing that they will soon support 5 million or even 10 million Chinese characters. But processing large amounts of text, while impressive, is very costly in the generative AI age—and some observers worry this isn’t the commercial direction that companies ought to head in.

One more thing

Fluffy pajamas, sweatpants, outdated attire: young Chinese people are dressing themselves in “gross outfits” to work—an intentional provocation to their bosses and an expression of silent resistance to the trend that glorifies career hustle. “I just don’t think it’s worth spending money to dress up for work, since I’m just sitting there,” one of them told the New York Times.

Update: The story has been updated to clarify the affiliation of the report authors.

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Mar 10 2024
Chinese EVs have entered center stage in US-China tensions

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

So far, electric vehicles have mostly been discussed in the US through a scientific, economic, or environmental lens. But all of a sudden, they have become highly political. 

Last Thursday, the Biden administration announced it would investigate the security risks posed by Chinese-made smart cars, which could “collect sensitive data about our citizens and our infrastructure and send this data back to the People’s Republic of China,” the statement from White House claims.

While many other technologies from China have been scrutinized because of security concerns, EVs have largely avoided that sort of attention until now. After all, they represent a technology that will greatly help the world transition to clean and renewable energy, and people have greeted its rapid growth in China with praise.

But US-China relations have been at a low point since the Trump years and the pandemic, and it seems like only a matter of time before any trade or interaction between the two countries falls under security scrutiny. Now it’s EVs’ turn.

The White House has made clear that there are two motivations behind the investigation: the economy and security.

Even though the statement didn’t explicitly mention EVs, it’s undeniable that they are the only reason Chinese automakers have now become serious challengers to their American peers. Chinese companies like BYD make quality EVs at affordable prices, making them increasingly competitive in international markets. A recent report by the Alliance for American Manufacturing, an industry group, even describes EV competition as “China’s existential threat to America’s auto industry.”

“The issue of Chinese EV imports really hits on so many major political factors all at the same time,” says Kyle Chan, a sociology researcher at Princeton University who studies industrial policies and China. “Not just the auto plants in swing states like Michigan and Ohio, but the broader auto manufacturing sector spread over many important states.”

If the US auto industry fails to remain competitive, it will threaten the job security of millions of Americans, and countless other parts of the US economy will be affected. So it’s no surprise Chinese EVs are seen as a major economic threat that needs to be addressed. 

In fact, it’s one of the few issues everyone seems to agree on in this election cycle. Before the Biden investigation, Trump drew people’s attention to Chinese EVs during campaign speeches, vowing to slap a 60% tariff on Chinese imported goods. Josh Hawley, a Republican senator and a longtime China hawk, proposed a bill last Tuesday for a whopping 125% tariff on Chinese cars, including Chinese-branded cars made in other countries like Mexico.

But the new action taken by the Biden administration introduces another factor to the discussion: security threats.

Basically, the argument here is that Chinese cars—especially the newer ones with smart features that collect information from the environment or connect to the telecom and satellite network—could be used to steal information and harm US national interests. 

To many experts, this argument is a lot less supported by reality. When TikTok and Huawei were subject to similar concerns, it was because their products were widely used in the US. But the majority of Chinese-made cars are running inside China. There are barely any Chinese cars being sold in the US today, let alone the latest models. That makes the White House’s position look slightly bizarre. 

Lei Xing, an auto analyst and observer of the EV industry, has very strong opinions about the security accusations in the Biden administration’s announcement. “It is full of subjective and inaccurate statements trying to paint a picture of threat and security risk that is much greater than it actually is, and is obviously aimed at gaining voter favor as the presidential election race heats up,” Xing tells me.

Nonetheless, fears over data security are shared across the political spectrum in the US. “There has been almost an emerging consensus in Washington, across party lines, that is much more concerned about Chinese data collection through potential technology channels,” Chan says. 

This lens has now been used to question almost any technology product with Chinese connections: whether it’s Chinese cars, Chinese e-commerce apps like Shein and Temu, social media platforms like TikTok and WeChat, or smart home gadgets, the sentiment about data security remains the same.

Having watched these other technologies come into the geopolitical crossfire from afar, Chinese EV companies were mostly prepared for what was announced last week. 

“I think the Chinese EV firms have already baked this into their calculations,” Chan says. “As they’ve been ramping up more joint ventures and partnerships and entering other markets of the world, I’ve noticed a very clear reluctance to put that much investment into the US market.”

Recently, BYD Americas’ CEO said in an interview that its new planned factory in Mexico will serve the domestic market rather than exporting to the US; Xing learned recently that NIO, another Chinese car company, removed the US from its initial plan of entering 25 markets by 2025. These are all signs that Chinese EV companies will shy away from the US market for a while, at least until the political animosity goes away. Being unable to sell in the world’s second-largest auto market is obviously not good news, but they have a lot of potential customers in Europe, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

“[The Chinese auto industry] for now will remain in a ‘watch and study’ mode and strategize accordingly. Mexico will be an important market and a critical production hub for the Americas region whether [the industry] eventually enters America or not,” says Xing.

I had been counting down the days until we’re able to drive Chinese EVs in the US and see how they compete with American cars on their home turf. I guess I’ll be in for a very long wait. 

Do you think this move will help or harm US domestic automakers in the long run? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. China started its annual parliamentary meeting today. It’s the highest-level of political meeting in China, and it’s where economic plans and other important policy signals are often released. So watch this space. (NBC News)

  • For the first time in 30 years, the country has scrapped the annual tradition where the premier briefs the press and answers questions. It was one of the only moments of access to China’s political leaders, and now it’s gone. (Reuters $)

2. A deepfake clone of a Ukrainian YouTuber is being used by Chinese people to express pro-Russia sentiments and sell Russian goods. (Voice of America News)

3. Hundreds of North Koreans are forced to work in Chinese seafood factories while enduring frequent beatings and sexual abuse. These factories supply major US retailers like Walmart and ShopRite. (New Yorker $)

4. The US government wants to stop data brokers from selling sensitive data to China and a few other adversaries. (Wall Street Journal $)

5. In tiny New York studios, American TikTok influencers are learning the tricks of livestream e-commerce from their Chinese counterparts. (Rest of World)

6. The US Department of Justice accused a Chinese chipmaker of stealing trade secrets five years ago. The company was just found not guilty in court. (Bloomberg $)

7. The number of patents filed by inventors in China has been growing rapidly—surpassing the US figure for the first time ever. (Axios)

Lost in translation

When a Chinese college graduate named Lu Zhi moved on from her first job after eight months at PDD (the Chinese e-commerce company that owns Temu), she didn’t realize the company would ask her to pay $36,000 back as a noncompete compensation. As the Chinese publication Caixin reports, Chinese tech companies, particularly PDD, have sparked outrage for how broad their noncompete agreements have become. 

It doesn’t just affect key personnel in critical positions. Almost any employee, no matter how junior or peripheral their role, has to sign such an agreement when hired. To enforce the agreement, PDD has even hired private detectives to follow former employees around and film their commute to the new workplace. People are questioning whether these companies have gone too far in the name of protecting their trade secrets.

One more thing

The new Dune 2 movie is barely out, and people are already making memes comparing the plot to the real-life geopolitical situation between the US, China, and Taiwan. Is it accurate? I’ll report back after I watch it.

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Feb 22 2024
Why China’s EV ambitions need virtual power plants

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The first time I heard the term “virtual power plants,” I was reporting on how extreme heat waves in 2022 had overwhelmed the Chinese grid and led the government to restrict electric-vehicle charging as an emergency solution. I was told at the time that virtual power plants (VPPs) could make grid breakdowns like that less likely to happen again, but I didn’t have a chance to delve in to learn what that meant.

If you, like me, are unsure how a power plant can be virtual, my colleague June Kim just published an insightful article explaining the technology and how it works. For this week’s newsletter, I took the chance to ask her some more questions about VPPs. It turns out the technology has a particularly good synergy with the EV industry, which is why the Chinese government has started to invest in VPPs. 

“VPPs are basically just aggregations of distributed energy resources that can balance electricity on the grid,” June says—resources including electric-vehicle chargers, heat pumps, rooftop solar panels, and home battery packs for power backups. “They’re working in coordination to replace the function of a centralized coal plant or gas plant … but also add a whole host of other functionalities that are beneficial for the grid,” she says.

To really make the most of these resources, VPPs introduce another layer: a central smart system that coordinates energy consumption and supply. 

This system allows utility companies to handle times of higher energy demand by making adjustments like shifting EV charge time to 2 a.m. to avoid peak hours.

The US government is working to triple VPP capacity by 2030, June says. That capacity is equivalent to 80 to 160 fossil-fuel plants that don’t have to be built. “They expect that EV batteries and the EV charging infrastructure are going to be the biggest factor in building up this additional VPP capacity,” she says.

Considering the significant impact that EVs have on the grid, it’s no surprise that China, where an EV revolution is taking place faster than in any other country, has also turned its attention to VPPs.

By the end of 2023, there were over 20 million EVs in China, almost half the global total. Together, these cars can consume monstrous amounts of energy—but their batteries can also be an emergency backup source. The power shortage that happens in China almost every summer is an urgent reminder that the country needs to figure out how to incorporate these millions of EVs into the existing grid.

Luckily, there are already some moves in this area, both from the Chinese government and from Chinese EV companies.

In January 2024, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, the top economic planning authority, released a blueprint for integrating EV charging infrastructure into the grid. The country plans to start pilot programs with dynamic electricity pricing in a few cities: lower prices late at night can incentivize EV owners to charge their vehicles when the grid is not stressed. The goal is that no more than 40% of EV charging will take place outside these “trough hours.” There will also be a batch of bidirectional charging stations in public and private spaces. At these chargers, batteries can either draw electricity from the grid or send it back.

Meanwhile, NIO, a leading Chinese EV company, is transforming its own charging networks. Last month, 10 NIO charging stations opened in Shanghai that allow vehicles to feed energy back into the grid. The company also has over 2,000 battery-swapping stations across the country. These are ideal energy storage resources for the VPP network. Some of them have already been connected to VPP pilot programs in eastern China, the company said in July 2023.

One of the key obstacles to adoption of VPPs is getting people to sign up to participate. But there’s a compelling reward on offer: money. 

If the reverse-charging infrastructure grows larger, millions of Chinese EV owners could make a little income by charging at the right times and selling electricity at others. 

We don’t know how much earning potential there is, since these pilot programs are still in their very early stages in China. But existing VPP projects in the US can offer some reference. Over the course of one summer, a Massachusetts home can make an estimated $550; participants in a separate VPP project in Texas can earn an estimated $150 per year. “It’s not huge, but it’s not nothing,” June says.

Obviously, it will take a long time to transform our electric grids. But developing VPPs along with the EV charging network seems like a win-win situation for China: it helps the country maintain its lead in the EV industry, and it also makes the grid more resilient and less dependent on coal power plants. I won’t be surprised if Chinese local governments and companies work together to roll out virtual power plants in earnest over the next few years.

Do you think China will catch up quickly on adopting virtual power plants? Tell me your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. The economic shadows of the pandemic have finally receded. This Lunar New Year, the number of travelers and the amount of spending in China finally surpassed pre-pandemic levels. (Bloomberg $)

2. The European Union is probing China’s state-owned train manufacturer for government subsidies that could give it an unfair advantage when bidding for overseas procurements. (Politico)

  • Last year, the European Commission started another anti-subsidy investigation over imports of Chinese electric vehicles. (MIT Technology Review)

3. Burgeoning sci-fi literature circles in China attracted the prestigious Hugo Awards to be held there last year. But leaked emails show that the awards’ administration team actively censored authors who could upset the Chinese government. (The Guardian)

4. A Volkswagen supplier found a component that might have been produced in Xinjiang, where the use of forced labor has been documented. Now thousands of Porsche, Bentley, and Audi cars are being held at US ports waiting for replacement parts. (Financial Times $)

5. The leading Chinese EV maker BYD is considering building a factory in Mexico. If that happens, we might be able to buy BYD vehicles in the US soon. (Nikkei Asia $)

  • Exports of BYD cars have grown so much in recent years that the company is now buying and hiring massive ships to help deliver them. (MIT Technology Review)

6. A new report by OpenAI and Microsoft says hackers from China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have used their large language models, but mostly for mundane tasks like drafting emails. (New York Times $)

7. China’s first domestically made passenger airplane made its first overseas trip to Singapore. (Reuters $)

8. New Chinese restaurant chains that combine traditional cuisine with fast food are blowing up in China. When are they going to open one in the US? (Time)

Lost in translation

Huaqiangbei is a neighborhood in Shenzhen known as a hub of domestic innovation and imitation. It has always played a pivotal role in introducing expensive products (like iPhones and AirPods) to Chinese users, either through smuggling or by producing knockoff versions. And the launch of Apple’s Vision Pro has again reminded people of Huaqiangbei’s influence on consumer trends, according to Chinese tech columnist Wang Qingrui. 

One Shenzhen-based company, EmdoorVR, has already launched a VR headset that looks almost identical to the Vision Pro. This imitator, which is much more limited in function, is named VisionSE and sells for less than 1/10 the price. However, many Huaqiangbei brands have yet to follow suit, since they are not confident about the future of VR headsets. Their hesitation could be another signal that it will be hard for the Vision Pro to find as much acceptance as Apple’s previous successes.

One more thing

For many Chinese families, playing mah-jongg is an essential New Year tradition. But machines are transforming how the game is played: a viral video on social media shows a mah-jongg machine without the usual tiles. Instead, it displays everything on five different screens. It also automatically voices the moves and calculates the results. Not many people in the comments are impressed. Mah-jongg is “99% about feeling the tiles,” says one.

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Feb 15 2024
How the internet pushed China’s New Year red packet tradition to the extreme

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

If you ask any child in China what’s the most exciting thing about welcoming another year, they are likely to answer: the red packets. It’s a festive tradition: During the holidays, people give out red envelopes full of cold hard cash to young members of the family. You can reliably get cash gifts every year until you graduate from school and start working full-time.

So this week is a great opportunity to talk about how the tradition of giving red packets, which has been around for hundreds of years, has evolved in the digital age. Even though I’m not in China now, I still managed to send two red packets to my nephew and niece, through mobile payments on WeChat.

In fact, red packets have not merely turned from a physical activity to a digital one. They’ve become a way for Chinese tech companies to make a stack of money each year and attract new users and traffic. In return, users have to follow increasingly complicated rules to get a few bucks.

The digitization of red-packet giving started in the early 2010s, when super apps like Alipay and WeChat made it convenient for everyone to send and receive money on their phones. They also introduced mechanisms that breathed new life into the tradition, like a randomization allotment system, where people put one giant red packet in a group chat, and everyone opening it will get a random share of the total amount. 

The promise of variable rewards increases the feeling of excitement when you get a big share. It also prompted those who didn’t get much to ask for another chance, which has really made it a centerpiece of the new red packet culture.

And it didn’t take long until tech companies became the ones giving out the money.

In 2015, WeChat decided to give out over $80 million in red packets during the Spring Festival Gala, a yearly tradition in China that gathers the family around the TV. To get a share of WeChat’s red packets, people had to shake their phones at a certain time of the show. According to data provided by WeChat, throughout Lunar New Year’s Eve, people shook their phones 11 billion times. At the peak, people shook their phones 800 million times in just one minute. 

This immense success inspired every other tech company in China to join the game and spend millions of dollars. Today, every major app offers a version of that promotion during the new year. But what users need to do in return has become much more complicated.

1For example, to participate in one of the red packet events this year on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, users have to complete a series of tasks: log in every day, invite new users to the platform, upload an avatar, follow certain accounts, set up a group chat, post a gif in the group chat, make a video call, upload a video, watch videos for a minimum amount of time, and download other apps. The more time you are willing to spend on these tasks, the more you will get back from the app.

The 2010s saw immense growth in China’s mobile internet sector, and one of the lasting outcomes is that apps have gotten very sophisticated at gamifying their gimmicks to attract users and traffic. The new year’s red packet promotions are essentially the pinnacle of these promotion gimmicks. 

As the rules get increasingly convoluted, most people don’t have the time to follow up with every single mini-game. I stopped participating in these red packet promotions years ago because the payout is always abysmal compared to the efforts required. (Am I willing to message five of my college friends whom I haven’t spoken to for years in order to get this $5 cash gift? No.)

But there are still people who treat it seriously. As Chinese publications have reported, some people, particularly those who are less well off, would study the rules of these red packet games thoroughly, hoping to make a fortune with them. Since the games reward social interactions, some people actually pay others with their own money to join in the efforts. New apps have even emerged that connect people who are gaming the system.

This is a side of the Chinese tech world that the outside doesn’t often get to see. The Chinese mobile internet industry is saturated with mini-games or incentives that are designed to chase infinite growth. 

Thanks to Temu, the Chinese ultra-fast e-commerce app that’s spending millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads, users outside China can also get a taste of these gimmicks. The spinning wheel of coupons, the never-ending request to invite new friends to join the app, and the farming mini-game to keep you hooked—these are the tactics that Chinese users are all too familiar with. 

From what I have heard, most people still see it as a nuisance. But as the longevity of red packet promotions in China shows, once companies find the right audience and the right profitability model, these stunts could become a fact of online life for all of us. 

Did you get any digital red packets this year? Let me know your experience at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. Sam Altman’s plan for a $7 trillion-worth semiconductor empire includes building dozens of chip fabrication plants with money from Middle East investors, then having the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC run them. (Wall Street Journal $)

2. A former TikTok executive is suing the company for unlawfully firing her due to what they called a lack of “docility and meekness.” (Financial Times $)

3. If he’s reelected, Donald Trump is promising a 60% tariff on all Chinese imports. If that actually happens (big if), it would almost wipe out all imports from China by 2030. (Bloomberg $)

  • For the first time in 22 years, Mexico has surpassed China to be the United States’ largest import source. (ABC News)

4. Members of the European Union have had a falling out because of their different positions on China and how to handle trade across economic sectors. (South China Morning Post $)

5. A new report found more than 100 websites disguised as local news outlets in Europe, Asia, and Latin America are actually part of an influence campaign linked to a Beijing public relations firm. (Reuters $)

6. How Hefei, a city in central China, rose up to become a leader in electric-vehicle production by investing government money in fledgling startups. (New York Times $)

Lost in translation

While we are on the topic of digital red packets, people are selling AI-generated artwork as red packet designs this year, according to the Chinese publication Guokr. After WeChat allowed users to customize what their red packet looks like on the app in 2019, a new business has emerged to let people spend a few bucks and get a new look for their digital gifts every year. Successful artists can make a decent bit of money with it. 

However, the industry is now unsurprisingly being disrupted by image-making AIs like Midjourney. There’s even a burgeoning entrepreneurial scene where people repackage these AI services to tailor them to design red packets, simplifying the process. On social media, some people are promising that you can earn quick cash by generating AI red packets, attracting others to cash in on the trend. But in reality, there are still many obstacles to fine-tuning the designs and gaining traction among potential buyers. 

One more thing

You might not be able to get an Apple Vision Pro yet, but you can hop on a Hainan Airlines flight, where all passengers are given a pair of augmented reality goggles made by a Chinese company for free in-flight entertainment. They look so much lighter than Apple’s headset. I want to try them out!

Passengers making their way from Shenzhen to Xi'an aboard Hainan Airlines flight HU7874 on February 7th were treated to an immersive entertainment experience with Rokid AR Entertainment Kits.

ROKID
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Feb 10 2024
This Chinese city wants to be the Silicon Valley of chiplets

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Last month, MIT Technology Review unveiled our pick for 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. These are the technological advancements that we believe will change our lives today or sometime in the future. Among them, there is one that specifically matters to the Chinese tech sector: chiplets.

That’s what I wrote about in a new story today. Chiplets—the new chipmaking approach that breaks down chips into independent modules to reduce design costs and improve computing performance—can help China develop more powerful chips despite US government sanctions that prevent Chinese companies from importing certain key technologies.

Outside China, chiplets are one of the alternative routes that the semiconductor industry could take to improve chip performance cost-effectively. Instead of endlessly trying to cram more transistors into one chip, the chiplet approach proposes that the functions of a chip can be separated into several smaller devices, and each component could be easier to make than a powerful single-piece chip. Companies like Apple and Intel have already made commercial products this way. 

But within China, the technology takes on a different level of significance. US sanctions mean that Chinese companies can’t purchase the most advanced chips or the equipment to make them, so they have to figure out how to maximize the technologies they have. And chiplets come in handy here: if the companies can make each chiplet to the most advanced level they are capable of and assemble these chiplets into a system, it can act as a substitute for more powerful cutting-edge chips.

The technology needed to make chiplet is not that new. Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that has a chip-design subsidiary called HiSilicon, experimented with its first chiplet design product in 2014. But the technology became more important to the company after it was subject to strict sanctions from the US in 2019 and couldn’t work with foreign factories anymore. In 2022, Huawei’s then chairman, Guo Ping, said the company was hoping to connect and stack up less advanced chip modules to keep the products competitive in the market. 

Currently, there’s a lot of money going into the chiplet space. The Chinese government and investors have recognized the importance of chiplets, and they are pouring funding into academic projects and startups.

Particularly, there’s one Chinese city that has gone all-in on chiplets, and you very likely have never heard its name: Wuxi (pronounced woo-she). 

Halfway between Shanghai and Nanjing, Wuxi is a medium-sized city with a strong manufacturing industry. And it has a long history in the semiconductor sector: the Chinese government built a state-owned wafer factory there in the ’60s. And when the government decided to invest in the semiconductor industry by 1989, 75% of the state budget went into the factory in Wuxi.

By 2022, Wuxi had over 600 chip companies and was behind only Shanghai and Beijing in terms of semiconductor industry competitiveness. Particularly, Wuxi is the center of chip packaging—the final steps in the assembly process, like integrating the silicon part with its plastic case and testing the chip’s performance. JCET, the third-largest chip packaging company in the world and the largest of its kind in China, was founded in Wuxi more than five decades ago.

Their prominence in the packaging sector gives JCET and Wuxi an advantage in chiplets. Compared with traditional chips, chiplets are more accommodating of less-advanced manufacturing capabilities, but they require more sophisticated packaging techniques to ensure that different modules can work together seamlessly. So Wuxi’s established strength in packaging means it can be one step ahead of other cities in developing chiplets.

In 2023, Wuxi announced its plan to become the “Chiplet Valley.” The city has pledged to spend $14 million to subsidize companies that develop chiplets in the region, and it has formed the Wuxi Institute of Interconnect Technology to focus research efforts on chiplets. 

Wuxi is a great example of China’s hidden role in the global semiconductor industry: relative to sectors like chip design and manufacturing, packaging is labor intensive and not as desirable. That’s why there’s basically no packaging capability left in Western countries, and why places like Wuxi usually fly under everyone’s radar.

But with the opportunity presented by chiplets, as well as other advancements in packaging techniques, there’s a chance for chip packaging to enter center stage again. And China is betting on that possibility heavily right now to leverage one of its few domestic strengths to get ahead in the semiconductor industry.

Have you heard of Wuxi? Do you think it will play a more important role in the global semiconductor supply chain in the future? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified in front of the US Senate on social media’s exploitation of children, along with the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, Snap, and Discord. (Associated Press)

2. Mayors from the US heartland are being invited to visit China as the country hopes to find local support outside Washington politics. (Washington Post $)

3. A new class action lawsuit is suing the genetic testing company 23andMe for a data breach that seems to have targeted people with Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. (New York Times $)

4. Tesla is opening a new battery plant in Nevada, with manufacturing equipment bought from China’s battery giant CATL. (Bloomberg $)

5. A new Chinese documentary shows the everyday lives of ordinary blue-collar workers by stitching together 887 short videos shot by themselves on their mobile phones. (Sixth Tone)

6. Baidu’s venture capital arm is planning to sell its stakes in US startups, as the US-China investment environment has become much more politically sensitive. (The Information $)

7. Huawei and China’s biggest chipmaker, SMIC, could start making five-nanometer chips—still one generation behind the most advanced chips today—as early as this year. (Financial Times $) 

8. A pigeon was detained in India for eight months, suspected of carrying spy messages for China. It turns out it’s an open-water racing bird from Taiwan. (Associated Press)

Lost in translation

Shanghai’s attempt to ban ride-hailing services from picking up passengers near the Pudong Airport lasted exactly one week before it was called off. From January 29 on, Chinese ride-hailing apps like Didi all stopped servicing users in the Shanghai airport area at the request of the local transportation department, according to the Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily. While traditional taxis are still allowed at the airport, passengers reported longer wait times and frequent refusals of service by taxi drivers. The raid-hail ban, aimed at ensuring smooth traffic flow during the Spring Festival travel rush, soon faced criticism and legal scrutiny for its suddenness and potential violations of antitrust laws. The situation underscores the ongoing debate over the role of ride-hailing services during peak travel seasons, with some Chinese cities like Shanghai frowning upon them while others have embraced them. In the early hours of February 4, the Shanghai government decided to reverse the ban, and ride-hailing cars were back in the airport area. 

One last thing

Lingyan, a panda living in a zoo in Henan province, could have been the first panda to get suspended on China’s TikTok for … twerking. The zoo hosted a livestream session on January 31, but it was suddenly suspended by the algorithm when Lingyan climbed on top of a dome and started shaking his butt. I don’t know if this means the algorithm is too good at recognizing twerking or too bad at telling pandas from humans.

A panda standing on top of a play den and twerking.

LUANCHUAN ZHUHAI WILDLIFE PARK VIA DOUYIN
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Feb 10 2024
This Chinese city wants to be the Silicon Valley of chiplets

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Last month, MIT Technology Review unveiled our pick for 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2024. These are the technological advancements that we believe will change our lives today or sometime in the future. Among them, there is one that specifically matters to the Chinese tech sector: chiplets.

That’s what I wrote about in a new story today. Chiplets—the new chipmaking approach that breaks down chips into independent modules to reduce design costs and improve computing performance—can help China develop more powerful chips despite US government sanctions that prevent Chinese companies from importing certain key technologies.

Outside China, chiplets are one of the alternative routes that the semiconductor industry could take to improve chip performance cost-effectively. Instead of endlessly trying to cram more transistors into one chip, the chiplet approach proposes that the functions of a chip can be separated into several smaller devices, and each component could be easier to make than a powerful single-piece chip. Companies like Apple and Intel have already made commercial products this way. 

But within China, the technology takes on a different level of significance. US sanctions mean that Chinese companies can’t purchase the most advanced chips or the equipment to make them, so they have to figure out how to maximize the technologies they have. And chiplets come in handy here: if the companies can make each chiplet to the most advanced level they are capable of and assemble these chiplets into a system, it can act as a substitute for more powerful cutting-edge chips.

The technology needed to make chiplet is not that new. Huawei, the Chinese tech giant that has a chip-design subsidiary called HiSilicon, experimented with its first chiplet design product in 2014. But the technology became more important to the company after it was subject to strict sanctions from the US in 2019 and couldn’t work with foreign factories anymore. In 2022, Huawei’s then chairman, Guo Ping, said the company was hoping to connect and stack up less advanced chip modules to keep the products competitive in the market. 

Currently, there’s a lot of money going into the chiplet space. The Chinese government and investors have recognized the importance of chiplets, and they are pouring funding into academic projects and startups.

Particularly, there’s one Chinese city that has gone all-in on chiplets, and you very likely have never heard its name: Wuxi (pronounced woo-she). 

Halfway between Shanghai and Nanjing, Wuxi is a medium-sized city with a strong manufacturing industry. And it has a long history in the semiconductor sector: the Chinese government built a state-owned wafer factory there in the ’60s. And when the government decided to invest in the semiconductor industry by 1989, 75% of the state budget went into the factory in Wuxi.

By 2022, Wuxi had over 600 chip companies and was behind only Shanghai and Beijing in terms of semiconductor industry competitiveness. Particularly, Wuxi is the center of chip packaging—the final steps in the assembly process, like integrating the silicon part with its plastic case and testing the chip’s performance. JCET, the third-largest chip packaging company in the world and the largest of its kind in China, was founded in Wuxi more than five decades ago.

Their prominence in the packaging sector gives JCET and Wuxi an advantage in chiplets. Compared with traditional chips, chiplets are more accommodating of less-advanced manufacturing capabilities, but they require more sophisticated packaging techniques to ensure that different modules can work together seamlessly. So Wuxi’s established strength in packaging means it can be one step ahead of other cities in developing chiplets.

In 2023, Wuxi announced its plan to become the “Chiplet Valley.” The city has pledged to spend $14 million to subsidize companies that develop chiplets in the region, and it has formed the Wuxi Institute of Interconnect Technology to focus research efforts on chiplets. 

Wuxi is a great example of China’s hidden role in the global semiconductor industry: relative to sectors like chip design and manufacturing, packaging is labor intensive and not as desirable. That’s why there’s basically no packaging capability left in Western countries, and why places like Wuxi usually fly under everyone’s radar.

But with the opportunity presented by chiplets, as well as other advancements in packaging techniques, there’s a chance for chip packaging to enter center stage again. And China is betting on that possibility heavily right now to leverage one of its few domestic strengths to get ahead in the semiconductor industry.

Have you heard of Wuxi? Do you think it will play a more important role in the global semiconductor supply chain in the future? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, testified in front of the US Senate on social media’s exploitation of children, along with the CEOs of Meta, Twitter, Snap, and Discord. (Associated Press)

2. Mayors from the US heartland are being invited to visit China as the country hopes to find local support outside Washington politics. (Washington Post $)

3. A new class action lawsuit is suing the genetic testing company 23andMe for a data breach that seems to have targeted people with Chinese and Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. (New York Times $)

4. Tesla is opening a new battery plant in Nevada, with manufacturing equipment bought from China’s battery giant CATL. (Bloomberg $)

5. A new Chinese documentary shows the everyday lives of ordinary blue-collar workers by stitching together 887 short videos shot by themselves on their mobile phones. (Sixth Tone)

6. Baidu’s venture capital arm is planning to sell its stakes in US startups, as the US-China investment environment has become much more politically sensitive. (The Information $)

7. Huawei and China’s biggest chipmaker, SMIC, could start making five-nanometer chips—still one generation behind the most advanced chips today—as early as this year. (Financial Times $) 

8. A pigeon was detained in India for eight months, suspected of carrying spy messages for China. It turns out it’s an open-water racing bird from Taiwan. (Associated Press)

Lost in translation

Shanghai’s attempt to ban ride-hailing services from picking up passengers near the Pudong Airport lasted exactly one week before it was called off. From January 29 on, Chinese ride-hailing apps like Didi all stopped servicing users in the Shanghai airport area at the request of the local transportation department, according to the Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily. While traditional taxis are still allowed at the airport, passengers reported longer wait times and frequent refusals of service by taxi drivers. The raid-hail ban, aimed at ensuring smooth traffic flow during the Spring Festival travel rush, soon faced criticism and legal scrutiny for its suddenness and potential violations of antitrust laws. The situation underscores the ongoing debate over the role of ride-hailing services during peak travel seasons, with some Chinese cities like Shanghai frowning upon them while others have embraced them. In the early hours of February 4, the Shanghai government decided to reverse the ban, and ride-hailing cars were back in the airport area. 

One last thing

Lingyan, a panda living in a zoo in Henan province, could have been the first panda to get suspended on China’s TikTok for … twerking. The zoo hosted a livestream session on January 31, but it was suddenly suspended by the algorithm when Lingyan climbed on top of a dome and started shaking his butt. I don’t know if this means the algorithm is too good at recognizing twerking or too bad at telling pandas from humans.

A panda standing on top of a play den and twerking.

LUANCHUAN ZHUHAI WILDLIFE PARK VIA DOUYIN
Ecommerce MGMT 0 Comments
Feb 4 2024
Why BYD is breaking into shipping

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

For people who have been watching BYD for a long time, it won’t be surprising that the company has just ventured into a new field. 

The Chinese electric-vehicle maker has been particularly good at expanding into different, related businesses. Not only can it make high-performing and safe batteries for cars, but it also does almost everything in house, from designing car chips to mining lithium and other materials. The fact that it has subsidiaries in every step of the EV supply chain enables the company to keep its costs down and sell cars at more competitive prices.

Now, to pull that off once again, BYD is starting a sea freight business. As I just wrote in a story published today, the company is assembling a fleet of at least eight car-carrier ships that will transport BYD cars from factories in China to sell in Europe, South America, and other markets.

BYD has had a meteoric rise to become the Chinese EV sector’s poster child in recent years, and 2023 was particularly good for the company. It sold 3 million electric cars and plug-in hybrid models last year, up from 1.8 million in 2022. BYD managed to beat Tesla to become the world’s top-selling EV company in the fourth quarter of 2023. 

While the majority of those cars were sold in China, BYD’s export business has been expanding significantly. It exported over 240,000 cars in 2023, more than a fourfold increase from 55,000 cars in 2022; and the latter number was itself more than a fourfold increase from 13,000 in 2021.

But one thing has been getting in the way of these bonkers numbers: the lack of car-carrier ships internationally. A bust cycle in the international shipping industry since 2008, the technological challenge of making ships greener, and the fact that existing vessels are often already reserved by automakers in other countries—these factors have collectively resulted in ever-rising costs to hire a ship that can transport Chinese EVs abroad.

So Chinese companies like BYD and SAIC Motor are following in the footsteps of Japanese and Korean automakers: they’re building, chartering, and managing their own fleets of ships. This January, one boat operated by BYD and another operated by SAIC Motor set sail for the first time, between them carrying over 10,000 vehicles toward Europe. 

These two massive ships are a symbol of just how competitive and successful China’s EV industry has become. And that’s likely to continue for some time, as other countries and traditional car brands are belatedly playing catch-up.

This is not to say China’s EV industry has nothing to fear. As I’ve laid out in previous articles, there are still factors that could slow down or even derail the export of Chinese EVs. Geopolitics is a major one. For example, in Europe, where many of the new car-carrier ships are heading, there’s already an anti-subsidy investigation against Chinese cars going on, which could end up making it much more costly to sell there.

Chinese companies going into sea shipping should note at least one cautionary tale from recent history. Before BYD, there was another Chinese car company called Chery, which started exporting its cars in the 2000s. In 2007, it acquired a shipbuilding company for the exact same reason: it wanted to increase the capacity to ship cars abroad. But the financial crisis doomed Chery’s burgeoning export business, and it didn’t build its first ship until a decade later. 

Chery is still around today. It has made the pivot from gas to electric cars and is competing with BYD both domestically and in the export market. But its ill-fated shipbuilding attempt could be a lesson for other Chinese companies that are now making similar moves: even though the future looks bright, building and maintaining these massive ships is a risky, expensive business if their car sales don’t keep up.

Do you think it’s the right decision for companies like BYD and SAIC Motor to build their own car-carrier fleet? Tell me your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. The White House plans to cut off Chinese entities’ access to American cloud services to train AI models. (Reuters $)

2. Some legislators in the US want to reactivate the Justice Department’s China Initiative. (NBC News)

  • The controversial program was built to protect national security. But it strayed from its focus and ended in 2022. (MIT Technology Review)

3. Another proposed bill in Congress seeks to ban Chinese biotech firms from federal contracts. (South China Morning Post $)

4. After an almost five-year import freeze on Boeing’s 737 MAX, Chinese airline companies have restarted purchasing the controversial jet model. (Reuters $)

5. The Chinese movie market used to be a cash machine for Hollywood blockbusters. Not anymore. (New York Times $)

6. The Taiwanese government is funding efforts to build its own Chinese AI model that’s free of China’s political influence. (Bloomberg $)

  • Meanwhile, US spies want an AI model of their own to use against China without leaking national secrets. (Bloomberg $)

7. Elon Musk has praised Chinese electric vehicles, again. He says Chinese EV makers will “pretty much demolish” most competitors if there are no trade barriers. (CNBC)

Lost in translation

Another type of device is getting an AI transformation in China: student tablets. Commonly called “learning machines” (though they have no connection to machine learning), these are tablets specifically designed to tutor children in school subjects, supporting functions like electronic dictionaries and virtual classes. According to Chinese outlet IQ Tax Research Center, many of these sorts of products have embraced AI in the past year, including devices made by China’s leading AI companies like Baidu and iFlytek. 

However, some parents have found these “AI-powered devices” prone to errors and inaccuracies. For example, one user mentioned that a math problem was solved with different answers each time the AI explained it. Others felt the educational content recommended by the AI was not always suitable for their children’s needs. At the end of the day, these “learning machines” are often still inadequate, despite how they are marketed.

One more thing

Do you stick to reserving dinner at restaurants with 4.5+ stars on Google? In China, some young people have had too many disappointing experiences chasing after viral restaurants with inflated reviews. Instead, they are starting a trend of choosing restaurants with review scores around 3.5. Their justification? “If a restaurant can survive for decades with such a low review, there must be something really special about it,” one comment on social media reads. It’s also about rebelling against the ubiquitous digital platforms that dictate where everybody goes, reports China’s Lifeweek magazine.

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Jan 13 2024
The end of anonymity online in China

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Happy New Year! I hope you had a good rest over the holidays and feel ready to take on 2024. But for one more time, please allow me to indulge in a look back at 2023.

At the end of last month, I published an essay reflecting on how the prospects for anonymity online in China changed drastically last year. Following many smaller decisions that make posting anonymously more difficult, the largest blow came in October when all social media platforms in China demanded that certain users with large followings display their legal names.

The government and the platforms argue that the new rule can help prevent online harassment and misinformation. While anonymity can be associated with wrongdoing, their argument conveniently neglects what anonymity—a right that has existed since the invention of the internet—has afforded people online. 

Who among us hasn’t participated in a niche online hobby that we didn’t tell our family about? Who insists that every online acquaintance call them by their real name? There’s comfort in knowing that my online persona and who I am in real life don’t have to be the same. Not everyone should, or deserves to, know everything about us. 

Scholars I talked to have observed and found evidence of many benefits that come with anonymity in China. It gives people the courage to speak up against censorship or provide communal help to strangers. “We are more likely to do what’s risky when we feel there’s more protection,” says Xinyu Pan, a researcher at Hong Kong University. It’s particularly important to marginalized groups, from women to LGBTQ individuals, who feel that their identities could attract harassment online. They can find comfort and community in anonymity.

This topic is important for me both professionally and personally. As a reporter, I’m always watching what people are saying online and working to extract important information from between the lines. But I’ve also used Chinese social media personally for more than a decade, and my profiles and communities mean a lot to me, whether as archives of my life’s moments or places where I met dear friends.

That’s why I wrote the essay. And I’m worried there’s more change to come. 

Vibe shifts are always small when they begin. I felt one earlier last year, when I started to notice little signs of aggression here and there that made me less comfortable sharing real-life experiences online. But soon they can begin to feel like a tsunami. And now, if people don’t want to end their digital lives, they don’t have much choice; the only option seems to be to give in and float with the waves, even if we don’t know where it’s taking us.

Consider that when it was first announced in October, platforms stated the real-name rule would only apply to accounts in more “serious” fields—people talking about politics, financial news, laws, health care. Even Weibo’s CEO, Wang Gaofei, replied to a user with 2 million followers who was worried about the rule, posting, “Took a look at [the] content. If it’s only an influencer sharing about their personal life, I don’t think they need to display their real names upfront.”

But as we’ve seen in the past, these kinds of “small” changes are really a slippery slope. Fast-forward to today and that Weibo user’s real name is already on their public profile. And other accounts on the platform that don’t engage in serious topics—pet influencers, comedians, artists, car bloggers—have all received messages that they need to display their names or their accounts’ reach will be restricted, essentially meaning they’d be shadow-banned on the platform. 

Meanwhile, some platforms have acted even more quickly to implement the rule thoroughly. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, seems to be already displaying the real names of most users with more than 500,000 followers. And last week, accounts on Bilibili, a Chinese YouTube-like video platform, also started mass-displaying popular users’ real names. 

For people like me, this all proves that our fear is not overblown: the introduction of the mandatory real-name rule will almost certainly lead to more strict and expansive restrictions for everyone. The tendency to control more will always prevail, as platforms tend to err on the side of caution in China’s stringent censorship ecosystem.

Perhaps the only glimmer of hope I’ve found is that users all over China have not given up. Through rounds of previous changes that restricted anonymity, they’ve come up with all kinds of workarounds to protect themselves, either by adopting shared identities or entrusting a group account to post content for them. These solutions are not guaranteed to work in the long term, but I don’t doubt people will continue to come up with creative solutions that we haven’t even thought of yet. As always, to report on internet censorship in China is to report on the ingenious grassroots resistance. Perhaps that’s at least something to look forward to in 2024.

What do you think about the value of social media anonymity? Let me know where you stand by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. A draft of a harsh new regulation regarding video games tanked the stocks of major Chinese tech companies and caused widespread market fears in December. Now, a Chinese official behind the regulation has been removed from his position. (Reuters $)

  • China’s domestic gaming industry was just starting to pick up after a lengthy freeze on game publishing approvals. (Pocket Gamer)

2. China has sanctioned five US defense companies for selling arms to Taiwan. (BBC) 

3. In the fourth quarter of 2023, Chinese electric-vehicle maker BYD officially outsold Tesla globally for the first time. (Wall Street Journal $)

  • The company is now spending 2 billion RMB ($281 million) to reward its dealers. (Reuters $)
  • Want to know more about BYD? It was on our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch in 2023. (MIT Technology Review $)

4. As China has set aggressive goals for decarbonization, “dinosaur” state-owned companies are being forced to pivot to using more renewable energy. (Financial Times $)

5. For two decades, major Chinese e-commerce platforms like Alibaba didn’t offer a “refund-only” option for buyers. That’s finally changed. (South China Morning Post $)

6. Thermo Fisher, a US-based biotechnology company, says it has halted sales of DNA collection kits to Tibet. The sales were criticized after it was revealed that the Chinese police used these kits for mass DNA collection. (Axios)

Lost in translation

If you call up or message a customer service representative in China today, there’s a high chance you will be answered by an AI chatbot masquerading as a human. But as the publication China News Service reports, the technology has brought more frustration than convenience, since it often gives completely irrelevant or boilerplate responses. The users end up wasting much more time and energy trying to circumvent the AI and get to a human representative. Even though the technology is not yet mature, AI customer service is prevalent because it’s a fairly easy way for businesses to cut costs. And its use will only expand: the AI customer service market in China is expected to grow threefold in five years.

One more thing

Have you ever seen a Chinese terra-cotta warrior looking so expressive? Well, it’s not real; it was generated by Alibaba’s newly released image-to-video model. The feature, called “Everybody is a dancing king,” can move any still image into a dance TikTok and is included in Alibaba’s AI app Tongyi Qianwen. Predictably, it’s going a bit viral on social media. Wanna watch the (generated) dance moves of Napoleon and Jeff Bezos? Scroll down in this story by the Chinese publication QbitAI.

A terra-cotta warrior in a museum, doing an expressive dab pose as part of a viral dance routine.

QBITAI
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Dec 22 2023
China’s judicial system is becoming even more secretive

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

The new year will be here soon! Typically, it’s a great time for a fresh start. But not always. And today I want to talk about something that’s unfortunately moving in the wrong direction: transparency in China’s judicial system. 

Last week, a leaked document started circulating online from China’s highest court, the Supreme People’s Court, saying that by the end of 2023, courts of all levels should finish uploading their judgments to a new “National Court Judgment Document Database.” This database is to come online in January and will only be accessible to internal staff. The document’s authenticity has since been confirmed by Chinese media.

Building an internal digitized system isn’t inherently bad. But this development caused alarm because academics and other experts believe it is likely to replace a similar resource that was free and open to the public: China Judgements Online. 

First built in 2013, CJO is one of the largest widely accessible databases that can help someone understand governance in China—a unique window into an increasingly opaque system. By allowing the Chinese public to search through millions of detailed court judgments, it was able to hold the powerful accountable, at least to some degree. If it goes away, that will have a big impact both on Chinese people and those observing from the outside.

Back when it was built, China was still in an era when it celebrated more transparency and oversight over itself. There was even a follow-up regulation in 2016 that instructed judges to avoid finding excuses not to upload their cases.

Sure, Beijing’s top goal may not have been transparency for transparency’s sake; the “main motivation for putting judicial decisions online was likely a desire for greater centralized control over a sprawling system, and an effort to strengthen the courts through enhanced professionalization among judges,” wrote Luo Jiajun and Thomas Kellogg, two legal academics who have been tracking CJO. (Previously, different local courts in China had their own tracking systems.)

Nonetheless, the result was effectively the same. CJO became an important resource for a variety of people: lawyers, scholars, law students, and human rights activists, among others. Today, more than 143 million verdicts have been uploaded to CJO, and the website has been visited more than 100 billion times. 

Outside of CJO, it’s incredibly difficult to get the Chinese government to disclose information, but the CJO verdicts, intentionally or not, tell us a lot about the judicial system and what’s happening in the country generally. “If CJO is shut down, it will be difficult to have public scrutiny over individual cases,” Luo tells me.

One particularly powerful example was in early 2022, when an influencer on Douyin documented how a Chinese woman with a mental disability had been abducted and forced to marry, and subsequently gave birth to eight children. The news, as well as initial efforts by the local government to cover it up, quickly angered people across the entire country.

Human rights advocates hoped to show this was not just a one-off incident, but a systemic issue ignored by the local government. In fact, Fengxian, the county where the woman lived, has long had an infamous reputation for allowing women to be abducted and sold to men looking to procreate. 

By searching CJO, advocates found at least two previous cases in which abducted women filed for divorce in Fengxian and were denied; they also found that people who were prosecuted in the county for human trafficking received minimal prison time. 

CJO also showed similar cases from outside Fengxian, revealing a pattern across China. One study that analyzed 1,480 trafficking cases published on CJO found that one-third of the cases involved women with mental disabilities, and that women were often sold for less than $10,000. All this information was obtained from the publicly available materials.

At the time this all came to light, many people believed human trafficking like this was a thing of the past in China. Then the records from CJO collectively contributed to one of the largest online social movements in the country in recent years, with people repeatedly bringing up the Fengxian woman’s name for months and pushing the government for an explanation.

CJO has served many other purposes over the years. Activists used it to uncover the prosecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the criminalization of online protests. It has even become a useful source of information on Chinese corporations, with people reviewing verdicts to evaluate whether a company is trustworthy.

But all this started to take a turn around 2021. 

A data visualization by He Haibo, a law professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, shows that the annual number of disclosed verdicts on CJO reached its peak in 2020, with 23.3 million cases. In 2022, the total number declined 62%, to 8.9 million. He also noted that in 2022, only 854 administrative cases (where the government is the defendant) were uploaded, which was just a tiny slice of the 670,000 administrative lawsuits that went to trial that year. 

Around the same time, CJO also started to lose case files en masse. In just one three-month period in 2021, CJO administrators removed over 11 million cases, citing the need for a system migration. According to one research project led by Benjamin Liebman, a law professor at Columbia Law School, 9% of criminal case verdicts were removed from the database in a 12-month period in 2021 and 2022. Certain criminal offenses have been totally erased on the platform, including “illegally producing or selling equipment used for espionage” and “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”—the latter being a classic cover for prosecuting Chinese protesters. 

What’s happened to CJO in the past three years means it is no longer an example of genuine government transparency in China, at least not the way it used to be. Yet it still offers immense value, with millions of cases remaining online for people to study. And it is better than what looks to be the likely alternative. 

Since last week’s news, several Chinese legal academics have publicly asked for the courts to keep CJO online and continue releasing verdicts to the public. But it’s hard to see that happening. When it’s gone, it will be even harder for people in and outside China to understand what’s going on there.

Have you used China Judgements Online for your work? Let me know your experience with it by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com. And a quick programming note: With the holiday season in full swing, China Report will take a two-week break. I’m really thankful to all of you for reading in 2023. See you in the new year!

Catch up with China

1. Public universities in Florida are scrambling to figure out how to implement a new state law that bans institutions from hiring Chinese students to work in labs. Students from a handful of other flagged countries are also affected. (Science) 

  • Not until last year did the federal government end its controversial China Initiative, which was found to target academics with Chinese heritage. (MIT Technology Review)

2. OpenAI has suspended accounts owned by ByteDance, which secretly used GPT-generated data to train its own competing model in China. (The Verge)

  • Meanwhile, Chinese users of Google’s new AI model Gemini found that if you ask the bot who it is in Chinese, Gemini will say it’s Baidu’s Ernie Bot. It could be the result of Gemini hallucinating, or a signal that it may have used Ernie Bot’s outputs for its training in Chinese. (Here’s one example on X.)
  • If you want to know more about Ernie Bot, I wrote about it over the fall. And earlier this month, my colleagues Will Douglas Heaven and Melissa Heikkilä wrote about the recently launched Gemini. 

3. A national security trial for Jimmy Lai, the pro-democracy media tycoon, began in Hong Kong on Monday. It will be a test for Hong Kong’s judicial independence. (BBC)

4. ByteDance has canceled its next-generation virtual-reality headset as the company pulls back from its metaverse ambitions. (The Information $)

5. Chinese e-commerce platform Temu filed another lawsuit against Shein, accusing the latter of “mafia-style intimidation” aimed at forcing suppliers to cut ties with Temu. (CNBC)

  • This is the latest development in the fast-fashion wars, which I wrote about in July. 

6. Chinese spies recruited a far-right Belgian politician for more than three years in order to create division in the US-European relationship. (Financial Times $)

7. The Japanese auto company Nissan is expanding its research ties with a leading Chinese university to catch up in electric vehicles. (Associated Press)

8. As Taiwan’s presidential election nears, it’s fighting against a flood of disinformation from China. (CNN)

Lost in translation

Do you remember the super-short-lived Quibi? Well, Quibi-style dramas are making a comeback in China, and the industry is making more money than ever. According to the Chinese tech publication Huxiu, series with dozens of two-minute episodes have become extremely popular on Chinese social media this year. 

They are inexpensive to make: it only takes a week or two to finish shooting, and everything from scripts to costumes can be done cheaply. But many entertainment industry insiders have reportedly been surprised that they draw in millions of viewers. The first eight to 12 episodes of a show can usually be watched for free, but once the viewers are hooked, they need to pay to unlock the rest. Even prominent movie studios are now starting to produce these series.

One more thing

Sometimes AI can be used to generate dangerous misinformation; other times, it can create this bizarre music video of world leaders (and Lady Gaga, for some reason) dancing and telling you to stop working.

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