“High-speed rail for computing power” in Qiushi: “More fundamentally, computing power is a matter of national security. If computing resources cannot be supplied efficiently, the AI industry, smart manufacturing and even national defense will be constrained.”

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng is one of the top 10 richest people in China. China’s Hurun Rich List has seen a surge of individuals in tech: semiconductors, AI, clean tech, etc. Meanwhile, mainland real estate used to make up 1/3 a decade ago and now has zero in the top 100.

China is taking AI-induced job displacement more seriously. “Adapting to the Development of AI and Promoting an Employment-Friendly Development Model” Some highlights: - Strengthen monitoring and early warning of employment risks from AI - Do more research on impact of AI on jobs - Encourage firms to set up unemployment buffer period, inform workers in advance of AI rollout, help with job transfers and finding new jobs - Provide workers displaced by AI with support, such as career guidance, training, job search support Overall, it’s not much and not very concrete. There’s no discussion of universal basic income or any major expansion of the social safety net. But it’s a more prominent sign that Beijing is taking this issue more seriously, no longer content to just focus mainly on the upsides of AI like new AI jobs.

China is trying to use AI to accelerate science R&D in areas like fusion, materials science, and biology. "An April 2025 article in China Energy News reposted by the People’s Daily stated that researchers at CNNC’s Southwest Institute of Physics in Chengdu utilized AI-enhanced simulations to reduce the preparation time per plasma shot at the institute’s Circulator-3 (aka Huanliu-3) experimental tokamak from several days to just half an hour."

Unitree CEO Wang Xingxing recently said that GPT-7 could solve the challenges of embodied AI entirely and that he had made a mistake by not taking AI seriously enough. Quote: “We’ve put it (GPT-6) on various robots and tested it across a range of tasks, and the results have actually been very good. Our company and other robotics companies are already running pilot deployments in factories. To achieve large-scale adoption, though, both generalization and efficiency still need to improve further. But I think these challenges could very well be resolved over the next few years. My faith in AI grows stronger every year. The biggest mistake I’ve made over the past decade or so has been not believing in AI enough. Deployment in commercial services may happen even faster than in industrial settings.”

China’s largest maker of tactile sensors for humanoid robots got its start making sensors for EVs, including BYD. Great piece by @davidjlynch. Glad I could contribute some thoughts:

China’s total domestic auto sales haven’t changed much over the past decade. What changed was a massive shift from ICE to EVs & hybrids since 2020. But this year we’re seeing sharp drops in both, bringing down total car sales significantly. NEV sales got hit with the phasing out of tax incentives. A similar phase-out of tax incentives plus tightening emission standards caused ICE sales to drop back in 2018 and 2019. And of course there’s the sluggish economy dragging on both today.

Xi Jinping talks about AI like Jiang Zemin talked about the IT revolution—as an opportunity for “leapfrog development” 跨越式发展. Jiang Zemin in 2000: “Use informatization to drive industrialization, leverage latecomer advantages, and strive to achieve leapfrog technological development." 以信息化带动工业化，发挥后发优势，努力实现技术的跨越式发展 Xi Jinping in 2018: “Accelerating the development of next-generation AI is an important strategic lever for gaining the initiative in global technological competition, and a key strategic resource for achieving leapfrog technological development, industrial upgrading, and an overall leap in productivity." 加快发展新一代人工智能是我们赢得全球科技竞争主动权的重要战略抓手，是推动我国科技跨越发展、产业优化升级、生产力整体跃升的重要战略资源

It’s useful to think of the Chinese Party-state as a giant corporation: - obsessed with KPIs and productivity metrics - very sensitive to bad PR - struggles immensely to get middle management to do what leadership wants - (and don’t underestimate HR)

Chinese official documents and speeches can seem repetitive and uninteresting. But it’s often the auxiliary statements and follow-on commentary that shed the most light on what’s really happening.

NYT: “For now, time favors Beijing. Each passing month adds more than $30 billion to China’s trade surplus with Europe, supporting hundreds of thousands of Chinese industrial jobs. Meanwhile, European manufacturers continue to weaken.” @KeithBradsher

This is the Xi Jinping line on AI safety that keeps getting repeated in Chinese official docs: "AI brings unprecedented development opportunities, but also unprecedented risks and challenges. China must understand the trends and underlying dynamics of AI development, accelerate the formulation and improvement of relevant laws and regulations, policies, application standards, and ethical guidelines, and establish systems for technology monitoring, risk warning, and emergency response to ensure that AI is safe, reliable, and controllable." From the April 2025 Politburo study session on AI

Why did China just issue a new directive on "new quality productive forces"? From the NDRC explainer: "They are intended to correct problems that have emerged in practice, including blindly planning and investing without regard for actual conditions, rushing headlong into emerging and future industries, neglecting the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries, and emphasizing development at the expense of reform. These four principles must be consistently upheld in practice to ensure that the development of new quality productive forces does not veer off course, advance recklessly, or become driven by speculative bubbles."

China is not just building new power plants at breakneck pace but also grid infrastructure: ultra-high voltage lines, battery storage, pumped storage. In May, China announced it would invest $700 billion in grid infrastructure through 2030. Great report: