How China will push ahead with AI under the new 5-year plan – Winston Ma

 

Winston Ma

AI was a keyword in China’s 15th five-year plan, running from 2026 to 2030. “These are kind of concrete examples that big tech companies are taking actions to try to engage everyday people with advanced AI,” said Winston Ma, author of “The Digital War” and adjunct professor in the global AI-digital economy at Bastille Post.

The Bastille Post:

Signs of the AI push are already visible in the private sector. During the country’s recent Spring Festival holiday which marked celebrations for the Chinese New Year, major companies distributed traditional red packets — or lucky money coupons — through AI-driven apps, a consumer-level case study of how policy is meeting practice.

“These are kind of concrete examples that big tech companies are taking actions to try to engage everyday people with advanced AI,” said Winston Ma, author of “The Digital War” and adjunct professor in the global AI-digital economy.

Ma believes that wider adoption of AI among consumers will also generate vast amounts of data, fueling improvements in AI products and services.

“You have more than a billion internet users that are integrated by the same language, same culture, and the same mobile payment. So, every day there is tremendous amount of data accumulated at the digital platforms. So, the next step is to better utilize the data, organize the data, and put the data into work by AI to generate value,” he said.

That value is increasingly visible in intelligent products, most notably robots. At the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas back in January, Chinese firms dominated the exhibition floor with machines and high-tech robots of every shape and size, performing not only acrobatic displays but also practical tasks that underscored their commercial potential…

“There will be a huge range of embodied AI. But overall, China has the advantage of the manufacturing process developed here in the “Made in China” expansion the last three decades. Essentially, Chinese manufacturing power can be combined with Chinese open source models to develop a huge industry, relating to industry robots as well as humanoids,” Ma said.

Ma noted that this year’s “two sessions” could extend the technology agenda “Beyond AI,” encompassing quantum computing and biomedicine to lay the groundwork for next-generation industries.

More in the Bastille Post.

Winston Ma 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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How China’s AI industry gains at the Hong Kong stock market – Winston Ma

 

Winston ma

Chinese chipmaker Montage Technology soared 64% on its Hong Kong IPO debut. Financial analyst Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and former head of North America for CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, explains how US efforts to curtail Chinese semiconductor and AI firms helped them in the current boost, he tells Bloomberg. “The strong lineup of global cornerstone buyers suggests that Chinese AI-related IPOs are attracting institutional investors back to the HKEX market again,” he says.

Bloomberg:

Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law and former head of North America for CIC, China’s sovereign wealth fund, said US sanctions limiting China’s access to advanced chips such as Nvidia’s were accelerating capital and policy support for China’s domestic semiconductor value chain, including “middleware” chip designers such as Montage.

“The strong lineup of global cornerstone buyers suggests that Chinese AI-related IPOs are attracting institutional investors back to the HKEX market again,” he said, referring to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

“Montage’s Hong Kong debut underscores how China’s AI chip ecosystem is moving ‘up the stack’ from basic components towards specialised chips that connect processors and memory inside data centres,” he added.

Montage’s listing also comes as Hong Kong logged its strongest start to a year since 2021, with IPOs and second listings raising about US$5.5 billion in January, the most since US$7.6 billion was raised in January 2021, LSEG data showed.

More at Bloomberg.

Winston Ma 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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China: one of the AI dark horses – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

Leading AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin, on the road to the World Economic Forum in Davos, discusses how China will be one of the AI dark horses to watch in 2026, as he tells at the Big Bang Tech Report. He points at Minimax, Moonshot, and Z.AI, and also on the hardware side, Huawei, he adds.

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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AI growth now moves from brutal force to collaboration – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

For years, the growth of AI was built on scaling up its GPUs, but innovation expert Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, sees now a move to more collaboration. Chip maker Nvidia is not the only winner anymore, as competition is growing and AI models can develop through more experience and need less capacity to grow, as China’s Deepseek proved earlier this year, he says at the Big Bang Future Lab.

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

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Fast changing e-commerce in China – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Drastic changes have been influencing e-commerce and the position of global brands in this fast-moving industry in China. Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok provides an overview of the changes in the past few years on her website, Chozan.

Ashley Dudarenok:

China’s e-commerce sector is poised for a transformative shift by 2025, driven by advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), immersive shopping experiences, and a strategic pivot towards direct-to-consumer (DTC) models. These developments reshape the digital retail landscape, influence consumer behaviors, and redefine business strategies.

Immersive Retail and Predictive Infrastructure

While content remains king, China’s retail infrastructure is evolving to make digital shopping more tactile, immersive, and real-time. Shoppers can now try on lipstick shades using AR filters, tour 3D virtual stores during festivals, or interact with AI-powered assistants that mimic a live consultation.

At the same time, fulfillment and supply chains are becoming smarter and more responsive. AI is used to:

• Predict product demand based on platform activity and livestream events
• Sync inventory across online and offline systems
• Enable same-day or under-one-hour delivery in top markets
• Support real-time order routing and smart warehousing

Experimental platforms like Baidu’s XiRang and ByteDance’s Project Puff also explore the metaverse layer, where digital avatars browse virtual malls, try on clothes, and attend product launches in immersive environments.

The result is an intelligent, multi-channel, and frictionless retail stack. Shopping no longer begins with a search bar—it starts in a video feed, a private community, or a personalized app homepage. And it ends wherever the customer chooses: in a live stream, in-store, or with a package arriving in 20 minutes.

Much 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.

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Comparing US and China strategies on AI – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, worked in both the US and China on AI and compares the strategy of both countries. While China focuses on a multipolar approach, with mainly economic targets, the US does the opposite and looks at military strategies, he tells Veronica Hylak at Hey AI.

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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How AI has entered the stage as filmmaker – Winston Ma

 

Winston ma

AI tools to generate videos, like TikTok, have been challenged by a new wave of innovations using AI as filmmakers, says Winston Ma, author of The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace at CNBC. “Just like TikTok took the global markets by storm with short videos in the mobile internet age, Chinese AI companies could well lead the Generative AI revolution in visual digital entertainment,” said Ma.

CNBC:

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has also stayed on top of the trend by releasing the latest version of its video generation AI model this week called Wan2.2. The company claimed that with the open-source model, users can control lighting, time of day, color tone, camera angle, frame size, composition and focal length.

Open source allows users to download a model for free, and customize, if not commercialize, products with it. Alibaba claimed that since open sourcing the “Wan” model series in February, the models have been downloaded more than 5.4 million times from the Hugging Face platform and a similar one in China called ModelScope.

“The age of AI in film is over. We’ve entered the age of AI as filmmaker,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. He pointed out that China’s 1.4 billion population has given local companies “enormous” amounts of video-watching data to work with.

“Just like TikTok took the global markets by storm with short videos in the mobile internet age, Chinese AI companies could well lead the Generative AI revolution in visual digital entertainment,” said Ma, author of “The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.”

More at CNBC.

Winston Ma is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Email us or fill in our speakers’ request form.

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How the state, market and academia move AI in the same direction – Kaiser Kuo

 

Kaiser Kuo

Technology veteran Kaiser Kuo explains how AI developments with DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, and iFlyTek emerged as winners in China’s technology scene. Especially, the coordination between the state, the market, and academia helps technology to move in the same direction, he adds at the World Economic Forum.

Kaiser Kuo:

One of the less visible but profoundly consequential enablers of China’s rapid advance in generative AI is the unusually tight coordination among its public sector institutions, academic research bodies and private firms. While this kind of alignment is sometimes viewed with suspicion outside of China, particularly when it is framed in terms of state-led industrial policy or state-backed enterprise, the practical effect has been to lower barriers between research and application, to accelerate funding decisions and to unify long-term technological goals across domains.

Consider how China’s most capable research universities — Tsinghua, Peking University, Shanghai Jiaotong, Zhejiang University — serve not only as training grounds for AI talent, but as intellectual incubators for commercial ventures. Many of the leading generative AI firms in China, including Zhipu AI and Baichuan, emerged directly from university research labs, often with seed funding from state-affiliated venture arms and built-in partnerships with municipal development zones or digital economy clusters.

State guidance funds, particularly those aligned with the “New Infrastructure” initiatives launched in the late 2010s, have prioritised compute infrastructure, AI chips and cloud services. These funds offer long-horizon capital to projects that would likely struggle to gain equivalent traction in private markets, particularly during periods of economic tightening or when returns on investment are uncertain. Yet at the same time, the market incentive remains intact. Leading Chinese AI startups face intense domestic competition from rivals like DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and iFlyTek, all of which operate in a fast-moving environment that rewards iterative gains and rapid deployment.

Much more at the World Economic Forum.

Kaiser Kuo 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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Pl

Why China can apply AI better into the real economy, compared to the US – Winston Ma

 

Winston ma

China and the US are racing to develop and apply AI applications to the real economy. NYU innovation adjunct professor Winston Ma, author of The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace, believes China has a clear advantage in applying AI tools into the real economy, compared to the US, he says on CNBC.

Winston Ma 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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AI started to replace jobs in China – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenok says human programmers will still be needed in her vlog. But AI is already replacing a range of jobs in China. For example, Alibaba introduced its first AI employee, Tongyi Lingma, last summer, and it made huge inroads into the work process, she notes.

Ashley Dudarenok is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Would you like her at your meeting or conference? Contact us or fill out our speakers’ request form.

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Why weaponizing AI can turn it into an unprecendented danger – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

We see some dangerous signs AI is not going to benefit all, but potentially becomes a high risk tool, argues Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, at the Delphi Economic Forum earlier in April. We should all work together to prevent AI from being used as a weapon, he says.

Alvin Wang Graylin is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Do you need him at your meeting or conference? Get in touch or fill out our speakers’ request form.

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China leading the way in innovation – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

Who will be winning the race in innovation, China or the US? Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok expects China will have advantages, not only with Deepseek playing its way into AI development but also for robotics to NEVs, quantum computing, and eVTOL she explains at the Jing Daily.

Ashley Dudarenok:

From AI and robotics to NEVs, quantum computing and eVTOL, the country is setting the pace for global advancements. These developments reflect a broader vision to transition from being the “Factory of the World” to the “R&D Center of the World.” For businesses, the opportunities are vast, but so are the challenges. Success will depend on the ability to adapt, forge meaningful collaborations, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving market. As China continues to shape the future of technology, the question is not whether to engage, but how to do so effectively and safely.

More at the Jing Daily.

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

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Number of US billionaires increased more than those in China – Rupert Hoogewerf

 

Rupert Hoogewerf

The number of billionaires has increased more in the US compared to China for the first time in ten years, according to the latest  14th annual Hurun Global Rich List, according to Barrons.  “It’s been a tough year for luxury, telecommunications, and real estate in China”, writes Rupert Hoogewerf,  chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report.

Barrons:

The number of U.S. billionaires in the world reached 870 in mid-January, outpacing the number in China for the first time in 10 years, according to a snapshot of the wealthiest in the world by the Hurun Report.

The U.S. gained 70 billionaires since last year, powered by a rising stock market, a strong dollar, and the insatiable appetite for all things AI, according to the 14th annual Hurun Global Rich List. China gained nine billionaires overall for a total of 823. Hurun is a China-based research, media, and investment group.

“It’s been a good year for AI, money managers, entertainment, and crypto,” Rupert Hoogewerf, chairman and chief researcher of the Hurun Report, said in a news release. “It’s been a tough year for luxury, telecommunications, and real estate in China.”

Overall, the Hurun list—which reflects a snapshot of global wealth based on calculations made Jan. 15—counted 3,442 billionaires in the world, up 5%, or 163, from a year ago. Their total wealth rose 13% to just under $17 trillion…

The overall list this year contained 387 new billionaires, while 177 dropped off the list—more than 80 of which were from China, Hurun said. “China’s economy is continuing to restructure, with the drop-offs coming from a weeding out of healthcare and new energy and traditional manufacturing, as well as real estate,” Hoogewerf said in the release.

Among those who wealth sank was Colin Huang, the founder of PDD Holdings —the parent company of e-commerce platforms Temu and Pinduoduo—who lost $17 billion.

Also, Zhong Shanshan, the founder and chair of the Nongfu Spring beverage company and the majority owner of Beijing Wantai Biological Pharmacy Enterprise, lost $8 billion from “intensifying competition” in the market for bottled water. The loss knocked Zhong from his top rank in China, which is now held by Zhang Yiming founder of Tik-Tok owner Bytedance. Zhang is ranked No. 22 overall.

More in Barrons.

Rupert Hoogewerf 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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The reality of the China-US AI arms race – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

Technology expert Alwin Wang Graylin, author of  Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, explains how the AI arms race between China and the US is going to shape the upcoming five to ten years at the 2025 Abundance 360 Summit and moderated by Peter Diamandis.

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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How AI is shaping China’s industrial revolution – Winston Ma

 

Winston Ma

Financial and innovation expert Winston Ma, an adjunct professor at NYU, discusses how AI is reshaping the Chinese industrial revolution at state-owned CGTN. Not only has DeepSeek emerged as a leading AI tool, but other companies are following this lead and expanding into industrial sectors rapidly.

Winston Ma is a speaker at the China Speakers Bureau. Would you like him to speak at your meeting or conference? Contact us or fill out our speakers’ request form.

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How far is China’s tech ahead of the US – Winston Ma

 

Winston Ma

China’s tech industry seems ahead of the US, especially now that DeepSeek has come onto the playing field. Tech and finance adjunct professor at NYU Winston Ma discusses how the US restrictions on tech might have hampered US-China trade relations at CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Winston Ma 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 list.

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