China's Week, Sunday Feb. 23
Seedance threatens Hollywood; 165,000 battery swaps/day; Chinese are natural loophole-finders; Low-altitude insurance; “The emergence of the CJ-1000 missile.."
Science & Technology
Seedance 2, a new video creation model, surpasses Sora 2 and Veo 3 from OpenAI and Google. China doesn’t need the latest Nvidia chips to remain competitive.
YH-1000S cargo UAV shows its 1,500-km range, 1,200 kg payload. For logistics, disaster, ocean, maritime supervision and advancing the ‘low-altitude economy’.
Forty-two ‘10,000-card’ IA computing clusters, with 1,590 total exaflops shifts data-processing workloads to western provinces with abundant renewable resources.
Alibaba held 36% of China’s AI cloud market in 2025, and its AI inference chip, Zhenwu, is optimized for the MoE architecture that Alibaba’s Qwen 3.5 uses.
15 car companies to make humanoid robots: their supply chains and humanoids’ overlap by 60%: sensors, motors, batteries and 70% of the AI software stack.
The world’s largest producer of lithium metal, Ganfeng Lithium, is mass-producing semi-solid-state batteries with an impressive energy density of 650 Wh/kg.
Nio broke its single-day battery swap record yesterday by performing 165,000 battery swaps in single day.
Economy & Finance
Chinese carmakers have lower cost structures, tighter control over supply chains and a stronger focus on the China market. This puts Western OEMs in a tough spot.
CIPS, China's answer to SWIFT, has grown 40% annually in transaction value since 2021, with a 10% YoY increase of participating financial institutions,
China supplies over 70% of world’s essential pharmaceutical ingredients, develops 1000s of innovative drugs.
Chinese companies overtook American as Singapore’s largest source of fixed-asset investment in 2025, 20.6% vs 17.3%. In 2024 the US held 55.5% and China 2.5%.
Chinese brands win 60% of Japan’s domestic TV market. In 2025, Hisense and TCL already held a 50% combined market share.
China produces 60% of the world’s lab-grown diamonds, or 22 M carats, 98% of industrial-grade production and a strategic weapon.
Society & Environment
In 2021, the Yangtze River fishing moratorium retired 111,000 fishing vessels and resettled 231,000 fishers at a cost of $2.7 billion. The policy is already showing measurable results.
Battery storage costs fell 27%, to a record low last year, improving the economics of projects to pair the equipment with renewables.
The Chinese are natural loophole-finders rather than rule-followers in the Japanese vein. They are Taosits trapped in Confucian bodies.
40% of China’s population, 590 million people, enrolled in KFC’s loyalty program– the world’s largest restaurant loyalty program.
Governance
China widens anti-corruption net to catch ‘quasi-naked officials’ with scrutiny of officials whose children live abroad, with some losing promotions and jobs.
What happens when a state-controlled consultancy can monetize officials’ career anxiety and does so through a methodology that is, by design, hard to audit?
Beijing Boosts Low-Altitude Insurance: new policy guidance accelerate the development of a comprehensive insurance system for the low-altitude economy.
Xi Jinping, On Governance: “A country chooses its political system based on whether the system can resolve the critical challenges it faces. When the Chinese nation was plagued by poverty, debility and foreign abuse, it tried out various doctrines and ideas. The capitalist path along with reformism, liberalism, and pragmatism failed. None of them resolved the problems of China's future and destiny. It was Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong thought that helped the Chinese people to emerge from misery and to found the People's Republic of China. It was socialism with Chinese characteristics that enabled China to achieve rapid development.”
Geopolitics
Nine of the world’s ten highest bridges are in China, all but two built in the past decade. China produces thirty-three Golden Gate Bridges’ worth of steel every day.
If the US-China AI race is decided in datacenters, how expensive are they in the U.S. versus China, and how much “AI” would each data center generate?
China excluded from the EUs’s €94-billion research-funding programme.
In China, the idea that crucial parts of the central government could simply cease to operate for a month, as part of a procedural standoff between rival governing factions, would beggar belief. And in turn, to an American observer, the thought that miles of new high-speed rail lines could simply materialize by bureaucratic fiat, unencumbered by years of legislative horse-trading, environmental review, suburban backlash, and budgetary overshoot, is no less astonishing.
Defense
“The emergence of the CJ-1000 missile marks China’s transition from closely following to taking a leading position in the most advanced aerospace domains”.
When I say that the Chinese would take about 30 minutes to wipe out the Seventh Fleet anchored in Japan, a lot of people are shocked, but the American squadron is almost completely vulnerable.