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
Ahead of a possible meeting between presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump, business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The Split: Finding the Opportunities in China’s Economy in the New World Order, is explaining how the US is boosting China’s stature globally. The US is losing its former friends in Australia, Canada, and Europe, while domestically, inflation is killing the US economy through a trade war with China, he tells at Moats.
So your next book coming out is a historical novel inspired by China’s first feminist, Qiu Jin . Can you tell us a little bit about her?
Oh, Qiu Jin was and is absolutely fabulous. She was the most colorful and extraordinary character in contemporary China. We’re talking about the end of the Qing dynasty. She was beheaded in 1907, four years before the downfall. In fact, she had a role in the downfall of the Qing. At that time, women were expected to stay at home but she had a public role. She ran a school to train insurgents trying to overthrow the Qing dynasty. They were Manchus, and the majority of the population were Han people like me.
Qiu Jin was a very colorful character, extraordinary. She loved to cross dress. She loved to dress up. She was a woman but she loved to put on men’s clothes and she was very into martial arts and she rode horses, championed for women to ban the foot binding, give up foot binding, and things like that.
Then she was beheaded in 1907 for organizing a military uprising. Because of her death changed public opinion, so many people began to stand against the Manchus. She was an absolutely wonderful character. She drank like a fish. She wrote her poems. Hopefully, after the publication, I hope I can sell the film rights.
Many young feminists, for example, in a few days, I’m going to see Lee Maizi. She organized a queer choir, and I’m going to see her on Saturday. Okay. Yes, people like her, she looks up to Qiu Jin, and one of the songs Qiu Jin composed herself is called nüquanzhige (女权之歌), the Song of the Feminist, and she, the lesson is we have to fight. I think we cannot just sit around waiting, praying that gender equality will be materialized. I think you have to fight for it. And I’m very pleased to see that young women still find interesting ways to do so in China.
Q:Do you consider it to be a logical next step for governments to create AI sovereign wealth funds given that sovereign funds are already the largest investors in AI?
WM: Exactly. The U.S. sovereign fund (and its Intel investment, among others) is a new phenomenon, but my Hunt for Unicorns book, which was published in 2020, was already talking about how sovereign funds globally — from the Middle East, China, Korea, Singapore, and Southeast Asia — were investing in tech, including AI.
Today government sovereign funds are the biggest investors in AI. Look at Anthropic: it’s the most valuable AI startup (and its CEO said the total addressable market exceeds $30 trillion). Most recently, the two largest rounds were led by Singapore GIC, the Singapore Government Investment Corporation.
The same is true for data centers. There’s a digital infrastructure investment consortium with the potential to invest $100 billion known as the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (AIP), co-led by BlackRock, the world’s largest alternative assets manager, and its subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP), as well as a few major sovereign wealth funds, including Singapore’s Temasek, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and Kuwait’s KIA.
When it comes to public AI stock trading, Norway’s sovereign investment fund is one of the largest public market investors in Nvidia, which dominates the AI chip layer, and it has huge voting power in many AI and tech companies because of its public holdings. These are 100% state-owned investment vehicles investing into the full AI stack.
The year 2026 is the start of a new phase: since public investment funds like those listed above are already financing the entire AI stack, formally establishing AI’s own sovereign wealth funds — such that AI gains can be shared as public benefits — is the natural institutional evolution.
Q: There is a very good reason for governments to invest. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change noted in a recent report that compute is not just a source of scientific and economic progress, but the new benchmark of global power economically and geopolitically.
WM: It’s not the compute alone; it’s the overall AI stack.
Q: This is why the whole issue of sovereignty has become so important in Europe because it doesn’t control the full stack.
WM: That is precisely the point. True AI sovereignty requires alignment across all five layers: securing energy baseload, manufacturing silicon, building data centers, hosting proprietary or open-weight models, and deploying productivity applications.
China has focused heavily on using sovereign vehicles to capitalize this stack. In addition to the well-known CIC sovereign wealth fund, where I worked as a financial investor managing a global market portfolio, China also established the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund (“Big Fund”). Its $47.5 billion Phase III, launched in late 2024, directly targets advanced semiconductors, yielding major market listings like ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) — China’s domestic answer to both U.S.-based Micron and South Korea’s Samsung.
In January 2025, Big Fund III co-founded the $8.2 billion National AI Fund. When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek raised its external financing round, the National AI Fund contributed a ¥1 billion check. Although smaller than the non-voting capital injected by commercial giants like Tencent and CATL, the state fund took the only position with direct governance voting rights.
Q: So when the U.S. government takes a 10% share in Intel, they’re essentially copying China?
WM: Exactly. Trump is taking a page out of China’s sovereign AI playbook — that’s the title of my Financial Times op-ed in June.
While the G20 is trying to make a front against China, Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein calls on CNBC for an end to the ongoing trade wars with China. Both China and the US are better off working together, he adds.
The position of women in China has changed profoundly, says Zhang Lijia, author and expert on China’s cultural change in The Persistent. “Growing up in China, I was told marriage was my destiny. For today’s young women, it’s a choice – and one many are rejecting,” she says.
Zhang Lijia:
China’s transformation from a poor, tightly controlled country into the world’s second-largest economy with far greater personal freedom has reshaped not only its cities but its expectations of women. Education has expanded. Careers have opened up. Financial independence has become far more common among urban women. With that independence comes a quiet but decisive shift: marriage is no longer necessary.
At the same time, the costs of marriage have risen, both materially and emotionally. Housing prices in major cities remain high, while raisingchildren has become an increasingly demanding undertaking, shaped by fierce competition and rising costs.
Yet economics alone don’t explain the change. For one thing, there has been a rise in individualism in a society that was once all about the collective – meaning women are putting their own needs before those of others. More important is the widening gap between women’s expectations and the reality of marriage. Although young men contribute more at home than their fathers did, women continue to do the majority of childcare and domestic work, even among affluent urban couples. For many, marriage looks less like a partnership than an added weight — a second shift waiting at the end of the day.
The march of industrial inspection robots is changing power, pipeline inspection, and hazardous site automation, writes innovation expert Ashley Dudarenokat her website. “China operates one of the world’s largest networks of power transmission assets, industrial facilities, municipal utility systems, and transportation infrastructure. Maintaining these assets requires frequent inspections under challenging operating conditions,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
China’s industrial inspection landscape is undergoing a fundamental shift. The country is deploying inspection robots at scale across power grids, pipeline networks, and high-risk industrial sites. This is not a pilot phase or a future projection. It is happening now, with measurable results in efficiency, safety, and data intelligence.
The numbers tell the story. In 2025, the Chinese inspection robots market reached approximately 27.48 billion yuan, with电力智能巡检机器人 accounting for 88.54 percent of that total. Demand reached 7,738 units in the same year. These are not experimental deployments. They are operational assets replacing human workers in some of the most demanding environments on the planet.
Global business leaders watching China’s industrial automation trajectory need to understand what is driving this adoption, where the technology is most advanced, and what it means for supply chains, energy security, and industrial safety standards worldwide.
China operates one of the world’s largest networks of power transmission assets, industrial facilities, municipal utility systems, and transportation infrastructure. Maintaining these assets requires frequent inspections under challenging operating conditions.
The government’s industrial AI strategy increasingly promotes intelligent equipment that combines robotics, machine vision, sensing technologies, and data analytics. The 2025 MIIT guidance specifically mentions intelligent industrial robots, intelligent inspection vehicles, and predictive maintenance services powered by AI models and industrial data.
This policy direction aligns with the practical needs of infrastructure operators. High-voltage substations, petrochemical facilities, underground pipelines, confined spaces, and remote utility corridors expose workers to electrical hazards, toxic gases, difficult terrain, and extreme weather.
Deploying industrial inspection robots reduces human exposure while producing consistent inspection records that can feed digital asset management platforms.
Another notable shift is the growing importance of inspection data workflows. Infrastructure owners increasingly evaluate robotic systems based on how well inspection results integrate into maintenance software rather than on mobility alone. Images, thermal readings, gas measurements, equipment locations, and maintenance histories have become strategic operational data.
Winston Ma, Professor at NYU School of Law and former North America Head of China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund CIC, explains how the dramatic drop in valuation of Shein looks like what happened to Zoom during COVID, as he tells Asia One.
Asia One:
“Shein’s US$27 billion valuation targets a new equilibrium.
“Public investors are no longer paying for hyper-growth; they are underwriting a mature cross-border platform that must now defend its profit margins against trade tariffs, higher compliance costs, and regulatory scrutiny in both US and China.
“Also on valuation, Shein is experiencing its ‘Zoom moment.’ Just like Zoom, Shein’s Covid-era business model is now being tested by the new market, where investors have aggressively rotated into AI stack-related investments.
“Robust demand would affirm Hong Kong’s role as the pragmatic listing venue for large consumer and e-commerce names that face hurdles elsewhere.”
Drug deals dominated much of the international relations between biotech companies. But now, another change: the way China’s biotech companies structure their innovation shows a major shift, known widely as “NewCo,” says long-term China lawyer Mark Schaubon the website of his law firm, King&Wood.
Mark Schaub:
Perhaps the biggest development in China biotech dealmaking right now isn’t a drug but a new way of structuring deals.
Known widely as “NewCo” this model involves a Chinese biotech licensing out the international rights to one or more drug pipelines/candidates to a newly formed offshore company funded by foreign investors.
In most cases the NewCo is run by an international management team with the plan of a future IPO or trade sale to a pharma company. The model has rapidly gained traction in 2025/2026.
The beauty of this structure is that it solves three problems at once: 1) Chinese parent retains a stake in the international economic upside of its assets; 2) foreign investors have a clean, ring-fenced platform to fund and operate without being involved in the Chinese parent’s broader local operations; and 3) allows parties to have a clearer financing and exit path than an open-ended joint venture.
The NewCo solves the dilemma of Chinese innovators and Western capital wishing to work together to globalise Chinese-developed drugs without foreign funders being overly involved in the China business where their added value may be limited. The Chinese innovator can continue developing and commercialising the product in China, where it already has management capability, clinical infrastructure and access to domestic funding. The foreign investors can concentrate their capital and expertise on their strength which is international development.
Although clever, the structure depends on careful and creative drafting – the parties will need to agree on governance rights, IP carve-outs, IP improvements, milestone triggers, and exit mechanics. These cannot be left to be worked out later – by its nature the parties’ interests will diverge along with the technology. In many cases the Chinese and Western products may look very different over time despite sharing a common ancestor. Like the VIE structure before it, the NewCo structure can solve a lot of problems but if it is not set up and implemented properly it can also lead to a lot of problems.
Marketing guru Ashley Dudarenok analyses on her website 25 of China’s most famous brands and looks into how they change the world, both in China and globally. They include Anta, Li-Ning, Bosideng, Ep Yaying and many others.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Chinese fashion brands now influence far more than domestic wardrobes. They shape sportswear technology, premium outerwear, digital retail, contemporary tailoring and the international understanding of Chinese design.
This shift comes during a more selective consumer cycle. China’s retail sales reached RMB 50.12 trillion in 2025, up 3.7 percent, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Buyers still spend, but product quality, price credibility and brand distinction carry more weight.
The strongest Chinese clothing brands respond with focused identities and stronger operating models. Some use performance technology and supply chain scale. Others translate Chinese craftsmanship and cultural confidence into modern clothing that works across Shanghai, Seoul, Paris and London.
AI innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin explains why the AI fight between China and the US is wrongly seen as a zero-sum game. The struggle is wrongly perceived as a race to a finish line, but that line does not exist, he tells at Moonshots.
Ian Johnson, author of China’s Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future and founder and director of China Unofficial Archives, discusses critical issues facing China at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University. “Reclaiming Historical Memory and the Struggle for China’s Future”.
Ian Johnson 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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While the G20 is trying to make a front against China, Shanghai-based 
