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 Winston Wenyan Ma. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Winston Wenyan Ma. Show all posts
Winston Ma, Professor at NYU School of Law and former North America Head of China’s Sovereign Wealth Fund CIC, explains how the dramatic drop in valuation of Shein looks like what happened to Zoom during COVID, as he tells Asia One.
Asia One:
“Shein’s US$27 billion valuation targets a new equilibrium.
“Public investors are no longer paying for hyper-growth; they are underwriting a mature cross-border platform that must now defend its profit margins against trade tariffs, higher compliance costs, and regulatory scrutiny in both US and China.
“Also on valuation, Shein is experiencing its ‘Zoom moment.’ Just like Zoom, Shein’s Covid-era business model is now being tested by the new market, where investors have aggressively rotated into AI stack-related investments.
“Robust demand would affirm Hong Kong’s role as the pragmatic listing venue for large consumer and e-commerce names that face hurdles elsewhere.”
The US has put a row of larger Chinese commercial firms on its Pentagon blacklist for connections with China’s military, including Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, CATL, Unitree, Xiaomi, Huawei and chipmaker CXMT. “It signals that the definition of strategic technology has expanded dramatically, says Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU, across a range of media.
The Sri Lanka Guardian:
“When companies like Alibaba, Baidu, BYD, Tencent and Xiaomi are viewed through a national security lens, it signals that the definition of strategic technology has expanded dramatically,” said Winston Ma. He noted that the updated Pentagon list aligns with broader regulatory shifts in the United States, including earlier efforts by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to broaden its review of mergers and acquisitions involving foreign-linked firms. That expansion, implemented in early 2025, was designed to tighten oversight of investments from geopolitical competitors, particularly China. Ma added that these developments reflect a structural shift in how commercial innovation is assessed within policy frameworks. “Both developments reflect a broader reality: The boundary between commercial technology and national security is becoming increasingly blurred,” he said.
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 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.
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.
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.
The lack of details in the Chinese side’s statement “suggests that China is taking time to negotiate when U.S. is keen to have deals,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law, pointing out that Beijing “said nothing about [an] APEC meeting.”
That contrasts with the constant flow of details from the U.S., now covering everything from investors to board seats. A Politico report, citing an unnamed senior White House official, even claimed that the Trump administration is “100% confident” of a deal forcing Beijing-based ByteDance to spin off TikTok’s U.S. operations.
Trump, however, may have preempted China’s coolness, saying in a Truth Social post Friday that he “appreciate[s] the TikTok approval” after his call with Xi, even as Beijing kept its language vague.
The US exchange Nasdaq has proposed a US$25 million fee for IPOs of Chinese companies, a popular venue for raising money because domestic exchanges are more troublesome due to government regulations. The move will pose a major barrier, especially for the smaller firm from China, says financial analyst Winston Ma at CNBC.
CNBC:
The Nasdaq stock exchange in the U.S. is planning listing requirements that will make it harder for small Chinese companies to list in New York, after a flood of tiny initial public offerings.
As part of proposed changes, companies operating primarily in China will need to raise at least $25 million in initial public offerings to list on the exchange, Nasdaq said late Wednesday local time.
The move comes as tensions between the U.S. and China simmer, and as the Nasdaq faces broader financial market issues.
“It will be more difficult for small Chinese companies to go IPO [on the] Nasdaq under the new rule,” said Winston Ma, adjunct professor at NYU School of Law. “The new rule reacts to some IPO cases of ‘pump and dump’ due to small float size.”
There have been been few large Chinese IPOs in the U.S. since the fallout around ride-hailing company Didi’s New York listing in 2021. But in 2024, 35 small China-based companies listed in New York, roughly twice the 17 U.S.-based microcap listings, Renaissance Capital said in December.
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 Cyberspaceat 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.
China can and will use its financial tools to offset the negative effects of the massive tariffs US President Trump has imposed on Chinese goods, says financial expert Winston Ma, adjunct professor at the New York University in a discussion with Bloomberg. China has not been using financial stimuli during and after the Covid crisis unlike the US, and still has the resources to do so now, he says.
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.
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.
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.
The introduction of the digital yuan didn’t make much headlines in 2024, but financial expert Winston Ma, an adjunct law professor at New York University and former managing director at China’s sovereign wealth fund, expects the debate will be back in 2025, he tells the Cointelegraph.
The Cointelegraph:
China’s central bank digital currency was once one of the industry’s hottest topics, but 2024 saw a relatively quieter year for the digital yuan.
Still, Winston Ma, an adjunct law professor at New York University and former managing director at China’s sovereign wealth fund, predicts a strong push for the digital yuan’s overseas expansion in 2025…
Despite … setbacks, China remains committed to its digital finance ambitions. At the third plenum, which is China’s most authoritative meeting with President Xi Jin Ping in attendance, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China announced plans for a renewed focus on the internationalization of its currency, including advancing the digital yuan…
Then in November, Shanghai, China’s financial hub and most populous city, unveiled plans to boost digital finance, including improving digital yuan acceptance.
Ma said that the digital yuan expansion could be met with resistance from the US.
“[This] may be a year where China’s CBDC overseas expansion efforts, especially with the BRICS countries, would meet with challenges from [Donald Trump], as he indicated in his recent tweet about defending the US dollar supremacy,” Ma says…
China has tested retail cross-border digital yuan payments with Singapore. It’s also part of the mBridge project, a wholesale cross-border experiment with the central banks of Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia.
