The United States is preparing to issue a stern diplomatic warning to dozens of partner nations, telling them they must choose between Washington and Beijing in the escalating global artificial intelligence race. According to a leaked internal U.S. State Department draft reviewed by sources, the administration is targeting 35 countries that signed an American "AI Opportunity Statement" in June.


US warns countries over China's rival AI framework

American export controls were written to stop Nvidia's most advanced chips reaching Chinese companies. They were written around the idea of a shipment.&nbsp;Buying a GB300 is prohibited. Renting time on one sitting in a data centre in a third country is a different transaction, and the rules do not clearly reach it.&nbsp;That gap is now the central problem in US technology policy, and Washington is moving to close it.&nbsp;The Accusation That Made It Concrete&nbsp;On July 22, Michael Kratsios, the White House director of science and technology policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI of obtaining servers fitted with Nvidia GB300 chips and routing training workloads through GB300-enabled infrastructure in Thailand.&nbsp;Kratsios said the arrangement violated ‘both US export regulations and the terms of service set by American AI developers’.&nbsp;The GB300 belongs to Nvidia's Blackwell generation and is explicitly barred from export to Chinese firms. Lower-tier parts such as the H200 have received exemptions. Nvidia did not comment on the White House statement.&nbsp;The timing was what gave the accusation its force. Days earlier, on July 27, Moonshot had released Kimi K3.&nbsp;The Model At The Centre Of It&nbsp;Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model, the largest ever released with open weights. It activates 16 of 896 experts at inference, handles a context window of one million tokens, and is built on a hybrid linear attention mechanism the company calls Kimi Delta Attention.&nbsp;Its benchmark position is the part Washington noticed. On LMArena's Frontend Code evaluation, conducted through blind developer testing, K3 placed first at 1,679 points — ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scored 57.11, fourth overall behind Claude Fable 5 at 59.86 and two configurations of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol.&nbsp;Moonshot's own assessment was more modest, placing K3 behind Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on overall performance while ahead of every other system it tested, including Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5.&nbsp;A Chinese laboratory, operating under a chip embargo, released open weights that beat the best American model on a blind coding evaluation and sit within three points of it overall. That is the outcome the export controls were designed to prevent.&nbsp;Why Renting Is Not Buying&nbsp;The controls regulate the movement of goods. A chip that never leaves a data centre in Thailand or Malaysia has not been exported to China in any sense the regulation recognises, even if every workload it runs originates in Beijing.&nbsp;Several Chinese firms have reportedly reached restricted compute this way, through facilities across Southeast Asia. Reports indicate Kimi K3's training drew on roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips accessed through Alibaba's infrastructure.&nbsp;The Bureau of Industry and Security is now examining whether Chinese entities bypassed restrictions using overseas subsidiaries or third-party cloud providers. That inquiry is about structure rather than smuggling: not who moved a chip, but who controlled the workload running on it.&nbsp;The Bill That Would Close It&nbsp;The legislative answer is the Remote Access Security Act, which would extend export controls to cover cloud-based access to restricted hardware — treating remote access as an export event in itself.&nbsp;It passed the House in January. It has not moved in the Senate since.&nbsp;The delay is not simple obstruction. Redefining remote access as export has consequences well beyond China. Cloud computing is sold on the premise that the physical location of the machine is irrelevant to the customer. A rule that makes location determinative would require American cloud providers to identify the ultimate controller of every workload on restricted hardware, worldwide, and to refuse service on that basis.&nbsp;That is an enforcement burden of a different order from checking a shipping manifest, and it lands on companies that are themselves among the largest buyers of the chips in question.&nbsp;What It Means Beyond Washington&nbsp;For the rest of the world, the significant detail is that the fix under discussion does not stop at China.&nbsp;Any framework that treats compute access as a controlled export gives the United States a licensing decision over who may use American chips anywhere on earth, regardless of where those chips physically sit. Countries building sovereign AI capability on Nvidia hardware — which is very nearly all of them — would be operating inside that framework.&nbsp;India's own AI compute programme runs on Nvidia silicon, under the same statutory authority Washington used against China in 2022. So does most of Europe's, and the Gulf's.&nbsp;The Remote Access Security Act is aimed at one country. The instrument it creates would not be.&nbsp;The Underlying Problem&nbsp;Export controls assume a chokepoint. They work when the restricted thing is physical, traceable and has to cross a border.&nbsp;Compute has stopped behaving that way. It is rented by the hour, brokered through intermediaries, and consumed thousands of miles from where it is installed. A control regime built for cargo is being asked to police a utility.&nbsp;Kimi K3 is the evidence that the mismatch is not theoretical. Whatever hardware trained it, the weights are now published, downloadable, and running on machines their authors will never see.

US export controls bar Nvidia's top chips from Chinese companies but do not clearly cover renting the same chips abroad. A bill treating remote access as an export event passed the House in January and remains stalled in the Senate.

American export controls were written to stop Nvidia's most advanced chips reaching Chinese companies. They were written around the idea of a shipment. Buying a GB300 is prohibited. Renting time on one sitting in a data centre in a third country is a different transaction, and the rules do not clearly reach it. That gap is now the central problem in US technology policy, and Washington is moving to close it. The Accusation That Made It Concrete On July 22, Michael Kratsios, the White House director of science and technology policy, publicly accused Moonshot AI of obtaining servers fitted with Nvidia GB300 chips and routing training workloads through GB300-enabled infrastructure in Thailand. Kratsios said the arrangement violated ‘both US export regulations and the terms of service set by American AI developers’. The GB300 belongs to Nvidia's Blackwell generation and is explicitly barred from export to Chinese firms. Lower-tier parts such as the H200 have received exemptions. Nvidia did not comment on the White House statement. The timing was what gave the accusation its force. Days earlier, on July 27, Moonshot had released Kimi K3. The Model At The Centre Of It Kimi K3 is a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model, the largest ever released with open weights. It activates 16 of 896 experts at inference, handles a context window of one million tokens, and is built on a hybrid linear attention mechanism the company calls Kimi Delta Attention. Its benchmark position is the part Washington noticed. On LMArena's Frontend Code evaluation, conducted through blind developer testing, K3 placed first at 1,679 points — ahead of Anthropic's Claude Fable 5. On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scored 57.11, fourth overall behind Claude Fable 5 at 59.86 and two configurations of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol. Moonshot's own assessment was more modest, placing K3 behind Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on overall performance while ahead of every other system it tested, including Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5. A Chinese laboratory, operating under a chip embargo, released open weights that beat the best American model on a blind coding evaluation and sit within three points of it overall. That is the outcome the export controls were designed to prevent. Why Renting Is Not Buying The controls regulate the movement of goods. A chip that never leaves a data centre in Thailand or Malaysia has not been exported to China in any sense the regulation recognises, even if every workload it runs originates in Beijing. Several Chinese firms have reportedly reached restricted compute this way, through facilities across Southeast Asia. Reports indicate Kimi K3's training drew on roughly 20,000 Nvidia chips accessed through Alibaba's infrastructure. The Bureau of Industry and Security is now examining whether Chinese entities bypassed restrictions using overseas subsidiaries or third-party cloud providers. That inquiry is about structure rather than smuggling: not who moved a chip, but who controlled the workload running on it. The Bill That Would Close It The legislative answer is the Remote Access Security Act, which would extend export controls to cover cloud-based access to restricted hardware — treating remote access as an export event in itself. It passed the House in January. It has not moved in the Senate since. The delay is not simple obstruction. Redefining remote access as export has consequences well beyond China. Cloud computing is sold on the premise that the physical location of the machine is irrelevant to the customer. A rule that makes location determinative would require American cloud providers to identify the ultimate controller of every workload on restricted hardware, worldwide, and to refuse service on that basis. That is an enforcement burden of a different order from checking a shipping manifest, and it lands on companies that are themselves among the largest buyers of the chips in question. What It Means Beyond Washington For the rest of the world, the significant detail is that the fix under discussion does not stop at China. Any framework that treats compute access as a controlled export gives the United States a licensing decision over who may use American chips anywhere on earth, regardless of where those chips physically sit. Countries building sovereign AI capability on Nvidia hardware — which is very nearly all of them — would be operating inside that framework. India's own AI compute programme runs on Nvidia silicon, under the same statutory authority Washington used against China in 2022. So does most of Europe's, and the Gulf's. The Remote Access Security Act is aimed at one country. The instrument it creates would not be. The Underlying Problem Export controls assume a chokepoint. They work when the restricted thing is physical, traceable and has to cross a border. Compute has stopped behaving that way. It is rented by the hour, brokered through intermediaries, and consumed thousands of miles from where it is installed. A control regime built for cargo is being asked to police a utility. Kimi K3 is the evidence that the mismatch is not theoretical. Whatever hardware trained it, the weights are now published, downloadable, and running on machines their authors will never see.

US export controls bar Nvidia's most advanced chips from being sold to Chinese companies. They do not clearly cover renting the same chips through data centres in third countries. A bill that would treat remote access as an export event passed the House in January and is still waiting on the Senate, while the Bureau of Industry and Security examines whether Chinese firms reached restricted hardware through overseas subsidiaries and third-party cloud.

US banned its best chips from China. Renting them is still legal

A Chinese military proposal envisions disputed islands in the South China Sea to be surrounded by autonomous drones, machines that could detect, disrupt and even attack hostile forces. 


China plans autonomous drone forts to guard disputed South China Sea islands 

#Gravitas A Chinese military proposal envisions disputed islands in the South China Sea to be surrounded by autonomous drones, machines that could detect, disrupt and even attack hostile forces. 


China plans robot forts against America on South China Sea islands

A new Reuters investigation reveals that China's Unitree Robotics, now a global leader in robot dogs and humanoids, built its most successful designs on innovations originally funded by the US military. Unitree's $1,600 Go2 model reportedly matches, almost to the millimetre, a robot called Mini Cheetah developed under the US Army's DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory program


Unitree's Robot dogs drew on US military-funded research: Report

China has cut its holdings of U.S. treasury securities to 633.4 billion dollars in June, down nearly 26 billion dollars from May. That is the lowest level since September 2008, nearly 18 years ago.


Global US dollar holdings decline

China's economic narrative is undergoing a structural shift as consumption momentum moves beyond traditional Tier-1 mega-cities and spills over into lower-tier markets, smaller towns, and rural regions.


China's consumption story is moving beyond the big cities

China's Unitree has unveiled a new high-speed humanoid robot dubbed “Superman,” just days before becoming the first general-purpose robotics company to list on mainland China's stock market. The company, the world's largest humanoid robot maker by sales, raised 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million) in its Shanghai IPO.

China: Unitree robot hits a top speed 12.66 metres per second

World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency venture linked to U.S. President Donald Trump and his family, is partnering with Hong Kong-based AI platform WorldClaw. The deal is drawing scrutiny because WorldClaw offers access to AI models developed by Chinese technology firms that have faced U.S. national security and intellectual property concerns.

Trump-linked crypto firm works with Hong Kong AI platform

Germany's automotive sector shed 42,300 jobs over the past year, pushing employment to its lowest level since 2005. Carmakers like Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz are grappling with falling China profits and growing competition from Chinese EV brands gaining ground across Europe.


China competition hits Germany's car industry hard: Employment at 20-year low 

China’s yuan is steadily expanding its influence across Africa, moving beyond trade settlements into banking, debt financing, investment, and even tax collection systems. As Beijing strengthens financial links with African economies, it is also building the infrastructure needed to support wider yuan adoption. The shift reflects growing efforts by several countries to diversify away from the U.S. dollar and deepen economic ties with China. Could the yuan emerge as Africa’s leading alternative currency for trade and finance?

Yuan builds a financial foothold in Africa 

Taiwan is determined to strengthen its defences and plans record defence ‌spending next year, President Lai Ching-te said on Monday, describing his government's military budget proposal as an investment in peace.

Taiwan's cabinet will unveil next year's budget on Thursday, including a breakdown of where defence spending will go, but Lai confirmed media reports ​that 2027's overall defence budget would exceed T$1 trillion ($31.40 billion) for the first time.


Taiwan’s defence spending to cross $31 billion in 2027 

Nitesh Tiwari's much-anticipated "Ramayana" is set for a major international leap, releasing in China this November under the title "Ramayana: The Legend of the Prince." Sony Pictures will distribute the film, marking a big moment nearly a decade after Tiwari's "Dangal" won over Chinese audiences. The Chinese version will reportedly run 33 minutes shorter to comply with local content regulations. Starring Ranbir Kapoor as Ram, Yash as Ravana, and Sai Pallavi as Sita, "Ramayana: Part 1" releases November 6 internationally, and November 8 in India around Diwali.


Nitesh Tiwari's 'Ramayana' set for major release in China 

Nitesh Tiwari's 'Ramayana' set for major China release, renamed 'Legend of the Prince'

The US-China AI rivalry has taken a sharper turn, with Washington preparing to tell 35 countries, including Japan, South Korea, and Australia, that they can't have it both ways. A draft State Department letter warns that joining China's new World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation would mean exclusion from the American-led Pax Silica coalition, which covers AI models, chips, and critical minerals.


US tells 35 countries: Pick us or China in the global AI race

Two of America's largest technology companies released open-weight AI models within a day of each other this week. The notable part is not the models. It is that the effort is being described, openly, as catching up to China.&nbsp;What Happened&nbsp;Meta unveiled Muse Glimmer on Monday — a 30-billion-parameter model under Apache 2.0 that runs on a single consumer GPU — alongside a Zuckerberg essay committing to open the weights of Muse Spark 1.2 as well.&nbsp;Nvidia followed a day later with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open mixture-of-experts model with 30 billion total parameters and roughly 3 billion active per token, built for the execution layer of long-running agents.&nbsp;Box chief executive Aaron Levie, a signatory to an industry letter on open models, characterised the moment as planting ‘a very firm flag in the ground that America will have near-frontier open-source models.’&nbsp;Read that phrasing carefully. Not the best open models. Near-frontier ones. And a flag planted is an intention stated, not a position held.&nbsp;Who Is Actually Ahead&nbsp;The candour is warranted, because the open-weight field is currently led by Chinese laboratories and not by a small margin.&nbsp;Moonshot AI released Kimi K3's complete weights on July 27 — 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weight release in history, free to download and modify. Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max carries 2.4 trillion parameters and claims a 16-day autonomous coding run. DeepSeek's V4 Flash reaches within two percentage points of Claude Opus 4.7 on coding benchmarks at roughly one per cent of the cost. ByteDance is reported to be pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters.&nbsp;In mid-July, six of the top ten models on independent leaderboards were Chinese, including all of the top five.&nbsp;Against that, a 30-billion-parameter model from Meta and a 30-billion-parameter model from Nvidia are useful contributions rather than a change in the standings. Both companies still have to demonstrate there is an audience for their offerings in a market where developers have already built on Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek.&nbsp;Why It Matters Beyond Bragging Rights&nbsp;Open weights determine which models the next generation of developers builds on, and that has consequences that compound.&nbsp;A developer who downloads a model, fine-tunes it and ships a product on top of it has made a commitment that is expensive to reverse. Universities teach on what is available. Startups build on what is free. The ecosystem that forms around a model — the tooling, the tutorials, the fine-tunes, the accumulated institutional knowledge — is considerably more durable than any single benchmark result.&nbsp;That is the position American open-weight releases are trying to contest, and the reason both Meta and Nvidia have commercial logic for doing so despite giving the models away. Meta earns through advertising on its own platforms and benefits from commoditising what rivals sell. Nvidia sells the hardware every open model runs on, so free capable models generate demand for exactly what it makes.&nbsp;The Policy Fight Underneath&nbsp;There is a regulatory dimension that gives the timing urgency.&nbsp;On July 24, more than 20 US technology companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to place early restrictions on open-weight AI — explicitly including models built through distillation.&nbsp;That last clause is doing a lot of work. Three weeks earlier, White House science director Michael Kratsios had accused Moonshot AI of covertly distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build Kimi K3, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that ‘open source is not open season on American IP’ and that sanctions were on the table.&nbsp;So American technology companies are lobbying to protect the same practice their own government is threatening to sanction a Chinese laboratory over — because restricting distillation would constrain American open-weight efforts at precisely the moment they are trying to catch up. Zuckerberg's essay defends distillation explicitly, and Muse Glimmer is itself distilled from Meta's closed Muse Spark.&nbsp;The uncomfortable position is that the tool America needs to compete in open weights is the tool America is accusing China of misusing.

Meta released Muse Glimmer and Nvidia followed with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning a day later, both open-weight catch-up moves in a field led by Chinese labs. Box CEO Aaron Levie called it planting 'a very firm flag' that America will have near-frontier open-source models.

Two of America's largest technology companies released open-weight AI models within a day of each other this week. The notable part is not the models. It is that the effort is being described, openly, as catching up to China. What Happened Meta unveiled Muse Glimmer on Monday — a 30-billion-parameter model under Apache 2.0 that runs on a single consumer GPU — alongside a Zuckerberg essay committing to open the weights of Muse Spark 1.2 as well. Nvidia followed a day later with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning, an open mixture-of-experts model with 30 billion total parameters and roughly 3 billion active per token, built for the execution layer of long-running agents. Box chief executive Aaron Levie, a signatory to an industry letter on open models, characterised the moment as planting ‘a very firm flag in the ground that America will have near-frontier open-source models.’ Read that phrasing carefully. Not the best open models. Near-frontier ones. And a flag planted is an intention stated, not a position held. Who Is Actually Ahead The candour is warranted, because the open-weight field is currently led by Chinese laboratories and not by a small margin. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3's complete weights on July 27 — 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weight release in history, free to download and modify. Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max carries 2.4 trillion parameters and claims a 16-day autonomous coding run. DeepSeek's V4 Flash reaches within two percentage points of Claude Opus 4.7 on coding benchmarks at roughly one per cent of the cost. ByteDance is reported to be pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters. In mid-July, six of the top ten models on independent leaderboards were Chinese, including all of the top five. Against that, a 30-billion-parameter model from Meta and a 30-billion-parameter model from Nvidia are useful contributions rather than a change in the standings. Both companies still have to demonstrate there is an audience for their offerings in a market where developers have already built on Kimi, Qwen and DeepSeek. Why It Matters Beyond Bragging Rights Open weights determine which models the next generation of developers builds on, and that has consequences that compound. A developer who downloads a model, fine-tunes it and ships a product on top of it has made a commitment that is expensive to reverse. Universities teach on what is available. Startups build on what is free. The ecosystem that forms around a model — the tooling, the tutorials, the fine-tunes, the accumulated institutional knowledge — is considerably more durable than any single benchmark result. That is the position American open-weight releases are trying to contest, and the reason both Meta and Nvidia have commercial logic for doing so despite giving the models away. Meta earns through advertising on its own platforms and benefits from commoditising what rivals sell. Nvidia sells the hardware every open model runs on, so free capable models generate demand for exactly what it makes. The Policy Fight Underneath There is a regulatory dimension that gives the timing urgency. On July 24, more than 20 US technology companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to place early restrictions on open-weight AI — explicitly including models built through distillation. That last clause is doing a lot of work. Three weeks earlier, White House science director Michael Kratsios had accused Moonshot AI of covertly distilling Anthropic's Fable model to build Kimi K3, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warning that ‘open source is not open season on American IP’ and that sanctions were on the table. So American technology companies are lobbying to protect the same practice their own government is threatening to sanction a Chinese laboratory over — because restricting distillation would constrain American open-weight efforts at precisely the moment they are trying to catch up. Zuckerberg's essay defends distillation explicitly, and Muse Glimmer is itself distilled from Meta's closed Muse Spark. The uncomfortable position is that the tool America needs to compete in open weights is the tool America is accusing China of misusing.

Meta released Muse Glimmer on Monday and Nvidia followed with Nemotron 3.5 Lightning a day later, both open-weight. The framing in the coverage is unusually candid: China is well ahead in open-weight models, and these are catch-up moves. Box chief executive Aaron Levie described the releases as planting ‘a very firm flag’ that America will have near-frontier open-source models.

America is losing the open-weight aI race and Meta and Nvidia just admitted it

China's push into humanoid robotics has hit the streets, literally. The city of Wuhu in Anhui Province has officially deployed "Wuyou Zhijing R001," a humanoid robot traffic officer, to assist human police at busy intersections. Dressed in a police uniform and cap, the robot uses a 360-degree camera, LiDAR, and millimeter-wave radar to direct traffic with standard hand gestures, issue voice warnings, and flag violations like jaywalking or missing helmets.


China's humanoid robot joins Wuhu's traffic police force

Meta bought an AI company for $2 billion. China told it to give the company back. Meta is giving the company back.&nbsp;What Happened&nbsp;Manus announced this week that it will soon resume operating as an independent company, completing the unwinding of its acquisition by Meta.&nbsp;The sequence began last December, when Meta announced it had acquired Manus — a developer of general-purpose AI agents, founded in China in 2022 and subsequently relocated to Singapore. The deal drew immediate scrutiny in both Beijing and Washington, with Chinese officials examining whether it violated the country's rules on foreign investment.&nbsp;In April, China's National Development and Reform Commission issued its decision, instructing the parties to withdraw the transaction. Meta has since cut Manus staff off from its internal data systems and barred its own employees from using Manus tools, working through the operational separation.&nbsp;The Precedent That Matters&nbsp;The significant part is not the deal itself but the principle the NDRC established in killing it.&nbsp;Manus had relocated from China to Singapore before the acquisition. That structure — incorporating offshore while the underlying technology and engineering talent remain Chinese in origin — is common enough that critics have a name for it: Singapore washing. The assumption behind it is that a company outside Chinese jurisdiction can be sold to a foreign buyer without Beijing's approval.&nbsp;The NDRC's ruling made clear that assumption does not hold. Where the technology and the talent originated in China, offshore incorporation does not shield a transaction from Chinese authority.&nbsp;For every Chinese-founded AI company that has restructured through Singapore, Dubai or Delaware, that is a material change in what is possible. And for every American acquirer evaluating one of them, it introduces a regulatory approval nobody had priced in.&nbsp;What Happens To Manus Now&nbsp;The unwinding has set off a complicated scramble over who ends up owning the company.&nbsp;Co-founders Xiao Hong, Ji Yichao and Zhang Tao have explored raising roughly $1 billion to buy the company back. Tencent is separately reported to be in discussions for a controlling stake.&nbsp;Those are quite different futures. A founder buyback returns Manus to independence. A Tencent stake places one of China's largest technology companies in control of a general-purpose AI agent business — which, given the NDRC's evident interest in keeping the technology within Chinese reach, is an outcome consistent with the ruling's logic.&nbsp;The Wider Frame&nbsp;This sits inside a broader contest over who controls AI technology as it crosses borders, and the striking thing is that it runs in both directions.&nbsp;Washington has spent this year restricting the flow of AI capability out of the United States: banning imports of new Chinese humanoid robots, accusing Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's model with sanctions threatened, and now reviewing how Chinese firms rent Nvidia compute located in third countries because they cannot buy the chips outright.&nbsp;Beijing is doing the same in reverse, and this is the clearest demonstration to date. It did not block a Chinese company from buying foreign technology. It blocked a foreign company from buying Chinese technology, and made a $2 billion completed transaction come apart eight months after it closed.&nbsp;Both governments have arrived at the same conclusion: that AI capability is strategic in a way that overrides ordinary commercial freedom. The Manus unwinding is what that looks like when it is enforced rather than announced.

Manus, acquired by Meta for $2 billion last December, is returning to independence after China's NDRC ordered the deal withdrawn. The ruling established that offshore incorporation does not shield a company from Beijing when its technology and talent originated in China.

Meta bought an AI company for $2 billion. China told it to give the company back. Meta is giving the company back. What Happened Manus announced this week that it will soon resume operating as an independent company, completing the unwinding of its acquisition by Meta. The sequence began last December, when Meta announced it had acquired Manus — a developer of general-purpose AI agents, founded in China in 2022 and subsequently relocated to Singapore. The deal drew immediate scrutiny in both Beijing and Washington, with Chinese officials examining whether it violated the country's rules on foreign investment. In April, China's National Development and Reform Commission issued its decision, instructing the parties to withdraw the transaction. Meta has since cut Manus staff off from its internal data systems and barred its own employees from using Manus tools, working through the operational separation. The Precedent That Matters The significant part is not the deal itself but the principle the NDRC established in killing it. Manus had relocated from China to Singapore before the acquisition. That structure — incorporating offshore while the underlying technology and engineering talent remain Chinese in origin — is common enough that critics have a name for it: Singapore washing. The assumption behind it is that a company outside Chinese jurisdiction can be sold to a foreign buyer without Beijing's approval. The NDRC's ruling made clear that assumption does not hold. Where the technology and the talent originated in China, offshore incorporation does not shield a transaction from Chinese authority. For every Chinese-founded AI company that has restructured through Singapore, Dubai or Delaware, that is a material change in what is possible. And for every American acquirer evaluating one of them, it introduces a regulatory approval nobody had priced in. What Happens To Manus Now The unwinding has set off a complicated scramble over who ends up owning the company. Co-founders Xiao Hong, Ji Yichao and Zhang Tao have explored raising roughly $1 billion to buy the company back. Tencent is separately reported to be in discussions for a controlling stake. Those are quite different futures. A founder buyback returns Manus to independence. A Tencent stake places one of China's largest technology companies in control of a general-purpose AI agent business — which, given the NDRC's evident interest in keeping the technology within Chinese reach, is an outcome consistent with the ruling's logic. The Wider Frame This sits inside a broader contest over who controls AI technology as it crosses borders, and the striking thing is that it runs in both directions. Washington has spent this year restricting the flow of AI capability out of the United States: banning imports of new Chinese humanoid robots, accusing Moonshot AI of distilling Anthropic's model with sanctions threatened, and now reviewing how Chinese firms rent Nvidia compute located in third countries because they cannot buy the chips outright. Beijing is doing the same in reverse, and this is the clearest demonstration to date. It did not block a Chinese company from buying foreign technology. It blocked a foreign company from buying Chinese technology, and made a $2 billion completed transaction come apart eight months after it closed. Both governments have arrived at the same conclusion: that AI capability is strategic in a way that overrides ordinary commercial freedom. The Manus unwinding is what that looks like when it is enforced rather than announced.

Manus, the AI agent startup Meta acquired last December for $2 billion, is returning to independent operation after China's National Development and Reform Commission ordered the transaction withdrawn. The ruling established that relocating a company offshore does not put it beyond Beijing's reach when the technology and talent originated in China.

Beijing forced Meta to unwind a $2 billion acquisition and it worked

The White House has dropped a bombshell trade report, accusing over 40 countries, including Mexico, Canada, India, and the EU, of helping China dodge US tariffs through what it calls "The Great Transshipment Scam." Goods are allegedly relabeled or lightly processed in these countries before reaching American shores at lower duty rates.


US accuses 40+ countries of helping China evade tariffs 

Christopher Nolan's epic The Odyssey has officially released in mainland China, opening on more than 20,000 screens. The film is also playing across nearly 90% of China's IMAX network, with previews and presales already crossing $13.5 million (RMB 91 million) ahead of its launch.

Nolan's 'The Odyssey' opens on 20,000 screens in China

Chinese AI laboratories have spent two years being compared to American ones. Alibaba has now made the comparison itself, and named the model it says it matches.&nbsp;The Claim&nbsp;Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max positioning it as a leading platform for software development and collaborative work, and stating that the model can compete with the best American AI systems — naming Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 specifically.&nbsp;Qwen3.8-Max is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.4 trillion total parameters, of which roughly 95 billion activate for any given inference, carrying a one-million-token context window.&nbsp;Its headline demonstration is autonomy. Alibaba says the model ran continuously for more than 16 days on a software engineering project, beginning from an empty repository and producing an open-sourced framework called oh-my-cli. Before writing the software it had been asked to write, it built its own coding harness — a state machine, a dispatcher and a testing loop — the scaffolding an AI agent would normally be given by the engineers deploying it.&nbsp;Why Naming A Competitor Matters&nbsp;Chinese laboratories have historically described their models in absolute terms — parameter counts, benchmark scores, context windows — while leaving comparisons to outside observers.&nbsp;Naming a specific American flagship is a different posture. It converts a capability claim into a testable proposition and invites direct comparison rather than avoiding it. That is the behaviour of a company that expects the comparison to go well, and it reflects a shift in confidence that the leaderboard results this quarter go some way toward justifying.&nbsp;In mid-July, six of the top ten models on independent rankings were Chinese, including all of the top five. Real companies have acted on that: Airbnb uses Alibaba's Qwen for customer service, the coding startup Cursor built its Composer 2 model on Moonshot's Kimi, and Coinbase halved its AI spending by moving employees onto Kimi and Z.ai's GLM.&nbsp;The Verification Problem&nbsp;The claim deserves the same scrutiny any vendor claim does, and in this case there is a specific reason for it.&nbsp;The 16-day autonomy run is entirely vendor-reported. Alibaba designed the task, conducted the run and published the result. No independent party has replicated a comparable session, and the nature of the demonstration makes verification difficult — testing it would require running an equivalent multi-week project under equivalent conditions.&nbsp;The New Stack characterised the release pointedly as ‘an API business model wearing an open source jacket’, a reference to the gap between open-weight positioning and how the model is actually accessed and monetised.&nbsp;The industry also has fresh reason for caution on self-reported numbers generally. Meta's former chief AI scientist confirmed that Llama 4's headline results were assembled by training multiple checkpoints and publishing the best score from each benchmark as a composite no single model achieved. Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 has an unresolved gap between its claimed 80.0 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and the 69.29 an independent evaluator measured.&nbsp;The Competitive Picture&nbsp;Qwen3.8-Max is one of several Chinese releases compressed into a few weeks. Moonshot AI published Kimi K3's full weights on July 27 — 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weight release in history. DeepSeek released V4 Flash on July 31, scoring within two percentage points of Claude Opus 4.7 on SWE-bench Verified at roughly one per cent of the cost. ByteDance is reported to be pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters using around 30,000 GPUs.&nbsp;Each competes on a different axis — Kimi on openness, DeepSeek on price, ByteDance on raw scale, Qwen on autonomy. Between them they cover most of the dimensions on which American laboratories have claimed advantage.&nbsp;Alibaba naming Claude Fable 5 is the clearest signal yet that Chinese labs no longer regard themselves as following. Whether the claim survives independent testing is the question — and the fact that it can now be tested at all is itself the change.

Alibaba positioned Qwen3.8-Max as competitive with the strongest American systems, naming Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 specifically. The 2.4-trillion-parameter model follows a quarter in which Chinese labs briefly held six of the top ten leaderboard places.

Chinese AI laboratories have spent two years being compared to American ones. Alibaba has now made the comparison itself, and named the model it says it matches. The Claim Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max positioning it as a leading platform for software development and collaborative work, and stating that the model can compete with the best American AI systems — naming Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 specifically. Qwen3.8-Max is a mixture-of-experts model with 2.4 trillion total parameters, of which roughly 95 billion activate for any given inference, carrying a one-million-token context window. Its headline demonstration is autonomy. Alibaba says the model ran continuously for more than 16 days on a software engineering project, beginning from an empty repository and producing an open-sourced framework called oh-my-cli. Before writing the software it had been asked to write, it built its own coding harness — a state machine, a dispatcher and a testing loop — the scaffolding an AI agent would normally be given by the engineers deploying it. Why Naming A Competitor Matters Chinese laboratories have historically described their models in absolute terms — parameter counts, benchmark scores, context windows — while leaving comparisons to outside observers. Naming a specific American flagship is a different posture. It converts a capability claim into a testable proposition and invites direct comparison rather than avoiding it. That is the behaviour of a company that expects the comparison to go well, and it reflects a shift in confidence that the leaderboard results this quarter go some way toward justifying. In mid-July, six of the top ten models on independent rankings were Chinese, including all of the top five. Real companies have acted on that: Airbnb uses Alibaba's Qwen for customer service, the coding startup Cursor built its Composer 2 model on Moonshot's Kimi, and Coinbase halved its AI spending by moving employees onto Kimi and Z.ai's GLM. The Verification Problem The claim deserves the same scrutiny any vendor claim does, and in this case there is a specific reason for it. The 16-day autonomy run is entirely vendor-reported. Alibaba designed the task, conducted the run and published the result. No independent party has replicated a comparable session, and the nature of the demonstration makes verification difficult — testing it would require running an equivalent multi-week project under equivalent conditions. The New Stack characterised the release pointedly as ‘an API business model wearing an open source jacket’, a reference to the gap between open-weight positioning and how the model is actually accessed and monetised. The industry also has fresh reason for caution on self-reported numbers generally. Meta's former chief AI scientist confirmed that Llama 4's headline results were assembled by training multiple checkpoints and publishing the best score from each benchmark as a composite no single model achieved. Meta's Muse Spark 1.1 has an unresolved gap between its claimed 80.0 on Terminal-Bench 2.1 and the 69.29 an independent evaluator measured. The Competitive Picture Qwen3.8-Max is one of several Chinese releases compressed into a few weeks. Moonshot AI published Kimi K3's full weights on July 27 — 2.8 trillion parameters, the largest open-weight release in history. DeepSeek released V4 Flash on July 31, scoring within two percentage points of Claude Opus 4.7 on SWE-bench Verified at roughly one per cent of the cost. ByteDance is reported to be pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters using around 30,000 GPUs. Each competes on a different axis — Kimi on openness, DeepSeek on price, ByteDance on raw scale, Qwen on autonomy. Between them they cover most of the dimensions on which American laboratories have claimed advantage. Alibaba naming Claude Fable 5 is the clearest signal yet that Chinese labs no longer regard themselves as following. Whether the claim survives independent testing is the question — and the fact that it can now be tested at all is itself the change.

Alibaba has positioned Qwen3.8-Max as competitive with the strongest American AI systems, naming Anthropic's Claude Fable 5 specifically. The 2.4-trillion-parameter model is pitched at software development and collaborative work, and follows a quarter in which Chinese laboratories briefly held six of the top ten places on independent leaderboards.

Alibaba says its new model matches Anthropic's best and names it

American export controls stopped Chinese companies buying the most advanced Nvidia chips. They did not stop Chinese companies using them, and Washington has now begun examining exactly how.&nbsp;The Review&nbsp;The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is reviewing how Chinese artificial intelligence firms acquire and access Nvidia chips overseas — specifically by renting computing capacity located in other countries, according to reporting by Bloomberg.&nbsp;The trigger, by that account, was a run of technical results from Chinese laboratories that made plain their access to cutting-edge hardware despite Washington's restrictions.&nbsp;The Loophole Being Examined&nbsp;Export controls are written around the physical movement of goods. A chip sold to an entity in a restricted country is a transaction that can be blocked, traced and penalised.&nbsp;Renting compute is a different transaction entirely. If a Chinese company accesses a data centre in a third country through a cloud arrangement, the chips never move, never enter China, and never change ownership. What crosses the border is network traffic. Whether that constitutes an export at all is precisely the question the review has to resolve.&nbsp;This is not the first attempt to close the gap. In May, the Commerce Department moved against a related loophole — the export of advanced processors, including Nvidia's Rubin and Blackwell chips and AMD's MI350x, to Chinese-owned entities located outside China. That action addressed ownership. The current review addresses use.&nbsp;What Prompted It&nbsp;The results that drew attention have been substantial and public.&nbsp;Moonshot AI released Kimi K3's full weights on July 27 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model, the largest ever published as an open download. Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max, at 2.4 trillion parameters, reportedly ran autonomously on a software project for more than 16 consecutive days. DeepSeek's V4 Flash reaches within two percentage points of Claude Opus 4.7 on SWE-bench Verified at roughly one per cent of the cost. ByteDance is reported to be pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters, requiring around 30,000 GPUs.&nbsp;In mid-July, six of the top ten models on independent leaderboards were Chinese, including all of the top five.&nbsp;Models at that scale require enormous quantities of advanced compute. The gap between what export controls were meant to prevent and what Chinese laboratories have demonstrably achieved is what the review exists to explain.&nbsp;The Nvidia Position&nbsp;Nvidia sits uncomfortably in the middle. Chief executive Jensen Huang met Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in late July, amid administration scrutiny of potential violations involving Nvidia chip exports to China.&nbsp;The company's commercial interest is straightforward: China is among the largest markets for AI compute in the world, and every restriction narrows it. Nvidia has consistently argued that export controls which exclude American hardware from a market do not eliminate demand — they redirect it toward domestic Chinese alternatives, accelerating exactly the self-sufficiency the controls are meant to delay.&nbsp;There is evidence in both directions. Chinese memory manufacturers CXMT and YMTC are expanding aggressively, and Acer, Asus and HP have begun using CXMT's DRAM in notebooks as the AI boom consumes Western supply. At the same time, the White House accused Moonshot AI in July of accessing banned Nvidia GB300 servers in Thailand — an allegation that, if accurate, suggests demand for American hardware has not redirected at all, merely relocated.&nbsp;What Follows&nbsp;Restricting remote access is considerably harder than restricting shipments. It would mean regulating who may log into a data centre in a third country, requiring cloud providers worldwide to verify the nationality and ownership of their customers, and enforcing that against jurisdictions with no obligation to cooperate.&nbsp;The alternative is accepting that in a world where compute is a service rather than a product, controls written for physical goods will keep leaking.&nbsp;The review has not produced a rule, and BIS reviews do not always produce rules. But the fact that Washington is now mapping how China rents what it cannot buy indicates the export-control fight has moved to different ground — and to a place where the existing tools were not designed to operate.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is reviewing how Chinese AI firms access Nvidia chips by renting computing power located abroad, Bloomberg reports — triggered by Chinese technical breakthroughs that demonstrated access despite export restrictions.

American export controls stopped Chinese companies buying the most advanced Nvidia chips. They did not stop Chinese companies using them, and Washington has now begun examining exactly how. The Review The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is reviewing how Chinese artificial intelligence firms acquire and access Nvidia chips overseas — specifically by renting computing capacity located in other countries, according to reporting by Bloomberg. The trigger, by that account, was a run of technical results from Chinese laboratories that made plain their access to cutting-edge hardware despite Washington's restrictions. The Loophole Being Examined Export controls are written around the physical movement of goods. A chip sold to an entity in a restricted country is a transaction that can be blocked, traced and penalised. Renting compute is a different transaction entirely. If a Chinese company accesses a data centre in a third country through a cloud arrangement, the chips never move, never enter China, and never change ownership. What crosses the border is network traffic. Whether that constitutes an export at all is precisely the question the review has to resolve. This is not the first attempt to close the gap. In May, the Commerce Department moved against a related loophole — the export of advanced processors, including Nvidia's Rubin and Blackwell chips and AMD's MI350x, to Chinese-owned entities located outside China. That action addressed ownership. The current review addresses use. What Prompted It The results that drew attention have been substantial and public. Moonshot AI released Kimi K3's full weights on July 27 — a 2.8-trillion-parameter model, the largest ever published as an open download. Alibaba's Qwen3.8-Max, at 2.4 trillion parameters, reportedly ran autonomously on a software project for more than 16 consecutive days. DeepSeek's V4 Flash reaches within two percentage points of Claude Opus 4.7 on SWE-bench Verified at roughly one per cent of the cost. ByteDance is reported to be pre-training a model of up to 10 trillion parameters, requiring around 30,000 GPUs. In mid-July, six of the top ten models on independent leaderboards were Chinese, including all of the top five. Models at that scale require enormous quantities of advanced compute. The gap between what export controls were meant to prevent and what Chinese laboratories have demonstrably achieved is what the review exists to explain. The Nvidia Position Nvidia sits uncomfortably in the middle. Chief executive Jensen Huang met Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in late July, amid administration scrutiny of potential violations involving Nvidia chip exports to China. The company's commercial interest is straightforward: China is among the largest markets for AI compute in the world, and every restriction narrows it. Nvidia has consistently argued that export controls which exclude American hardware from a market do not eliminate demand — they redirect it toward domestic Chinese alternatives, accelerating exactly the self-sufficiency the controls are meant to delay. There is evidence in both directions. Chinese memory manufacturers CXMT and YMTC are expanding aggressively, and Acer, Asus and HP have begun using CXMT's DRAM in notebooks as the AI boom consumes Western supply. At the same time, the White House accused Moonshot AI in July of accessing banned Nvidia GB300 servers in Thailand — an allegation that, if accurate, suggests demand for American hardware has not redirected at all, merely relocated. What Follows Restricting remote access is considerably harder than restricting shipments. It would mean regulating who may log into a data centre in a third country, requiring cloud providers worldwide to verify the nationality and ownership of their customers, and enforcing that against jurisdictions with no obligation to cooperate. The alternative is accepting that in a world where compute is a service rather than a product, controls written for physical goods will keep leaking. The review has not produced a rule, and BIS reviews do not always produce rules. But the fact that Washington is now mapping how China rents what it cannot buy indicates the export-control fight has moved to different ground — and to a place where the existing tools were not designed to operate.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security is reviewing how Chinese AI companies obtain access to Nvidia chips by renting computing power located outside China, according to Bloomberg. The review follows a run of Chinese technical breakthroughs that demonstrated access to advanced hardware despite export restrictions.

Washington is now mapping how China rents the Nvidia chips it cannot buy

Tibetans in exile are mounting a global protest against China's newly enforced "Ethnic Unity and Progress Law," which they say is designed to erase Tibetan identity and force cultural assimilation. Organized by the Tibetan Youth Congress, a 49-day chain hunger strike is underway in Dharamshala, with parallel marches and hunger strikes held in Himachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and cities worldwide.


Tibetans in exile on hunger strike, oppose China's ethnic unity law

The Trump administration on Thursday (August 13) flagged more than 40 US trading partners as potential risks for helping China evade US tariffs. The administration also said it would use artificial intelligence to identify illegal trade practices in the future.&nbsp;The countries named in the report include the European Union, Taiwan, Mexico and Canada. India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam were also among those listed.&nbsp;The White House report focused on what it called "illegal transhipment". This practice involves sending goods through a third country with lower US tariffs to avoid higher duties imposed by President Donald Trump.&nbsp;"For years, the great transhipment scam has let Communist China launder its exports through more than 40 countries," White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told reporters.&nbsp;A report from Navarro's office said more than 40 countries faced an elevated risk of illegal transhipment. It also identified Mexico, Canada, the European Union, India, Japan and South Korea as "China’s biggest enablers".&nbsp;The report said some countries have become more closely connected to China-linked supply chains.&nbsp;&nbsp;Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/india-news/jharkhand-protest-police-book-600-protesters-over-assembly-march-in-ranchi-1786627463383">Jharkhand students protest: Police book 600 protesters over Assembly march in Ranchi</a><h2>US plans AI-powered border checks</h2>Navarro said the White House is working with US Customs and Border Protection to develop an AI-enabled "detective border". The system would help determine whether shipments contain goods that were rerouted through third countries.&nbsp;According to the report, the system would use shipment data, routing histories and other tools to identify potential cases of illegal transhipment.&nbsp;Experts have long pointed to supply chain diversions from China, particularly since Trump's first presidency, when Washington and Beijing became involved in a tariff war around 2018.&nbsp;Economists said countries such as Vietnam benefited as businesses diversified their supply chains.Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on US trading partners. These duties have added to existing tariffs on Chinese imports.

The Trump administration has flagged more than 40 trading partners, including India, as potential risks for helping China evade US tariffs and plans to use AI to detect illegal transshipment.

The Trump administration on Thursday (August 13) flagged more than 40 US trading partners as potential risks for helping China evade US tariffs. The administration also said it would use artificial intelligence to identify illegal trade practices in the future. The countries named in the report include the European Union, Taiwan, Mexico and Canada. India, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam were also among those listed. The White House report focused on what it called "illegal transhipment". This practice involves sending goods through a third country with lower US tariffs to avoid higher duties imposed by President Donald Trump. "For years, the great transhipment scam has let Communist China launder its exports through more than 40 countries," White House trade advisor Peter Navarro told reporters. A report from Navarro's office said more than 40 countries faced an elevated risk of illegal transhipment. It also identified Mexico, Canada, the European Union, India, Japan and South Korea as "China’s biggest enablers". The report said some countries have become more closely connected to China-linked supply chains. Also Read: Jharkhand students protest: Police book 600 protesters over Assembly march in Ranchi US plans AI-powered border checks Navarro said the White House is working with US Customs and Border Protection to develop an AI-enabled "detective border". The system would help determine whether shipments contain goods that were rerouted through third countries. According to the report, the system would use shipment data, routing histories and other tools to identify potential cases of illegal transhipment. Experts have long pointed to supply chain diversions from China, particularly since Trump's first presidency, when Washington and Beijing became involved in a tariff war around 2018. Economists said countries such as Vietnam benefited as businesses diversified their supply chains. Since returning to the White House last year, Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on US trading partners. These duties have added to existing tariffs on Chinese imports.

The Trump administration has flagged more than 40 trading partners, including India, as potential risks for helping China evade US tariffs and plans to use AI to detect illegal transshipment.

Trump admin deploys AI to track China tariff evasion; India, dozens of countries named

China and Indonesia just completed an unprecedented joint naval exercise in waters east of Taiwan, the first time Beijing has publicly trained with a foreign navy in this politically sensitive zone.


China-Indonesia's first-ever joint naval drill east of Taiwan draws Taipei's anger 

Viral AI video reimagines heaven with a Chinese touch.
Created by a Chinese man who learned AI on his own, the clip shows white jade bridges, floating temples, and grand palaces with curved roofs.
The video has gained widespread attention for blending traditional Chinese culture with AI-generated visuals.

"Heaven made in China": Optical shop owner masters AI and goes viral

Tensions are rising in the Indo-Pacific as Taiwan, the Philippines and other US-aligned partners push back against surprise missile launches and military drills. Taiwan has criticised planned China-Indonesia naval exercises near its eastern coast, while the Philippines has described a recent Chinese missile test as a reckless display. With around 40 countries calling for advance warnings before missile launches, concerns are growing over regional stability and the risk of miscalculation.


China’s missile tests spark global alarm as allies demand advance warnings

Former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji died on Wednesday at the age of 97 in Beijing. According to Chinese News agency Xinhua, he died of an unspecified illness at around 11:06 am in local time. Chinese state media honoured him in an obituary as a "loyal communist fighter" and an "outstanding leader," remembering his life as one of "revolution, struggle, and glory."&nbsp;He is widely regarded as the “free-marketeer” among the Chinese Communist Party and had been purged twice under Mao Zedong for criticising irrational economic planning. Western media celebrates him as a neo-liberal stalwart in the CCP who brought China into the World Trade Organisation in 2002 through gruelling negotiations. But he was more of a statist rather than a capitalist. He is widely recognised as the chief architect of modern Chinese state capitalism, shifting the country away from a traditional Soviet-style planned economy. He introduced the policy of "Zhuge Fangxiao", which meant selling off or closing smaller, inefficient local factories and moving local tax powers to the central government. He pushed government enterprises to act like a private one, to show profitability and punished those who failed to do so. He is remembered in China as a tough, pragmatic leader who delivered double-digit growth and rarely minced his words.Also Read: <a href="https://www.wionews.com/world/robert-gilman-released-russia-trump-putin-talks-1786469490294">Former US Marine Robert Gilman released by Russia without prisoner swap</a>His four volumes of speeches, which came out in 2011, had shocking references to "tofu dregs" flood dykes built by "parasites", and erring bankers labelled as "half-wits". It became a bestseller in the country. "Our country faces many potential crises that could ​erupt at any time," Zhu said early in 1998 as he was becoming the premier. “Ordinary people are discontent about us in many ways. Especially, there is corruption among officials, the gulf between rich and poor, and the way some local officials act like tyrants.” It provides a window into the deeper anxieties coursing through China as it approached a transition that ushered in Xi Jinping as leader.Zhu's tenure was not an unalloyed success. He was praised for fostering economic hyper-growth, but criticised for leaving structural imbalances, local debt issues, and factory closure fallout for his successors. However, the massive, state-controlled monopolies Zhu preserved formed the exact foundation that President Xi Jinping later used to strengthen state control over the economy.&nbsp;

Zhu Rongji dies, former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, Zhu Rongji economic reforms, China state capitalism, Zhu Rongji WTO, China economy, Chinese Communist Party, Zhu Rongji legacy, Xi Jinping, China economic reforms

Former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji died on Wednesday at the age of 97 in Beijing. According to Chinese News agency Xinhua, he died of an unspecified illness at around 11:06 am in local time. Chinese state media honoured him in an obituary as a "loyal communist fighter" and an "outstanding leader," remembering his life as one of "revolution, struggle, and glory." He is widely regarded as the “free-marketeer” among the Chinese Communist Party and had been purged twice under Mao Zedong for criticising irrational economic planning. Western media celebrates him as a neo-liberal stalwart in the CCP who brought China into the World Trade Organisation in 2002 through gruelling negotiations. But he was more of a statist rather than a capitalist. He is widely recognised as the chief architect of modern Chinese state capitalism, shifting the country away from a traditional Soviet-style planned economy. He introduced the policy of "Zhuge Fangxiao", which meant selling off or closing smaller, inefficient local factories and moving local tax powers to the central government. He pushed government enterprises to act like a private one, to show profitability and punished those who failed to do so. He is remembered in China as a tough, pragmatic leader who delivered double-digit growth and rarely minced his words. Also Read: Former US Marine Robert Gilman released by Russia without prisoner swap His four volumes of speeches, which came out in 2011, had shocking references to "tofu dregs" flood dykes built by "parasites", and erring bankers labelled as "half-wits". It became a bestseller in the country. "Our country faces many potential crises that could erupt at any time," Zhu said early in 1998 as he was becoming the premier. “Ordinary people are discontent about us in many ways. Especially, there is corruption among officials, the gulf between rich and poor, and the way some local officials act like tyrants.” It provides a window into the deeper anxieties coursing through China as it approached a transition that ushered in Xi Jinping as leader. Zhu's tenure was not an unalloyed success. He was praised for fostering economic hyper-growth, but criticised for leaving structural imbalances, local debt issues, and factory closure fallout for his successors. However, the massive, state-controlled monopolies Zhu preserved formed the exact foundation that President Xi Jinping later used to strengthen state control over the economy.

Zhu Rongji dies, former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji, Zhu Rongji economic reforms, China state capitalism, Zhu Rongji WTO, China economy, Chinese Communist Party, Zhu Rongji legacy, Xi Jinping, China economic reforms

Zhu Rongji dies at 97: How the former Chinese premier reshaped China’s economy

As Arctic ice retreats, China is turning a once-impenetrable frozen frontier into a potential new trade corridor.  A route that could slash sailing times between China and Europe, reduce dependence on crowded maritime chokepoints and give China a new strategic link to Western markets. China calls it the “Ice Silk Road.” 

 Russia, China, US are all eyeing the Arctic

Researchers in China are working on brain implants that could one day let paralysed patients control digital technology using nothing but their thoughts and, more importantly, without the need for open-brain surgery.

China claims 10-minute brain implant without skull surgery 

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US warns countries over China's rival AI framework

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Trump-linked crypto firm works with Hong Kong AI platform

China: Unitree robot hits a top speed 12.66 metres per second

China competition hits Germany's car industry hard: Employment at 20-year low

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Nitesh Tiwari's 'Ramayana' set for major release in China

Nitesh Tiwari's 'Ramayana' set for major China release, renamed 'Legend of the Prince'

US tells 35 countries: Pick us or China in the global AI race

America is losing the open-weight aI race and Meta and Nvidia just admitted it

China's humanoid robot joins Wuhu's traffic police force

Beijing forced Meta to unwind a $2 billion acquisition and it worked

US accuses 40+ countries of helping China evade tariffs

Nolan's 'The Odyssey' opens on 20,000 screens in China

Alibaba says its new model matches Anthropic's best and names it

Washington is now mapping how China rents the Nvidia chips it cannot buy

Tibetans in exile on hunger strike, oppose China's ethnic unity law

US deploys AI to track China tariff evasion; India, dozens of countries named

China-Indonesia's first-ever joint naval drill east of Taiwan draws Taipei's anger