Solid progress on all fronts..
Economy
Exports of integrated circuits and automobiles rose 26% and 21%. A Goldilocks economy: not too hot and not too cold. Foreign trade grew 3.5% to $3.5 trillion, up 2.9% YoY. Exports rose 4% and imports 2.8%. Trade surplus increased 7.9% to $518 billion. ASEAN trade grew 10.5% and trade with the US and South Korea rose 4.1% and 8%.
Railway networks saw a new record of 2.522 billion passenger trips YTD in 2024, up 15.7% YoY.
The US is China’s third-largest trading partner, behind ASEAN and the EU. The total value of China’s
International goods trade up 6.2% year-on-year, with a growing proportion of high-end exports. China’s YTD trade with ASEAN totaled 4 trillion yuan, up 10.5%, accounting for 15.8% of China’s foreign trade total. Trade with the EU totaled 3.22 trillion yuan, up 0.4%, accounting for 13%.
China-US flight frequency down 72% from 2019. In 2023, the US issued only one-third of the visas given to Chinese citizens in 2019, the US Department of State said, for 263,000 non-immigrant business or tourism visas for Chinese nationals.
QatarEnergy’s $6 billion order for 18 ultra-modern QC-Max size LNG vessels is biggest in history. With a capacity of 271,000 cubic meters each, they will be constructed at Shanghai’s Hudong-Zhonghua Shipyard, 6 delivered in 2028 and 2029, 10 in 2030 and 2031.
Sinograin’s national food and material management platform performs intelligent inspection, detects moisture, impurities, weight, and imperfections in grain by integrating 4.32 million temperature sensors and 80,000 surveillance cameras into the world’s largest Internet of Things (IoT) application, which integrates 400 million data entries in a “digital brain” for grain purchase, sale, and reserve supervision.
The New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor has 523 ports in 124 countries and regions. Growing 21% annually, it operated over 30,000 China-Europe freight trains in the past 5 years, connecting global ports via railways, sea routes and highways through southern Chinese provinces.
BYD announced a new project in Changfeng on July 9, 2021: From preliminary negotiations to the formal signing, 23 days passed; From signing the agreement between BYD and the local government to the start of construction, 42 days passed; From the start of construction to the commencement of operations, 10 months passed; The factory has an annual production capacity of 400,000 vehicles.
Q2 revenues for China’s top chipmaker, SMIC, grew 22% YoY, to $1.9 billion. However, gross margin contracted to 14% from 20% due to competition and net profit fell 59% to $164.5 million. SMIC’s revenue and gross margin outperformed expectations. Production utilization rate hit 85.2% in Q2, up from 80.2% in Q1.
Huawei is supplying premium off-road electric vehicles advanced driver assist systems to BYD, the first time the two giants have jointly pushed for the adoption of self-driving technologies. BYD’s RMB 500,000 ($69,694) Bao 8 luxury off-road EV, will feature Huawei’s Advanced Driving System (ADS), which will allow the cars to function by themselves in many cases on Chinese highways and busy streets.
China’s large, twin-engine unmanned transport aircraft made its maiden flight Sunday, with all systems functioning normally. Developed by Sichuan Tengden Co., its wingspan is 55ft. (16m) and 10ft high, with 12 cu.m./2 ton payload. With easy loading and unloading, high reliability and safety and a high degree of intelligence it will expand air cargo transportation scenarios and contribute to the low-altitude economy.
Media claim China has been dethroned as the world’s manufacturing hub, but the world’s #1 manufacturer, Foxconn, is investing 1 billion yuan in a new headquarters in Zhengzhou and hiring aggressively. Insiders attribute Foxconn’s return from India and Vietnam to better infrastructure, such as stable electricity provision, and a more experienced workforce.
Foxconn is hiring 50,000 more shift workers at $6.21 (26 yuan PPP) hourly, up from 25 yuan in July, plus a $1000 bonus for returning staff. Foxconn, the world’s largest assembler of Apple’s electronic devices, operates factories in Shenzhen, Chengdu and Yantai, in addition to its hub in Zhengzhou, but is closing its factories in India because of quality problems.
Apple’s China revenue fell 6.5% YoY in 2Q due to quality issues with Iphones assembled in India. Only half of Indian components in Apple phones meet quality standards, affecting the sales performance of Apple phones in the European and Chinese markets, forcing Apple to lower prices for promotions.
Reuters: Chinese factories poised for ‘cruel summer’ as PMI surveys raise outlook risks | Reuters.
Hainan’s conversion to a free trade port (FTP) paid off when GDP grew 9.2% in 2023. Value-added industrial output rose 18.5%, per capita disposable income of urban and rural residents increased by 6.3% and 8.3%, trade in goods and services soared 15.3% and 29.6%.
US PMI hits 8 month low 46.8, Eurozone 45.9, China 51.8 in June, up 0.1%, marking the index’s eighth straight month of expansion and its highest level since May 2021.
While American culture remains popular across the world, it has stopped making things the world needs, so the rise of China poses a unique challenge to America. Whereas people once saw China as the land of cheap knock-offs, it could now be seen as the land of cool products and innovation.Chinese companies have already transformed the lives of Moroccans with affordable motorcycles and smartphones. Low cost, good quality Chinese cars can significantly increase auto ownership globally.
Science
Passive maglev train, above, uses zero power to stay suspended. Its permanent
The content below was originally paywalled.
magnets generate the powerful electromagnetic field that holds the cars in suspension, eliminating physical contact with the rails for quiet travel. But energy consumption is currently 15% higher than conventional trains and, though China has 40% of the world’s reserves of the neodymium in its magnets, its scarcity raises questions about the long-term viability of this technology.
Scientists discovered a 90-gene expression assay for tumor origin classification that significantly improves therapeutic outcomes in patients with cancer of unknown primary when guided by site-specific treatment recommendations.
A drop of blood for a 90% accurate test to identify gastric cancer, the #4 cause of cancer deaths globally. When diagnosed late, the five-year survival rate is 30%. Detected early, the survival rate can exceed 90%, but diagnosis relies on uncomfortable endoscopies and serum markers, whose detection rate is 20%.
Launch date set for world’s first thorium molten salt nuclear power station. The reactor is scheduled to be generating 60 megawatts by 2029, and part will drive a 10 MW electric generator, and the rest will produce hydrogen by splitting water molecules at high temperature. Using bountiful, safe, cheap thorium as its primary fuel, China’s reserves will last 20,000 years. Thorium reactors are safer because they can’t sustain a nuclear chain reaction without an external neutron source. If something goes wrong, the reaction stops on its own. This project will drive the development of a wide range of technologies involving a complete thorium supply chain, the only one on earth.
6G ambitions behind G60 bet. This week, China launched the first batch of satellites for G60, a 14,000-strong internet satellite constellation ready by 2030. Media dub it “the Chinese version of Starlink,” but China treats specific technologies not as standalone factors, but constituent pieces of a larger state-led industrial ecosystem: Washington sees potential threats from Chinese UAVs, Beijing sees a ‘low altitude economy’. While the US focuses on consumer uses of LLMs, China is deploying industrial AI to amplify its manufacturing dominance. The 6G age promises hyperconnectivity between human, digital, and physical domains, networks will become sensors, signals from objects will be integrated with networks, allowing instant identification and positioning of all sorts of devices, like cars and factory robots. And 6G will both power and be powered by AI. Countries and companies that can shape this new telecommunications era will reap vast technological and market sway.
China’s Yutu-2 rover has been tooling around on the moon’s far side in 2019, thanks to a heater powered by radioactive plutonium-238 for the long and cold lunar night, and Chang’e-6 returned to Earth from the far side with samples. But NASA hasn’t had wheels on the lunar surface since the Apollo astronauts buggies and, on July 17, NASA stunned the scientific community by announcing its moon rover’s cancellation.
Among 60 researchers at Beidaihe were computational scientist Andrew Yao Chi-Chih and award-winning physicist Xue Qikun. President Xi singled out Yao, the computational scientist, for high praise. Yao left the United States two decades ago to teach at Tsinghua University and heads the university’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences and is on the academic advisory committee of Tsinghua’s newly established Institute for AI Industry Research. Physicist Xue has been working to synthesize topological insulators – materials that exist in a recently discovered state of quantum matter – for low-energy consumption electronics. Other prominent invitees included Zhou Qi, a geologist who discovered a massive manganese reserve; Wan Buyan, who developed China’s first deep-sea drilling rig; Li Jiulin, the chief engineer of the “Bird’s Nest” stadium; and Shanxi University vice-president Cheng Fangqin, for her work on repurposing coal waste.
