China's Week: Sunday, January 18
Killer science rankings; Fusion breakthrough; Weaponized soybeans; Microdrama exports earn $2B; Pentagon concedes hypersonic race to China.
Science & Technology
Nature’s Applied Sciences Institutions ranked global institutions’ output in 25 high-quality applied-sciences journals/conferences, selected via researcher survey. [Ed.]
Fusion Reactor Achieves Plasma Density Previously Considered Impossible.
AI drug screening rapidly maps drugs across the entire human genome. Today’s molecular docking tools need centuries for genome-scale screening.
Clone-hybrid rice breaks yield limits, seed traits self-replicate, eliminating the need for farmers to buy new hybrid seeds each season.
Supercooling technology makes stealth aircraft’s gallium nitride-based radars 40% more efficient. “The most significant breakthrough in this field in two decades,”
Alibaba’s LLM, Qwen, was downloaded more the combined total of the next eight
most popular, like Meta Platforms and OpenAI, Zhipu, Moonshot and MiniMax.
I asked Qwen to order 40 cups of bubble tea and it placed the order through Taobao Instant Commerce, applied discounts, completed payment in-chat, and scheduled delivery — all without switching apps.
Economy & Trade
By 2024, Brazil had 70% of China’s soybean market, 3.5 times the U.S., after a decade-long, aggressive strategy orchestrated by SOECOFCO International.
Shanghai stocks hit a decade high, insurers and tech lead gains.
China dominates humanoid robots, vendors take most global shipments.
CES has always been global, with attendees in Las Vegas from 150 countries. But in 2026 900 Chinese firms exhibited. Not ninety. Nine hundred.
Auto sales rose 10.4% to 34.53 million in 2025. New energy vehicles led the growth, with production and sales jumping 29% and 28%, respectively.
Overseas revenue from micro-dramas rose 195% in 2025, to $2 billion. Overseas app downloads grew 370%. 90% of the top 20 revenue-generating apps were Chinese.
Test pilots from the EU Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) have conducted verification flights of China’s C919 airliner in Shanghai, a crucial step towards global adoption.
Society & Environment
Security guard becomes world’s richest self-made woman entrepreneur: from factory floor to a $16 billion fortune; success comes from ‘refusal to accept defeat’.
Farmers’ pensions remain at $35/mo. Urban employees get $549 a month— sixteen times more, says the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security.
Supercritical CO₂ power goes commercial, waste heat turns into grid power.
All batteries get a digital identity as part of China’s management of recycling and comprehensive utilization of used EV power batteries.
Diplomacy & Geopolitics
If U.S. sanctions still worked, if dollar hegemony were still intact, if political pressure, financial warfare, and diplomatic isolation still delivered results, Washington would not need to personally step into the mud – kidnappings, floating regime-change fantasies, or openly talking about seizing resources as collateral. This is not muscle-flexing. This is imperial afterglow.
“Trump Declared a Space Race With China. The US Is Losing”. Nine ex-NASA officials say China will land humans on the Moon first. One calls the US approach “The worst of all worlds,” a race without planning to win.
Unprecedentedly, Purdue University has begun to curb the flow of Chinese graduate students to its Indiana campuses after pressure from Congress and President Trump.
Governance
The 1,300 year old Dujiangyan irrigation system control center’s digital twin runs in real time, covers 27ha., integrates live data from 59 sluice gates, 30 video feeds and readings from 20 safety sensors.
The $8 billion, 870-mile Yinjiangbuhan tunnel/canal system,1,000 m. deep in places, drains water from the Three Gorges Dam to the Han River and thence to Beijing.
Electrification is efficiency. In a decarbonised world, our final energy demand is 40% lower than it is today. The USA is 22% electrified, China is 29%.
Beijing’s public consultation on AI anthropomorphism, Interim Measures for the Administration of Humanized Interactive Services Based on AI.
Defense
Hurricane 3000 disables drone swarms at 3 km by frying their electronics. Low-cost, wide-area kills via radar and optical targeting. 70% cheaper than competing models.
January 11, 2026, marks 15 years since the maiden flight of the J-20 fighter, a milestone in China’s emergence as a leader in fighter aviation.
Pentagon says China has the world’s leading hypersonic missile arsenal for conventional and nuclear strikes.
PLA says hypersonics’ three advantages over ballistic missiles: greater precision, defense penetration and communications. US DoD: “Chinese hypersonic capabilities are top tier”.
China plans two satellite ‘super-constellations,’ CTC-1 and CTC-2, totaling 200,000 satellites. Starlink’s long-term target is 42,000. China’s policy is to actively support private firms as the main drivers of the commercial space industry.