What China’s car makers teach the global auto industry – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

China’s car makers take the lead in developing their software-driven industry, and innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok explains how the global industry can learn from their Chinese competitors in her weblog.

Ashley Dudarenok:

In our China Economic Mega Report 2025, one of the clearest shifts in Chinese consumer technology is cars changing from a physical product into a software defined vehicles. The consequence shows in the numbers.

In the first two months of 2026, L2-level combined driver assistance penetration in China’s newly sold passenger vehicles reached 69.15%, up 10 percentage points year-on-year, per Ministry of Industry and Information Technology data.

The vehicle operating system has become the primary competitive variable in the world’s largest auto market. What China figured out first, and why that lead compounds, is what this article maps.

Much more at Ashley’s website.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Can China help Africa to develop – Harry Broadman

 

Harry Broadman

China, Africa, and the US are pretty different bedfellows when it comes to trade, says political analyst Harry Broadman, to Al Jazeera. China seems to have a better understanding of Africa, where the US was in the past mainly focused on opening the African markets for its own benefit, he adds.

Harry Broadman is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more experts on China’s Belt&Road Initiative? Do check out this list.

How China helps Africa to develop – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

In the short run, the trade deficit between China and Africa might grow. Still, in the long run, China has a profound interest in helping Africa to develop its economy, including the abolishment of trade tariffs for most African countries, says business analyst Shaun Rein at Al Jazeera. Now China focuses on getting raw material, but its interest is broader, he adds.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Do you need more experts on China’s Belt&road Initiative? Do check out this list.

What AI model should your company adopt in 2026, Deepseek or Claude – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok compares at her weblog Chozan two AI models your company can pick from in 2026. “DeepSeek vs Claude is not a comparison of two AI tools. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of deploying intelligence inside an organization,” she writes.

Ashley Dudarenok:

DeepSeek vs Claude is not a comparison of two AI tools. It reflects two fundamentally different ways of deploying intelligence inside an organization.

In 2026, the critical question is no longer which model performs better. It is how AI is integrated, scaled, and governed across real systems. DeepSeek and Claude represent opposite answers to that question.

McKinsey reports that 88% of companies now use AI in at least one business function, but only about one-third have actually scaled it across the organization. That gap—between using AI and scaling it—is exactly where the difference between DeepSeek and Anthropic shows up.

DeepSeek treats AI as a cost-efficient, flexible infrastructure layer that companies can shape and deploy internally. Claude treats AI as a controlled, enterprise-ready system designed for reliability and structured execution.

This distinction matters because companies are no longer experimenting with AI. They are deciding how deeply it should be embedded into operations, and that decision requires choosing an architecture, not just a model.

More at Chozan.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Deepseek vs Gemini – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok looks at her website ChoZan into the differences between the two leading AI companies, Deepseek and Gemini. In detail, she examines where both companies work best, as they differ profoundly.

Ashley Dudarenok:

At a surface level, both models aim to compete at the frontier of AI capability. The difference shows up in how they are built and where they are meant to win.

DeepSeek stems from a Chinese engineering mindset that prioritizes efficiency and scalability in deployment. Teams behind it have roots in quantitative finance and high-performance computing. That influence shows in how aggressively they optimize for cost and inference efficiency.

Gemini, developed by Google, prioritizes differently. It is designed as a deeply integrated intelligence layer across products like Google Search, Gmail, and Google Workspace. The goal is not just performance but ecosystem dominance.

This creates a practical divide. DeepSeek vs. Gemini is not a purely model-based comparison. It is a comparison between an efficiency-first challenger and an ecosystem-first incumbent. A similar divide appears in DeepSeek vs ChatGPT when deployment model and control are compared directly.

More at ChoZan.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need her at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How Trump played poker in Beijing, where the game was Pokemon – Victor Shih

 

Victor Shih

Political analyst Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy,  looks at the Trump state visit in Beijing. While Trump was losing his poker game, he should have been playing Pokémon, he explains in the Wire China.

Victor Shih:

It is not entirely wrong to think of Great Power politics as a card game, as Trump at times does. However, it is not a poker game, where hands are dealt randomly, and players both try to read the cards held by other players and, at times, bluff their way to victory.

The card game of geopolitics is in fact more akin to the Pokemon card game, where players still need to guess or collect intelligence on a competitor’s hand, but have much more discretion than in poker to expend resources and make tradeoffs in order to build the best position they can relative to their competitors.

The evidence on display in Beijing last week was that China has done this expertly — while the Trump administration still needs to realize that they are not even playing the right card game.

More at the Wire China.

Victor Shih is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How China won the Trump visit in Beijing – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Business analyst Shaun Rein looks back at the Trump visit in Beijing and explains why China has been the winner of this historic get-together, he tells George Galloway. He explains why China will never buy US technology anymore

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Trump has no credibility in Beijing – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein explains at CNBC why we cannot expect too much from the ongoing meeting between US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping. Trump has no credibility at all in Beijing, he says.

Shaun Rein is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

What Western e-commerce can learn from China – Bjorn Ognibeni

 

Bjorn Ognibeni

Practical visionair and ChinaBriefs author Bjorn Ognibeni speaks at the E-commerce expo 2026 in Berlin about what Western e-commerce companies can learn from China. While Silicon Valley perfects Agentic AI demos, Chinese platforms are already deploying AI at scale – and making money doing it, he tells his audience

Bjorn Ognibeni is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

EV showrooms give way to emotional value – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

China’s shopping malls illustrate a profound change in consumer sentiment as EV showrooms are replaced by new features giving way to emotional value, says consumer expert Ashley Dudarenok in the Jing Daily.

Ashley Dudarenok:

When an EV showroom closes, it is increasingly being replaced by a brand selling something entirely intangible: emotional value.

Pop Mart, the Beijing-based designer toy maker, is aggressively expanding its physical footprint, moving from automated vending machines and small kiosks into massive, experiential ground-floor flagships. The financial backing for this expansion is staggering. In late March 2026, Pop Mart reported that its full-year 2025 revenue had surged by nearly 185% to RMB 37.1 billion ($5.4 billion), driven largely by the global phenomenon of its Labubu character series.

More at the Jing Daily.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do get in touch or fill in our speakers’ request form.

Are you looking for more consumer experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.