The China Memo

Neijuan (involution) and tangping (lying flat) are not about laziness, and they are not primarily about political protest. They are the vocabulary a generation has developed to describe a rational recalibration: the...

The AI conversation is dominated by chips. But before any compute can do useful work, data has to move — through thin strands of glass called optical fiber. And China makes more of it than the rest of the world...

China has crossed an inflection point in its energy transition: the binding constraint is no longer whether it can manufacture renewable energy equipment, but whether its grid infrastructure can absorb, transport, and...

<p>On April 20, 2026, China launched its first National Reading Week. Official framing positions it as a cultural initiative — books, libraries, literacy — with no mention of smartphones or screens. This episode argues...

<p>In January 2025, DeepSeek R1 — a reasoning model from a Chinese quant hedge fund spin-off — topped global app store charts, rattled US tech stocks, and was immediately labelled China's "AI Sputnik moment." This...

<p>The standard critique of BYD is straightforward: at least 3.7 billion dollars in documented government support, a protected domestic market, and government-steered early customers in bus fleets and taxi programmes...

<p>Half of the world's rare earth reserves sit outside China's borders. Almost none of the industrial capacity to process them does. That gap — between where the ore is found and where it gets turned into something a...

<p>Three Chinese automakers now produce or sell more than three million vehicles a year each — putting BYD, Geely, and SAIC in the same conversation as Volkswagen and Toyota on scale. But they got there through...

<p>In 2000, roughly 1.2 billion people in China lived below the threshold where genuine discretionary spending becomes possible. By 2030, roughly the same number are expected to sit at or above it — the largest...

<p>Two events in early 2026 together amount to the most significant stress test China's energy security strategy has faced in years. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz hit China's petrochemicals and...

<p>China built 48,000 kilometres of high-speed rail in twenty years — the largest network on earth. The productivity gains in the right corridors are real. But only six percent of the network turns a profit, and even...

<p>China's real estate crash is now in its fifth year, and the question has quietly changed. It's no longer "when does housing recover?" It's what fills the hole it leaves behind. This episode takes stock of how deep...

<p>A robot that can run, climb stairs, and carry a payload — now available from a Chinese company for roughly the price of a mid-range luxury car. That's not a prototype or a government showcase; it's a product you can...

<p>In this debut episode, we use Moore Threads — often dubbed "China's Nvidia" — as a lens to examine Beijing's push to build a domestic GPU ecosystem under sustained U.S. export controls. From the founding team's roots...