Deep thoughts! Medical breakthroughs! Dogfighting satellites! It’s all happening. Another fun week in China.
Science & Technology
Deepseek is AI that costs pennies. Unitree is Robots that cost less than a MacBook. DeepSeek + Unitree = the future of cheap, scalable digital labor. It’s not science fiction anymore. – Salesforce founder Marc Benioff
In 2028, an LEO satellite will be generating 10kW of microwave power transmission. By 2030, a 1MW station will be geostationary at 36,000 km. By 2035, 10 MW, to prove its potential for mass energy production. By 2050, 2GW from a 1 km-wide array.
Engineers levitated to 22cm with near-zero deviation, then accelerated and navigated a Hyperloop vehicle in a 2km vacuum tube track . Tube wall sensors allowed real-time adjustments to superconducting currents. Musk’s died of complexity. China exploits modularity.
New liquid rocket engine assembly line produces 300 reusable engines annually and completed the second-stage propulsion system test for a reusable launch vehicle.
Fridge-sized mini-satellite sends quantum encryption key from China to Stellenbosch University via laser pulses from a Beijing rooftop.
Japan’s Shinkai 6500 submersible is aging. America’s Alvin can dive to 6,500M, but China’s Fendouzhe collected samples from 11,000M down in the Mariana Trench.
Within 24 hours of minimally invasive surgery, four paralyzed patients lifted limbs, in weeks walked independently. Seismic for China’s 3.74 million spinal injury patients.
Beijing will enhance TCM by integrating AI across the profession to assess TCM clinical efficacy and transform traditional knowledge into scientific evidence.
A few drops of liquid calcium phosphate ion clusters fixes even invisible cracks and wear on aging molars. Its repair of the tooth “would be permanent”.
AI pediatrician in grassroots hospitals trained by 300 top pediatricians and 100M medical records. Autonomously conducts multi-round inquiries with parents.
The Chinese Meridian Project (CMP) key weather forecasting infrastructure and a key space project: monitoring Sun-Earth from the solar atmosphere to near-Earth space and identifying risks to preserve the country’s space assets.
Economy, Trade & Finance
BYD: L2 driving + the world’s fastest charging = <$40,000– when no other brand offers them at ANY price. BYD hit $100 billion revenue, ahead of Tesla.
BYD’s government subsidies worth a quarter of the $15bn that Tesla got from US authorities.
New regulations could give Beijing full control over all rare earth production. No more uncontrolled or exports imports of raw material or finished goods.
Trump’s Trade war Day 60: US cotton exports down 80%; cars down 70%; chips production equipment, 33%. LNG fell to 0 and agricultural products plummeted.
China’s AI SOP: study, copy, optimize, bankrupt everyone with low prices from enormous scale. Sell AI-embedded homes, self-driving cars, consumer drones and robot dogs.
BRICS nations can recover loss of the US market within 2.5 years With domestic fiscal support and BRICs nations’ bilateral and multilateral trade frameworks.
Society
Wages for on-demand manufacturing workers fluctuate in line with employment trends, with no sign of rising wages since 2022. This suggests that industry demand is dominant in shaping labor recruitment trends.
China’s gifted kids. National Intellectual Resource Development Plan:
By 10 years of age, Test, Filter & Identify outstanding potential intelligence candidates
By 15 years of age, Ensure geniuses are surrounded by others of similar caliber & accelerated curriculum & resources
By 20 years of age, Ensure geniuses are working in appropriate fields deserving of their ability, (sciences etc.)
By 30 years of age, Ensure geniuses can access the resources necessary to start
companies or teach & research with upcoming geniuses and provide sufficient access to top human capital.
Harvard and Stanford grads flood Chinese AI startups with resumes since DeepSeek.
Xiao Chen, 26, a tour guide, earns tips carrying fatigued females the final 1,000 steps of 5000 ft. Mount Tai after holding their hand when they tire along the route.
A low-budget, Sichuan-dialect micro drama My Sweet Home had 1 billion views three days after release. The free-to-air series of 80 two-minute episodes tells of two young 1980s single parents who defy social conventions.
Chiang Kai-shek’s great-grandson, Chiang You-ching, 35, has moved to Hangzhou, to develop a career, as his family plays a key role in promoting cross-strait exchanges.
Governance
When capitalism is able to kill people and oversell goods and engage in super-economic exploitation, it will never be polite. Only if it cannot engage in supra-economic exploitation, will it patiently sit down and engage in economic exploitation. From this point of view, the retrogression of capitalism today, which runs counter to the principles of market economy and profit, is not a new thing at all, but a form of capitalism itself.
Europeans valued freedom because slavery existed throughout European history. When you’re a free man, as a nobleman, like a citizen of Greece, and you look at a large number of slaves laboring for you, you think ‘I’m free!’ The neo-feudal tendency emerging in the West signals that their productive forces have begun to stagnate and regress.. The American political system is pre-industrial revolution, that is, a holdover from feudal times.
After the Western Zhou Dynasty we did not have large-scale slavery, so lacked a strong motivation to speak of freedom. So Chinese will feel that freedom is not a big deal.
Regarding payment systems and digital currencies, the USA is feudal while China is socialistic. Chinese can pay for everything conveniently and cheaply with mobile phones while Americans can’t because their credit card companies, banks, are reluctant to cooperate in distributing the benefits.
The bourgeoisie treated Marxism in three phases: First, stifle Marxism by never mentioning Marx’s theory, then openly attack and vilify Marxism. Now they distort and tamper with Marxism so that it becomes not both acceptable and useful to the bourgeoisie. -Lin Mo-Han (林默涵).
China Formula 1 Grand Prix attracts record 220,000 spectators, up 20,000 YoY.
The 2025 Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai attracted a record 220,000 spectators, representing an increase of nearly 20,000 compared to 2024.
New Regulations address facial recognition concerns, particularly in hotels and residential areas.
The Ministry will lift the Hukou-based marriage registration law after finding that young people avoid permanent households, making it a financial burden for couples to travel back and forth for the process.
Geopolitics
55-year-old Mukololo Chanda recalls Africa’s “freedom railway” after decades of underfunding and mismanagement. “I was working alongside Chinese colleagues, everything was running smoothly and we were always paid on time. I’d like the Chinese to come back.”
“America’s alliances, influence over multilateral institutions, global military presence, ideological and media dominance and the dollar’s global status will be significantly diminished after Trump. This is a deliberate choice by the Administration, most likely based on the belief that the costs of maintaining these global arrangements outweigh their benefits to the US”.
The West has been united under America’s dominance of Nato, Five Eyes, the World Bank and IMF and the Bretton Woods institutions that dictated the workings of the global economy. But France, Germany, the UK and Brussels are restructuring an independent European defense force. A divided West is a natural outcome of the emerging multipolar world and greater equality among nations. We should welcome it.
Defense
PLA Combined Arms Brigade, of which China has thirty.
Satellites dogfighting in space. “We observed five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchrony and in control”, says USSF Gen. Michael Guetlein. “They are practising tactics, techniques and procedures to do on-orbit space operations from one satellite to another”.
Compact device cuts the world’s most fortified underwater communication cables and power lines at 4,000 m (13,000 ft), designed for integration with its crewed and uncrewed submersibles.
The $20B+ contract to Boeing for the F-47 Next Generation Air Dominance fighter jet suggests panic at the appearance of China’s J-36 (above). The Air Force cancelled the NGAD fighter project months ago. The award of a sole-source contract now – to a failing Boeing – and its non-sequential designation of F-47 give it away.
Ukraine delivered 20,000 quadcopters/mo. in January 2024 and 200,000/mo. in January 2025. Russian figures are similar. A scale most people cannot comprehend, and so are stuck in obsolete paradigms of the war. China designs and manufactures 90% of the world’s drones.
