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Dora Zhang

Editor covering China's business and technology, focused on AI, electric vehicles, autonomous driving, and robotics, tracking industry developments, innovation, and market dynamics.

ChinaBiz Briefing | Alibaba's 2.4T AI Model, DeepSeek's Cost Edge, Leapmotor's 100K Record

China's technology and industrial sectors delivered a dense set of signals on Sunday and Monday: frontier AI models are closing the gap with Western rivals on both performance and price; the EV delivery race is fracturing into clear tiers; domestic chip companies are mounting a credible challenge to

Horizon and D-Robotics Are Building China’s Answer to NVIDIA’s Physical AI Empire

Two Chinese chip companies are mounting the most credible challenge yet to NVIDIA's dominance in autonomous driving and embodied AI — not by outperforming its silicon, but by undercutting its economics and replicating its ecosystem playbook. The convergence of Horizon Robotics and its sister company D-Robotics onto a

How Chinese Manufacturers Are Breaking Out of the OEM Trap — and Building Global Brands

From consumer drones to high-speed rail, a new generation of Chinese companies is leveraging supply chain depth to compete on quality and brand, not just price. What Is "Supply Chain Globalization" — and Why It's Different From Traditional Exporting? For decades, the default model for Chinese

Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max Challenge: How China’s AI Stack Is Closing the Gap With Silicon Valley

Alibaba Cloud's new flagship model enters the global AI top tier with aggressive pricing, autonomous agentic capabilities, and a chip-to-cloud infrastructure stack designed to turn cost asymmetry into competitive advantage. Alibaba on Sunday unveiled Qwen3.8-Max, a 2.4-trillion-parameter large language model that

China’s EV Pecking Order in July Shifts as Leapmotor Breaks 100K, Rivals Stall

Leapmotor's 101,267-unit July delivery print—the first monthly six-figure tally ever recorded by a Chinese new-energy vehicle startup—has cleaved the domestic EV field into three distinct tiers, exposing a structural fault line between brands with diversified product portfolios and those betting survival on

Shanghai Startup Raises RMB 330M as China’s Invasive BCI Race Goes Clinical

Shanghai Prosynx Technologies, a six-month-old invasive brain-computer interface company incubated by Lingang Laboratory, has closed a RMB 330 million (US$45.8 million) angel round — the largest single-tranche angel financing in China's BCI sector on record — signaling that the industry's competitive axis

DeepSeek-V4-Flash Punches Above Its Weight, Undercutting OpenAI on Cost by 60%

A lightweight Chinese AI model with 28.4 billion active parameters has matched near-flagship performance against models three times its size, dealing a fresh blow to the premium-pricing logic that has long underpinned Western AI platform valuations. DeepSeek released the production version of its DeepSeek-V4-Flash model

ChinaBiz Briefing | Apollo Go Hits London, CATL Margin Squeeze, Xiaomi's Memory Edge

China's technology and industrial sectors delivered a cluster of strategically significant signals on Tuesday, spanning autonomous driving, battery economics, consumer robotics, and mobile memory. Taken together, the day's developments underscore a single through-line: Chinese companies are no longer competing on home turf alone — they are

AutoFlight’s Kazakhstan Bet: Turning a New Aviation Framework Into an eVTOL Launchpad

0:00 /1:03 1× China's AutoFlight executed its first public electric air taxi demonstration in Kazakhstan's capital on July 24, transforming a regulatory milestone into a live commercial proof-of-concept before an audience of diplomats, aviation officials and investors from multiple nations. The flight,

China's EV Makers Face Margin Collapse as Battery Giants Capture the Value Chain

Automakers posted RMB 1,954 billion (US$271.4 billion) in industry profit in H1 2026—down 20% year-on-year—even as revenue grew, exposing a structural squeeze that is forcing vehicle manufacturers to rethink their entire supply chain posture. The headline numbers from China's Passenger Car