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Explainers

In-depth guides that explain China’s technology, policy, and business landscape — from chipmaking and AI to space, energy, and geopolitics. Built for readers who want context, not just headlines.

Tencent's RMB 52.8B AI Bet Signals a New Phase of China's Compute Race

What Is Actually Happening Here? Tencent's Q2 2026 earnings report contained a number that stopped analysts mid-sentence: capital expenditure of RMB 52.8 billion — 64% above consensus estimates and nearly three times the RMB 19.1 billion recorded in the same quarter a year earlier. The company

Why DeepSeek Is Raising Prices While OpenAI Cuts Them

What Is Happening? Something unusual is unfolding in the global AI model market: the pricing curves for American and Chinese large language models are moving in opposite directions. On one side, OpenAI slashed prices on its GPT-5.6 Luna tier by 80% in late July 2026, and Anthropic quietly

Why SERES Stock Has Fallen Two-Thirds Despite Record EV Sales

What the collapse in SERES Group's share price reveals about the structural economics of China's premium EV market What Is SERES, and Why Does Its Stock Decline Matter? SERES Group is a Chongqing-based automaker best known as the manufacturing partner behind the AITO brand of

Huawei Ascend: How China Built Its Own AI Chip Ecosystem Under Sanctions

What Is the Huawei Ascend Program? Huawei's Ascend is a family of AI processors — and the broader hardware-software ecosystem built around them — developed entirely in-house by the company's semiconductor division, HiSilicon. The program spans custom chip architecture (DaVinci), a proprietary operator library (CANN), a

The AI Car Race in China: Who Gets to Define the Next Generation of Smart Vehicles?

China's automakers and autonomous driving companies are racing to rebrand around "Physical AI" — but a stubborn trust gap between industry ambition and actual user behavior may determine who survives the transition. What Is the "AI Car" Debate Actually About? The term "AI car&

Why Chinese Smart Cars Struggle Abroad: The Localization Gap Explained

What Is the Problem? China's automakers have spent the past decade building some of the world's most feature-rich smart vehicles — cars with large touchscreens, AI voice assistants, over-the-air (OTA) software updates, and advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Yet as these vehicles enter overseas

How Trip.com Came to Control 70% of China's Online Hotel Market

What Is This About? One company controls approximately 70% of China's online hotel booking market by gross merchandise value. Trip.com Group — through its own platform, its controlled subsidiary Qunar, and its largest-shareholder stake in Tongcheng Travel — holds a level of market concentration that is rare even

China's "AI Six Dragons" Are No More: How the Country's Top AI Startups Diverged

Three years ago, six Chinese AI startups were grouped together as rivals racing to become China's OpenAI. Today, they have taken six completely different paths — and the divergence reveals how the entire industry is being repriced. What Were China's "AI Six Dragons"? Between 2023

Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3: How China’s AI Startups Can Scale Globally Without Building Alone

A structural look at Moonshot AI's commercialization strategy, open-source model releases, and the "ride the ship" approach to international expansion What Is Kimi, and Why Does It Keep Making Headlines? Kimi is the flagship AI model and product of Moonshot AI, a Chinese AI startup

China's AI Office War: Why ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent Are Rebuilding the Workplace

How three tech giants are racing to own the next generation of enterprise productivity — and why the window to win is closing fast. What Is AI-Native Office Software — and Why Does It Matter? For most of the past decade, "AI in the workplace" meant bolt-on features: