There are only a few thoughts that I wanted to express since some time already. Nothing too fancy, just some basic ideas. My recent “love for China” started before the tariffs. And it’s not love, not even Realpolitik; it’s pure realism.

Let’s talk AI

The public hysteria regarding DeepSeek is when most people started to worry about China. But there are many more AI providers in China, especially regarding LLMs (in the full sense of multimodal systems, so they can compete with the Western chatbots and customizable agents). The most notorious in the West are Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

● Recently, Baidu launched the ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo models.

ERNIE X1 Turbo is an upgraded deep thinking reasoning model. Featuring a more advanced chain of thought, stronger deep thinking capabilities, and further enhanced multimodal and tool invocation abilities, it excels in Q&A, literary creation, and logical reasoning, outperforming DeepSeek R1 as well as the latest version of V3.

ERNIE X1 Turbo offers improved performance while being priced at half of ERNIE X1, making it only 25% of the price of DeepSeek R1. The input price is RMB 1 per million tokens, and the output price is RMB 4 per million tokens.

ERNIE 4.5 Turbo demonstrates overall progress in hallucination reduction, logical reasoning, and coding abilities, with faster response. The multimodal capabilities of ERNIE 4.5 Turbo are on par with GPT-4.1 and superior to GPT-4o across multiple benchmarks. For ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, the input price is only RMB 0.8 per million tokens, and the output price is RMB 3.2 per million tokens, 80% off the price of ERNIE 4.5, 0.2% of GPT-4.5 and 40% of DeepSeek V3.

Baidu doesn’t offer any free online chatbot service (except for Ernie Bot, rebranded as Wenxiaoyan in Chinese), but there are demos hosted on Hugging Face: 🤖 ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and 🤖 ERNIE X1 Turbo. Beware that, while accepting inputs in English, the answers are exclusively in Chinese!

Note that Baidu “has produced 30,000 AI chips that it’s now using.” The chips are designed by Kunlun, Baidu’s AI chip unit.

● On the other hand, Alibaba unveils Qwen3 AI models that it says outperform DeepSeek R1:

The Qwen3 family consists of eight models, ranging from 600 million parameters to 235 billion, with enhancements across all models, according to the Qwen team at Alibaba’s cloud computing unit.

…

Benchmark tests cited by Alibaba revealed that models such as Qwen3-235B and Qwen3-4B matched or exceeded the performance of advanced models from both domestic and overseas competitors – including OpenAI’s o1, Google’s Gemini and DeepSeek’s R1 – in areas like instruction following, coding assistance, text generation, mathematical skills and complex problem solving.

Read the official announcement to find details and relevant links to the Qwen3 models, such as on GitHub, on Hugging Face, and…

… there is even a free Qwen chatbot available at 🤖 chat.qwen.ai. You can sign up by connecting with an existing Google or GitHub account and enjoy the Qwen3-235B-A22B model or a weaker one! Here’s my first chat with Qwen3. I find its style to be somewhere between ChatGPT’s and Grok’s, which is not bad at all.

But it’s censored, alright:

Try a more oblique question:

But then… kaboom!

Funny thing, if its answer (which is never the same!) manages to avoid the inclusion of Xi’s name, the output is not deleted!

This feat deserves a proper sharing: read it yourself.

Unfortunately, Qwen3 can also disappoint, and it’s nowhere near Grok3—read here.

Beyond the chatbot, Qwen3 has also released mobile apps, but its Android app is “not available in my country”! However, the APK from the first QR code, which currently provides QwenChat_release_v1.0.0.apk and avoids Google Play Store, works!

● Meanwhile, DeepSeek has released the Prover-V2 model a day after Alibaba released Qwen3, and ahead of an anticipated release of DeepSeek-R2. And the latest speculation is about DeepSeek-R2’s imminent launch.

● But China’s AI boom includes many more names scarcely known outside China. After all, most people don’t even know the full range of our West-made models (which go beyond ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Mistral, Llama, but most people never heard of anything else); how could they know about Tencent’s Hunyuan AI model, ByteDance’s Doubao, ModelBest’s MiniCPM, and the “Six Tigers”—Stepfun, Zhipu, Minimax, Moonshot, 01.AI, and Baichuan?

MIT Technology Review, back in February, had a slightly different focus:

Stepfun

Founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft senior vice president Jiang Daxin, Stepfun emerged relatively late onto the AI startup scene, but it has quickly become a contender thanks to its portfolio of foundational models. It is also committed to building artificial general intelligence (AGI), a mission a lot of Chinese startups have given up on.

With backing from investors like Tencent and funding from Shanghai’s government, the firm released 11 foundational AI models last year—spanning language, visual, video, audio, and multimodal systems. Its biggest language model so far, Step-2, has over 1 trillion parameters (GPT-4 has about 1.8 trillion). It is currently ranked behind only ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Claude, and Gemini’s models on LiveBench, a third-party benchmark site that evaluates the capabilities of large language models.

ModelBest

Researchers at the prestigious Tsinghua University founded ModelBest in 2022 in Beijing’s Haidian district. Since then, the company has distinguished itself by leaning into efficiency and embracing the trend of small language models. Its MiniCPM series—often dubbed “Little Powerhouses” in Chinese—is engineered for on-device, real-time processing on smartphones, PCs, automotive systems, smart home devices, and even robots. Its pitch to customers is that this combination of smaller models and local data processing cuts costs and enhances privacy.

ModelBest’s newest model, MiniCPM 3.0, has only 4 billion parameters but matches the performance of GPT-3.5 on various benchmarks. On GitHub and Hugging Face, the company’s models can be found under the profile of OpenBMB (Open Lab for Big Model Base), its open-source research lab.

Zhipu

Also originating at Tsinghua University, Zhipu AI has grown into a company with strong ties to government and academia. The firm is developing foundational models as well as AI products based on them, including ChatGLM, a conversational model, and a video generator called Ying, which is akin to OpenAI’s Sora system.

GLM-4-Plus, the company’s most advanced large language model to date, is trained on high-quality synthetic data, which reduces training costs, but has still matched the performance of GPT-4. The company has also developed GLM-4V-Plus, a vision model capable of interpreting web pages and videos, which represents a step toward AI with more “agentic” capabilities.

Among the cohort of new Chinese AI startups, Zhipu is the first to get on the US government’s radar. On January 15, the Biden administration revised its export control regulations, adding over 20 Chinese entities—including 10 subsidiaries of Zhipu AI—to its restricted trade list, restricting them from receiving US goods or technology for national interest reasons. The US claims Zhipu’s technology is helping China’s military, which the company denies.

Valued at over $2 billion, Zhipu is currently one of the biggest AI startups in China and is reportedly soon planning an IPO. The company’s investors include Beijing city government-affiliated funds and various prestigious VCs.

Infinigence AI

Founded in 2023, Infinigence AI is smaller than other companies on this list, though it has still attracted $140 million in funding so far. The company focuses on infrastructure instead of model development. Its main selling point is its ability to combine chips from lots of different brands successfully to execute AI tasks, forming what’s dubbed a “heterogeneous computing cluster.” This is a unique challenge Chinese AI companies face due to US chip sanctions.

Honorable mentions

Baichuan

While many of its competitors chase scale and expansive application ranges, Baichuan AI, founded by industry veteran Wang Xiaochuan (the founder of Sogou) in April 2023, is focused on the domestic Chinese market, targeting sectors like medical assistance and health care.

With a valuation over $2 billion after its newest round of fundraising, Baichuan is currently among the biggest AI startups in China.

Minimax

Founded by AI veteran Yan Junjie, Minimax is best known for its product Talkie, a companion chatbot available around the world. The platform provides various characters users can chat with for emotional support or entertainment, and it had even more downloads last year than leading competitor chatbot platform Character.ai.

Moonshot

Moonshot is best known for building Kimi, the second-most-popular AI chatbot in China, just after ByteDance’s Doubao, with over 13 million users. Released in 2023, Kimi supports input lengths of over 200,000 characters, making it a popular choice among students, white-collar workers, and others who routinely have to work with long chunks of text.

Founded by Yang Zhilin, a renowned AI researcher who studied at Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon University, Moonshot is backed by big tech companies, including Alibaba, and top venture capital firms. The company is valued at around $3 billion.

● As a side note, China is not only focused on software. Watch out, Elon Musk. Chinese robots are coming:

In China and elsewhere Tesla’s electric-vehicle sales are crashing as Chinese challengers, nurtured on state support then left to compete among themselves, offer EVs that are cheaper, better or both.

Now the Communist Party is making a similar song and dance about humanoids, both as a matter of technological pride and, given the shrivelling working-age population, out of demographic necessity. In January robots devised by Unitree, a startup from Hangzhou, literally pranced on stage during the Spring Festival Gala, a televised state-sponsored celebration of the Chinese new year. In a speech last month Li Qiang, China’s premier, name-checked Unitree alongside DeepSeek, the national AI superstar.

That is encouraging the private sector to pile in. Unitree’s corporate backers include Meituan, an e-commerce giant. AgiBot, another humanoid startup, has attracted investments by BYD, Tesla’s main EV rival, and Tencent, a vast digital conglomerate. Huawei, China’s mightiest tech titan, is pursuing its own android dreams. UBTech, a rare listed humanoid-maker which went public in 2023 and sells its robots for around $70,000 a pop, expects to ship 500-1,000 of them this year and more than 10,000 in 2027.

On top of state support, Chinese robot-makers enjoy another, bigger advantage over rich-world rivals: a well-oiled supply chain. America retains the edge in robot brains, notably in top-notch AI models (OpenAI and Google) and the chips these need to run (Nvidia, which also provides a software platform to program robots). To keep it that way, this month President Donald Trump again tightened curbs on the export of semiconductors to China.

But China is catching up fast in machine thinking. DeepSeek has shown that Chinese algorithms are clever and can do without fancy chips (a day after America’s new restrictions came to light Nvidia’s boss, Jensen Huang, flew to Beijing in a show of commitment to Chinese customers). Meanwhile, Chinese firms dominate the manufacture of components for machine bodies.

Of the 60 or so listed makers of robotic eyes (ie, cameras and sensors) and hands, muscles and joints (actuators), 48 are Chinese. Their combined market value of $217bn is up by 56% since September, even after the stockmarket rout provoked by Mr Trump’s tariffs. In the past year 12 had sales exceeding $1bn, compared with just two of their dozen non-Chinese rivals. That is not counting CATL, the world’s leading maker of electric stomachs (batteries). Bank of America says this supply chain will help halve the cost of materials in a Chinese humanoid by 2030, to $17,000.

Why is this a mistake?

That’s a simple one. The AI hysteria sucked hundreds of billions if not trillion of dollars that could have been used for better causes. It has also led to insane energy consumption, and not in the most ethical way:

Amazon, Microsoft and Google are operating datacentres that use vast amounts of water in some of the world’s driest areas and are building many more, the non-profit investigatory organisation SourceMaterial and the Guardian have found.

…

Datacentres, vast warehouses containing networked servers used for the remote storage and processing of data, as well as by information technology companies to train AI models such as ChatGPT, use water for cooling. SourceMaterial’s analysis identified 38 active datacentres owned by the big three tech firms in parts of the world already facing water scarcity, as well as 24 more under development.

Datacentres’ locations are often industry secrets. But by using local news reports and industry sources Baxtel and Data Center Map, SourceMaterial compiled a map of 632 datacentres – either active or under development – owned by Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

It shows that those companies’ plans involve a 78% increase in the number of datacentres they own worldwide as cloud computing and AI cause a surge in the world’s demand for storage, with construction planned in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

In parts of the world where water is plentiful, datacentres’ high water usage is less problematic, but in 2023 Microsoft said that 42% of its water came from “areas with water stress”, while Google said 15% of its water consumption was in areas with “high water scarcity”. Amazon did not report a figure.

Now these companies plan to expand their activities in some of the world’s most arid regions, SourceMaterial and the Guardian’s analysis found.

“It’s no coincidence they are building in dry areas,” as datacentres have to be built inland, where low humidity reduces the risk of metal corrosion, while seawater also causes corrosion if used for cooling, Jaume-Palasí said.

…

Between them, Amazon’s new datacentres in the Aragon region are predicted to use more electricity than the entire region currently consumes. Meanwhile, Amazon in December asked the regional government for permission to increase water consumption at its three existing datacentres by 48%.

…

“They’re using too much water. They’re using too much energy,” said Aurora Gómez of the campaign group Tu Nube Seca Mi Río – Spanish for “Your cloud is drying my river” – which has called for a moratorium on new datacentres in Spain due to water scarcity.

So maybe it’s a crime, not just a mistake. But if the West does it, China wants to do it to. This is not an arms race, nor a classic economic competition, but an AI race.

China Daily: Xi urges sound AI advancement:

President Xi Jinping has underlined the need to leverage the strength of the country’s system for mobilizing resources nationwide to promote the sound development of artificial intelligence, and he called for efforts to overcome challenges regarding core technologies such as high-end chips and foundational software.

Xi, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, made the remarks on Friday when presiding over a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee.

He emphasized that in the face of rapidly evolving new-generation AI technologies, China will uphold self-reliance and self-strengthening, prioritize application-oriented development, and promote the healthy and orderly advancement of the country’s AI sector toward a beneficial, safe and equitable direction.

…

In the Government Work Report for 2025, China vowed to effectively combine digital technologies with its manufacturing and market strengths. It will support the extensive application of large-scale AI models and develop new-generation intelligent terminals and smart manufacturing equipment, including intelligently connected new energy vehicles and intelligent robots.

…

At the group study session, Xi pointed out that the CPC Central Committee attaches great importance to the development of AI, and has improved top-level design and strengthened implementation efforts in recent years, thereby driving a holistic and systematic advancement of the country’s comprehensive AI strength.

English.gov.cn: Xi urges promoting healthy, orderly development of AI:

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, has urged efforts to promote the healthy and orderly development of artificial intelligence (AI) in a beneficial, safe and fair direction.

Xi made the remarks while presiding over a group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee on Friday.

Xi emphasized that in the face of rapidly evolving new-generation AI technologies, China shall give full play to the advantages of the new system for mobilizing resources nationwide, uphold self-reliance and self-strengthening, prioritize application-oriented development, and promote the healthy and orderly advancement of the country’s AI sector toward a beneficial, safe and equitable direction.

Zheng Nanning, a professor at Xi’an Jiaotong University in northwest China’s Shaanxi Province, gave a lecture on this issue and put forward suggestions. Members of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee listened carefully to the lecture and held discussions.

Speaking after these discussions, Xi pointed out that AI, as a strategic technology leading the new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation, has profoundly changed the way humans produce and live.

…

Xi stressed that breakthroughs must be achieved in fundamental theories, methodologies and tools to gain a first-mover advantage and secure a competitive edge in AI.

He urged efforts to consistently strengthen basic research and focus on overcoming challenges regarding core technologies such as high-end chips and foundational software, thereby building an independent, controllable, and collaboratively-functioning foundational software and hardware system for AI.

He emphasized leveraging AI to drive paradigm transformation in scientific research and accelerate breakthroughs in technological innovation across all fields.

Pointing out that China has rich data resources, a complete industrial system, a wide range of application scenarios and huge market space, Xi stressed that an industry-academia-research-application collaborative innovation system led by enterprises should be built to promote the in-depth integration of AI technological innovation and industrial innovation.

He highlighted AI’s roles in the transformation and upgrading of traditional industries and opening up new tracks for strategic emerging industries and future industries.

The construction of computing power infrastructure should be promoted in a coordinated manner, and the development, utilization and sharing of data resources should be deepened, Xi said.

He stressed the importance of policy support for AI, including policies concerning intellectual property rights, fiscal and taxation matters, government procurement and the opening of facilities, while he also called for advancing financial services for science and technology.

He underlined the necessity to promote AI education across all phases of schooling and general education for the entire society, in order to continuously cultivate high-quality talents.

The mechanisms for AI scientific research support, career development and talent evaluation should be enhanced, and platforms and conditions should be created for talents to showcase their abilities, Xi added.

Xi noted that AI not only introduces unprecedented development opportunities, but also brings unprecedented risks and challenges. It is essential to grasp the trends and patterns of AI development, and to accelerate the formulation and improvement of relevant laws, regulations, policy systems, application standards and ethical guidelines. It is also crucial to establish systems for technology monitoring, early risk warning and emergency response — to ensure that AI is safe, reliable and controllable.

He emphasized that AI can serve as a global public good that benefits humanity. It is important to widely carry out international cooperation in AI, help Global South countries strengthen their technological capacity building, and to make contributions to bridging the global AI divide.

Efforts should be made to promote the alignment and coordination of development strategies, governance rules, and technical standards among all parties, and to form a global governance framework and standards with extensive consensus as early as possible, Xi said.

FFS!

Why did they copied us?

While I didn’t have the time or the guts to ask one or more chatbots about my interpretation, I suppose it might hold some water. Here it is.

In brief, China began opening to the West in 1978, under Deng Xiaoping. Gone were Mao’s isolationist policies! Since the establishing of Special Economic Zones in 1980, China attracted more and more Western capital and technology. “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, Xi Jinping have all continued the capitalist development of a country that still claims to be socialist and ruled by a communist party!

How can this be explained?

On the one hand, the economy is clearly capitalist, and people have the right to become as rich as they can. The participation of the state in the economy is important (some oversimplifications say it’s “half-and-half,” but it’s more of a state-led capitalist system) but, in contrast to previous times or to the economy of the former socialist countries (those ruled by Communist parties), the result is that of remarkable economic growth and adaptability, and an extreme efficiency. Nothing like Mao’s failed “Great Leap Forward”!

On the other hand, the power is still pyramidal, with a mono-party system. Any attempts at a democracy have to be limited to an illusory “internal Party democracy” (Nicolae Ceaușescu liked this hollow term). But the Chinese Communist Party and its leadership cannot risk any instability brought by a multi-party system and open debates on everything.

I theorize that CCP’s claims that this phase is temporary and required to increase the nation’s wealth before going back to an equitable redistribution is a smart smokescreen. Everybody knows that this is never going to happen. I suspect that most Chinese citizens see this as a convenient narrative to maintain the “Communist” label while embracing capitalist realities.

The governance is bound to remain authoritarian, yet with a capitalist economy in which the State only controls the strategic sectors. But they cannot admit there’s nothing “Communist” in CCP’s policies, because they’d have to dethrone Mao, which can’t be done.

Mao is revered as the symbol of the new China. At the very most, the CCP can say that “some errors have been made under Mao’s leadership,” but his face should remain on public portraits, on banknotes, and in the official narrative.

Despite the obvious incompatibility between the new policies introduced by Deng and Mao’s strict dogmas (should I even mention the “Cultural Revolution”?), the CCP sticks to Mao as if it were their Jesus. They have to. Without Mao, what’s the legitimacy of CCP’s and of the single-party system?

Honestly, the CCP could rename itself the “Chinese National Party” or the “Chinese Fascist Party” or even the “Chinese Harmony Party” (to insert the official claim of building a harmonious society), but completely ditching Mao’s legacy would be too risky.

I’m not sure that the public support for a multi-party system would be massive. So many Chinese students who have studied in the West, including in the US and Canada, came back unimpressed by the multi-party systems they witnessed there, especially when at the national level there were only two parties alternating at power.

“What’s the good of switching between two parties if the problems are never solved, and each time they’re blaming each other for them?” I can’t say I don’t understand such a view. Besides, China’s ability to execute massive projects contrasts with the gridlock often seen in Western democracies. For those prioritizing results over political freedoms, the CCP’s model keeps looking like a decent compromise.

However, China’s stability comes at a price: censorship, lack of transparency, lack of accountability because of extremely limited checks-and-balances (if any), limitations of some rights.

Sure thing, it’s not like in the former Communist regimes where people were held captive by the State. The Chinese can travel to foreign countries rather easily. They’re not hostages of the State.

But maybe we should also look at Taiwan, which only ceased being a military dictatorship in 1987, when martial law ended. The first direct presidential election only occurred in 1996, but this island is now a vibrant democracy. So people would rather embrace political pluralism after decades of a lack of choice. But scaling this to China’s 1.4 billion people would be a different challenge. The Eastern European countries’ transition to democracy has been quite bumpy, and it has been accompanied by a severe drop in the GDP, albeit temporary. China cannot accept such an outcome.

Is this a better approach than a Western-style democracy? By many accounts, China is much more efficient economically than its democratic rivals, and this cannot be put exclusively on the exploitation of the workforce (oh, the irony). If the corruption is kept under control, maybe this authoritarian but quite enlightened leadership would prove to have been a working solution. But can China still claim they’re marching towards Communism? And will they keep Mao as an icon forever? He’s likely to stay for decades, merely because he’s the glue holding the CCP’s story together.

China’s leaders are definitely pragmatists trying to balance a capitalist economy with authoritarian control. The resulting system, dressed in communist rhetoric, works because it delivers results—until the day it doesn’t.

“The day it doesn’t” (anymore) doesn’t necessarily come as an exclusive result of the political system. By implementing a capitalist economy, be it with State control of the strategic components, China has copied (or mirrored) the West, including its heel of Achilles.

Like Slavoj Žižek keeps saying, Marx was a great diagnostician of capitalism, but a pathetic clinician: his “treatment” would kill the patient. But capitalism suffers from its reliance on continuous growth and its unique motivation being the profit.

China’s economic stability depends on a continuous increase of its GDP, of a continuous increase of its internal consumption, of a continuous increase of its exports. However, as there’s no ideal nor an infinite market, once China’s economy reached such a developed status, it became increasingly difficult to maintain close-to-full employment, to avoid economic crisis, to recover from erroneous decisions (which could also happen in democracies, because a company is not ruled democratically).

While the CCP tries to facilitate the investment and to compensate for some mass losses, like the current disturbances caused by Trump’s tariffs, there’s only so much the Party can do.

China is bound to experience recessions, crisis, depressions, just like any capitalist economy. So much for the “building of a harmonious society”! And that’s precisely because China’s system, despite its socialist branding, leans heavily on those capitalist mechanisms Marx critiqued.

Now, of course, a Marxist economist, 🎞️ Richard Wolff, argues that even the Eastern socialist countries whose systems were usually called “Communist” to differentiate them from the Western social-democracies that he calls “socialist” are still capitalist from an economic standpoint. We’re talking of state capitalism, but as long as the employer-employee relationship remains, it’s still capitalism. Bureaucrats and apparatchiks might have replaced the bourgeois capitalists, but the workforce itself has no saying about the functioning of the enterprise that employs them. And my interpretation of Richard Wolff’s views is that, while putting China on the same level with Western capitalist countries, he believes China’s governance to be more apt than the rest of the world to face a major crisis.

Well, again, only time will tell whether this bold theory holds water or not. China’s authoritarian system is a double-edged sword. On one hand, the CCP’s ability to act rapidly, without the gridlock of a democratic debate, can be a real asset in a crisis, as they can redirect resources and try to maintain stability. But on the other side, the lack of transparency and accountability can amplify mistakes, and there are no real checks and balances to catch a massive blunder before it snowballs into a catastrophe. The next big economic shock will be the best proof of China’s resilience. China’s experiment is going to be a hell of a case study.

But until then…

In the short run, I’m still waiting for China’s Xi to break Trump’s idiotic tariffs.

Despite Trump’s lies, Xi has never called it to negotiate. Trump acknowledged that American kids “might have two dolls instead of 30 dolls” this Christmas, but he insisted China will suffer more than the US from his trade war. Yeah, sure. Meanwhile, Walmart has told some Chinese suppliers to resume shipments: “The costs of the new import duties will be borne by the US clients, the firm said.”

Needless to say, China tries to find new allies against the US, courting not only its Asian partners but also the EU by lifting sanctions on members of European Parliament, trying to look more open, and generally being more proactive than most people realize.

Let me stress on the fact that China’s cheap cars that have disturbed the European market are not just BYD’s EVs and Geely’s models (or brands, as they own Volvo and Lotus), or SAIC’s MG, which is no longer British. There is also the strange case of Italy, where nominally Italian brands are used to sell Chinese cars. I just discovered that SWM (Wikipedia) also sells in Romania, and it even sells cars with purely aspirated ICE; DR Automobiles sells rebadged vehicles from Chinese automakers BAIC, Chery Automobile, Dongfeng, and JAC Motors (and I’ve seen their cars in Romania too!). Chery Automobile sells everywhere, even in Moldova. And Leapmotor is something you should ask Stellantis about. There are many more smaller brands that on paper are, say, German, while they sell Chinese cars. Two dozen brands—more than the genuine European brands!

Now tell me again how China can lose a trade war—any trade war!

For fuck’s sake, here’s an absurd case: The Chinese group CPMC, under the name of Benepack Hungary, has invested €74m in a factory that will produce metal cans for the Coca-Cola bottling plants in Romania and Serbia; and the Hungarian government even provided a state subsidy of €14m to them!

But Europe wanted to set tariffs on Chinese EVs because of the alleged state subsidies by the Chinese state. Find me a European factory of batteries for EVs that did not, does not, and will not benefit of EU subsidies, and I’ll eat my pants!

European maps are centered on Europe (and Africa); American maps are centered on the Americas. Maybe we should adopt a different perspective:

Full image (8800 x 4556 pixels)

Meanwhile… New CIA videos seek to lure Chinese officials to leak secrets to US:

The CIA on Thursday rolled out two Chinese-language videos aimed at enticing officials in China to leak secrets to the US, the latest public effort by the intelligence agency to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington’s strategic rival.

The CIA is confident that the videos are penetrating China’s “Great Firewall” internet restrictions and reaching the intended audience.

“If it weren’t working, we wouldn’t be making more videos,” a CIA official said, adding that China was the agency’s foremost intelligence priority in a “truly generational competition” between the US and China.

The two videos posted to the CIA’s social media accounts depict fictional scenes in which a senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official and a more junior government worker with access to classified information become disillusioned with China’s system and approach the CIA.

The videos appear aimed at tapping into possible discontent in the Chinese government and senior echelons of the CCP, as President Xi Jinping has purged top officials and military leaders, some considered close allies of Xi himself.

“As I rise within the party, I watch those above me being discarded like worn-out shoes, but now I realise that my fate was just as precarious as theirs,” the narrator says in Mandarin in one of the videos as the camera shows empty seats around a lavish dinner table.

“My family’s fate cannot rest in their hands,” the man says before the video depicts him contacting the CIA using a tablet computer. It ends with the CIA logo and dark web contact details for the agency.

The CIA official said that the US was not just interested in counter-intelligence, but was also seeking information on advanced science, military and cyber technology, valuable economic data, and China’s foreign policy secrets.

On the other hand, the Trump administration just ditched the “de minimis exemption” that allowed shipments of goods worth $800 or less to come into the United States duty-free. So, those ultra-low-cost junk from Shein, Temu and AliExpress? Forget about them!

CBP told CNN it currently processes “nearly 4 million duty-free de minimis shipments a day.” Research indicates that a majority of those shipments come from China and Hong Kong. In total, over the last fiscal year, CBP said 1.36 billion packages came to the US under the de minimis exemption.

…

“I can’t afford to buy from Temu now, and I already couldn’t afford to buy in this country,” Rena Scott, a 64-year-old retired nurse from Virginia, previously said to CNN Business.

Lower-income households will suffer the most from the end of cheap Chinese e-commerce sites. About 48% of de minimis packages shipped to the poorest zip codes in the United States, while 22% were delivered to the richest ones, according to February research from UCLA and Yale economists.

Great job, Trump!

Ironically, the US had one of the most generous “de minimis” exemptions in the world! The EU has a duty-free limit of €150 (~$165), but VAT is added in all cases (the €22 threshold for VAT exemption has been abolished on July 1, 2021); Canada’s limit is even stricter at CAD20 (~$15) for both duties and taxes, though a duty-free (but not tax-free) limit of CAD150 applies for courier shipped from the United States or Mexico under certain conditions (not shipped via postal services; the goods should not be transshipped; some items are ineligible), and over CAD40 tax (GST/HST/PST/QST) applies.