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Yiyun Cai

Neolix Raises $400M, Leads China’s Autonomous Delivery Race

Backed by Alibaba, a sovereign AI fund, and Tencent's prior stake, the Beijing-based L4 robotics firm has now raised over RMB 10 billion ($1.39 billion) and deployed more than 30,000 vehicles across nearly 20 countries — signaling that capital consolidation in unmanned delivery has entered a

China's Reusable Rocket Race Accelerates, But the Real Test Lies Ahead

Six Chinese launch vehicles have hit key milestones in 2026 alone — yet industry insiders warn that recovering a rocket and reusing it at scale are two entirely different problems. China's commercial space sector has compressed what took SpaceX nearly a decade into a single calendar year, with six

Unitree Rallies 20% in Two Days as China Policy Boosts Humanoid Demand

A confluence of national standards, nine-ministry commercial policy, and OpenAI's humanoid ambitions ignited China's robotics stocks, with Unitree Robotics reclaiming a RMB 200 billion market cap — but the real test arrives October 29 when the company reports its first post-IPO quarterly earnings. The October

China Moves to Control AI Model Exports — Here's What the Rules Actually Mean

China is redrawing the boundary between selling AI capabilities and exporting AI technology — and the distinction is no longer academic. On October 16, 2026, China's Ministry of Commerce and Ministry of Science and Technology published Announcement No. 48, proposing to add 40 technologies across artificial intelligence, solar photovoltaics,

MiniMax M3.1 Flash Sparks China’s Budget AI Rivalry

MiniMax (MiniMax) has officially claimed the anonymous model "Space Bunny" as its M3.1 Flash, a lightweight agent-optimized large language model that matches DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash-1017 on key benchmarks while pricing its peak-hour input tokens at roughly half its rival's

Leapmotor’s Zaragoza Bet: China’s Auto Exporters Face a Survival Test

China shipped a record 5.096 million vehicles overseas in the first half of 2026—yet the industry's profit margin has collapsed to 3.8%, and Leapmotor's lean-asset European factory model offers the clearest window yet into how the sector is attempting to reconcile volume

ChinaBiz Briefing: NIO Beats German Trio, DeepSeek Goes Mass Market, Tencent Enters Short Drama War

China's technology and automotive sectors delivered a concentrated set of structural shifts this week. A domestic EV brand outsold every German luxury marque in China for the first time. The country's most technically credible AI lab made its clearest pivot toward consumer users. And Tencent launched

NIO Outsells Mercedes, BMW and Audi in China for First Time

NIO surpassed all three German luxury automakers in China's retail market during the third quarter of 2026, marking the first time a domestic electric-vehicle brand has simultaneously outsold Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Audi in a single quarter, according to Wilson Terminal sales data cited by NIO co-

China's Token Export Trade: Runjian's $200M AI Contract Tests a New Frontier

A $200 million AI services contract announced on the evening of October 18 thrust Runjian into the spotlight of a nascent but consequential trend: the cross-border export of Chinese computing power, billed by the token. The one-year deal, signed through Runjian's subsidiary Five Elephant Cloud Valley,

Alibaba’s XuanTie Chips Top 6B Shipments, Debut Auto Processor

Alibaba Group's Damo Academy has shipped more than 6 billion units of its XuanTie RISC-V processor IP to date, the institute's chief scientist announced at the sixth RISC-V China Summit in Shenzhen, underscoring the growing commercial traction of the open-source chip architecture in