May 24 2025
Meet Cathy Tie, Bride of “China’s Frankenstein”

Since the Chinese biophysicist He Jiankui was released from prison in 2022, he has sought to make a scientific comeback and to repair his reputation after a three-year incarceration for illegally creating the world’s first gene-edited children. 

While he has bounced between cities, jobs, and meetings with investors, one area of visible success on his comeback trail has been his X.com account, @Jiankui_He, which has become his main way of spreading his ideas to the world. Starting in September 2022, when he joined the platform, the account stuck to the scientist’s main themes, including promising a more careful approach to his dream of creating more gene-edited children. “I will do it, only after society has accepted it,” he posted in August 2024. He also shared mundane images of his daily life, including golf games and his family.

But over time, it evolved and started to go viral. First came a series of selfies accompanied by grandiose statements (“Every pioneer or prophet must suffer”). Then, in April of this year, it became particularly outrageous and even troll-like, blasting out bizarre messages (“Good morning bitches. How many embryos have you gene edited today?”). This has left observers unsure what to take seriously.

Last month, in reply to MIT Technology Review’s questions about who was responsible for the account’s transformation into a font of clever memes, He emailed us back: “It’s thanks to Cathy Tie.”

You may not be familiar with Tie, but she’s no stranger to the public spotlight. A former Thiel fellow, she is a partner in the attention-grabbing Los Angeles Project, which promised to create glow-in-the-dark pets. Over the past several weeks, though, the 29-year-old Canadian entrepreneur has started to get more and more attention as the new wife to (and apparent social media mastermind behind) He Jiankui. On April 15, He announced a new venture, Cathy Medicine, that would take up his mission of editing human embryos to create people resistant to diseases like Alzheimer’s or cancer. Just a few days later, on April 18, He and Tie announced that they had married, posting pictures of themselves in traditional Chinese wedding attire.

But now Tie says that just a month after she married “the most controversial scientist in the world,” her plans to relocate from Los Angeles to Beijing to be with He are in disarray; she says she’s been denied entry to China and the two “may never see each other again,” as He’s passport is being held by Chinese authorities and he can’t leave the country.

Reached by phone in Manila, Tie said authorities in the Philippines had intercepted her during a layover on May 17 and told her she couldn’t board a plane to China, where she was born and where she says she has a valid 10-year visa. She claims they didn’t say why but told her she is likely “on a watch list.” (MIT Technology Review could not independently confirm Tie’s account.) 

“While I’m concerned about my marriage, I am more concerned about what this means for humanity and the future of science,” Tie posted to her own X account.

A match made in gene-editing heaven

The romance between He and Tie has been playing out in public over the past several weeks through a series of reveals on He’s X feed, which had already started going viral late last year thanks to his style of posting awkward selfies alongside maxims about the untapped potential of heritable gene editing, which involves changing people’s DNA when they’re just embryos in an IVF dish. 

“Human [sic] will no longer be controlled by Darwin’s evolution,” He wrote in March. That post, which showed him standing in an empty lab, gazing into the distance, garnered 9.7 million views. And then, a week later, he collected 13.3 million for this one: “Ethics is holding back scientific innovation and progress.” 

In April, the feed started to change even more drastically. 

He’s posts became increasingly provocative, with better English and a unique sensibility reflecting online culture. “Stop asking for cat girls. I’m trying to cure disease,” the account posted on April 15. Two days later, it followed up: “I literally went to prison for this shit.” 

This shift coincided with the development of his romance with Tie. Tie told us she has visited China three times this year, including a three-week stint in April when she and He got married after a whirlwind romance. She bought him a silver wedding ring made up of intertwined DNA strands. 

The odd behavior on He’s X feed and the sudden marriage have left followers wondering if they are watching a love story, a new kind of business venture, or performance art. It might be all three. 

A wedding photo posted by Tie on the Chinese social media platform Rednote shows the couple sitting at a table in a banquet hall, with a small number of guests. MIT Technology Review has been able to identify several people who attended: Cai Xilei, He’s criminal attorney; Liu Haiyan, an investor and former business partner of He; and Darren Zhu, an artist and Thiel fellow who is making a “speculative” documentary about the biophysicist that will blur the boundaries of fiction and reality.

In the phone interview, Tie declined to say if she and He are legally married. She also confirmed she celebrated a wedding less than one year ago with someone else in California, in July of 2024, but said they broke up after a few months; she also declined to describe the legal status of that marriage. In the phone call, Tie emphasized that her relationship with He is genuine: “I wouldn’t marry him if I wasn’t in love with him.”

An up-and-comer

Years before Tie got into a relationship with He, she was getting plenty of attention in her own right. She became a Thiel fellow in 2015, when she was just 18. That program, started by the billionaire Peter Thiel, gave her a grant of $100,000 to drop out of the University of Toronto and start a gene testing company, Ranomics. 

Soon, she began appearing on the entrepreneur circuit as a “wunderkind” who was featured on a Forbes “30 Under 30” list in 2018 and presented as an up-and-coming venture capitalist on CNN that same year. In 2020, she started her second company, Locke Bio, which focuses on online telemedicine.

Like Thiel, Tie has staked out contrarian positions. She’s called mainstream genomics a scam and described entrepreneurship as a way to escape the hidebound practices of academia and bioethics. “Starting companies is my preferred form of art,” she posted in 2022, linking to an interview on CNBC. 

By February 2025, Tie was ready to announce another new venture: the Los Angeles Project, a stealth company she had incorporated in 2023 under her legal name, Cheng Cheng Tie. The company, started with the Texas-based biohacker and artist Josie Zayner, says it will try to modify animal embryos; one goal is to make fluorescent glow-in-the-dark rabbits as pets.

The Los Angeles Project revels in explicitly transgressive aims for embryo editing, including a plan to add horn genes to horse embryos to make a unicorn. That’s consistent with Zayner’s past stunts, which include injecting herself with CRISPR during a livestream. “This is a company that should not exist,” Zayner said in announcing the newly public project.

Although the Los Angeles Project has only a tiny staff with uncertain qualifications, it did raise $1 million from the 1517 Fund, a venture group that supports “dropouts” and whose managers previously ran the Thiel Fellowship. 

Asked for his assessment of Tie, Michael Gibson, a 1517 partner, said in an email that he thinks Tie is “not just exceptional, but profoundly exceptional.” He sent along a list of observations he’d jotted down about Tie before funding her company, which approvingly noted her “hyper-fluent competence” and “low need for social approval,” adding: “Thoughts & actions routinely unconventional.” 

A comeback story

He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he and coworkers at the Southern University of Science & Technology in Shenzhen injected the CRISPR gene editor into several viable human embryos and then transferred these into volunteers, leading to the birth of three girls who he claimed would be resistant to HIV. A subsequent Chinese investigation found he’d practiced medicine illegally while “pursuing fame and fortune.” A court later sentenced him to three years in prison.

He has never apologized for his experiments, except to say he acted “too quickly” and to express regret for the trouble he’d caused his former wife and two daughters. (According to a leaked WeChat post by his ex-wife, she divorced him in 2024 “because of a major fault on his side.”)

Since his release from prison, He has sought to restart his research and convince people that he should be recognized as the “Chinese Darwin,” not “China’s Frankenstein,” as the press once dubbed him. 

But his comeback has been bumpy. He lost a position at Wuchang University of Technology, a small private university in Hubei province, after some negative press. In February 2024, He posted that his application for funding from the Muscular Dystrophy Association was rejected. Last September, he even posted pictures of his torn shirt—which he said was the result of an assault by jealous rivals.

One area of clear success, though, was the growing reach of his X profile, which today has ballooned to more than 130,000 followers. And as his public profile rose, some started encouraging He to find ways to cash in. Andrew Hessel, a futurist and synthetic biologist active in US ethics debates, says he tried to get He invited to give a TED Talk. “His story is unique, and I wanted to see his story get more widespread attention, if only as a cautionary tale,” Hessel says. “I think he is a lightning rod for a generation of people working in life sciences.”

Later, Hessel says, he sent him information on how to join X’s revenue-sharing program. “I said, ‘You have a powerful voice. Have you looked into monetization?’” Hessel says.

By last fall, He was also welcoming visitors to what he called a new lab in Beijing. One person who took him up on the offer was Steve Hsu, a Michigan State physics professor who has started several genetics companies and was visiting Beijing. 

They ended up talking for hours. Hsu says that He expressed a desire to move to the US and start a company, and that he shared his idea for conducting a clinical trial of embryo editing in South Africa, possibly for the prevention of HIV. 

Hsu says he later arranged an invitation for He to give a lecture in the United States. “You are a little radioactive, but things are opening up,” Hsu told him. But He declined the offer because the Chinese government is holding his passport—a common tactic it uses to restrict the movement of sensitive or high-profile figures—and won’t return it to him. “He doesn’t even know why. He literally doesn’t know,” says Hsu. “According to the law, they should give it back to him.”

A curious triangle

Despite any plans by He and Tie to advance the idea, creating designer babies is currently illegal in most of the world, including China and the US. Some experts, however, fret that forbidding the technology will only drive it underground and make it attractive to biohackers or scientists outside the mainstream. 

That’s one reason Tie’s simultaneous connection to two notable biotech renegades—He and Zayner—is worth watching. “There is clearly a triangle forming in some way,” says Hessel.

With Tie stuck outside China and He being kept inside the country, their new gene-editing venture, Cathy Medicine, faces an uncertain future. Tie posted previously on Rednote that she was “helping Dr. He open up the U.S. market” and was planning to return to the US with him for scientific research. But when we spoke on the phone, she declined to disclose their next steps and said their predicament means the project is “out of the window now.”

Even as the couple remain separated, their social media game is stronger than ever. As she waited in Manila, Tie sought help from friends, followers, and the entire internet. She blasted out a tweet to “crypto people,” calling them “too pussy to stand up for things when it matters.” Within hours, someone had created a memecoin called $GENE as a way for the public to support the couple. 

On May 20, Tie posted on X claiming that the amount donated to them is now worth almost $2 million. “I may need to retract my last statement about crypto,” she wrote. 

He’s X account also retweeted to express support: “I only want to reunite with my wife @CathyTie, and continue my gene editing research.” He added the hashtag $GENE.

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Jan 25 2025
How a top Chinese AI model overcame US sanctions

The AI community is abuzz over DeepSeek R1, a new open-source reasoning model. 

The model was developed by the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, which claims that R1 matches or even surpasses OpenAI’s ChatGPT o1 on multiple key benchmarks but operates at a fraction of the cost. 

“This could be a truly equalizing breakthrough that is great for researchers and developers with limited resources, especially those from the Global South,” says Hancheng Cao, an assistant professor in information systems at Emory University.

DeepSeek’s success is even more remarkable given the constraints facing Chinese AI companies in the form of increasing US export controls on cutting-edge chips. But early evidence shows that these measures are not working as intended. Rather than weakening China’s AI capabilities, the sanctions appear to be driving startups like DeepSeek to innovate in ways that prioritize efficiency, resource-pooling, and collaboration.

To create R1, DeepSeek had to rework its training process to reduce the strain on its GPUs, a variety released by Nvidia for the Chinese market that have their performance capped at half the speed of its top products, according to Zihan Wang, a former DeepSeek employee and current PhD student in computer science at Northwestern University. 

DeepSeek R1 has been praised by researchers for its ability to tackle complex reasoning tasks, particularly in mathematics and coding. The model employs a “chain of thought” approach similar to that used by ChatGPT o1, which lets it solve problems by processing queries step by step.

Dimitris Papailiopoulos, principal researcher at Microsoft’s AI Frontiers research lab, says what surprised him the most about R1 is its engineering simplicity. “DeepSeek aimed for accurate answers rather than detailing every logical step, significantly reducing computing time while maintaining a high level of effectiveness,” he says.

DeepSeek has also released six smaller versions of R1 that are small enough to  run locally on laptops. It claims that one of them even outperforms OpenAI’s o1-mini on certain benchmarks.“DeepSeek has largely replicated o1-mini and has open sourced it,” tweeted Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. DeepSeek did not reply to MIT Technology Review’s request for comments.

Despite the buzz around R1, DeepSeek remains relatively unknown. Based in Hangzhou, China, it was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, an alumnus of Zhejiang University with a background in information and electronic engineering. It was incubated by High-Flyer, a hedge fund that Liang founded in 2015. Like Sam Altman of OpenAI, Liang aims to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), a form of AI that can match or even beat humans on a range of tasks.

Training large language models (LLMs) requires a team of highly trained researchers and substantial computing power. In a recent interview with the Chinese media outlet LatePost, Kai-Fu Lee, a veteran entrepreneur and former head of Google China, said that only “front-row players” typically engage in building foundation models such as ChatGPT, as it’s so resource-intensive. The situation is further complicated by the US export controls on advanced semiconductors. High-Flyer’s decision to venture into AI is directly related to these constraints, however. Long before the anticipated sanctions, Liang acquired a substantial stockpile of Nvidia A100 chips, a type now banned from export to China. The Chinese media outlet 36Kr estimates that the company has over 10,000 units in stock, but Dylan Patel, founder of the AI research consultancy SemiAnalysis, estimates that it has at least 50,000. Recognizing the potential of this stockpile for AI training is what led Liang to establish DeepSeek, which was able to use them in combination with the lower-power chips to develop its models. 

Tech giants like Alibaba and ByteDance, as well as a handful of startups with deep-pocketed investors, dominate the Chinese AI space, making it challenging for small or medium-sized enterprises to compete. A company like DeepSeek, which has no plans to raise funds, is rare. 

Zihan Wang, the former DeepSeek employee, told MIT Technology Review that he had access to abundant computing resources and was given freedom to experiment when working at DeepSeek, “a luxury that few fresh graduates would get at any company.” 

In an interview with the Chinese media outlet 36Kr in July 2024 Liang said that an additional challenge Chinese companies face on top of chip sanctions, is that their AI engineering techniques tend to be less efficient. “We [most Chinese companies] have to consume twice the computing power to achieve the same results. Combined with data efficiency gaps, this could mean needing up to four times more computing power. Our goal is to continuously close these gaps,” he said.  

But DeepSeek found ways to reduce memory usage and speed up calculation without significantly sacrificing accuracy. “The team loves turning a hardware challenge into an opportunity for innovation,” says Wang.

Liang himself remains deeply involved in DeepSeek’s research process, running experiments alongside his team. “The whole team shares a collaborative culture and dedication to hardcore research,” Wang says.

As well as prioritizing efficiency, Chinese companies are increasingly embracing open-source principles. Alibaba Cloud has released over 100 new open-source AI models, supporting 29 languages and catering to various applications, including coding and mathematics. Similarly, startups like Minimax and 01.AI have open-sourced their models. 

According to a white paper released last year by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, a state-affiliated research institute, the number of AI large language models worldwide has reached 1,328, with 36% originating in China. This positions China as the second-largest contributor to AI, behind the United States. 

“This generation of young Chinese researchers identify strongly with open-source culture because they benefit so much from it,” says Thomas Qitong Cao, an assistant professor of technology policy at Tufts University.

“The US export control has essentially backed Chinese companies into a corner where they have to be far more efficient with their limited computing resources,” says Matt Sheehan, an AI researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “We are probably going to see a lot of consolidation in the future related to the lack of compute.”

That might already have started to happen. Two weeks ago, Alibaba Cloud announced that it has partnered with the Beijing-based startup 01.AI, founded by Kai-Fu Lee, to merge research teams and establish an “industrial large model laboratory.”

“It is energy-efficient and natural for some kind of division of labor to emerge in the AI industry,” says Cao, the Tufts professor. “The rapid evolution of AI demands agility from Chinese firms to survive.”

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Aug 1 2024
How the US and its allies can rebuild economic security

A country’s economic security—its ability to generate both national security and economic prosperity—is grounded in it having significant technological capabilities that outpace those of its adversaries and complement those of its allies. Though this is a principle well known throughout history, the move over the last few decades toward globalization and offshoring of technologically advanced industrial capacity has made ensuring a nation state’s security and economic prosperity increasingly problematic. A broad span of technologies ranging from automation and secure communications to energy storage and vaccine design are the basis for wider economic prosperity—and high priorities for governments seeking to maintain national security. However, the necessary capabilities do not spring up overnight. They rely upon long decades of development, years of accumulated knowledge, and robust supply chains.

For the US and, especially, its allies in NATO, a particular problem has emerged: a “missing middle” in technology investment. Insufficient capital is allocated toward the maturation of breakthroughs in critical technologies to ensure that they can be deployed at scale. Investment is allocated either toward the rapid deployment of existing technologies or to scientific ideas that are decades away from delivering practical capability or significant economic impact (for example, quantum computers). But investment in scaling manufacturing technologies, learning while doing, and maturing of emerging technologies to contribute to a next-generation industrial base, is too often absent. Without this middle-ground commitment, the United States and its partners lack the production know-how that will be crucial for tomorrow’s batteries, the next generation of advanced computing, alternative solar photovoltaic cells, and active pharmaceutical ingredients.

While this once mattered only for economic prosperity, it is now a concern for national security too—especially given that China has built strong supply chains and other domestic capabilities that confer both economic security and significant geopolitical leverage.

Consider drone technology. Military doctrine has shifted toward battlefield technology that relies upon armies of small, relatively cheap products enabled by sophisticated software—from drones above the battlefield to autonomous boats to CubeSats in space.

Drones have played a central role in the war in Ukraine. First-person viewer (FPV) drones—those controlled by a pilot on the ground via a video stream—are often strapped with explosives to act as precision kamikaze munitions and have been essential to Ukraine’s frontline defenses. While many foundational technologies for FPV drones were pioneered in the West, China now dominates the manufacturing of drone components and systems, which ultimately enables the country to have a significant influence on the outcome of the war.

When the history of the war in Ukraine is written, it will be taught as the first true “drone war.” But it should also be understood as an industrial wake-up call: a time when the role of a drone’s component parts was laid bare and the supply chains that support this technology—the knowledge, production operations, and manufacturing processes—were found wanting. Heroic stories will be told of Ukrainian ingenuity in building drones with Chinese parts in basements and on kitchen tables, and we will hear of the country’s attempt to rebuild supply chains dominated by China while in the midst of an existential fight for survival. But in the background, we will also need to understand the ways in which other nations, especially China, controlled the war through long-term economic policies focused on capturing industrial capacity that the US and its allies failed to support through to maturity.

Disassemble one of the FPV drones found across the battlefields of Ukraine and you will find about seven critical subsystems: power, propulsion, flight control, navigation and sensors (which gather location data and other information to support flight), compute (the processing and memory capacity needed to analyze the vast array of information and then support operations), communications (to connect the drone to the ground), and—supporting it all—the airframe.

We have created a bill of materials listing the components necessary to build an FPV drone and the common suppliers for those parts.

China’s manufacturing dominance has resulted in a domestic workforce with the experience to achieve process innovations and product improvements that have no equal in the West.  And it has come with the sophisticated supply chains that support a wide range of today’s technological capabilities and serve as the foundations for the next generation. None of that was inevitable. For example, most drone electronics are integrated on printed circuit boards (PCBs), a technology that was developed in the UK and US. However, first-mover advantage was not converted into long-term economic or national security outcomes, and both countries have lost the PCB supply chain to China.

Propulsion is another case in point. The brushless DC motors used to convert electrical energy from batteries into mechanical energy to rotate drone propellers were invented in the US and Germany. The sintered permanent neodymium (NdFeB) magnets used in these motors were invented in Japan and the US. Today, to our knowledge, all brushless DC motors for drones are made in China. Similarly, China dominates all steps in the processing and manufacture of NdFeB magnets, accounting for 92% of global NdFeB magnet and magnet alloy markets.

The missing middle of technology investment—insufficient funding for commercial production—is evident in each and every one of these failures, but the loss of expertise is an added dimension. For example, lithium polymer (LiPo) batteries are at the heart of every FPV drone. LiPo uses a solid or gel polymer electrolyte and achieves higher specific energy (energy per unit of weight)—a feature that is crucial for lightweight drones. Today, you would be hard-pressed to find a LiPo battery that was not manufactured in China. The experienced workforce behind these companies has contributed to learning curves that have led to a 97% drop in the cost of lithium-ion batteries and a simultaneous 300%-plus increase in battery energy density over the past three decades.

China’s dominance in LiPo batteries for drones reflects its overall dominance in Li-ion manufacturing. China controls approximately 75% of global lithium-ion capacity—the anode, cathode, electrolyte, and separator subcomponents as well as the assembly into a single unit. It dominates the manufacture of each of these subcomponents, producing over 85% of anodes and over 70% of cathodes, electrolytes, and separators. China also controls the extraction and refinement of minerals needed to make these subcomponents.

Again, this dominance was not inevitable. Most of the critical breakthroughs needed to invent and commercialize Li-ion batteries were made by scientists in North America and Japan. But in comparison to the US and Europe (at least until very recently), China has taken a proactive stance to coordinate, support, and co-invest with strategic industries to commercialize emerging technologies. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has been at pains to support these domestic industries.

The case of Li-ion batteries is not an isolated one. The shift to Chinese dominance in the underlying electronics for FPV drones coincides with the period beginning in 2000, when Shenzhen started to emerge as a global hub for low-cost electronics. This trend was amplified by US corporations from Apple, for which low-cost production in China has been essential, to General Electric, which also sought low-cost approaches to maintain the competitive edge of its products. The global nature of supply chains was seen as a strength for US companies, whose comparative advantage lay in the design and integration of consumer products (such as smartphones) with little or no relevance for national security. Only a small handful of “exquisite systems” essential for military purposes were carefully developed within the US. And even those have relied upon global supply chains.

While the absence of the high-tech industrial capacity needed for economic security is easy to label, it is not simple to address. Doing so requires several interrelated elements, among them designing and incentivizing appropriate capital investments, creating and matching demand for a talented technology workforce, building robust industrial infrastructure, ensuring visibility into supply chains, and providing favorable financial and regulatory environments for on- and friend-shoring of production. This is a project that cannot be done by the public or the private sector alone. Nor is the US likely to accomplish it absent carefully crafted shared partnerships with allies and partners across both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The opportunity to support today’s drones may have passed, but we do have the chance to build a strong industrial base to support tomorrow’s most critical technologies—not simply the eye-catching finished assemblies of autonomous vehicles, satellites, or robots but also their essential components. This will require attention to our manufacturing capabilities, our supply chains, and the materials that are the essential inputs. Alongside a shift in emphasis to our own domestic industrial base must come a willingness to plan and partner more effectively with allies and partners.

If we do so, we will transform decades of US and allied support for foundational science and technology into tomorrow’s industrial base vital for economic prosperity and national security. But to truly take advantage of this opportunity, we need to value and support our shared, long-term economic security. And this means rewarding patient investment in projects that take a decade or more, incentivizing high-capital industrial activity, and maintaining a determined focus on education and workforce development—all within a flexible regulatory framework.

Edlyn V. Levine is CEO and co-founder of a stealth-mode technology start up and an affiliate at MIT Sloan School of Management and the Department of Physics at Harvard University. Levine was co-founder and CSO of America’s Frontier Fund, and formerly Chief Technologist for the MITRE Corporation.

Fiona Murray is the William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT School of Management where she works at the intersection of critical technologies, entrepreneurship, and geopolitics. She is the Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund—a multi-sovereign venture fund for defense, security and resilience, and served for a decade on the UK Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology.

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Sep 7 2023
Chinese AI chatbots want to be your emotional support

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

Chinese ChatGPT-like bots are having a moment right now.

As I reported last week, Baidu became the first Chinese tech company to roll out its large language model—called Ernie Bot—to the general public, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese government. Previously, access required an application or was limited to corporate clients. You can read more about the news here.

I have to admit the Chinese public has reacted more passionately than I had expected. According to Baidu, the Ernie Bot mobile app reached 1 million users in the 19 hours following the announcement, and the model responded to more than 33.42 million user questions in 24 hours, averaging 23,000 questions per minute.

Since then, four more Chinese companies—the facial-recognition giant SenseTime and three young startups, Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, and MiniMax—have also made their LLM chatbot products broadly available. But some more experienced players, like Alibaba and iFlytek, are still waiting for the clearance.

Like many others, I downloaded the Ernie Bot app last week to try it out. I was curious to find out how it’s different from its predecessors like ChatGPT. 

What I noticed first was that Ernie Bot does a lot more hand-holding. Unlike ChatGPT’s public app or website, which is essentially just a chat box, Baidu’s app has a lot more features that are designed to onboard and engage new users. 

Under Ernie Bot’s chat box, there’s an endless list of prompt suggestions—like “Come up with a name for a baby” and “Generating a work report.” There’s another tab called “Discovery” that displays over 190 pre-selected topics, including gamified challenges (“Convince the AI boss to raise my salary”) and customized chatting scenarios (“Compliment me”).

It seems to me that a major challenge for Chinese AI companies is that now, with government approval to open up to the public, they actually need to earn users and keep them interested. To many people, chatbots are a novelty right now. But that novelty will eventually wear off, and the apps need to make sure people have other reasons to stay.

One clever thing Baidu has done is to include a tab for user-generated content in the app. In the community forum, I can see the questions other users have asked the app, as well as the text and image responses they got. Some of them are on point and fun, while others are way off base, but I can see how this inspires users to try to input prompts themselves and work to improve the answers.

Left: a successful generation from the prompt “Pikachu wearing sunglasses and smoking cigars.” Right: the Ernie Bot failed to generate an image reflecting the literal or figurative meaning of 狗尾续貂, “To join a dog’s tail to a sable coat,” which is a Chinese idiom for a disappointing sequel to a fine work.

Another feature that caught my attention was Ernie Bot’s efforts to introduce role-playing.

One of the top categories on the “Discovery” page asks the chatbot to respond in the voice of pre-trained personas including Chinese historical figures like the ancient emperor Qin Shi Huang, living celebrities like Elon Musk, anime characters, and imaginary romantic partners. (I asked the Musk bot who it is; it answered: “I am Elon Musk, a passionate, focused, action-oriented, workaholic, dream-chaser, irritable, arrogant, harsh, stubborn, intelligent, emotionless, highly goal-oriented, highly stress-resistant, and quick-learner person.”

I have to say they do not seem to be very well trained; “Qin Shi Huang” and “Elon Musk” both broke character very quickly when I asked them to comment on serious matters like the state of AI development in China. They just gave me bland, Wikipedia-style answers.

But the most popular persona—already used by over 140,000 people, according to the app—is called “the considerate elder sister.” When I asked “her” what her persona is like, she answered that she’s gentle, mature, and good at listening to others. When I then asked who trained her persona, she responded that she was trained by “a group of professional psychology experts and artificial-intelligence developers” and “based on analysis of a large amount of language and emotional data.”

“I won’t answer a question in a robotic way like ordinary AIs, but I will give you more considerate support by genuinely caring about your life and emotional needs,” she also told me.

I’ve noticed that Chinese AI companies have a particular fondness for emotional-support AI. Xiaoice, one of the first Chinese AI assistants, made its name by allowing users to customize the perfect romantic partner. And another startup, Timedomain, left a trail of broken hearts this year when it shut down its AI boyfriend voice service. Baidu seems to be setting up Ernie Bot for the same kind of use. 

I’ll be watching this slice of the chatbot space grow with equal parts intrigue and anxiety. To me, it’s one of the most interesting possibilities for AI chatbots. But this is more challenging than writing code or answering math problems; it’s an entirely different task to ask them to provide emotional support, act like humans, and stay in character all the time. And if the companies do pull it off, there will be more risks to consider: What happens when humans actually build deep emotional connections with the AI?

Would you ever want emotional support from an AI chatbot? Tell me your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. The mysterious advanced chip in Huawei’s newly released smartphone has sparked many questions and much speculation about China’s progress in chip-making technology. (Washington Post $)

2. Meta took down the largest Chinese social media influence campaign to date, which included over 7,000 Facebook accounts that bashed the US and other adversaries of China. Like its predecessors, the campaign failed to attract attention. (New York Times $)

3. Lawmakers across the US are concerned about the idea of China buying American farmland for espionage, but actual land purchase data from 2022 shows that very few deals were made by Chinese entities. (NBC News)

4. A Chinese government official was sentenced to life in prison on charges of corruption, including fabricating a Bitcoin mining company’s electricity consumption data. (Cointelegraph)

5. Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Foxconn, is running as an independent candidate in Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election. (Associated Press)

6. The average Chinese citizen’s life span is now 2.2 years longer thanks to the efforts in the past decade to clean up air pollution. (CNN)

7. Sinopec, the major Chinese oil company, predicts that gasoline demand in China will peak in 2023 because of the surging demand for electric vehicles. (Bloomberg $)

8. Chinese sextortion scammers are flooding Twitter comment sections and making the site almost unusable for Chinese speakers. (Rest of World)

Lost in translation

The favorite influencer of Chinese grandmas just got banned from social media. “Xiucai,” a 39-year-old man from Maozhou city, posted hundreds of videos on Douyin where he acts shy in China’s countryside, subtly flirts with the camera, and lip-synchs old songs. While the younger generations find these videos cringe-worthy, his look and style amassed him a large following among middle-aged and senior women. He attracted over 12 million followers in just over two years, over 70% of whom were female and nearly half older than 50. In May, a 72-year-old fan took a 1,000-mile solo train ride to Xiucai’s hometown just so she could meet him in real life.

But last week, his account was suddenly banned from Douyin, which said Xiucai had violated some platform rules. Local taxation authorities in Maozhou said he was reported for tax evasion, but the investigation hasn’t concluded yet, according to Chinese publication National Business Daily. His disappearance made more young social media users aware of his cultish popularity. As those in China’s silver generation learn to use social media and even become addicted to it, they have also become a lucrative target for content creators.

One more thing

Forget about bubble tea. The trendiest drink in China this week is a latte mixed with baijiu, the potent Chinese liquor. Named “sauce-flavored latte,” the eccentric invention is a collaboration between Luckin Coffee, China’s largest cafe chain, and Kweichow Moutai, China’s most famous liquor brand. News of its release lit up Chinese social media because it sounds like an absolute abomination, but the very absurdity of the idea makes people want to know what it actually tastes like. Dear readers in China, if you’ve tried it, can you let me know what it was like? I need to know, for research reasons.

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Aug 31 2023
The involuntary criminals behind pig-butchering scams

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

There’s something so visceral about the phrase “pig-butchering scam.” The first time I came across it was in my reporting a year ago, when I was looking into how strange LinkedIn connection requests turned out to be from crypto scammers. 

As I wrote then, fraudsters were creating “fake profiles on social media sites or dating sites, [to] connect with victims, build virtual and often romantic relationships, and eventually persuade the victims to transfer over their assets.” The name, which scammers themselves came up with, compares the lengthy, involved trust-building process to what it’s like to grow a pig for slaughter. It’s a tactic that has been used to steal millions of dollars from victims on LinkedIn and other platforms. You can read that story here. 

But there are also other, far more dire consequences to these scams. And over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed growing attention, in both the US and China, to the scammers behind these crimes, who are often victims of the scams themselves. A new book in English, a movie in Chinese, and a slew of media reports in both languages are now shining light on the fascinating (and horrifying) aspects of a scary trend in human trafficking.

For a sense of scale, just last week Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges, released data showing a huge jump in the number of pig-butchering scams reported to the company: an increase of 100.5% from 2022 to 2023, even though there are still a few months left in this year. 

This kind of fraud is the subject of a new Chinese movie that unexpectedly became a box-office hit. No More Bets is centered on two Chinese people who are lured to Myanmar with the promise of high-paying jobs; once trapped abroad, they are forced to become scammers, though—spoiler alert—they eventually manage to escape. But many of their fellow victims are abused, raped, or even killed for trying to do the same.

While the plot is fictional, it was adapted from dozens of interviews the movie crew conducted with real victims, some of which are shown at the end of the film. (I’ll probably check out the movie when it premieres in the US on August 31.）

Many low-level scammers have in fact been coerced into conducting crimes. They leave their homes with the hope of getting stable employment, but once they find themselves in a foreign country—usually Myanmar, Cambodia, or the Philippines—they are held captive and unable to leave.

Since the movie came out on August 8, it has made nearly $470 million at the box office, placing it among the top 10 highest-grossing movies worldwide this year, even though it was only screened in China. It has also dominated social media discourse in China, inspiring over a dozen trending topics on Weibo and other platforms. 

At the same time, investigative reports from Chinese journalists have corroborated the credibility of the movie’s plot. In a podcast published earlier this month, one Chinese-Malaysian victim told Wang Zhian, an exiled Chinese investigative journalist, about his experience of being lied to by job recruiters and forced to become a scammer in the Philippines. There, 80% of his colleagues were from mainland China, with the rest from Taiwan and Malaysia. 

Many of them are from rural areas and have little education. But as another Chinese publication recently reported, scammer groups are increasingly looking to recruit highly educated people as they target more Chinese students overseas, or even English-speaking populations. 

Chinese people are no strangers to telecom fraud and online scams, but the recent wave of attention has made them aware of how globalized these scams have become. It has also tarnished the reputation of Southeast Asian countries, which are now struggling to attract Chinese tourists.  

These days, if you type “Myanmar” into Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, all autocompletes are related to the pig-butchering scams, like the “self-told story of someone who escaped from Myanmar.” There are still videos promoting Myanmar to tourists, but the comment sections are filled with viewers who insinuate that the Burmese video creators are working for the human-trafficking groups. Myanmar even recently tried to work with a Chinese province to promote tourism, and most social media responses were negative. 

Meanwhile, in the US, Number Go Up, a new book about cryptocurrencies by Bloomberg reporter Zeke Faux, is out next month. Faux traveled to Sihanoukville in southwestern Cambodia, where criminal gangs orchestrate pig-butchering scams. It was once a prosperous casino town for Chinese businesspeople (gambling is outlawed in China). But after the Cambodian government turned against gambling, and the pandemic made international travel difficult, the gambling gangs turned their casinos into online scam operation centers. 

Faux visited one giant compound called “Chinatown,” where scam victims are trapped and isolated from the outside world by metal gates. Neighbors told Faux of frequent suicides: “If an ambulance doesn’t go inside at least twice a week, it is a wonder.” One victim told him he had to hide a phone in his rectum to get in touch with someone outside and escape. 

But stories of successful escapes are rare. Even though the Chinese government announced in mid-August that it would work more with Southeast Asian countries to crack down on these criminal activities, it remains to be seen how successful those efforts will be. In the case of Cambodia, international law enforcement actions so far have been obstructed by alleged corruption on the ground, according to a recent investigation by the New York Times.

As I reported last year, there are many factors that make it hard to hold these scammers accountable: their use of crypto, the weak government control in the regions where they operate, and the criminals’ ever-changing tactics and platform choices. But the fact that both reporting and pop culture are starting to draw attention to where and how these criminal groups operate could be a good first step toward justice.

What solution do you think can help reduce the number of pig-butchering scams? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com

Catch up with China

1. Forbes got a copy of a draft proposal from 2022 that would address national security concerns related to TikTok. While it is unclear whether the draft is still being considered a year later, it shows that the US government wanted unprecedented control over the platform’s internal data and essential functions. (Forbes)

2. After Japan started releasing treated radioactive water into the ocean last week, the Chinese government protested by banning seafood imports from the country. (CNN)

  • Many Chinese people are also mad about the release and have resolved to harass Japanese businesses with phone calls. (Al Jazeera)

3. The US commerce secretary, Gina Raimondo, visited Beijing on Monday, making her the latest high-ranking Biden administration official to travel to the country. She agreed with her Chinese counterpart that they would launch an “information exchange” on export controls. (Associated Press)

4. A new type of battery developed by the Chinese company CATL can make fast charging for EVs even faster. (MIT Technology Review)

5. The Biden administration is hoping to secure a six-month extension of the Science and Technology Agreement with China, a 44-year-old document that fosters scientific collaboration. (NBC News)

6. Chinese ultra-fast-fashion company Shein will acquire a one-third stake of Forever 21’s operating company, Sparc Group. In return, Sparc will gain a minority stake in Shein. The Chinese company will start selling Forever 21 apparel online, while Forever 21 will take Shein products to its physical stores. (Wall Street Journal $)

7. DiDi, the troubled Chinese ride-hailing giant, is selling its electric-vehicle business to XPeng, a Chinese EV company. (Reuters $)

Lost in translation

Currently, there are over 2,700 online hospitals in China, where people can get diagnoses and prescriptions completely online. Because many of these platforms are able to come up with a prescription in less than two minutes, there’s widespread suspicion that they are risking patient health by relying on ChatGPT-like models. 

Last week, the industry was put on notice after Beijing’s Municipal Health Commission drafted a new regulation to ban AI-generated prescriptions. According to Sailing Health, a Chinese medical news publication, the city-wide regulation repeats and reinforces a March 2022 national policy that instituted the same kind of ban, but the new proposal comes at a time when people have started to see what large language models are capable of and when a few tech platforms have already started experimenting with medical AI. 

Following news of the new proposal, JD Health, one of the leading digital health-care platforms in China, told the publication that its AI features are currently used only to match patients with doctors and help doctors increase productivity. Medlinker, a Chinese internet startup that announced an AI product in May, responded that the product, called MedGPT, is still in internal testing and hasn’t been used in any external services. 

One more thing

NBA star James Harden was having a lot of fun during a recent trip to China. When Harden promoted his new wine brand on the Douyin livestream e-commerce channel of Chinese influencer Crazy Young Brother, he was shocked that the first batch of 10,000 bottles (sold in bundles of two for $60) sold out in only 14 seconds. After a second batch of 6,000 bottles also sold out in seconds, Harden was so excited that he did a cartwheel in the back of the room.

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Aug 31 2023
Chinese ChatGPT alternatives just got approved for the general public

On Wednesday, Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial-intelligence companies, announced it would open up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public.

It’s been a long time coming. Launched in mid-March, Ernie Bot was the first Chinese ChatGPT rival. Since then, many Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, have followed suit and released their own models. Yet all of them forced users to sit on waitlists or go through approval systems, making the products mostly inaccessible for ordinary users—a possible result, people suspected, of limits put in place by the Chinese state.

On August 30, Baidu posted on social media that it will also release a batch of new AI applications within the Ernie Bot as the company rolls out open registration the following day. 

Quoting an anonymous source, Bloomberg reported that regulatory approval will be given to “a handful of firms including fledgling players and major technology names.” Sina News, a Chinese publication, reported that eight Chinese generative AI chatbots have been included in the first batch of services approved for public release. 

ByteDance, which released the chatbot Doubao on August 18, and the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which released Zidong Taichu 2.0 in June, are reportedly also included in the first batch. Other models from Alibaba, iFLYTEK, JD, and 360 are not.

When Ernie Bot was released on March 16, the response was a mix of excitement and disappointment. Many people deemed its performance mediocre relative to the previously released ChatGPT. 

But most people simply weren’t able to see it for themselves. The launch event didn’t feature a live demonstration, and later, to actually try out the bot, Chinese users need to have a Baidu account and apply for a use license that could take as long as three months to come through. Because of this, some people who got access early were selling secondhand Baidu accounts on e-commerce sites, charging anywhere from a few bucks to over $100. 

More than a dozen Chinese generative AI chatbots were released after Ernie Bot. They are all pretty similar to their Western counterparts in that they are capable of conversing in text—answering questions, solving math problems (somewhat), writing programming code, and composing poems. Some of them also allow input and output in other forms, like audio, images, data visualization, or radio signals.

Like Ernie Bot, these services came with restrictions for user access, making it difficult for the general public in China to experience them. Some were allowed only for business uses.

One of the main reasons Chinese tech companies limited access to the general public was concern that the models could be used to generate politically sensitive information. While the Chinese government has shown it’s extremely capable of censoring social media content, new technologies like generative AI could push the censorship machine to unknown and unpredictable levels. Most current chatbots like those from Baidu and ByteDance have built-in moderation mechanisms that would refuse to answer sensitive questions about Taiwan or Chinese president Xi Jinping, but a general release to China’s 1.4 billion people would almost certainly allow users to find more clever ways to circumvent censors.

When China released its first regulation specifically targeting generative AI services in July, it included a line requesting that companies obtain “relevant administrative licenses,” though at the time the law didn’t specify what licenses it meant. 

As Bloomberg first reported, the approval Baidu obtained this week was issued by the Chinese Cyberspace Administration, the country’s main internet regulator, and it will allow companies to roll out their ChatGPT-style services to the whole country. But the agency has not officially announced which companies obtained the public access license or which ones have applied for it.

Even with the new access, it’s unclear how many people will use the products. The initial lack of access to Chinese chatbot alternatives decreased public interest in them. While ChatGPT has not been officially released in China, many Chinese people are able to access the OpenAI chatbot by using VPN software.

“Making Ernie Bot available to hundreds of millions of Internet users, Baidu will collect massive valuable real-world human feedback. This will not only help improve Baidu’s foundation model but also iterate Ernie Bot on a much faster pace, ultimately leading to a superior user experience,” said Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO, according to a press release from the company.

Baidu declined to give further comment. ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.

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Aug 24 2023
The fascinating evolution of typing Chinese characters

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

The idea of downloading a third-party keyboard to your phone may seem unnecessary to most people, but in China it’s the norm. 

Chinese is the only modern language that’s logographic, meaning that the way a character is written can be completely separate from its pronunciation (Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have their variations of the Chinese characters). Because of that, relying on a default keyboard would be incredibly difficult. So today, 800 million people in China use smart keyboard software that predicts what a user wants to type.

But a strong reliance on this technology also presents a security risk: most keyboard apps transmit keystrokes to the cloud to enable better text prediction, creating an opportunity for the content to be intercepted if the apps don’t have strong enough encryption protocols.

This week, I reported on one such encryption loophole found in Sogou, one of China’s most popular third-party keyboard apps. A group of researchers at the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group, managed to intercept almost everything they typed into Sogou by deploying a two-decade-old exploit. 

Not only can this kind of software endanger people’s personal and financial information, but—perhaps more important—it can compromise otherwise encrypted messages in apps like Signal, and allow them to be caught by police or malicious actors.

For more information on this particular loophole and the broader implications, you can read the story here.

But for the newsletter, I want to take you all on a geeky journey into the history of keyboard apps—or input method editors (IMEs), as they are formally called. IMEs are so ubiquitous and fundamental today that it’s easy to forget how much hard work was put into their creation. And they’re a fascinating example of how innovations can bridge the gap between the digital world and the real world.

In the ’80s, there was no way of processing Chinese characters with the personal computers on the market. Even after the laborious process of digitizing Chinese characters to be displayed on computer screens, a big question remained: How do you type those characters? Particularly, how do you match the tens of thousands of Chinese characters to the 26 letters on a QWERTY keyboard?

The first attempt was vastly different from the keyboard apps today, and centered on how Chinese characters are written.

In August 1983, exactly 40 years ago, a Chinese engineer named Wang Yongmin developed the first popular way to input Chinese characters into a computer: Wubi. He did it by breaking down a Chinese character into different strokes and assigning several strokes to each letter on the QWERTY keyboard.

A diagram of how Wubi uses the QWERTY keyboard.
The diagram above shows how each key is matched with three to 12 character components. The texts at bottom are poems to help users remember the combinations.

For example, the Chinese character for dog, 犬, has several shapes in it: 犬, 一, 丿, and丶.These shapes were matched with the keys D, G, T, and Y, respectively. So when a user typed “DGTY,” a Wubi input software would match that to the character 犬.

On the left are the Chinese character 犬 and its phonetic spelling; on the right is a guide on how to type the character in Wubi.
A guide on how the character 犬 should be typed into Wubi software.

Wubi was able to match every Chinese character with a keystroke combination using at maximum four QWERTY keys. It’s considered one of the fastest ways to type Chinese, but the downside is also pretty obvious: users need to memorize which keys correspond to which strokes, so the learning curve is quite steep. (One way people have remembered the keyboard designations? Jingles!)

The next step in the evolution of Chinese IMEs was the invention of typing by phonetic spelling.

It may be hard to believe, but pinyin, the modern way of spelling each Chinese word in a standardized Latin alphabet, was only created in the 1950s. In the ’80s and ’90s, China started to experiment with teaching kids pinyin in school before teaching them how to write Chinese characters. One result was that pinyin became an easier and more widely accepted way to match Chinese characters to the Latin letters on a keyboard.

To stick with the example of the character 犬 (dog), its pronunciation was standardized as quǎn, so typing Q, U, A, N on the standard keyboard would get you this character on your screen. 

A large number of pinyin-based IMEs were invented in the ’90s. The most prominent was Zhineng ABC, developed in 1993 by Zhu Shoutao, a computer science professor at Peking University. After Microsoft integrated Zhineng ABC as one of the default IMEs in Windows PCs, it became the most widely used one in the country.

But typing by pinyin also has its problems: dozens or hundreds of Chinese characters can share the same phonetic spelling. If you type QUAN, the computer has no way to tell which of 81 characters is the one you want.

A list of all Chinese characters with the spelling quan.
There are at least 81 Chinese charactershat are spelled quan.
LELEKETANG

So every time you typed a word in Zhineng ABC, you still needed to select the correct character from a long list of potential candidates.

How Zhineng ABC displayed words for users to choose from.

Luckily, they were always displayed in the same order, meaning you’d start to remember where characters you frequently used appeared in the little window. 

I can confirm this, as I learned to type with Zhineng ABC. The last character in my name is 毅, spelled yi; and yi happens to be the sound with the most possible matches in Chinese, with hundreds of characters spelled the same way (thanks, Mom and Dad). It was etched in my mind that when I wanted to type 毅 in Zhineng ABC, I needed to scroll to the fourth page and choose the sixth option.

Obviously, that’s not efficient. In fact, it’s actually slower to type in Zhineng ABC than in Wubi. But the next generation of keyboard apps quickly surpassed its predecessors.

In 2006, Sogou was released, essentially combining the foundation of pinyin typing and the tech of a search engine. Just as search engines recommend content that’s closest to what people are asking about, keyboard software can predict what users may want to type. 

With Sogou, the candidate characters and words are no longer displayed in a permanent order; the order changes based on a user’s typing history and what’s in the news. For example, now that I’ve typed 毅 a few times in this newsletter already, Sogou remembers that and puts it at the top whenever I type yi.

Many other innovative IMEs were invented around the same time as Sogou. Some tried to combine the methods based on shapes with those based on spelling. Others enabled users to write a Chinese character directly on the device, since trackpads and touch screens were coming into use.

But over time, these methods were slowly given up in favor of the much more efficient typing in smart keyboard apps like Sogou, which became the foundation of how Chinese people interact with technologies and each other. 

They became a necessity for people’s everyday lives—but this unfortunately opened everyone to a greater security risk. Even if more people knew about these vulnerabilities, it’s hard to imagine Chinese users would ever ditch the apps; instead, maybe it’s time users start demanding better security practices and more transparency from these companies. 

(There are many more fascinating aspects to the historical relationship between the Chinese language and technology. For example, people in Taiwan and Hong Kong have developed their own ways of typing Chinese characters. For a great introduction, I’d recommend the book Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale.)

What else do you want to know about Chinese keyboard apps? Ask me any questions at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. A landmark agreement between the US and China to cooperate on science and technology is set to expire on August 27 after being in effect for 44 years. Its end would deal a heavy blow to the future of scientific research. (Wall Street Journal $)

2. Xiong’an, the Chinese city near Beijing that’s being built as a flagship smart city, is experiencing particularly devastating rain this summer, leaving some people to wonder if the choice of location was a mistake. (CNN) 

  • Just how bad was the rain in and around Beijing? One county recorded 1.6 years’ worth of rain in just three days. (Reuters $)

3. Huawei will provide surveillance systems for the Taliban to install across Afghanistan. (Kabul Now)

4. To balance the increasing demand for burial space and the declining supply of land, Beijing is turning its cemeteries vertical and digital. (Bloomberg $)

5. A Chinese artist is re-creating the old houses demolished in the country’s modernization process, one miniature at a time. (New York Times $)

6. One Chinese AI-powered chatbot allowed users to create an ideal partner to talk to every day. When the app went out of business, the users were heartbroken. (Rest of World)

7. Dozens of Chinese companies are developing their own version of “miracle” weight-loss drugs like Wegovy that are popular in the West. (Financial Times $)

8. American intelligence agencies issued a warning that their Chinese and Russian counterparts are now targeting space companies and their employees. (New York Times $)

Lost in translation

During the height of the pandemic, almost every Chinese province was building 方舱 (fangcang), makeshift hospitals where covid patients were quarantined. So what happened to them? Reporters at the Chinese publication Southern Weekly combed through hundreds of government procurement reports across the country and found that local governments are spending millions of dollars to dismantle or repurpose them—or, in some cases, to build more of them.

At least four makeshift hospitals are being shut down and the land returned to its original use, and the construction of five new ones has been halted. Equipment and construction materials from those hospitals are now being resold online at low prices. Meanwhile, 24 existing hospitals are being transformed into permanent medical or disease prevention centers. But there are 10 new hospitals still being built, with a total budget of $17 million. One possible explanation is that the local governments’ annual budgets were already set at the beginning of this year to cover the construction of fangcang.

One more thing

How smart can and should a public restroom be? At Shanghai’s Hongqiao railway station, a big screen displays real-time information about which stalls and urinals are occupied and which are not. I understand the idea is to guide a passenger to an empty spot faster, but hear me out—maybe not everything needs to be “smartified.” 

A big blue screen at the Shanghai Hongqiao railway station displaying which restroom stalls and urinals are available currently.
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Aug 22 2023
How ubiquitous keyboard software puts hundreds of millions of Chinese users at risk

For millions of Chinese people, the first software they download on a new laptop or smartphone is always the same: a keyboard app. Yet few of them are aware that it may make everything they type vulnerable to spying eyes.

Since dozens of Chinese characters can share the same latinized phonetic spelling, the ordinary QWERTY keyboard alone is incredibly inefficient. A smart, localized keyboard app can save a lot of time and frustration by predicting the characters and words a user wants to type. Today, over 800 million Chinese people use third-party keyboard apps on their PCs, laptops, and mobile phones. 

But a recent report by the Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto–affiliated research group focused on technology and security, revealed that Sogou, one of the most popular Chinese keyboard apps, had a massive security loophole.

“This is an app that handles very sensitive information—specifically, every single thing that you type,” says Jeffrey Knockel, a senior research associate at the Citizen Lab and coauthor of the report. “So we wanted to look into that in greater detail and see if this app is properly encrypting this very sensitive data that it’s sending over the network—or, as we found, is it improperly doing it in a way that eavesdroppers could decipher?” 

Indeed, what he and his colleagues found was that Sogou’s encryption system could be exploited to intercept and decrypt exactly what people were typing, as they were typing it. 

Sogou, which was acquired by the tech giant Tencent in 2021, quickly fixed this loophole after the Citizen Lab researchers disclosed it to the company. 

“User privacy is fundamental to our business,” a Sogou spokesperson told MIT Technology Review. “We have addressed the issues identified by the Citizen Lab and will continue to work so that user data remains safe and secure. We transparently disclose our data processing activities in our privacy policy and do not otherwise share user data.”

But there’s no guarantee that this was the only vulnerability in the app, and the researchers did not examine other popular keyboard apps in the Chinese market—meaning the ubiquitous software will continue to be a security risk for hundreds of millions of people. And, alarmingly, the potential for such makes otherwise encrypted communications by Chinese users—in apps like Signal, for example—vulnerable to systems of state surveillance.

An indispensable part of Chinese devices

Officially called input method editors (IMEs), keyboard apps are necessary for typing in languages that have more characters than a common Latin-alphabet keyboard allows, like those with Japanese, Korean, or Indic characters.

For Chinese users, having an IME is almost a necessity. 

“There’s a lot more ambiguity to resolve when typing Chinese characters using a Latin alphabet,” says Mona Wang, an Open Technology Fund fellow at the Citizen Lab and another coauthor of the report. Because the same phonetic spelling can be matched to dozens or even hundreds of Chinese characters, and these characters also can be paired in different ways to become different words, a keyboard app that has been fine-tuned to the Chinese language can perform much better than the default keyboard.

Starting in the PC era, Chinese software developers proposed all kinds of IME products to expedite typing, some even ditching phonetic spelling and allowing users to draw or choose the components of a Chinese character. As a result, downloading third-party keyboard software became standard practice for everyone in China.

Released in 2006, Sogou Input Method quickly became the most popular keyboard app in the country. It was more capable than any competitor in predicting which character or word the user actually wanted to type, and it did that by scraping text from the internet and maintaining an extensive library of Chinese words. The cloud-based library was updated frequently to include newly coined words, trending expressions, or names of people in the news. In 2007, when Google launched its Chinese keyboard, it even copied Sogou’s word library (and later had to apologize).

In 2014, when the iPhone finally enabled third-party IMEs for the first time, Chinese users rushed to download Sogou’s keyboard app, leaving 3,000 reviews in just one day. At one point, over 90% of Chinese PC users were using Sogou.

Over the years, its market dominance has waned; as of last year, Baidu Input Method was the top keyboard app in China, with 607 million users and 46.4% of the market share. But Sogou still had 561 million users, according to iiMedia, an analytics firm. 

Exposing the loophole

A keyboard app can access a wide variety of user information. For example, once Sogou is downloaded and added to the iPhone keyboard options, the app will ask for “full access.” If it’s granted, anything the user types can be sent to Sogou’s cloud-based server. 

Connecting to the cloud is what makes most IMEs successful, allowing them to improve text prediction and enable other miscellaneous features, like the ability to search for GIFs and memes. But this also adds risk since content can, at least in theory, be intercepted during transmission. 

It becomes the apps’ responsibility to properly encrypt the data and prevent that from happening. Sogou’s privacy policy says it has “adopted industry-standard security technology measures … to maximize the prevention of leak, destruction, misuse, unauthorized access, unauthorized disclosure, or alteration” of users’ personal information.

“People generally had suspicions [about the security of keyboard apps] because they’re advertising [their] cloud service,” says Wang. “Almost certainly they’re sending some amount of keystrokes over the internet.” 

Nevertheless, users have continued to grant the apps full access. 

When the Citizen Lab researchers started looking at the Sogou Input Method on Windows, Android, and iOS platforms, they found that it used EncryptWall, an encryption system it developed itself, instead of Transport Layer Security (TLS), the standard international cryptographic protocol that has been in use since 1999. (Sogou is also used on other platforms like MacOS and Linux, but the researchers haven’t looked into them.)

One critical difference between the two encryption systems, the Citizen Lab found, is that Sogou’s EncryptWall is still vulnerable to an exploit that was revealed in 2002 and can turn encrypted data back into plain text. TLS was updated to protect against this in 2003. But when they used that exploit method on Sogou, the researchers managed to decrypt the exact keystrokes they’d typed. 

Example of recovered data; line 19 contains the user-typed text and line 2 contains the package name of the app in which the text is being typed.
THE CITIZEN LAB

The existence of this loophole meant that users were vulnerable to all kinds of hacks. The typed content could be intercepted when it went through VPN software, home Wi-Fi routers, and telecom providers. 

Not every word is transmitted to the cloud, the researchers found. “If you type in nihao [‘hello’ in Chinese] or something like that, [the app] can answer that without having to use the cloud database,” says Knockel. “But if it’s more complicated and, frankly, more interesting things that you’re typing in, it has to reach out to that cloud database.” 

Along with the content being typed, Knockel and his Citizen Lab colleagues also obtained other information like technical identifiers of the user’s device, the app that the typing occurred in, and even a list of apps installed on the device.

A lot of malicious actors would be interested in exploiting a loophole like this and eavesdropping on keystrokes, the researchers note—from cybercriminals after private information (like street addresses and bank account numbers) to government hackers. 

(In a written response to the Citizen Lab, Sogou said the transmission of typed text is required to access more accurate and extensive vocabularies on the cloud and enable a built-in search engine, and the uses are stated in the privacy agreement.)

This particular loophole was closed when Tencent updated the Sogou software across platforms in late July. The Citizen Lab researchers found that the latest version effectively fixed the problem by adopting the TLS encryption protocol. 

How secure messaging becomes insecure

Around the world, people who are at high risk of being surveilled by state authorities have turned to apps that offer end-to-end encryption. But if keyboard apps are vulnerable, then otherwise encrypted communication apps like Signal or WhatsApp are now also unsafe. What’s more, once a keyboard app is compromised, even an otherwise offline app, like the built-in notebook app, can be a security risk too. 

(Signal and WhatsApp did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s requests for comment. A spokesperson from Baidu said, “Baidu Input Method consistently adheres to established security practice standards. As of now, there are no vulnerabilities related to [the encryption exploit Sogou was vulnerable to] within Baidu Input Method’s products.”)

As early as 2019, Naomi Wu, a Shenzhen-based tech blogger known as SexyCyborg online, had sounded the alarm about the risk of using Chinese keyboard apps alongside Signal.

“The Signal ‘fix’ is ‘Incognito Mode’ aka for the app to say ‘Pretty please don’t read everything I type’ to the virtual keyboard and count on Google/random app makers to listen to the flag, and not be under court order to do otherwise,” she wrote in a 2019 Twitter thread. Since keyboard apps have no obligation to honor Signal’s request, “basically all hardware here is self-compromised 5 minutes out of the box,” she added. 

Wu suspects that the use of Signal was the reason some Chinese student activists talking to foreign media were detained by the police in 2018. 

In January 2021, Signal itself tried to clarify that its Incognito Keyboard feature (which only works for users on Android systems, which are more vulnerable than iOS) was not a foolproof privacy solution: “Keyboards and IME’s can ignore Android’s Incognito Keyboard flag. This Android system flag is a best effort, not a guarantee. It’s important to use a keyboard or IME that you trust. Signal cannot detect or prevent malware on your device,” the company added to its article on keyboard security.

The recent Citizen Lab findings lend further support to Wu’s theory. 

The security risk is particularly acute for users in China, since they are more likely to use keyboard apps and are under strict surveillance by their government. (Wu herself has disappeared from social media since the end of June, following a visit from police that was reportedly related to her online discussions of Signal and keyboard apps.) 

Still, other governments seem to have been paying attention to vulnerabilities with encrypted data transmission as well. A 2012 document leaked by Edward Snowden, for instance, shows that the Five Eyes intelligence alliance—comprising Canada, the US, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand—had been discreetly exploiting a similar loophole in UC Browser, a popular Chinese program, to intercept certain transmissions. 

Beyond being targeted by state actors, there are other ways keystroke information acquired via keyboard apps can be sold, leaked, or hacked. In 2021, it was reported that advertisers were able to access personal information through Sogou, as well as Baidu’s keyboard and similar apps, and use it to push customized ads. And in 2013, a loophole was found that made multimedia files that users uploaded and shared through Sogou searchable on Bing. 

These security problems are not unique to Chinese apps. In 2016, users of SwiftKey, an IME that was acquired by Microsoft that year, found that the app was auto-filling other people’s email addresses and personal information, as a result of a bug with its cloud sync system. The following year, a virtual keyboard app accidentally leaked 31 million users’ personal data.

Even though the specific loophole identified by the Citizen Lab was fixed quickly, given all these breaches, it feels somewhat inevitable that another security flaw in a keyboard app will be revealed soon. 

As Knockel notes, using Sogou and similar apps always poses security risks, particularly in China, since all Chinese apps are legally required to surrender data if asked by the government. 

“If that’s something that’s concerning to you,” he says, “you might also just reconsider using Sogou, period.”

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Aug 19 2023
China’s car companies are turning into tech companies

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

This year, car buyers in China are constantly bombarded with claims about how advanced Navigation on Autopilot (NOA) systems are coming to their city. These software systems are not quite fully autonomous driving—your hands are still supposed to be holding the wheel—but they let cars stop, steer, and accelerate in the city by themselves.

Both EV makers and AI startups have published aggressive roadmaps for national rollouts of their city NOA services, claiming their customers in dozens or hundreds of Chinese cities will soon be able to experience being driven by their cars through narrow city streets. 

This morning, I published a story that took a closer look at how city NOAs have become the industry darling in 2023, including how they actually perform and the difficulty in educating drivers on using the system responsibly. You can read all of it here.

But during my interview with Zhang Xiang, a Chinese auto industry analyst and visiting professor at Huanghe Science and Technology College, one comment stuck out to me. “The auto industry is very competitive now. Consumers are expecting those vehicles to be tech products, like smartphones. It’d be hard for auto brands to sell their cars if they didn’t advertise their products this way,” he said.

Zhang’s observation is consistent with what I saw this year, particularly when I went to the massive auto show this April in Shanghai. Not only was everyone boasting about their brand’s autonomous driving capabilities, but companies were also showcasing all kinds of other advanced software features.

For example, SenseTime, an AI company, uses facial recognition tech to monitor driver fatigue and also to identify children left in the car; SAIC Volkswagen is using augmented reality to display map information on the windshield; Baidu is incorporating its generative AI model in the in-car audio chatbot for route planning.

NIO, one of the frontrunner companies in China’s homegrown EV industry, has embraced the subscription model. By paying 380 RMB ($52) a month, NIO owners can get the basic version of an NOA system in their cars, which works on highways and major urban roads. In the future, they will be able to pay double the amount for a more advanced version. Meanwhile, as batteries make up the majority of the costs and upkeep of an EV model, NIO also launched a monthly battery-swap service in China and a monthly battery-rental subscription in Europe.

All of these examples show that we are increasingly seeing auto companies turn into tech companies. Beyond horsepower and exterior/interior design, companies are now also competing on who can adapt the latest technology into a consumer-facing product. Globally, this trend is spearheaded by Tesla, with traditional auto brands slowly playing catch-up. But that transition is happening even faster in China.

Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a business consulting firm that specializes in transportation, breaks down the ongoing auto industry evolution into four phases: electrification, smartification, servicification, and autonomization. (While the first two are easy to understand, the third phase means the auto companies’ business models revolve around selling services, and the fourth phase means the proliferation of robotaxis.)

As I wrote earlier this year, China has managed to achieve a significant lead with the development and adoption of EVs, through a mix of different factors like government subsidies and battery tech innovations. That enables the Chinese auto industry to hop on the next phase earlier than everyone else. “The United States and Europe are in phase one, electrification; China is in phase two, smartification,” Tu says. 

The third phase is not far away, he believes. “Once more and more EVs on Chinese roads have ADAS [advanced driver-assistance systems]—the free systems and the premium systems—then we will get to servicification. Then they will start adding more features and trying to charge you,” he says. 

Chinese car companies aren’t just becoming tech companies, Chinese tech companies are also turning into car companies. Autonomous driving tech is one of Baidu’s main focuses now that it has transitioned from a search engine to an AI company. Xiaomi, one of China’s smartphone giants, has spent nearly a billion dollars on becoming an EV company. Even Huawei, forced by US sanctions to reinvent itself, is now targeting smart cars as its next strategic focus.

With these tech juggernauts joining the race, Chinese car companies are being forced to up their tech game to have a chance of competing.

At the end of the day, is that a good thing? I’m not sure. The heated competition is pushing Chinese auto companies to offer more advanced tech products at more affordable prices, and consumers stand to benefit from that. At the same time, it also brings in the difficult problems that the tech industry has failed to address: data security, privacy invasion, AI biases and failures, and potentially more.

But it does seem like this is an inevitable trend. In that sense, whatever’s happening in China now will be a valuable lesson for the industry in other countries.

What do you think of the trend of automakers turning into tech companies? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

Catch up with China

1. With domestic adoption of the digital yuan stalled, Beijing is increasingly pushing for its use in international trade settlement. (MIT Technology Review)

2. The Biden administration released new rules that ban US private equity and venture capital investment in Chinese AI, quantum computing, and semiconductor companies. (CNN)

  • Afterward, Beijing issued a document of 24 guidelines on how to attract more foreign investment, including strengthening the enforcement of intellectual property rights. (Reuters $)
  • Foreign investment in China is already at its lowest point in decades. (Bloomberg $)

3. The best place to buy a Tesla is in China, where they are 50% cheaper than in Europe and the US, after several rounds of price cuts. (Financial Times $)

4. International students are more likely to be accused of cheating by AI writing detection tools, new Stanford research finds. (The Markup)

5. China’s internet regulator was busy last Tuesday: it released one regulation restricting the use of facial recognition tech to protect privacy (Wall Street Journal $) and another that mandates all mobile apps available in the country must register their business details with the government (Reuters $).

6. The Village Basketball Association, a national league for amateur players from the countryside, has become the latest sports sensation in China. (Wall Street Journal $)

7. Taiwanese chip giant TSMC is investing $3.8 billion to build a new factory in Germany. (New York Times $)

8. After Taiwan’s justice department announced that being filmed smoking marijuana abroad is a prosecutable offense, an activist filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk to show the rule’s overreach. (Radio Taiwan International)

Lost in translation

An anti-corruption campaign is shaking up China’s healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. According to the Chinese publication Lanjing Caijing, China’s top anti-corruption regulator has in recent months been publicizing cases of bribery in the healthcare field. Most hospitals are publicly owned in China, and the investigations focus on pharmaceutical companies allegedly bribing hospital executives to secure procurement contracts through sponsoring their research, hosting academic conferences, and paying kickbacks. 

While these practices are not new, the campaign this year seems to be particularly serious. At least 160 top hospital executives in China have been placed under investigation so far—that’s already twice as many as in all of 2022. Because these bribes would often be recorded as marketing expenses in the companies’ accounting books, companies with sky-high marketing spending are under particularly strict scrutiny right now. In 2022, nearly 40 of the top 66 pharmaceutical companies in China spent half of their annual revenues on marketing, according to their financial disclosures.

One more thing

Don’t you just long for some VR-powered propaganda education when you are exercising on a stationary bike? A Chinese company recently posted a video of its “Red VR Rides” educational device, which allows the user to read about the Chinese Communist Party’s history while pedaling. In fact, there are quite a few Chinese VR companies that have released similar products in the past. This niche industry is apparently thriving.

Three people riding on different VR stationary bikes designed for Chinese Community Party history education.
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Aug 16 2023
The race to lead China’s autonomous driving market

Toward the end of a nearly 15-minute video, William Sundin, creator of the ChinaDriven channel on YouTube, gets off the highway and starts driving in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. Or rather, he allows himself to be driven. For while he’s still in the driver’s seat, the car is now steering, stopping, and changing speed—successfully navigating the busy city streets all by itself. 

“It’s a NOA, [Navigation on Autopilot] function but for the urban environment,” he explains to the people watching him test-drive the XPeng G6, a Chinese electric vehicle model. “Obviously this is much more difficult than simple highway NOA, with lots of different junctions and traffic lights and mopeds and pedestrians and cars chopping and cutting lanes—there’s a lot more for the system to have to deal with.”

His final assessment? The Navigation on Autopilot isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty “impressive” and a preview of more advancements to come. 

Beyond a simple product review, Sundin’s video is giving his followers a close-up view into the production race that has sped up among Chinese car companies over the past year. And whether they are electric vehicle makers or self-driving tech startups, they all seem fixated on one goal in particular: launching their own autonomous navigation services in more and more Chinese cities as quickly as possible.

In just the past six months, nearly a dozen Chinese car companies have announced ambitious plans to roll out their NOA products to multiple cities across the country. While some of the services remain inaccessible to the public now, Sundin tells MIT Technology Review “the watershed could be next year.” 

Similar to the Full Self-Driving (FSD) features that Tesla is beta testing in North America, NOA systems are an increasingly capable version of driver-assistance systems that can autonomously stop, steer, and change lanes in complicated urban traffic. This is different from fully autonomous driving, since human drivers are still required to hold the steering wheel and be ready to take over. Car companies now offer NOA as a premium software upgrade to owners willing to pay for the experience, and who can afford the premium models that have the necessary sensors.

A year ago, the NOA systems in China were still limited to highways and couldn’t function in urban settings, even though most Chinese people live in densely populated urban areas. As Sundin notes, it’s incredibly challenging for NOA systems to work well in such environments, given the lack of separation between foot traffic and vehicles, as well as each city’s distinctive layout. A system that has learned the tricks of driving in Beijing, for instance, may not perform well in Shanghai. 

As a result, Chinese companies are racing to produce more and more city-unique navigation systems before gradually expanding into the rest of the country. Leading companies including XPeng, Li Auto, and Huawei have announced aggressive plans to roll out these NOA services to dozens or even hundreds more cities in the near future—in turn pushing one another to move faster and faster. Some have even decided to release NOA without extra costs for the owner.

“They are launching it quickly in order to create awareness, to try to build credibility and trust among the Chinese consumers, but also, it’s FOMO [fear of missing out],” says Tu Le, managing director of Sino Auto Insights, a business consulting firm that specializes in transportation. Once a few companies have announced their city navigation features, Tu adds, “everyone else needs to follow suit, or their products are at a disadvantage in the Chinese market.”

At the same time, this fierce competition is also having unintended side effects—confusing some customers and arguably putting other drivers at risk. And underneath the automakers’ ubiquitous marketing campaigns, many of these features simply remain hard to access for those who don’t live in the pilot cities or own the high-end models.  

Don’t think of it as full self-driving—at least not yet 

The autonomous driving industry divides its technological advancements into six levels: from Level 0, where humans control the entire driving process, to Level 5, where no human intervention is needed at all. 

There are really only two levels in use today. One is the tech in robotaxis, led by companies like Cruise, Waymo, and the Chinese giant Baidu, which offer Level 4 technology to passengers but are often limited in certain geographical boundaries. 

The other level is the NOA system, exemplified by Tesla’s FSD or XPeng’s XNGP. They are only Level 2, meaning human drivers still need to monitor most tasks, but the technology is much more accessible and is now available in auto vehicles sold around the world.

It’s easy to believe that commercially available vehicles are closer to fully autonomous than they actually are, because Chinese car companies have given their NOA products all kinds of misleading or meaningless names:

  • Li Auto follows Tesla’s tradition and calls it NOA
  • NIO calls it NOP (Navigate on Pilot) and NAD (NIO Assisted and Intelligent Driving)
  • XPeng calls it NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) and more recently XNGP (the “last step before full autonomous driving is realized,” the company says)
  • Huawei calls it NCA (Navigation Cruise Assist)
  • Haomo.AI, an AI startup, calls it NOH (Navigation on HPilot)
  • Baidu calls it Apollo City Driving Max

Confused yet? 

Apart from just being hard to remember, the different names also mean a lack of consistent standards. There’s no guarantee that these companies are promising the same things with their similar-sounding products. Some might only cover the major beltways in a city, while others go into smaller streets; some use LiDAR (a laser-based sensor) to help improve accuracy, while others only use cameras. And there’s no standard on how safe the tech needs to be before it is sold to consumers.

“Many such concepts are invented by Chinese companies themselves with no reference or background,” says Zhang Xiang, an auto industry analyst and visiting professor at Huanghe Science and Technology College. “What are the standards for achieving NOA? How many qualifications are there? No one can explain.” 

More cities! 

Last September, two Chinese companies were racing to be the first to launch a city NOA system in China: On September 17, XPeng, the EV company that has long centered its brand image around the use of AI, managed to win the race by making its product available in Guangzhou. A week later, Huawei—a tech giant that has made smart driving a focus in recent years—launched it in Shenzhen.

But the progress really hit the accelerator in 2023. In January, Haomo.AI, a four-year-old Chinese autonomous driving startup, announced that it would make its city NOA service available in 100 Chinese cities by the end of 2024. Then on April 15, Huawei raised its goal to 45 cities by the end of 2023; three days after that, Li Auto, another Chinese EV company, pushed it further to 100 cities by the end of 2023. XPeng, NIO, and more companies followed soon after with similar announcements ranging in plans to expand to up to 200 cities.

For homegrown EV companies to remain competitive in the market, they are developing Level 2 navigation technology in-house and selling city NOA services as an upgrade to their vehicles; like other advanced features, they often require additional payments every month or year. 

At the same time, AI companies are also competing against more conventional automakers, and as they work toward Level 4 or 5 self-driving technology, they still need interim revenue. NOA services can mean quick cash, easy sales, and, crucially, access to more data to train AI models.  

“If you are just an autonomous vehicle company, significant revenue is 10 years out,” says Tu. “If you are under pressure from investors to generate revenues today, what do you do? You create incremental revenue through selling your hardware and software stack, or licensing it.” 

Tu’s analysis is in line with what Cai Na, Haomo.AI’s vice president, told MIT Technology Review: “We think going the [Level 2] route is more realistic. The L2 technology has already made the breakthrough from being a technology to being a product, and many companies have turned it from just a product to a commercially viable product.” 

The complexity on the ground

Behind all the big promises is the reality that today, these urban navigation services are not available to much of the public. 

In 2023, about 360,000 cars produced in China will be equipped with city NOA capabilities, according to market research by Western Securities, a Chinese brokerage company. These models are usually more expensive than normal cars because they need hardware upgrades, like LiDAR or other sensors. Some companies are charging users extra for accessing the software functions, similar to what Tesla does.

But to have a car merely capable of providing city NOA is not enough. You also need to actually live in one of the few first-tier cities where the function has been made available, like Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, or Guangzhou. Because of that, city NOA remains a niche technology in China right now (though few companies have shared data on their tech’s adoption).

For example, in addition to the XPeng test drive in Guangzhou, ChinaDriven’s Sundin has also test-driven a Li Auto vehicle with similar features in Beijing. He can’t use it in his daily commute, however, because he lives in Changsha, a second-tier city where no car company has enabled city NOA functions yet.

He notes how even in cities where it’s offered, navigation is often obstructed by poor road markings, new construction, pedestrians, or two-wheeled vehicles. “There’s a lot going on in China. The city is being turned over year on year; roads are being repainted,” he says. “And do mopeds drive on the road? Do they drive on the pavements?” 

Haomo’s Cai echoes this: “[T]he real urban environment is far more complicated than what is imagined. The planning, policies, driving styles are different in each city,” she said. “For example, the traffic lights we usually see have three signs—red, yellow, and green. But some cities have five-sign lights, Chinese characters as signs, or triangle-shaped lights.”

But even within these pilot places, city NOA products still only offer limited functionalities.

Lei Xing, the former chief editor at China Auto Review, drove a recent XPeng model for a week in Beijing to test its autopilot features. XPeng was the first Chinese company to bring urban autonomous navigation to China’s capital city. So far, its autonomous features are limited to Beijing’s major ring roads and expressways. 

One night when the traffic was light, he drove from a train station on the outskirts of the city all the way to Beijing’s innermost ring road highway, and XPeng’s tech did the driving for the whole process. Xing was impressed enough, but it still didn’t fully meet his expectations, particularly when traffic picked up.

He believes the automakers oversell their NOA’s capabilities: “I think the reality is much more difficult. These goals are quite aggressive, and I’m doubtful [that they will become true].”

XPeng, Li Auto, and Baidu didn’t respond to questions sent by MIT Technology Review. A Huawei spokesperson responded in an email that Huawei’s Advanced Driving System “has reached the start of production (SOP)” and focuses on three major scenarios: “highway driving, urban driving, and parking.”

Accidents waiting to happen

Even those who have been impressed by the urban NOA systems say it’s still a stressful experience. “When the traffic is busy, it will occasionally attempt to change lanes and cut someone off…sometimes it was too aggressive and it felt like I could bump into the car behind me,” Xing says. 

Sundin also felt stressed when he tested XPeng’s features in Guangzhou. “To be honest, if you are a responsible driver and you are working with these systems, you are under a lot more pressure,” he says, mainly because he couldn’t predict how the car was going to react to traffic situations. “It can make you tired if you are properly monitoring what the system is doing,” he says.

Some of the cars offer checks on drivers to make sure they are paying attention. Xing says XPeng’s system would sometimes ask him to steer the wheel a little just to prove his hands were still holding the wheel. If the driver fails to do so, the car will warn the driver every few seconds. He says he also needed to complete a driver education procedure in which he was repeatedly reminded that the driver needs to stay focused and ready to take over the wheel. Sundin, however, found the same education mechanism lacking. The driver is asked to complete several multiple-choice questions, but he warns that it’s hardly an obstacle if you just click through all the answers to finish it quickly. 

The fact that not every driver could be using the technology responsibly also means others on the road are more at risk. Unlike robotaxis, which are usually clearly labeled as such on the exterior or have noticeable sensors and cameras, a car with experimental NOA systems looks the same as any other car on the road.

“I don’t want to be part of someone else’s pilot if I’m driving a vehicle on the road,” says Tu, who has mixed feelings about how the products are currently being used. He thinks the industry is only one or two severe accidents away from the public and regulators turning against it.

“[How can you] strike that balance between being realistic and safe with your system but also using it as a selling point for your cars?” asks Sundin. “It’s a difficult situation, and I don’t know what the solution is. But definitely, if you are rolling it out, the education around these systems needs to speed up fast.”

Correction: We updated the name of William Sundin’s YouTube channel. It should be ChinaDriven, not ChinaDrive.

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