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
Showing posts with label China Speakers Bureau. Show all posts
Showing posts with label China Speakers Bureau. Show all posts
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.
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.
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.
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.
Innovation expert Ashley Dudarenokcompares 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 Dudarenokin 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.
The exit bans send a message—that any AI company founded in China, with business operations still in the country, are likewise reachable by Beijing, Ke Yan, head of Singapore’s DZT Research, told Newsweek.
Beijing’s regulators then treat the deal as a technology export, arguing that the team, model weights, and training data were developed in China, regardless of where the company is legally based.
“Once they were physically in China, Singapore’s corporate domicile became irrelevant,” he said.
Beijing is most concerned on whether strategically sensitive technologies developed in China—and the talent and data behind them—continue to be transferred offshore through corporate restructuring in Singapore, Winston Ma, New York University law school adjunct professor and the author of The Digital War, told Newsweek.
The Chinese authorities have made clear this “Singapore washing” will not automatically insulate any deal from government oversight, Ma stated.
“The real challenge is defining what counts as ‘strategic’ in a fast-moving AI landscape—much like how TikTok’s seemingly goofy videos initially appeared far removed from national security concerns—until their underlying data and algorithmic power came into sharper focus.”
China’s leading e-commerce firm, Alibaba, runs two different retail platforms. Consumer expert Ashley Dudarenokexplains on her website how both platforms, while owned by the same company, differ profoundly in their approaches.
Ashley Dudarenok:
Tmall vs Taobao describes the two primary retail platforms inside Alibaba’s ecommerce ecosystem. Taobao operates as a discovery marketplace where consumers explore products and compare sellers. Tmall functions as a brand-controlled retail platform where verified flagship stores convert that discovery into trusted purchases.
Search interest around Tmall vs Taobao often assumes the two platforms compete for the same role inside China’s e-commerce market. In reality, Alibaba structured them as complementary layers within a unified commerce system.
China’s financial authorities shocked the financial world by blocking a 2 billion dollar deal by Meta to purchase AI startup Manus. Financial expert Winston Ma, adjunct professor of law at New York University, explains at CNBC how unwinding a done deal might be a landmark decision for China, but in no way exceptional, as the US has a longstanding practice of cancelling deals for national security reasons.
Branding expert Ashley Dudarenok uses Alibaba’s Tmall as an example for brands that successfully use e-commerce to generate sales, she explains on her website ‘Social platforms generate interest. The Tmall platform converts that interest into purchases through brand-controlled retail infrastructure,” she writes.
Ashley Dudarenok:
China’s e-commerce environment has changed rapidly in recent years. Product discovery now happens widely on Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and other content platforms where creators influence demand, reflecting the rapid rise of social commerce in China. When consumers reach the purchase stage, many still complete the transaction on Tmall China.
The platform provides a structured retail environment where brands operate verified stores, manage promotions, and control the final transaction experience. This structure explains why Tmall ecommerce remains central to brand strategy in 2026.
Social platforms generate interest. The Tmall platform converts that interest into purchases through brand-controlled retail infrastructure.
China veteran and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo discusses at the Asia Society in Hong Kong the balance in the relationship between China and the US. Ying Chan interviews him.
China was pretty well off in the first month of the Iran war, but its economy is now feeling the backlash that other economies already felt earlier because of the lack of energy, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein at the Thinkers’ Forum. Now the global economy is going to hit a wall, he adds.
Marketing expert Ashley Dudarenok dives on het weblog into the successful Chinese platform Xiaohongshu, outside China also known as the Little Red Book or RedNote. Now that the platform is expanding beyond China and Chinese travellers, the world is taking note of this feature.
Ashley Dudarenok:
When people search what is RedNote, they are often trying to understand why this platform appears so often in discussions about China’s consumer trends. RedNote refers to a lifestyle community where millions of users document their real experiences with products, routines, travel, and everyday purchases. These posts create a large archive of practical reviews that readers explore before deciding what to buy.
Interest in RedNote expanded beyond China in early 2025, when the platform saw a surge in international attention. During the period when a potential TikTok ban in the United States was widely discussed, the platform reportedly added nearly3.4 million new US users in a single day andmore than 700,000 people within 48 hours, according to Reuters.
This sudden influx introduced the Xiaohongshu ecosystem to a broader global audience and helped establish RedNote as the international reference point in media discussions about the platform.
This article explains how RedNote evolved into a trusted research space within China’s digital commerce ecosystem. It examines how notes guide product discovery, how user experiences influence purchasing confidence, and why the platform plays a distinctive role in China’s social commerce landscape.
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.
