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
Consumer analysts say singles are also spending more on video games, AI companions and micro-dramas, soap opera-like shows with episodes under two minutes.
“When you’re back home from work and it’s 10 p.m. and you’ve already eaten, if you had a husband or wife, you would talk to them,” said Ashley Dudarenok, founder of China market consultancy ChoZan.
“If that companionship is missing, you are left with subscriptions to games, to streaming, and that is a huge, huge trend that is reshaping the way people entertain themselves.”
Dudarenok said that China’s vast and competitive consumer market could accelerate the development of products and services for people living alone and eventually export them to the rest of the world.
AI companions and micro-dramas have already gained traction in the US. Companies there are also increasingly courting solo diners. Domino’s Pizza announced recently it would begin offering small rectangular pies designed for one.
Previously, businesses and governments typically treated singledom as a temporary stage before marriage, Dudarenok points out.
“We need to start thinking about single living and this new economic model as something that is here to stay,” she said.
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.”
Dropping birth figures in China are changing the country’s consumer market profoundly, as singles move upwards in spending patterns, says consumer analyst Ashley Dudarenok, author of Innovation Factory: China’s Digital Playbook For Global Brands at CNN. “We need to start thinking about single living and this new economic model as something that is here to stay,” she said.
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While the G20 is trying to make a front against China, Shanghai-based 
