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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein looks at the impact the Iran war might have on China if the hostilities go on for two months or more. The fallout might last for years to come, not only for the US but also for China, he tells OAN.
Shanghai-based business analyst Shaun Rein, author ofThe Split: Finding the Opportunities in China’s Economy in the New World Order, dives into the upheaval in the Middle East and explains how a possible US financial crisis could make China the world’s largest economy, as he tells in a discussion with David Lin. Chinese feel Trump is the best thing that could happen to China, he adds.
China protested against the US and Israeli attacks on Iran, but economist Arthur Kroeber, author of China’s Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® does not think this major upheaval will derail the planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, he says at CNBC.
China watcher Kaiser Kuo sees now the China hawks in the US are losing ground, after Trump realized China was not the pushover he hoped for, in a wide-ranging discussion at the Nonzero podcast with Robert Wright.
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.
, 
does not think this major upheaval will derail the planned meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, he says at CNBC.
