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
Tariffs and sanctions on China are not going to help the US, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein. Only fair competition can help, certainly not when it comes to AI, he argues in The Rise of Asia.
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US IT firms are wrongly pushing President Donald Trump to sanction winning Chinese companies like DeepSeek instead of trying to compete on a level playing field, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein at the Thinkers Forum. Sanctions and tariffs are shooing the US in the foot as China develops its own industries instead of buying it in the US.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo, host of the renowned Sinica Podcast, moderates a debate on China’s strategy in the global power transitions for the Ukrainian Platform for Contemporary China. Some of the key questions: How does the Russo-Ukrainian War affect China’s relations with its key partners? How has the Russo-Ukrainian War reshaped China’s economic capacity?
He is joined by
Klaus Larres, Distinguished Professor of History & International Affairs, University of
North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, U.S.
Qiang Liu, Secretary-General of the Global Forum on Energy Security, Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences, P.R.C.
Una Aleksandra Bērziņa-Čerenkova, Director of the China Studies Centre, Riga Stradins
University, Latvia
Dmytro Yefremov, Board Member, Ukrainian Association of Sinologists, Ukraine
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.
China’s consumers turn to local brands because they tend to be cheaper than international brands, and because of patriotism because of the US-China trade war, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein to CNBC. Anti-US sentiment was already virulent under Biden because of anti-Chinese measures. Under Trump that has not yet improved, adds Shaun Rein, but the Chinese hope Trump is more transactional than Biden was.
Business analyst Shaun Rein looks at the nervewracking few weeks for the global IT industry, starting with the DeekSeek moment of fame, proving that China was way ahead of the US competition in AI. Also, TikTok, Trump’s curtailing of Nvidia, RedNote’s success, censorship in the US, and Silicon Valley get his verdict on East-West Investment opportunities.
What’s the relationship between TikTok and the Chinese Communist Party?
TikTok is a private company, and it’s now registered offshore from China — but, of course, historically most of its operation has been in China. As of five or six years ago, maybe even a bit longer, the Chinese government has required large, private companies to have branches of the Chinese Communist Party within the company structure.
For the Chinese equivalent of TikTok, Douyin, there’s a party committee in the company. And the parent company, ByteDance, which is located in China, also has a Chinese Communist Party branch. Most of the people in the party committee would not be full-time government officials — they’re just workers or executives who had already belonged to the party. That’s actually a common thing to happen. You will soon be recruited into the party at a university or in the workplace, and a lot of people do it just to advance their careers.
There are certain requirements for joining the party, and the No. 1 requirement is that you have to obey the party no matter what. I think that’s where a lot of U.S. lawmakers and people in the government really have an issue.
More recently, within the past four years, the party has demanded top tech companies to give part of their shares to entities of the Chinese government. So China has sovereign wealth funds. Through that mechanism, the government becomes a minority shareholder of these tech companies, so then it can send members to the management boards of these tech companies, and these board members are full-time Chinese government officials.
How has this relationship between ByteDance and the party played into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s larger goals?
Xi Jinping recognizes the power of social media and the internet in general — not really as something to control people’s minds with, but certainly something to use to sway people’s opinions. He has ordered internet companies in China to work for the party on behalf of the party. It’s very well known that the Chinese counterpart of TikTok is ordered by the Chinese government to convey propaganda to users within China all the time, even if TikTok claims that it doesn’t do that for audiences outside of China.
Xi has also said that he wants users around the world, not just in China, to use Chinese technology. And of course, TikTok has been the most successful case of this, certainly on the software side: it’s used by over a billion users worldwide.
Is there reason for the U.S. to be legitimately concerned about how TikTok might make users’ personal data available to the Chinese government?
I don’t buy the argument that we should be alarmed how the Chinese government can get all this data on users from TikTok — because all the other internet platforms active in the U.S. already sell user data to data brokers, and China can obtain it that way. To be clear, I’m sure TikTok is feeding some data to the Chinese government; I’m just saying that it’s probably not that much worse than what they could do already using all the other sources of data.
The other worry is that TikTok is so powerful, and that it’s used by so many people that the people behind the app can bias the politics within the United States. I think that TikTok does have the potential to do that. But then, compare that with other people who are influencing opinion on social media. You have to ask yourself, “Who has done more damage to the quality of American democracy: Elon Musk or TikTok?”
Is the ban a wise move? How could it affect relations between the two countries?
It’s really difficult to assess because former government officials, sometimes at 21st Century China Center events, will say, “If only you knew what we knew, you would definitely support the ban.” But we don’t know what they know.
One consideration is that the Chinese government has banned pretty much all of our social media and search platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and Google.
From a pure competitive technology perspective: I don’t think the ban is optimal, but at least it’s fair game. But of course, TikTok has great currency in the United States: people make a living off of TikTok, so a ban is going to affect them, and as a result, for domestic political reasons it may not be the smartest thing to do.
Business analyst Shaun Rein, author of The Split: Finding the Opportunities in China’s Economy in the New World Order, dives into the future of EU-China relations, as Trump is getting settle for his second term as US president. He discusses the currently hostile relationship between some of the EU leaders and how the European continent can move ahead with a better relationship with China, more independent from the United States, he tells Volker Friedrich.
‘Trump will use a shock and awe strategy to control China, similar to his tactics with Denmark, Greenland, Canada, Panama, and Mexico,’ says Shaun Rein, Founder and Managing Director, China Market Research Group (CMR) in an interview at WION. Tariffs, TikTok, and many other issues are hanging over the negotiations. But in the end, both countries are better off working together, says Shaun Rein.
A prime example is the Chinese-developed DeepSeek AI chatbot, whose developer claims to have spent only a fraction of the development costs compared to companies like OpenAI. In some tests, it closely matched OpenAI’s ChatGPT model and outperformed Meta’s Llama AI model.
“You could have said that thanks to the sanction of the chips, lots of Chinese AI startups focused on developing AI applications in a more efficient way, using much fewer GPU chips than the U.S. counterparts,” said Winston Ma, author of “The Digital War.”
One area where Chinese tech companies have focused their efforts is humanoid robotics.
“[If you went to] the recent CES Las Vegas Exhibition, you will find Chinese manufacturers dominate the exhibition of smart robotics. It’s interesting that ‘Made in China’ was started when China was at the low end of the global supply chain. But after two, three decades, the Chinese manufacturing ecosystem, especially relating to electronics, has become the strongest in the world,” said Ma.
According to Shanghai-based analyst Shaun Rein, most Chinese prefer Trump over Harris because they expect Trump to be more transactional, while they feared Harrid would lead a more ideological struggle, he tells CNBC.
Former Shanghai-based foreign correspondent Howard French recently returned to Shanghai for the first time after corona and takes stock of its current state, by talking to Chinese and foreign residents in the city. In Foreign Policy he reports about these findings. French: “All I can say with certainty is that we are all in for a turbulent, costly, and possibly dangerous ride.”
Howard French:
In the final of these conversations, I asked a much older Chinese scholar about the mounting tech war between the two countries, in which the United States has been seeking to limit China’s access to the most sophisticated microprocessor manufacturing equipment, advanced graphics chips from companies such as Nvidia, and artificial intelligence technologies.
The scholar said the West badly misunderstands China, underestimating its preoccupation with its standing in the world. This will only push Beijing to strive harder to build these technologies on its own—and ultimately prevail. He clarified that he was not predicting that China would win across the board. The point he left me with was that any perceived antagonism from the West will feed Beijing’s preexistent desire to lead in every field that it thinks matters.
This, he said, will lead China to double down on industrial policies and state-driven investments. Many of these will prove misguided or inefficient in the long run. But in a country of China’s size, with enormous resources not only in national wealth but in human talent, many will also succeed, giving its Western competitors all they can handle over the next few decades. All I can say with certainty is that we are all in for a turbulent, costly, and possibly dangerous ride.
Whether the world is heading for a recession does not depend on the state of China’s economy, but on demand in de US, says China economist Arthur Kroeber at the CNBC. In the eyes of Xi Jinping, China is not doing as bad as some economists say it does, he adds.
China veteran Kaiser Kuo of the Sinica Podcast moderates a discussion on how the US-China tension have an profound impact on the war in the Ukraine and the position of Taiwan at the Ukrainian platform for Contemporary China.
The speakers: Da Wei, Director of Center for International Security and Strategy; Professor at School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University; Dmytro Burtsev, Junior Fellow at A. Krymskyi Institute of Oriental Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine; Emilian Kavalski, Professor at Centre for International Studies and Development, Jagiellonian University in Krakow; Yuan I, Research Fellow, Institute of International Relations, National Chengchi University, Taiwan.
Business analyst Shaun Rein discusses the current state of China’s economy, how consumer confidence is slowly recovering, and why the fear of geopolitical tensions stops them from spending more in the economy. And why investors should be careful in investing right now in the second economy of the world.
The USA is dealing with huge problems and cannot afford to challenge China directly, but decided to stabilize the relations between both countries, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein to CNBC-TV18. But the USA is for sure keeping economic pressure going, he adds.
Tariffs and sanctions on China are not going to help the US, says Shanghai-based business analyst 
