Collated China's donations data in last few years to see how common prosperity, which emphasizes donations as a key tool for wealth redistribution, is doing. Conclusion: not great. Total est. donations in 2024 lowest in 10 years Story for The Diplomat: thediplomat.com/2025/02/2024-w…

Xu Jilin has a very interesting essay on how Chinese Gen-zers are different from the generations that came before them: The younger generation wants to "leave the polis"

First heard about Belgian electronic artist Bolis Pupul on a Chinese alt. music radio show where he spoke beautifully about his late mother and grandparents from Wenzhou. Truly admire how he channeled his grief through music. My profile: scmp.com/postmag/cultur…

My Barron's debut with Sam Bresnick! PRC AI companies are following a familiar playbook for PRC tech. What does this mean for the AI race? Esp timely w/ Alibaba’s release of QwQ-32B, another open-source SOTA PRC model. A quick thread 1/7

Some Troubled Science Reporting at South China Morning Post - A review of the SCMP's recent cable-cutting blockbuster and 8 other science stories in the past year. pekingnology.com/p/some-trouble…

lol. What was an incipient bipartisan pro-tariff, pro-industrial party movement is being turned into an full fledged bipartisan anti-tariff, anti-industrial policy movement.

Interesting list from SCMP similar to several Wechat articles at the end of last year that heavily insinuated US involvement in killing these researchers e.g. mp.weixin.qq.com/s/PpZkaVyqD2xo… sc.mp/dcmb9?utm_sour…

🚨🚨New Working Paper🚨🚨 AI-generated content is getting more politically persuasive. But does labeling it as AI-generated change its impact?🤔 Our research says the disclosure of AI authorship has little to no effect on the persuasiveness of AI-generated content. 🧵1/6

iFlytek's models are ones to watch closely as entity listing has meant theirs are the only Chinese reasoning models wholly trained on Huawei ecosystem. As Huawei improves, as it seems to be doing rapidly, expect similarly of iFlytek scmp.com/tech/big-tech/…

Alibaba’s Qwen3 possible release later today, described as “generalist model” (non reasoning and reasoning in the same model) just before China’s golden week holiday. Going to be a huge few weeks for Chinese AI if DeepSeek R2 also drops soon as expected

"During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line... They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day." Love him, hate him - his energy and instincts are simply incredible

Did you know the Chinese gov publishes an official list of public-facing generative AI tools operating in China? I spent the last six months cataloging and analyzing all 3,739 of them. Here are my early findings – and my data set. Exec sum in thread. 1/9 triviumchina.com/research/seeki…

My colleague Ian McKenzie spent six hours red-teaming Claude 4 Opus, and easily bypassed safeguards designed to block WMD development. Claude gave >15 pages of non-redundant instructions for sarin gas, describing all key steps in the manufacturing process.

Nice interview with Angela Zhang, her main points: - Beijing keen not to stifle AI development with burdensome regs - Reg focus still mainly content moderation - She calls on China and US to take AI risks more seriously, akin to "buying insurance." sc.mp/hwrf7?utm_sour…

"A famous Chinese essay written 100 years ago was evaluated by the tools as more than 60 per cent AI-generated" Clearly what's needed now is an AI content detection detector scmp.com/news/china/sci…

Claude's actions in Diplomacy are very on brand

Wow. Ren Zhengfei gets front page treatment on today's People's Daily, usually reserved for party leaders. While confident re. China's chips situation, he identifies two key AI bottlenecks: talent pipeline and basic research. Whole interview worth reading mp.weixin.qq.com/s/IWXq1NoPgNE0…

Happy to have won a SOPA for my story on Bunker, the academic bar in Shanghai that went viral last year. Sad to say that it was finally forced to close by the authorities just a couple weeks ago - but its young team will no doubt continue to do great and interesting things!