Weblog with daily updates of the news on a frugal, fair and beautiful China, from the perspective of internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and president of the China Speakers Bureau Fons Tuinstra
Political scientist Victor Shih participates in a wide-ranging debate on how the China Shock 3.0 is hitting both the US and Europe. In this sequence, he illustrates how the European car industry, particularly Volkswagen, woke up in a harsh way to the reality of how to collaborate with its Chinese competitors, in the Folks Center’s Trade and Diplomacy series of the USC Darla Moore School of Business.
In the summer of 2026, a Republican president, a democratic socialist senator, the CEO of OpenAI and the Chinese government all reached the same conclusion: artificial intelligence is too important to leave to private capital alone. They agree on almost nothing else.
Winston Ma spent a decade investing for China’s sovereign wealth fund in North American markets. In Who Owns AI? he follows the state money now going into power grids, chip foundries, data centers and the frontier labs themselves. He finds Saudi Arabia selling its flagship football club to pay for compute. China’s National AI Fund writes the smallest check in DeepSeek’s first outside round and comes away with the only voting seat. Washington turns $8.9 billion in CHIPS Act grants into an Intel stake worth more than $46 billion within a year. And in March 2026, Iranian drones strike three Amazon data centers in the Gulf. It was the first time data centers had been deliberately targeted in a war.
Three parties now claim a share of what AI produces: the companies that build it, the governments that fund it, and the public whose knowledge it was trained on. Ma shows why none of them can hold that claim alone. He also shows why nearly every serious proposal ends up at the same answer, a sovereign wealth fund for AI. Still unsettled: who owns it, who runs it, and who it answers to.
Norway turned its oil into a fund that has been growing for decades. The people in this book are deciding right now whether anyone will do the same with AI.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo, producer of the Sinica Podcast in Beijing, takes a deep dive into China’s history and explains how the country has become a leading force in modernity, in a debate with Richard Hames at Novara Media.x`
China has officially banned access to Musk’s Starlink, but two Chinese companies are developing alternative satellite constellations, Guowang and Qianfan (SpaceSail), writes innovation expert Ashley Dudarenokat her website Chozan.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Starlink in China does not work and is not legally available. China has banned Starlink’s consumer services and instead developed two sovereign LEO satellite constellations—Guowang and Qianfan (SpaceSail) —to compete directly with SpaceX’s global broadband network.
The question of whether Starlink works in China has shifted from a consumer curiosity to a geopolitical and commercial imperative.
For global technology investors, telecommunications equipment suppliers, and multinational corporations operating in Asia, understanding China’s satellite internet ecosystem directly affects supply chain decisions, regulatory compliance, and market-entry strategies.
Starlink available in China is not—and will not become—a reality under current policy. China’s telecommunications licensing framework and its 2025 direct-to-satellite regulations restrict unauthorized foreign satellite services.
Starlink is not authorized to provide consumer satellite internet services in mainland China. However, the more significant development is what Beijing is building instead.
Global travellers know how challenging making payments can be, whether foreigners are going to China or Chinese are going to the rest of the world. Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok explains how Weixin can offer a two-way payment system solving those problems, she writes in the Jing Daily.
Ashley Dudarenok:
A Chinese traveler lands in Malaysia. She needs a ride but does not want to download a local app or find a foreign credit card. Instead, she opens Weixin, hails a car in Chinese, and communicates with the driver through translation.
Likewise, a Malaysian tourist arriving in Shenzhen can now use a wallet from home rather than downloading a Chinese payment app. Tencent’s latest program includes planned PayPal World interoperability, multilingual guidance, and international-card incentives.
These are not isolated payment upgrades. They are early signs of a much larger shift: Weixin is becoming a two-way travel stack — one that makes foreign services feel usable to Chinese travelers while making China’s QR-first economy less foreign to everyone else.
US-developed AI agents got into big trouble as they went rogue. Innovation expert Winston Ma looks at the situation in China, especially Alibaba’s AI platform Accio, and how they make sure human control has the last say on how the AI agents work; he writes at FirstPost.
Winston Ma:
Why bounded authority works
Finding suppliers, comparing quotes and preparing compliance paperwork once took a small business weeks. The agent now does it continuously, within limits the buyer sets. The point at which the business becomes bound stays with a person, so the questions that matter have clear answers: whose deal it is, what the agent was allowed to do, and who catches a mistake before money moves.
The international legal framework points the same way. UNCITRAL’s 2024 Model Law on Automated Contracting recognises contracts formed through automated systems, while making clear that automation does not excuse non-compliance with other legal requirements. The networks’ operator-linked agent credentials and Accio’s approval gate serve one principle at two layers of the same transaction: an agent acts only within authority that a known party has granted and stands behind.
Next: Portable proof of authority
Today the approval record lives inside one platform. As suppliers deploy agents of their own, the next generation of tools should let that record travel, so the other side of a deal can verify what a buyer’s agent was authorised to do. Cross-network identity frameworks are the natural foundation.
Confidentiality is a second design frontier. Alibaba says its agent can use the best terms from one supplier as a reference point in talks with others, a powerful feature that needs care where quotes are confidential.
Three steps would accelerate progress:
Businesses should write down each agent’s mandate and keep human approval at binding terms and payments.
Platforms should build review screens that show what changed, and flag confidential supplier terms before an agent reuses them.
Policymakers should make agent identity interoperable across networks and borders, so that trust built in one ecosystem is recognised in another.
Who signs
The race in agentic commerce is often framed as a contest over autonomy. The more durable advantage is provable authority: who the agent is, what it is allowed to do, and who stands behind the commitment.
That combination can give a small importer in Lagos or Ho Chi Minh City the leverage of a large trading house: months of sourcing work done in hours, with the commitment still its own. Payment networks are building ways to verify who an agent is and whom it represents. Accio shows what comes next: agents that do the work, and people who sign. Together, they give AI agents what agency law has always asked of human ones.
Online shopping used to be a fast-growing retail segment in Chna, but growth is dropping, says consumer expert Ashley Dudarenokat Asia One. Influencers feel the pressure after they have been winner for the past years now AI is gaining pace, she adds.
Asia One:
The industry is grappling with a weaker consumer environment, where retail sales rose just 0.4 per cent in August on the year, down from July’s 0.6 per cent, while growth of 1.1 per cent over the first eight months of 2026 reflected sluggish household spending.
Yet livestreaming has reshaped China’s shopping habits, with online retail sales exceeding 36 per cent in 2025, up from less than 18 per cent in 2021.
“It is still growing, but the growth is a lot more difficult,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of digital consultancy Chozan.
“Merchants need to compete a lot harder for customers’ wallets … and the expectations of customers are as high as ever, but the budgets are lower.”…
The debate is also playing out among regulators and consumers. Rules for clear labelling of AI-generated content took effect in September 2025, while ByteDance-owned Douyin – China’s version of TikTok – has banned fully AI-generated livestreams and requires disclosure of the use of digital hosts.
Backlash has greeted some influencers who revealed that AI avatars were appearing in their place.
“I think a human livestreaming host is sort of an endangered species, but it depends,” Dudarenok said, adding that as AI-generated content becomes more common, consumers may gravitate back toward the authenticity of human hosts.
“I don’t think they’re going to disappear completely, but the less successful hosts … they will have to use better tools or change occupations.”
Political scientist Victor Shih participates in a wide-ranging debate on how the China Shock 3.0 is hitting both the US and Europe. In this sequence, he illustrates how the European car industry, particularly Volkswagen, woke up in a harsh way to the reality of how to collaborate with its Chinese competitors, in the Folks Center’s Trade and Diplomacy series of the USC Darla Moore School of Business.
