China shocks and feared technological innovation – Kaiser Kuo

 

Both the US and Europe regularly fear new China shocks and unsettling technological innovations like BYD and DeepSeek. China veteran Kaiser Kuo, host at the renowned Sinica Podcast, discusses China’s position in the fast-moving developments that outflank its global competitors at Renewable Matter.

Renewable Matter:

Returning to the shocks that Americans, but also Europeans, are still experiencing every time China overtakes them in some cutting-edge sector such as renewables, electric cars (BYD) or AI (DeepSeek), what will be the next major shock we should expect?

If only I knew, so I could invest in it! One thing is clear, though: China is investing heavily in nuclear fusion. We are likely to witness breakthroughs in new materials, battery chemistry and quantum computing. But the biggest advances will probably come from the life sciences and biotechnology, which receive less attention. China has built a very solid foundation in pharmaceutical discovery: in the past, it merely acted as an external supplier of molecular analysis services on behalf of major Western biopharmaceutical companies. Now, however, many of these Chinese companies are operating independently, and I believe that in the coming years we will see significant pharmaceutical discoveries emerging from China.

The “technological containment” that the United States is trying to impose on China is a policy that cuts across party lines, from Democrats to Republicans. But what do scientists, both Chinese and American, make of this? Is there no hope of achieving constructive scientific cooperation?

I believe that scientists on both sides consider this policy an absolute tragedy. It is a loss for all of humanity that collaboration between the scientific communities of China and the United States – two of the largest, best-funded and most creative in the world – is suffocated by geopolitics. Unfortunately, in the United States, even within the scientific community, many people are still obsessed with national security, convinced that China must be kept away from the most advanced technologies. The debate over which policy is the right one is still ongoing.
In China, however, there is no doubt. They are angry, believing this policy to be fundamentally immoral, but at the same time they believe it has sparked a fuse, forcing scientists and engineers to redouble their efforts towards innovation. And China has indeed achieved considerable progress towards greater self-sufficiency, particularly in the production of semiconductors.

However, if we take AI as an example, China is implementing much stricter regulations than the US. Why, then, are the Americans so afraid of China’s technological development?

I interpret this mainly as a projection: Americans believe that any other power would behave just as they do. Faced with enormous capabilities that would allow a country to aspire to global hegemony, they believe that any nation possessing such technological strength would exercise it immediately. In essence, they think that China would do what they imagine the United States would do. Never thoroughly analysed, this assumption is the basis for much of the paranoia emerging, particularly from Silicon Valley. But I do not think it is a valid hypothesis. In fact, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Relating to another country on this basis means demonstrating your own bad faith, proving that you are willing to bring it to its knees. How can anyone think this will not influence their perception? It will generate precisely the kind of hostility that was taken for granted from the outset, but it was their own actions that created it. This, at least, is my interpretation. I would argue that an open and collaborative approach across all these technological frontiers would have significantly reduced China’s propensity to try to exert leverage over the United States.

More at Renewable Matter.

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.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

China’s consumers still queue up for American fast food – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

Despite geopolitical tensions, China’s consumers still line up for American fast food chains, says Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein in AP. “Despite political tensions between the U.S. and China, Chinese actually still go crazy for American brands,” said Shaun Rein.

AP:

American fast-food companies are expanding their presence in China

Last month, Chinese customers lined up in the rain for the opening of the first Church’s Texas Chicken in Shanghai. Church’s plans at least 600 more across China. Wendy’s says it anticipates opening 1,000 restaurants there over the next decade.

Established players are deepening their reach as well. McDonald’s plans 1,000 new Chinese restaurants this year and 10,000 total by 2028. Burger King, which arrived in China in 2005, says it expects to triple its store count to 4,000 by 2035.

“Despite political tensions between the U.S. and China, Chinese actually still go crazy for American brands,” said Shaun Rein, founder and managing director of the Shanghai-based China Market Research Group.

KFC became the first major American fast-food chain to enter mainland China when it opened a Beijing restaurant in 1987. At the time, it was viewed as a premium destination worth taking a date to, Rein said. McDonald’s and Pizza Hut arrived in 1990.

“McDonald’s and KFC were a beacon of health and hygiene compared to what you had in the rest of the market,” Rein said.

China is now KFC’s largest market by far. The Kentucky-born fried chicken chain counts about 13,000 restaurants in China, compared with around 3,750 in the U.S. American brands see room for further growth.e>

More in AP.

Shaun Rein 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.

Are you looking for more experts on China’s consumers? Do check out this list.

How China’s oil reserves saved the world from even higher prices – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

China has used its massive oil reserves to prevent oil prices from going further through the roof, says business analyst Shaun Rein. But that might not happen again, he warns in a discussion with David Lin.

Shaun Rein 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.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Why there is no AI race between China and the US – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

Alvin Wang Graylin, author of Our Next Reality: Preparing for the AI-powered Metaverse, worked both in China and the US on AI. In a discussion with Nathan B. Jones, his main argument is that both countries are not in an AI race, and the largest misconception is this wrong idea an arms race is developing. Nobody has won the electricity race; the same goes for AI, he argues.

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,

Are you looking for more stories by Alvin? Do check out this list.

How the US is boosting China – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

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.

Shaun Rein 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.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How governments relate to AI developments – Winston Ma

 

Winston Ma

Governments are increasingly investing in sovereign funds to steer their investments into AI, copying China’s strategy, says Winston Ma, investor, attorney, author, and adjunct professor focused on the global AI economy, in The Innovator. Winston Ma wrote ten books on the digital economy, including The Digital War: How China’s Tech Power Shapes the Future of AI, Blockchain and Cyberspace.

The Innovator:

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.

More in the Innovator.

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.

Are you looking for more experts on innovation? Do check out this list.

Why we need to stop the trade war with China – Shaun Rein

 

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.

Shaun Rein 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.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Why the AI race between China and the US is no zero sum game – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

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.

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.

Are you looking for more strategy experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How Trump made China stronger – Zhang Lijia

 

Zhang Lijia

China’s citizens have profoundly changed their view of the United States and their president, Trump, journalist Zhang Lijia writes at Democracy Asia.  He is called the “nation builder”, helping to improve the global standing of the country worldwide. “Many Chinese believe his erratic behaviour and foreign policy blunders weakened the United States and gave China greater diplomatic room to manoeuvre,” she writes.

Zhang Lijia:

At first, Trump was seen less as a politician than as a reality television character who had somehow wandered into the  White House. Chinese netizens mocked his hair, marvelled at his rhetorical excesses and, for a time, even admired his supposed business success. Over the years, however, amusement has faded, and hostility has grown.

This shift reflects not only changing Chinese perceptions of  America, but also a deeper transformation in how China sees itself and its place in the world. Most revealing was the nickname  Chinese netizens gave Trump: ‘Chuan Jianguo’ (川建国), which roughly translates as ‘Trump the nation builder’.

Jianguo is an immensely popular Chinese name, borne by nearly a million people. The joke was that Trump was actually helping to make China stronger. By launching trade wars and trying to cut China off from advanced technologies, he unintentionally accelerated Beijing’s push for technological self-reliance and fuelled nationalist sentiment. More importantly, many Chinese believe his erratic behaviour and foreign policy blunders weakened the United States and gave China greater diplomatic room to manoeuvre.

More at Democracy Asia.

Zhang Lijia 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.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

What does China want out of its relationship with the US? – Victor Shih

 

Victor Shih

China has arrived as a superpower and wants its recognition as a superpower from the US, says Victor Shih, the Ho Miu Lam Chair in China and Pacific Relations at the University of California, San Diego, in a discussion at the National Committee on US-China Relations. That is a major shift from the past, he adds.

Victor Shih 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.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How China's electrification strategy fought off the fuel crisis – Kaiser Kuo

 

Kaiser Kuo

The blockage of the Street of Hormuz threw the world into a fuel crisis, while China was able to fend off most of the effects. China veteran Kaiser Kuo describes how the strategy of electrification offered a way for China to avoid the spike in fuel prices, although it is not clear if other countries can copy this strategy, he explains at the World Economic Forum.

Kaiser Kuo:

The conflict that erupted at the end of February 2026 was, among other things, an energy shock. Nine weeks of disruption in and around the Strait of Hormuz pushed Brent to nearly $120 a barrel, sent liquefied natural gas (LNG) prices to multi-year highs, and forced governments to confront the fragility of supply chains they had spent the post-COVID years assuming were secure. The shock exposed which economies had built genuine resilience into their energy systems, and which had merely diversified their suppliers of imported hydrocarbons.

On paper, China should have been among the most exposed economies. Columbia’s Center on Global Energy Policy has noted that roughly 45-50% of its crude imports transit Hormuz, and nearly a third of its LNG comes from the Gulf. But China’s economy proved considerably more insulated than those numbers would predict. Goldman Sachs trimmed its 2026 growth forecast for the country by only 0.2 percentage points – the smallest downgrade in the Asia-Pacific region.

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.

Are you looking for more strategic experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

The myth of the AI race – Alvin Wang Graylin

 

Alvin Wang Graylin

AI expert Alvin Wang Graylin discusses the AI race between China and the US with James M. Lindsay at the Council of Foreign Relations. He explains why the current priorities for winning that race are fundamentally wrong.

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.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Why Chinese lost their trust in the US – Zhang Lijia

 

Zhang Lijia

 

In China, many citizens looked with admiration at the US, but those days are certainly over, says London-based journalist Zhang Lijia, author of Lotus: A Novel, in an opinion piece at the South China Morning Post. Trump forced educated Chinese to rethink long-held assumptions about democracy, modernity, and the direction of history itself, she argues.

Zhang Lijia:

However, admiration has become more qualified. The US is increasingly seen not as a political role model but as a complex society grappling with many of the same challenges facing other countries: inequality, social division, political polarisation and diminishing trust in institutions. Trump became an unlikely catalyst for this shift.

The US remains powerful and influential, yet the country many educated Chinese once imagined from afar is now viewed less idealistically. More than any other recent American leader, Trump accelerated this transformation, narrowing a psychological distance that had existed for decades.

For many educated Chinese, the US no longer appears as the destination towards which all modern societies naturally evolve. Trump did not merely change the way Chinese people viewed America, he also forced them to rethink long-held assumptions about democracy, modernity and the direction of history itself.

More at the South China Morning Post.

Zhang Lijia 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.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

Deepseek vs Gemini – Ashley Dudarenok

 

Ashley Dudarenok

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.

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.

Are you looking for more innovation experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How Trump played poker in Beijing, where the game was Pokemon – Victor Shih

 

Victor Shih

Political analyst Victor Shih, director of the 21st Century China Center at the University of California, San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy,  looks at the Trump state visit in Beijing. While Trump was losing his poker game, he should have been playing Pokémon, he explains in the Wire China.

Victor Shih:

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.

More at the Wire China.

Victor Shih 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.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.

How China won the Trump visit in Beijing – Shaun Rein

 

Shaun Rein

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

Shaun Rein 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.

Are you looking for more political experts at the China Speakers Bureau? Do check out this list.