China News

Dutch chipmaker Nexperia and its Chinese parent, Wingtech Technology, are set for another showdown in early 2026, as the legal battle over control of the semiconductor firm intensifies. The two sides will face off before the Dutch Enterprise Chamber on January 14, a court representative told the Post on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The hearing aims to determine whether there were valid reasons to doubt the sound management of Nexperia before the chamber’s ruling in early October,...

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Deserts are hard to reclaim because plants cannot survive on shifting sand, but scientists in northwest China are changing that by dropping vast amounts of blue-green algae onto the dry terrain. These specially selected strains of cyanobacteria can survive extreme heat and drought for long periods, according to China Science Daily on Thursday. When rain finally comes, they spring to life, spreading rapidly and forming a tough, biomass-rich crust over the sand. This living layer stabilises the...

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Police in multiple Chinese cities have issued pre-emptive notices stating that no official New Year’s Eve countdowns will be held at popular landmarks, as they prioritise public safety and order ahead of the holiday. This coordinated messaging, consistent with recent years, emerged through a flurry of police notices issued on Tuesday and Wednesday. It reflects a cautious strategy by authorities to prevent a recurrence of tragedies like the 2014 Shanghai stampede. Authorities in major Chinese...

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Nvidia is scrambling to meet strong demand for its H200 artificial intelligence chips from Chinese technology companies and has ‌approached contract manufacturer Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) to ramp up production, sources said. Chinese tech companies have placed orders for more than 2 million H200 chips for 2026, while ‍Nvidia currently holds just 700,000 units in stock, two of the people said. The exact additional volume Nvidia intends to order from TSMC remains unclear, they...

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China has unveiled the details of an extension to its popular consumer goods trade-in scheme, a policy which has helped to fuel short-term boosts in consumption and contributed to the achievement of nationwide targets for economic growth. On Tuesday, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) – the country's top economic planner – announced with the Ministry of Finance that 62.5 billion yuan (US$8.93 billion) in ultra-long-term special bonds would be fast-tracked to local governments...

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We have put together stories from our coverage on science from the past two weeks to help you stay informed. If you would like to see more of our reporting, please consider subscribing.

1. How China cracked US ‘super code’ that controls most power grids in the world China is no longer using American software to run its power grid. The Southern Regional Electricity Market (SREM) – the world’s largest unified power market – has switched fully to Tianquan, a solver developed by Chinese engineers...

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The Japanese government has expressed concern to Beijing over its military drills around Taiwan amid tensions between the two countries that are already strained by the Japanese prime minister’s comments nearly two months ago about a Taiwan contingency, according to Kyodo. It coincides with a statement by Japan that Chinese coastguard vessels have patrolled near the Diaoyu Islands – which are at the centre of a separate long-time dispute between the two countries – for a record number of days...

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China’s factory activity returned to expansionary territory in December – beating market expectations to end an eight-month contraction – but analysts said it might be premature to view the rebound as a sign of sustained stabilisation. The manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) stood at 50.1 in December, up from 49.2 the previous month, according to data released on Wednesday by the National Bureau of Statistics. The reading exceeded a projection of 49.6 from economists polled by the...

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China is set to break its own record in hypergravity research with a colossal new centrifuge that can spin multi-tonne samples at unmatched intensities. The machine, known as CHIEF1900, was built by Shanghai Electric Nuclear Power Group and shipped to Zhejiang University in eastern China on December 22 for installation. Once up and running, it will allow researchers to compress space and time, recreating catastrophic events such as dam failures and earthquakes inside a laboratory, according to...

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European aviation giant Airbus won another two major orders from Chinese clients for a total of 90 A320neo aircraft on Tuesday, just a day after receiving orders for 55 passenger jets of the same model from two other Chinese airlines. The orders came weeks after Airbus’ CEO accompanied French President Emmanuel Macron on a state visit to China and mark a big win for the European manufacturer over its American competitor Boeing in one of the world’s biggest aviation markets. Air China, Beijing’s...

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Myanmar’s military junta is staging the country’s first general election since its coup in 2021. Western critics have dismissed it as a “sham”, while the generals have insisted that the polls are “free and fair”. Posting on X, Tom Andrews, the United Nations rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, called the election “a theatre of the absurd”. He may be right but it is also beside the point. Andrews was a long-time foreign supporter of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose second-term government was...

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President Xi Jinping has issued a mandate to expand grain production as China moves to shield its food supply from global volatility, calling for renewed efforts to modernise agriculture and rural areas over the coming year. Speaking at a two-day work conference in Beijing that ended on Tuesday, Xi urged a “no-relaxation” approach to grain output and called for higher overall production capacity and efficiency by integrating high-quality land, seeds, machinery and farming techniques. “We must...

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As families and friends gather to bid farewell to a turbulent 2025, the unassuming potato will, no matter where you live, almost certainly find its place on the dinner table. Domesticated nearly 10,000 years ago in Peru, it did not voyage beyond the Americas until the 16th century. Yet no vegetable has played a more significant role in human history and politics than this humble tuber. Dubbed the calorie king, potatoes produce more calories and nutrients per unit of land than any other major...

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China-founded start-up Tripo AI on Tuesday launched a major update to its flagship platform, renamed Tripo Studio 1.0, that speeds up artificial intelligence-driven 3D content creation by up to 200 per cent compared with its previous version, as the company’s international user community continues to expand. A pioneer in large-scale, general-purpose 3D models, Tripo AI’s user base has more than doubled to 6.5 million from 3 million in August, company founder and CEO Simon Song Yachen told the...

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American novelists Ken Liu and Rebecca F. Kuang were the undisputed stars of the annual Singapore Writers Festival last month. Their sessions were packed to capacity, with audiences eager to hear their thoughts on artificial intelligence, education, and even Singaporean cuisine. Days before the 10-day festival, which started on November 7, the leaders of China and the United States held key talks in Busan, South Korea, sending conciliatory signals amid an intense geopolitical rivalry. Yet in...

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In a pointed display of diplomatic unity, the ambassadors of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) nations – the United States, Australia, India, and Japan – convened in Beijing on Tuesday, just as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted live-fire exercises during its large-scale military drills around Taiwan. “The Quad is a force for good, working to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific. It is always great to meet with the Quad Ambassadors here in Beijing,” said US Ambassador to...

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At least two oil tankers have made their way to Venezuela in recent days and others are navigating towards the country, a sign of ‍state-run oil and natural gas company PDVSA’s effort to expand floating storage and keep selling crude even as a US blockade has reduced exports to a minimum. US President Donald Trump this month announced a blockade of all sanctioned vessels going in or out of Venezuelan waters as part of a strategy to pressure Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. The US move has...

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China has signalled that its YJ-20 hypersonic ship-to-ship missile is ready for mass production with the release of a video showing the advanced weapon being put through its “finalisation test”. The footage of the YJ-20 being fired from the vertical launch system (VLS) of the Type 055 destroyer Wuxi was posted to social media on Sunday by China Military Bugle, the official People’s Liberation Army account. “Missile hit. Target destroyed,” the crew can be heard saying over the radio, though...

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US President Donald Trump’s hopes for a grand deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping are being undercut by American allies’ self-interested amplification of the “China threat”. This year’s Nanking massacre memorial was particularly poignant in light of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s controversial remarks on Taiwan. Beijing warned that any attempt to challenge the post-war international order or undermine established historical truths would be “doomed to failure”. Meanwhile, Singaporean...

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China’s official national Buddhist association has established its first supervisory body less than six months after the high-profile downfall of the “CEO monk”, former Shaolin Temple abbot Shi Yongxin. The move to improve oversight of Chinese Buddhist monks’ conduct was announced on Tuesday, a day after the Buddhist Association of China’s (BAC) 11th national congress concluded in Beijing. Shi Zhengci, the abbot of Wuzu Temple in Huangmei county, Hubei province, was elected as the association’s...

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South Korean President Lee Jae-myung will make a state visit to China next week as the two countries try to find a way through their intense economic rivalry to improve ties. The trip will make Lee the first sitting South Korean president to travel to China since 2019, and will include a three-day stop in Beijing from Sunday, a presidential official in Seoul said on Tuesday. Lee will meet President Xi Jinping in the Chinese capital before heading to Shanghai and then back to Seoul. The talks...

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Shenzhen, China’s top tech hub, plans to roll out what it calls “full-suite, full-time” adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) across households and businesses over the next five years – a move analysts say could position the city at the forefront of the country’s intensifying tech race with the United States. The local government announced the goal on Monday in a new policy paper on Shenzhen’s 15th five-year plan, the socio-economic blueprint covering the years 2026 to 2030. The document...

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Bullets:

Nvidia faces severe challenges, as China's monopolies on gallium allow its telecom providers to build low-cost 5G telecom across the world.

That leads to global adoption of Chinese standards and equipment for Artificial Intelligence.

To survive, Nvidia needs to keep lower-cost AI chips out of the US market. Nvidia is also desperate to sell billions of dollars' worth of its own AI chips in the Chinese market, the world's largest.

But even in the US and Europe, Nvidia desperately needs power prices to fall, as new data center construction faces soaring public opposition.

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This is a transcript, for the YouTube video here:

Report:

Good morning.

Everything about this is supposed to be impossible. But all the experts were wrong-- spectacularly wrong—yet again.

Nvidia is the world’s most valuable public company, worth over $4 trillion, and its CEO is meeting in the White House, again, to figure out what to do, how to save his company, and how to save the Artificial Intelligence industry in the West.

Looking here at the first three paragraphs:

China will soon export its AI technologies across the world; think of the Belt and Road Initiative, but for Artificial Intelligence. That’s a given if Chinese companies like Huawei run away with the market. Huawei and other Chinese companies are building technologies that will mature and compete globally with the top American companies. China is a big important market – for chips and semiconductors – and it’s a mistake to concede the Chinese market to Chinese companies. Western companies need to compete for it.

That’s the introduction. But rewinding the tape, just a year or two, and what were our top experts saying? The entire objective of the sanctions against Huawei was to prevent China from developing artificial intelligences technologies at all. At the time, US companies were years ahead, and would remain so.

The Belt and Road Initiative was a failure, or so our top think tanks once believed, and said so to our top policymakers. It was a failure, and establishment Washington was celebrating the demise of the Belt and Road, just recently.

As to the semiconductors, the abandonment of the Chinese market was a deliberate strategy. Huang says here “we shouldn’t concede the entire market to them”—but that’s already happened, and it was by design. That was the point: Western tech was not allowed to go to China, and China would have to develop all these technologies for themselves. Zoom forward to today, and China did build them, and now China is exporting AI to other countries, and it is Huawei that is leading the way.

The Belt and Road Initiative. It has “helped Huawei export 5G technology to countries”, and that is a catalyst to those “countries adopting Chinese AI systems and standards.” Huawei has built the ecosystem, the platforms, the 5G telecom. The next logical step is for Huawei to supply everything else.

The reason why Huawei is able to supply the world with affordable 5G telecommunications, and why our companies cannot, is that China and Huawei enjoy monopolies on the key raw materials to build 5G. China’s gallium export bans mean that Chinese companies like Huawei have almost all the world’s gallium, and we need gallium to build 5G systems.

The White House, earlier, pointed this out, that Western countries and companies are vulnerable to any supply chain disruptions in gallium, and when China cut off exports of it, Ericsson and Nokia fell behind Huawei. Huawei can get it, so China’s monopoly in gallium leads right away to a monopoly for Huawei on 5G. Gallium just makes everything in telecom work better—faster data transfer speeds, more efficiency. It allows 5G base stations to be built lighter and smaller, and it’s used across the other hardware systems.

Huang and President Trump met in the White House, a follow-up to the previous meetings whereby Nvidia struck a deal: the Trump Administration will give Nvidia export licenses to sell to China—downgraded chips—and Nvidia in exchange will pay the US government 15% of sales. Sounds okay in theory, except for one big problem: China doesn’t want to buy Nvidia chips. And Nvidia’s market share in China went from 95% to zero.

Huawei and the other chipmakers here in China were supposed to be at least five to ten years behind our top companies. Huawei and the other Chinese telecom providers, like ZTE, were supposed to be out of business entirely. Instead we’ve got the head of Nvidia, the richest company on the planet, meeting with Donald Trump and saying that Huawei is the most innovative company in the world.

And underscoring the entire problem is electricity, which is the biggest long-term threat to Nvidia in the US and European markets. Nvidia obviously needs Chinese chips to be out of the US market, and Nvidia is desperate to be allowed to sell their chips in the Chinese market. But most of all, Nvidia needs US electricity prices to fall. Popular opinion is already mobilizing, fast, against the construction of US data centers, because electric bills are screaming higher every time another one gets built.

That isn’t a problem in China, where electricity just costs much less, and new power supplies are being added much faster than the growth in demand.

The data for Chinese electricity are hard to believe. Every year, Chinese new power demand is the same as the entire country of Germany. Add up all the power the is used by Germany, and that’s the NEW demand, from Chinese industry and households. But on the supply side, Chinese power companies are adding twice as much—two Germany’s worth of power supply.

So even with skyrocketing electricity demand in China, the supplies are going up twice as fast. That’s right now. US electricity supply hasn’t budged much for over a decade, and if everything goes perfectly well, the United States will quadruple nuclear energy production . . . in 25 years. That assumes construction goes smoothly, and that the Russians will supply us the uranium.

Be Good.

Resources and links:

Fortune, AI experts return from China stunned: The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over

https://fortune.com/2025/08/14/data-centers-china-grid-us-infrastructure/

How much does the US depend on Russian uranium?

https://www.mining.com/web/how-much-does-the-us-depend-on-russian-uranium

Largest US companies by market capitalization

https://companiesmarketcap.com/usa/largest-companies-in-the-usa-by-market-cap/

Nikkei, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang warns of China’s AI ‘belt and road’ ambitions

https://asia.nikkei.com/business/technology/artificial-intelligence/nvidia-s-jensen-huang-warns-of-china-s-ai-belt-and-road-ambitions

Huawei has one 5G power that is hard for the US to hurt

https://www.lightreading.com/5g/huawei-has-one-5g-power-that-is-hard-for-the-us-to-hurt

Gallium Nitride Semiconductors in 5G Networks

https://www.azom.com/article.aspx?ArticleID=22494

Bloomberg, China Is ‘Rejecting’ Nvidia’s H200 Chips, Outfoxing US Strategy, Sacks Says

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-12/china-is-rejecting-h200s-outfoxing-us-strategy-sacks-says

Choking off China’s Access to the Future of AI

https://www.csis.org/analysis/choking-chinas-access-future-ai

The Rise and Fall of the BRI

https://www.cfr.org/blog/rise-and-fall-bri

Support for AI Data Center Bans Is Growing

https://pro.morningconsult.com/analysis/ai-data-center-energy-prices-november-2025

Inside China / Business is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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China’s top diplomat Wang Yi on Tuesday called for a new paradigm for engagement with the United States, emphasising the need for stable, cooperative ties while firmly defending what he described as China’s core interests, particularly regarding Taiwan. During a speech in Beijing, Foreign Minister Wang also accused Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi of “openly challenging” Chinese territorial sovereignty after she suggested last month that a potential Taiwan conflict could threaten Japan’s...

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China has unveiled new legislation to promote ethnic unity and the use of standard Chinese, warning of legal penalties for those who obstruct the use of the national language and linking its approach with national security policy. A draft Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress underwent its second review by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), the country’s top legislative body, last week and will be open for public consultation until January 25. Meanwhile, the...

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