Pure coincidence, surely: Saudi Arabia announced its withdrawal—which actually occurred last year—right after Houthi strikes and Beijing’s failed push for Iran to rein them in. Turns out money is only useful if you’re alive to spend it.

On Sept 17, China convened its first-ever National Advanced Manufacturing Conference. Premier Li Qiang delivered Xi's latest directive to "continue expanding and strengthening advanced manufacturing"—a phrase that immediately headlined paired editorials in Qiushi and People’s Daily. The Qiushi piece touted that China’s manufacturing value-add now accounts for nearly a third of the global total, holding the top spot worldwide for 16 consecutive years. The People’s Daily editorial was even more aggressive on industrial dominance, noting that one out of every three cars sold globally is manufactured in China, with NEV sales surging more than 930-fold and market penetration expanding over 590-fold since 2013. Thus, despite Brussels urging Beijing to voluntarily curb hybrid car exports, China has no intention of slowing down. Guess where those excess cars are heading next?

Things are getting really interesting, as MFA spokesperson dodges @business question on whether Xi is visiting the US by saying that China and the US maintains communication on the "interactions of the two leaders within the year".

Hardly surprising: as I noted last year, China played its rare-earth card at least a year too early. Pair that with news that @Tesla's Cybercab motor eliminates rare earths entirely, and I’d expect the U.S. to announce a major breakthrough soon.

Is India about to change its position on plurilateral agreements at the WTO? I would say yes. India’s new WTO submission, “Guiding Principles for Plurilateral Initiatives and Agreements at the WTO,” proposes a set of safeguards to govern plurilateral initiatives. That is a marked departure from its previous approach, which often appeared to be opposition for opposition’s sake. The message of the new paper seems to be: India is prepared to accept plurilateral agreements—provided that adequate safeguards are built in. This also helps explain the intriguing language in last week’s BRICS New Delhi Declaration, which calls on BRICS members to “identify appropriate pathways for plurilateral initiatives into the WTO legal framework,” including on development-oriented issues, and to explore forward-looking WTO rules. Rather than rejecting plurilaterals outright, India now appears to be negotiating the terms on which they can be accommodated within the multilateral system.

“Regard other people’s property as one’s own”—which is why I have always said that Mozi was the earliest communist. Perhaps @VitalikButerin could put that principle into practice by making his ETH as everyone else’s ETH.

Anyone dismissing the recent China rumours as “just rumours” needs a master class in Chinese history. For 3000 years, rumours have always been instruments of political mobilisation and change: Chen Sheng’s prophecy concealed in a fish’s belly; Liu Bang’s tale of killing the white snake; the CCP’s denunciations of the “four big families” as symbols of Nationalist corruption; and the alleged secret order attributed to Chiang Kai-shek not to resist Japan. In Chinese history, rumours are rarely just rumours. In the right hands, they can become political weapons—testing public sentiment, delegitimising rivals, shaping collective memory, and preparing the ground for change.

It has been six years since China introduced its “dual circulation” strategy, which was supposed to strengthen domestic consumption in response to Trump’s trade war. Yet consumption in China has only grown weaker. Why? The answer may be found in today’s Qiushi editorial, which argues that the contradiction between strong supply and weak demand is, in fact, a “happy problem” for China. Drawing on “international experience,” it notes that once a country’s per capita GDP exceeds US$10,000, consumption naturally shifts: spending on physical goods declines, while spending on services rises. Since China’s per capita GDP exceeded US$13,000 in 2025, the editorial argues, Chinese consumers are no longer concerned merely with meeting basic needs. Instead, they are entering a stage in which “development-oriented” and “enjoyment-oriented” discretionary consumption is becoming widespread and upgrading. The editorial therefore concludes that, as people’s demand for a higher-quality and more diversified lifestyle continues to grow, especially in services, China’s consumer potential will inevitably be released—expanding and upgrading the domestic market while raising both household consumption and the share of services consumption. In other words, the problem, according to the editorial, is not that Chinese households lack income, confidence, or economic security. It is that China supposedly lacks enough “high-quality”—that is, more expensive—goods and services for them to buy. This recalls the story of Emperor Hui of Jin, often described as one of the most foolish emperors in Chinese history. When told that his people had no rice to eat, he reportedly asked: why do they not eat minced meat instead? The proposed solution is equally revealing. The editorial stresses that China still has an extensive macroeconomic-policy toolbox and ample room for both counter-cyclical and cross-cyclical adjustment. More importantly, it invokes the institutional advantages of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”: the state’s capacity to assess the situation, mobilise high-quality resources, launch major strategies and projects, manage major risks, and thereby drive economic and social development. This helps explain why China is all-in on AI. As I noted earlier, Beijing appears to believe that major state-led projects such as AI can pull the entire economy upward. It is rather like trying to lift oneself off the ground by pulling one’s own hair. In summary, as I argued in @tabletmag last year, weak consumption is not a bug of the Chinese system. It is one of its defining features.

Washington and its allies need a clear roadmap as suggested by @milesyu10 and his colleagues @HudsonInstitute: prepare to integrate a democratic, peaceful, and prosperous China, or risk facing another Russia—or worse, several Russias.

What are China’s biggest concerns about AI? A new article by Chen Yixin, China’s Minister of State Security, in the latest issue of China Cybersecurity Magazine offers some revealing clues. Chen identifies six major risks: 1. Regime security. Hostile forces and people with ulterior motives can use deepfakes, AI-generated text and images, and automated online accounts to cheaply and massively produce political rumors, spread harmful information, and incite social divisions—waging “public-opinion wars” and “cognitive warfare” against China and directly threatening its political, institutional, and ideological security. 2. Critical infrastructure. AI can enable countries and organizations to rapidly discover vulnerabilities, automatically chain together attack paths, and carry out sophisticated hacking operations, dramatically lowering the technical barriers and costs of cyberattacks against China’s critical information infrastructure. 3. Data leakage. Foreign intelligence agencies can use AI-powered web crawlers, data mining, and profiling to collect sensitive information, including critical national data, trade secrets, and citizens’ personal information. Chinese users who process sensitive information through foreign AI products or export data abroad could also cause large-scale data leaks. 4. Closed technological ecosystems. Countries with advantages in AI theory, model architecture, and computing power may invoke “national security” to impose technology controls, entity lists, monopolize technical standards, and build closed-source ecosystems, restricting other countries’ access to advanced technologies and fragmenting global AI supply chains. 5. Structural challenges to social governance. AI creates new uncertainties for social governance and public order. Algorithmic “black boxes” and data poisoning can amplify existing social biases; misuse of personal information can trigger crises of public trust; automated decision-making creates difficult questions of accountability; and the rapid development of AI is increasingly outpacing existing laws, ethics, and regulatory mechanisms. 6. A fundamental transformation of warfare. AI is pushing warfare into an era of “intelligentization.” Whoever can use algorithms to achieve more precise sensing, judgment, and targeting will gain the initiative on the battlefield. AI is moving from an auxiliary role to a central one in intelligence fusion, decision support, target identification, combat operations, and cognitive warfare. And what is the solution? Chen’s answer is revealing: strengthen “Party control over the internet” and “Party control over data,” and “transform the advantages of Party leadership into the effectiveness of AI governance.” In other words, from the CCP’s perspective, the central question is not simply AI versus no AI. Nor is it even fundamentally a contest between the US and China. It is a contest between the US and the CCP over who gets to control AI, data, information, and ultimately the future of society. And whoever wins that contest will decide the future of humanity.

China is reportedly considering turning the Great Firewall into a two-way barrier by blocking overseas traffic to Chinese websites. If fully implemented, this could effectively transform the internet in China into a giant intranet, where the only way to access critical data from government agencies, universities, and companies may be to physically go to China. This further reinforces a point I have been making for some time: the urgent need for China experts in the West to strengthen their ability to read between the lines of official propaganda and uncover the realities hidden behind the official narrative.

For those who didn’t get it, the plan is simple: Gulf states pay to maintain security in the Gulf, just as European states pay to maintain security in Europe, so that the US can free up more of its resources to focus on its biggest strategic rival.