AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin discusses the AI race between China and the US with James M. Lindsay at the Council of Foreign Relations. He explains why the current priorities for winning that race are fundamentally wrong.
Alvin Wang Graylin 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.
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Turning AI into a paid platform is a key criterion for China’s success, writes marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok on her weblog, as video AI has become a major commercial success in setting up paid platforms. “Chinese video AI has become one of China’s clearest tests for artificial intelligence commercialization. The category is being judged by paid usage, creator demand, and platform placement,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Chinese video AI has become one of China’s clearest tests for artificial intelligence commercialization. The category is being judged by paid usage, creator demand, and platform placement.
China has a rare advantage here. Video tools can enter short video feeds, ecommerce stores, ad accounts, and creator studios at the same time. This embedded distribution gives Chinese video AI a faster route from model release to business use…
Chinese video AI now has commercial numbers that most generative video categories still lack. Kling AI crossed USD20 million in monthly revenue in December 2025. That translated into USD240 million in Annualized Revenue Run Rate (ARR).
Annualized Revenue Run Rate means the yearly revenue implied by one month of recurring revenue. Kuaishou said Kling had reached USD100 million ARR in March 2025, ten months after launch.
The pace did not slow at the start of 2026. Caixin put Kling’s ARR above USD300 million by January 2026, with 2025 revenue of 1.04 billion yuan (USD153 million). Kling’s business had also entered funding talks. A possible spinoff carried a target valuation of up to USD20 billion.
These figures put commercial viability at the center of the story. The useful test is whether users keep paying after the launch excitement fades. Kling’s curve suggests that professional creators, merchants, and commercial teams are paying for repeat output.
China’s wider AI base gives this category more room to mature. The State Council said China’s core AI industry exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan (USD176.4 billion) in 2025, with more than 6,200 AI companies. A separate State Council summary put China’s internet user base at 1.125 billion and generative AI adoption at 42.8 percent by the end of 2025.
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.
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Xiaomi took off as a successful mobile phone company, but has moved into a wide range of industries, explains consumer expert Ashley Dudarenok on her weblog ChoZan. “Xiaomi EV matters because it shows how a consumer technology company can move into cars quickly, with pricing confidence and ecosystem depth,” writes Dudarenok.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Xiaomi EV has become one of China’s most important smart mobility stories because it integrates cars, phones, AIoT, retail, and software into a single consumer system. In 2025, Xiaomi reported 411,082 vehicle deliveries and RMB 103.3 billion (US$15.2 billion) in smart EV revenue.
For 2026, the company set a 550,000-unit delivery target, making Xiaomi Auto a serious force in China’s crowded EV market.
The point for global executives is clear. Xiaomi EV is leveraging consumer electronics discipline, founder-led brand trust, rapid product cycles, software familiarity, and a large connected-device base to reshape expectations for smart EVs in China…
Xiaomi EV matters because it shows how a consumer technology company can move into cars quickly, with pricing confidence and ecosystem depth. The company’s smart EV, AI, and new initiatives segment reached RMB 106.1 billion (US$15.6 billion) in 2025, with a gross margin of 24.3 percent and positive operating income of RMB 0.9 billion (US$132.4 million).
That financial shift changes the discussion around Xiaomi’s electric vehicles. Many new EV entrants struggle to move from attention to scale. Xiaomi reached a large volume quickly, then placed its auto business inside a wider technology platform that already includes phones, wearables, home appliances, internet services, and AI-enabled user interfaces.
This is why Xiaomi EV car demand differs from that of a normal car launch. Buyers respond to design and range, yet they also respond to a familiar Xiaomi logic. The company has trained consumers to expect strong specifications, accessible premium features, and frequent software improvements across devices.
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.
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In China, many citizens looked with admiration at the US, but those days are certainly over, says London-based journalist Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus: A Novel
Zhang Lijia:
However, admiration has become more qualified. The US is increasingly seen not as a political role model but as a complex society grappling with many of the same challenges facing other countries: inequality, social division, political polarisation and diminishing trust in institutions. Trump became an unlikely catalyst for this shift.
The US remains powerful and influential, yet the country many educated Chinese once imagined from afar is now viewed less idealistically. More than any other recent American leader, Trump accelerated this transformation, narrowing a psychological distance that had existed for decades.
For many educated Chinese, the US no longer appears as the destination towards which all modern societies naturally evolve. Trump did not merely change the way Chinese people viewed America, he also forced them to rethink long-held assumptions about democracy, modernity and the direction of history itself.
More at the South China Morning Post.
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The US has put a row of larger Chinese commercial firms on its Pentagon blacklist for connections with China’s military, including Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, CATL, Unitree, Xiaomi, Huawei and chipmaker CXMT. “It signals that the definition of strategic technology has expanded dramatically, says Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU, across a range of media.
The Sri Lanka Guardian:
“When companies like Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, Tencent and Xiaomi are viewed
through a national security lens, it signals that the definition of strategic
technology has expanded dramatically,” said Winston Ma. He noted that the
updated Pentagon list aligns with broader regulatory shifts in the United
States, including earlier efforts by the Committee on Foreign Investment in
the United States to broaden its review of mergers and acquisitions involving
foreign-linked firms. That expansion, implemented in early 2025, was
designed to tighten oversight of investments from geopolitical competitors,
particularly China.
Ma added that these developments reflect a structural shift in how
commercial innovation is assessed within policy frameworks. “Both
developments reflect a broader reality: The boundary between commercial
technology and national security is becoming increasingly blurred,” he said.
More at the Sri Lanka Guardian.
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Digital strategy expert Bjorn Ognibeni explains why Western retail continues to miss what we are missing from the way China is developing, in an interview with Philipp Labrovsky at Omni Strategies. How the market economy and competition really make China strong.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
