Johanna M. Costigan 林乐乐

Gig workers in China are posting videos highlighting the allegedly precarious working conditions powering Shein's aggressive growth.

In a video uploaded to the Chinese social media platform Bilibili in October, a Shein warehouse worker in southern China with black-rimmed glasses tells the camera he picked 650 clothing items during his last shift—a feat he claims to have accomplished, in part, by not taking a single bathroom break. The worker says the sacrifice would help him reach his goal of earning 10,000 RMB (nearly $1,500 at the time) a month at his job picking and packing customer orders for Shein, the global fast-fashion juggernaut valued last year at $66 billion.

In a separate Bilibili video posted a few days later, a different Shein staffer says that he is “sweating profusely after picking goods all night,” but he’s grateful, at least, that his team leader is friendly. In a third clip shared to the short-form video platform Kuaishou in November, another Shein worker with long hair pulled back into a low ponytail tells the camera she is having trouble lifting her left hand after completing an 11-and-a-half hour shift at a Shein warehouse. “My first time working in logistics, there won’t be a second time,” reads the caption.

Over the past three years, dozens of purported gig workers at Shein fulfillment centers in southern China have filmed day-in-the-life vlogs like these, sharing with viewers extensive details about their wages, working conditions, and reasons for choosing to take jobs in the logistics industry.

WIRED analyzed more than 30 of the videos from four Chinese platforms tagged with the hashtag Xiyin (#希音), Shein’s name in Chinese. Together, they provide a rare and deeply human glimpse into the meticulously optimized logistics supply chain that allows Shein to send millions of $3 polyester tube tops and $5 pairs of patterned leggings to consumers around the world.

Read the article via WIRED here.

High-quality, low-cost batteries — used to power clean technologies such as electric vehicles and energy storage — are crucial for the green transition and the prosperity it has the potential to facilitate. They also happen to be made primarily by Chinese companies.

While the Biden administration attributes Chinese firms’ success in the space to “unfair, non-market practices,” the industry has also benefited from the fact that China has an underdeveloped traditional auto market compared to the United States. As a result, Chinese consumers have been more eager to shift from internal combustion engine cars to inexpensive, domestically-made electric vehicles.

Whatever its origin, China’s success in the sector is significant enough that, according to Bloomberg NEF, it currently makes enough lithium-ion batteries to meet all global demand. But to American lawmakers, that success story represents nothing more than an additional layer — which they plan to crack — in the comprehensive national security threat Chinese firms pose.

Read the article via Forbes here.

The House of Representatives just wrapped up a week dedicated to passing 25 China-themed bills, primarily centered on restricting Chinese companies’ presence in the U.S. market.

The purpose of “China Week,” according to John Moolenaar, Chairman of the House Select Committee on China, is for Congress to “tell Xi Jinping, this far, and no further” using “one voice.”

In practice, lawmakers did not manage to speak with such unity. Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), ranking member of the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, told Politico he was unhappy with what was left out of the package of bills.

Read the article via Forbes here.

Artificial intelligence was mentioned multiple times in the resolution for China’s Third Plenum, last week’s major agenda-setting gathering of China’s leaders centered on economic policy. The resolution discusses how AI should be harnessed for economic growth, cooperation with developing countries, and protecting minors online. But the Third Plenum was most focused on AI safety—and the technology’s implications for China’s national security.

Xi Jinping’s full explanation of the Third Plenum’s outcomes includes a proposal to create an AI Safety oversight mechanism (“establish an AI regulatory system” is a closer translation of the original). In language familiar to anyone who has reviewed U.S. official proclamations on the subject, like President Biden’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy AI, Xi calls on China to “better leverage science and technology to safeguard national security.”

Governance-oriented leaders around the world increasingly believe they have a responsibility to try to make AI “safe”—even if their efforts come at a cost for industry. They don’t yet and may never, however, agree on how high a cost would be tolerable or, more foundationally, the details of what constitutes “safety.”

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

A severe blow to regulatory agencies’ power leveled earlier this month by the Supreme Court could have major ramifications for the United States’ nascent efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.

The Court decided in Loper Bright Enterprises vs. Raimondo to overrule landmark precedent from 1984: Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. Per Chevron doctrine, courts were required to defer to agency interpretation.

When it comes to AI regulation, the Loper Bright decision therefore constitutes a clear but not quite decisive victory for those who believe over-regulation is the greatest danger of AI development and a loss for anyone who thinks the U.S. should pursue — not prevent — AI governance.

China doesn’t need the most advanced chips to take a leading role in global AI development, Zhang Ping’an, CEO of Huawei Cloud, said at the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week.

Based on the technologies exhibited at the conference, major players in the country’s AI industry may be attempting to draw attention away from China’s chip shortages and toward its advancements in a quintessential sci-fi form: humanoid robots.

According to Huawei’s Zhang, accepting the premise that advanced chips are the only path to AI leadership amounts to a de facto embrace of defeat. "If we believe that not having the most advanced AI chips means we will be unable to lead in AI, then we need to abandon this viewpoint," he said.

While banned chips can be found in places like Shenzhen’s Huaqiangbei electronics market, they are rare and expensive. As the United States continues to tighten its controls on chip exports to China, it makes sense that top tech executives would try to find an effective spin.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

Recent developments highlight the United States’ and China’s shared interest in bifurcating technological development—a sector that has long benefited from globalization.

Leaders in both Beijing and Washington have reached two conclusions. The first is straightforward: Innovation is the best and only key to economic growth and geopolitical leadership. The second: To win the sci-tech advantage, each country must take robust public and private sector measures to compete with (and separate from) the other.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

At the first bilateral AI safety dialogue between the U.S. and China held in Geneva last week, the Chinese side emphasized “strengthening the global governance of artificial intelligence” and advocated for expanding the role of the United Nations. The subtext: China doesn’t want the United States to have unchallenged control over global AI safety standards. While the Chinese readout noted the U.S. should be “included,” it highlighted China’s support of an AI governance framework that enjoys “broad consensus.”

Beijing has tried to bring voices from the developing world into the conversation on managing AI—partly to find safety in numbers in its attempts to challenge U.S. dominance in the field. In addition to their geopolitical utility, however, China’s appeals to the global south do in fact have legs. In October, the country released its Global AI Governance Initiative, which states, “All countries, regardless of their size, strength, or social system, should have equal rights to develop and use AI.”

Read the whole article via Forbes.

The Biden Administration announced extensive new tariffs on Chinese goods yesterday, targeting cleantech industries China dominates—which also happen to be critical to the green energy transition.

The move represents President Joe Biden’s election-year decision to limit U.S. market access for companies from China, a country he and his electoral opponent will both try to convince voters they can be “tough on.”

In the process, he has ceded ground from another, more important objective: advancing decarbonization and turning the United States into a global leader on climate change mitigation efforts.

Read the whole article via Forbes.

China’s leadership is fixated on combating ‘historical nihilism’—the act of failing to completely comport to the official, often positive version of history. The end game is to secure an uncontradictable narrative of China’s history that not only makes the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) look good, but also convincingly describes the country’s current successes as the indisputable outcomes of continued CCP rule. China’s ups and downs are considered, in almost faith-based fashion, part of the party’s plan. Positive developments are supposed to be the inheritance of each new generation of CCP-governed Chinese people. Negative ones, when acknowledged, are the struggles they have to undergo to earn their birthright.

The state has created a climate of positive memory preservation so powerful that in some cases, it may even exceed its own intended boundaries. For example, the patriotic blogger Wu Wanzheng is suing the writer Mo Yan on the basis that he has violated a 2018 Chinese law meant to “strengthen protections of heroes and martyrs”. Wu’s allegation is that Mo failed to write about the Japanese soldiers who occupied China with sufficiently one-dimensional disdain. He also didn’t make Mao look good enough, therefore endangering the country’s most important hero. The authorities may step in, directly or indirectly, to squelch the case if they deem it an instance of civilian overreach. But it is impossible not to see a connection between the state’s control over history and a nationalistic, perhaps overzealous, individual’s ability to sue based on a historical narrative.

In China, history is guarded yet distributed en masse. Challenges to its presentation are not tolerated, yet the state is constantly editing it—sometimes resulting in changes so severe they amount to reversals. It is one of the most emphasised subjects in schools. Organic discussions of history are curbed, yet lectures on it are decisive. In other countries, history is a force and a foundation the state and citizens reckon with—or they fail to do so and national identity becomes weakened or contested. In China, history is more like a sharp tool used by the government and the governed—both to attack one another and defend themselves.

Ian Johnson’s book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, profiles scholars and artists he calls “underground historians” who enter the taboo universe of unapproved historical research, facing risks and punishments as a result. Their work bravely challenges the party’s attempt to erase episodes from the national narrative. In a chapter titled ‘The Limits of Amnesia’, Johnson argues the Communist Party combines cultural memory (the texts and beliefs that hold a society together) and communicative memory (direct personal or intergenerational experiences) by “using myths to explain the recent past”.

Read the full article via the Mekong Review here.

Xi Jinping has charged Chinese Communist Party officials with the task of simultaneously suppressing and popularizing history. Fatal chapters of China’s history in living memory like the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen should be largely buried — even as lessons learned from those eras continue to help shape Party ideology. (The major takeaway from the Cultural Revolution: keep the people involved; from Tiananmen: make them patriotic.) Other historical stories, like the lead-up to the CCP’s first National Congress in Shanghai and, decades later, China’s valorous efforts to defend itself against Japan during World War II, should be spotlighted. Their protagonists — heroes and martyrs — should be admired. 

It’s up to rank-and-file cadres to bring these events into public consciousness through traditional means, such as education and tourism. But increasingly, they are also expected to use digital communication to transmit the Party-approved version of history to the people. The aim is not to stifle all discussions of history just because some less flattering, more factual episodes have to be sacrificed. Officials don’t want to make history a dirty word; on the contrary, they want to make it sexy. The goal: maximize Party history’s “attractiveness and infectiousness” 吸引力感染力.

Read the whole article here.

Now that the legislation has passed, the next chapter of this story will play out in the courts. The government has a better case against TikTok if it argues TikTok should be banned due to the Chinese government’s ability to manipulate the opinions of American users (a speculation that has not been confirmed, let alone measured against all the other mis- and disinformation in the American information diet).

If American users are indeed as susceptible to manipulation as the ban suggests, it is more likely to be by videos coming from any source other than the Chinese state, which is known to create clunky and heavy-handed content that wouldn’t pass the smell test of the average high school student. Posts from Chinese agencies don’t go viral in China; they are less likely to go viral stateside.

Read the whole article via Forbes.

Lawmakers have found a new weapon in their quest to ban TikTok: linking the forced divestment bill, which passed the House last month, to aid packageshfor Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.

Read the article here via Forbes.

United States’ diplomatic gymnastics toward China is particularly clear in the realm of AI talent. In trying to curb China’s technological development, the US might be limiting its own potential in the sector, since so many professionals working at American AI companies are Chinese nationals.

Read the article via Forbes here.

The House of Representatives’ bipartisan passage of an act that would ban TikTok unless its Chinese owner, ByteDance, sells the company within six months is another testament to the power of invoking the word “China” to get American legislation passed.

The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act follows years-long suspicions about the app, popularized by Donald Trump’s 2020 attempt to ban it. These suspicions have been fueled nearly entirely by TikTok’s Chinese ownership, which may in practice be one of its least troubling characteristics—that is, if it is being assessed on the basis of American users’ rights and protections.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

An AI company was found by the Guangzhou Internet Court to have committed copyright infringement in its provision of AI-generated text-to-image services, according to Chinese media reports. The first of its kind ruling places clear responsibility on the AI company, which the plaintiff argued reproduced copyrighted images unlawfully and without permission.

The intellectual property at the center of the case is Ultraman, a well-known character owned by Tsuburaya Productions that was awarded the Guinness World Record for being the subject of the highest number of spin-off TV shows. When a user requested Ultraman-related images from the AI platform, which was not named in reporting, the outputs were extremely similar to the plaintiff’s original creation.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

The world’s two biggest artificial intelligence powers—the U.S. and China—are attempting to address intellectual property concerns relating to AI-generated content domestically, as their ability to effectively collaborate on managing AI remains hampered by the dismal state of bilateral relations.

But whether they can find a degree of compromise on AI governance, including IP, will make a big difference to companies. Firms are hoping for the least degree of legislative variation possible between countries.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

China is currently home to some of the most advanced AI regulations in the world. Its party-state government, free from the burden of compromise, can swiftly regulate AI as it sees fit. Beijing has in recent months and years crafted regulations that both (partially) protect citizens from tech companies’ greediest impulses and uphold the paternalistic impulse to preserve state power over individual expression and corporate interest.

In China, regulators, companies and users are to a degree engaged in a game of hot potato. The goal is to avoid disagreeing with or pushing back on the regulations without actually assuming direct responsibility for enforcing them.

Read the whole article via Forbes.

In October, in front of leaders from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, Xi Jinping stood triumphant in a celebratory keynote address celebrating the tenth birthday of his Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The speech, delivered at the BRI Forum, championed the initiative’s successes and charted a path toward a version 2.0 that will be smaller, greener, and more focused on diplomacy. The speech depicted China as an alternative standards-setter for the developing world in artificial intelligence, climate resilience, and attainable modernization.

A white paper released in the run-up to the Forum more explicitly explains the Party’s read on the state of the world—and its origins. The paper distinguishes the BRI from the “old colonial path” taken by rich countries over much of the last century. The BRI, the white paper says, “will not transfer problems, use neighbors as beggars, or harm others to benefit itself.” Instead, it will create “win-win” opportunities and liberate developing countries from operating within the global system the Party sees as a creation of the U.S.

That leaders from more than 20 developing nations attended the celebration suggests they are at least somewhat wary of the U.S.-led global affairs status quo. That skepticism creates convenient space for China, a country that has long since retired its “hide and bide” approach to international relations, reframing itself as the leader of the developing world.

China’s leader Xi Jinping’s Global Civilization Initiative (GCI) is the most recent in a line of global development and outreach proposals, including the BRI as well as the Global Security and Development Initiatives. The GCI demonstrates that Xi wants China to lead not only in implementing global governance, but in conceptualizing why and how it should exist.

Read the whole article via ChinaFile here.

Xu Huaizhong’s novel, That Which Can’t Be Washed Away, is a more recent engagement with the past. It was published in Chinese in 2019, titled 牵风记 (literally “diary of pulling the wind”), and won the prestigious Mao Dun prize that year. The book, translated by Haiwang Yuan and Will Spence, was released in English earlier this year by Sinoist Books, a specialist publisher in translated Chinese literature whose mission is “adding nuance and dimension to the discussions that go on in English about the Chinese-speaking world,” according to chief publisher Wang Ying Mathieson. The book takes place during the Chinese Civil War, and its main characters are fictionalized and flawed CCP fighters. The novel follows two soldiers as they create, preserve and contend with their memories of the war, both in real time and in retrospect.

Read the whole article via China Books Review here.

ChatGPT’s success and Altman’s resultant celebrity gave him easy access to world leaders, making him the de facto ambassador for a version of “safe AI development” that suited his personal preferences as well as the financial interests of the company he led. The support he has received from Microsoft, big names in Silicon Valley and the more than 500 OpenAI employees who are calling for the board’s replacement and Altman’s reinstatement suggests that no matter where he works, Altman could become an even more dominant voice in the global conversation about AI development and risk.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

Many Americans will accept at face value that it is in the United States’ interest to prevent the People’s Liberation Army from obtaining AI-enabled weapons that could destroy the planet. But a concurrent consideration of Washington’s confrontational approach to the bilateral relationship and its nonexistent domestic AI regulations suggests that U.S. lawmakers have become susceptible to the coalescing temptations of China hawkishness and AI hype.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

Deepfakes of the dead are further proof that in America, where no federal artificial intelligence regulations exist, AI-generated content can be legally used and monetized without consent from the humans whose work fed and keeps feeding the datasets AI relies on. Our ability to die without an AI-generated clone emerging in our wake is now uncertain.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

After Chinese regulators stalled the deal for almost a year, Intel on Tuesday abandoned its attempted acquisition of Tower Semiconductor, a chip manufacturer that was going to help Intel make semiconductors in-house. The plan was part of Intel’s strategy—which aligned with President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act—to manufacture semiconductors domestically.

Beijing had the authority to delay the Intel deal because China requires that its State Administration of Market Regulation approves mergers if one of the companies has significant business interest in the country. (Intel operates factories in China, and the country is one of its biggest markets. It made almost $23 billion in China in 2021.)

SAMR had incentive to obstruct the deal because of the now-apparent geopolitics of the chip sector, which Beijing believes has held it hostage to a growing international contingent of countries interested in curbing China’s economic success. The other word for it is “containment”—a term the United States seems increasingly willing to openly deploy in its China policy.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

Like China’s actual AI regulations, the “Model Law” from a team at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) shows that Chinese AI researchers share unsurprisingly parallel concerns with their international counterparts. Everyone wants to innovate (and profit-generate) while maintaining safety (or appearing to).

Read the whole contribution here via Stanford’s DigiChina.

Splashed across numerous international publications last November was an image of a young man in an orange jacket, a blue hoodie and a black face mask, surrounded by a crowd of people on a city street, staring fixedly at the camera. Holding up a white piece of paper with his right hand, his left points determinedly at… us. This direct address seems to demand something of the viewer, but as his sign is blank, his message remains elusive.

The hundreds of people who surround him also hold white pieces of paper, suggestive of a shared purpose. Static documentary evidence of a crowd could plausibly be read as a rally, a protest, a celebration. The choice of white, however, and its association with mourning in China, helps characterise the event as a vigil. And that is exactly what it was, or at least how it started.

These public gatherings began as a way to remember the ten lives lost in Xinjiang province on 24 November 2022, after a fire broke out in an apartment building where residents struggled to escape due to movement-control obstacles introduced to prevent the spread of Covid-19. While the gatherings—like the one in Shanghai on Wulumuqi Road (named after Ürümqi in Xinjiang)—started as a way for a grieving public to mourn, they quickly transitioned to large-scale protests. Many directly called for an end to President Xi Jinping’s stringent zero-Covid policy, while others rejected his repressive measures and, in some cases, his regime.

Read the full article via Mekong Review here.

The leaders of America’s biggest AI-focused companies—including Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Inflection AI, and OpenAI—met with President Biden on Friday, committing to continue to do what they were already doing to make AI safe, per their own definitions of safety.

The meeting can be considered symptomatic of AI executives’ dominance in the conversation about the dangers posed by their own products. That dominance has resulted in the proliferation of ominous scenarios centered on the hypothetical and dire possible long-term outcomes of the technology.

Read the whole article here.

The advent of large language models like ChatGPT crystallizes the particular threats writers face; while LLMs can’t replace the humanity necessary for good reporting, fiction and poetry, they can flood the internet with mediocre content that could make higher quality work even less marketable than it already is—if we, the reading public, let them.

The Authors Guild released an open letter, signed by over 8,000 authors, addressed to the CEOs of OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft and other companies demanding that authors get the opportunity to give consent and get credit and compensation when their work is used to train AI models. The letter is at least partially retroactive in nature as AI companies have already used writers’ copyrighted content without permission and for profit.

Read the whole article here.

“Being a plus sized influencer means being constantly ridiculed for being fat,” said Kiera Wilson, a cultural writer and graduate student in intermediality at the University of Edinburgh. Many creators who are regularly criticized for their weight or appearance have cultivated a body-positivity movement, which Wilson says has trickled into a general positivity movement.

That “positivity” can show up in attempts to promote Shein, like when creators post unboxing videos of their hauls with voiceovers describing their evolution in self love. In other instances, creators might post fun-loving photos of themselves with positive captions and simply tag the brand. But persistent positivity is not reserved for the influencers of the fashion world. In China, the term "positive energy"—originally popularized organically by social media users—has been co-opted by Xi Jinping to promote content that comports with CCP policies and narratives. Its unclear definition gives it a boundless relevance when it comes to state control of online discourse in China. The Shein influencers’ videos would have a high chance at passing the positive energy censorship test—not exactly a badge of honor if one’s goal is to be truthful.

Read the whole article here.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the weekend called for enhanced collaboration between the U.S. and China on artificial intelligence development. Without mentioning the fact that his company’s products like ChatGPT are not available in China, he argued that China should be a major player in ensuring the safety of global AI development and rollout.

“With the emergence of the increasingly powerful AI systems, the stakes for global cooperation have never been higher,” he said in the keynote address for a conference hosted by the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, sounding more like someone leading an advocacy group on responsible tech than what he is: the CEO of a company responsible for shepherding that emergence.

Altman’s call for U.S.-China collaboration on “mitigating risk” is only the latest (and, given the state of U.S.-China technological competition, possibly the most hazardous) incident in his quest to convince the world to regulate his industry. Unlike other tech leaders, he has been eager to meet with policymakers around the world, not just in the United States but also in South America, Africa, Europe and Asia, in an effort to encourage and influence the development of AI regulations. Presumably, he is advocating for rules that would benefit OpenAI’s business interests.

Read the whole article via Forbes here.

China’s technological prowess is frequently invoked by U.S. policymakers hoping to get votes, attention, or enough bipartisan support to pass a bill. Competition with China was a central motivating factor in federal legislation like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, not to mention the work of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party. “Beating China”—specifically in science and technology development—is a key driver of U.S. governance and, ahead of the 2024 presidential race, elections.

George Washington University Assistant Professor of Political Science Jeffrey Ding published a recent article that explains why measuring a state’s scientific and technological power should include not only how many innovations a country can check off, but also the degree to which new technologies are integrated into the economy and society. Ding spoke with Johanna Costigan about his new paper. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Read the whole interview here.

Technology featured heavily at last weekend’s G7 meetings. The Hiroshima Leaders’ Communiqué, named for the G7 host city, recognized the need to “take stock” on generative AI, which it calls “increasingly prominent across countries and sectors.” The clearest action item listed in this section tasks ministers from G7 nations to hold discussions on generative AI before the end of this year.

The group of seven rich democracies (the U.S., UK, Japan, Italy, France, Canada, Germany, plus the European Union) chose to focus on AI following the dissemination of new AI regulations from China, one of the group’s unmistakable concerns. China’s draft regulations on generative AI, which were released last month and follow previous regs targeted at deep fakes, grant Chinese users stronger privacy protections from emerging AI applications than their G7 peers. For all their condemnation of China—and parallel interest in regulating AI—member states may stand to learn from aspects of China’s approach.

China’s role as an unnamed catalyst is palpable in the technology and economy sections of the communiqué. Just under supporting Ukraine and nuclear nonproliferation, the statement pledges to, “coordinate an approach to economic resilience and economic security that is based on diversifying and deepening partnerships and de-risking, not decoupling.”

Read the whole article here via Forbes.

In April, in an effort to regulate rapidly advancing artificial intelligence technologies, China’s internet watchdog introduced draft rules on generative AI. They cover a wide range of issues — from how data is trained to how users interact with generative AI such as chatbots.

Under the new regulations, companies are ultimately responsible for the “legality” of the data they use to train AI models. Additionally, generative AI providers must not share personal data without permission, and must guarantee the “veracity, accuracy, objectivity, and diversity” of their pre-training data.

These strict requirements by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) for AI service providers could benefit Chinese users, granting them greater protections from private companies than many of their global peers. Article 11 of the regulations, for instance, prohibits providers from “conducting profiling” on the basis of information gained from users. Any Instagram user who has received targeted ads after their smartphone tracked their activity would stand to benefit from this additional level of privacy.

Read the whole op-ed here.

Talk of innovation has risen in recent decades. The internet age produces clashes between neoliberal big claims, big egos, and big rewards, and the tangible practice of innovation. But innovation is not the same as invention.

In 1939, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter described invention as “an act of intellectual creativity undertaken without any thought given to its possible economic import, while innovation happens when firms figure out how to craft inventions into constructive changes in their business model.”

Our culture prioritises the latter. Innovation capitalism merges two fixations: being first to “make” something (or perceived as such by a critical mass), and getting paid for that ingenuity. Both are about credit and status—not making the world better, nor even creation, despite the positive associations “innovation” has come to enjoy.

George Mason economist Tyler Cowen observes invention—which innovation passes itself off to be—is actually in decline. “Americans have this self-image that we're the great inventors, [but] we've dropped the ball in many areas. We also see a lot of social tolerance—people confuse that with technological breakthroughs. [They have] a vague sense that things are getting better."

If inventiveness is in decline, then innovation in a true sense is, too. So why are public and private funders so captivated by the latter without considering whether the former is meaningfully present?

Read the article here.

I wrote about Peng Ke, a photographer whose work captures life in China:

“I kept thinking about how for a girl to be born in China [during the one child policy], she has already survived a very difficult journey—not being abandoned or aborted,” Peng says.

In considering how to translate these thoughts, conversations, and experiences into her work, Peng began to frame the start of life as a success in itself: “being born as having survived.” She enters discussions on feminism, whether it’s with her American or Chinese peers, from this lens—that of a female newborn. Someone who started surviving before she started living.

Now, facing a demographic crisis, China’s government has completely reversed course; couples are now not only allowed, but encouraged to have three children, even as the cost of raising a single child continues to go up. Peng is also thinking about feminism’s role in cultivating enhanced individual agency for women amid the consistently inconsistent socioeconomic conditions of contemporary China.

Read the whole article here.

According to a 2015 article in a Communist Youth League’s paper, college students ranked “Papa Xi” the highest among a group of public figures, citing their admiration for the “aggression behind his anti-corruption campaign” (铁腕反腐的霸气) and his helpful advice that young people should not stay up late. Notably, he outranked Jack Ma, another public figure mentioned in the same article. Technology — which presents opportunities for tech CEOs to gain threatening prominence and individuals to find modes of expression and information the CCP has an interest in burying — presents an especially tricky development for a father figure like Xi.

Under the leadership of the CCP, regulators have taken concrete, if highly imperfect, steps to protect citizens from the harmful applications of generative AI — amid a global preoccupation with how we might limit, expand, or guide AI applications. These include large language models (LLMs)1 like ChatGPT, which attracted more than 100 million active users within two months of its launch. China’s regulations on deepfakes and algorithm recommendation services make the country an exemplar for harm-reducing laws — with a strong caveat: the same regulations fit seamlessly into the CCP’s moralistic and patriarchal policy agenda.

“Traditional” gender roles have received a “discursive boost” over the past decade of Xi Jinping’s rule. Two recent laws exemplify his aims to regulate AI and simultaneously empower himself and the patriarchal system he leads. The laws limit personal expression and information access in service of the Party-state’s interests — and institutionalize the management of individual and corporate use and misuse of AI with a degree of technical and administrative specificity. Precisely how Chinese authorities will apply laws is unknowable by design, but the letter of the law is worth consideration and, in this case, limited appreciation. The United States is still the world leader in nearly every area of technological development, save any checks or regulation on said technologies. The PRC’s protections against deepfakes and addictive algorithms are far from perfect, but until the United States crafts its own preferable versions of them, critiques of China’s AI regulations are easy to discount. They are worth a closer look.

Read the whole paper via Asia Society here.

To better protect the interests of the U.S., and its partners like Taiwan, the Biden administration should focus its efforts on an affirmative agenda centered on helping Americans pull themselves up by their bootstraps, rather than using them to choke China — and harming the interests of American allies in the process.

Read the whole op-ed here.

In China, the Ministry of Science and Technology’s official newspaper recently praised Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu for their contributions to the country’s economy and development. Yet praise does not imply future independence. Over the past two years, the Chinese leadership’s (somewhat delayed) recognition of the platform companies’ significance spurred a fintech “rectification.” What started as a flurry of punitive measures quickly evolved into more systemic control. Earlier this year, Guo Shuqing, the Party Secretary for the People’s Bank of China, announced that rectification of the 14 biggest fintech firms had been “basically completed.”

While regulators’ splashier moves might be over, the crackdown still casts a shadow over China’s tech sector. Regulatory empowerment and deeper state involvement mean that full emancipation for the private sector is out of reach. On top of permanent regulatory oversight, state entities are taking “golden shares” (which confer special management power) in major tech companies such as Alibaba and Tencent. Perhaps not coincidentally, these two firms’ operations far exceed financial services. Tencent owns the super-app WeChat, while Alibaba’s Ant Group is a multi-pronged digital services and e-commerce giant.

One of the Communist Party of China’s core priorities is economic growth, which these firms are poised to supply. But the party-state’s first priority is to maintain central control, which the government will rush to defend if and when these firms start to appear too powerful. If industry and party goals overlap, fintech firms will have nothing to worry about. But that is a big “if.” Uninterrupted harmony between the two is unlikely.

Read the full conversation per Project Syndicate Quarterly here.

All three governments are applying the 21st century concept of economic security while carrying the memory of 20th century exploitation. They are trying to manage security dilemmas, ideological differences, and a bifurcating global order as the world departs from the postwar era of globalization and free trade.

Japan's apparent willingness to play a supporting role in America's Indo-Pacific strategy, in terms of both traditional and economic security, demonstrates the inescapability of the U.S.-China competition in the region. But just because Japan cannot avoid the Washington-Beijing rivalry does not mean it should join it wholeheartedly, especially through symbols of support that do little of substance for Taiwan while crossing Beijing's known red lines.

Read the full article here.

I think Beijing has a tough time fitting its Taiwan strategy inside the rest of its priorities. There’s an absolutism to what it needs to say, do, achieve with Taiwan that creates zero flexibility to manage the problems and contradictions that arise with other parts of its domestic and external policy choices. The rhetoric coming out of Beijing right now is that China plans to prioritize its domestic economic growth over and above a tough approach toward its neighbors in the region.

Beijing is on a charm offensive abroad: It has muted the “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy approach; Xi Jinping is meeting with world leaders; Liu He is at Davos saying China’s open for business. But they still haven’t recognized how a charm offensive fits into what I see as an escalation of tensions in the Taiwan Strait that is likely to come to yet another head in the coming months, when the U.S. Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, travels to Taipei as he’s likely to do. What happens to the charm offensive in that scenario? There’s simply no way for Beijing to release itself from the corner it has backed itself into on Taiwan policy. Therefore, I would expect the charm offensive to take a hit based on decisions that are outside of Beijing’s control.

Read the full interview via Young China Watchers here.

While often cast as part of the rectification—or crackdown, depending on your preferred term—China’s patriarchal censorship campaigns since 2020 are largely unrelated to Beijing’s pioneering, if possibly problematic, tech regulations. The latter are China’s unique response to the challenge, faced in every country, of creating fair internet regulation amid a fast-changing technological landscape. The former are manifestations of the CCP’ censorship pattern, which is idiosyncratic in both intention and capacity.

Read the whole forum via DigiChina here.

When protests broke out in China in response to severe, and sometimes fatal, COVID-19 lockdowns, blank sheets of A4 paper became the dominant symbol of dissent, appearing in the streets of Chinese cities and at solidarity protests around the world. Their digital analog, a visual rendering of a white square (akin to the solid black square used by the #BlackLivesMatter movement), came to represent protests against not just China’s zero-COVID policy but the Chinese government’s speech control regime; the white square was, at least temporarily, a censor-proof anti-censorship symbol. The square’s blankness cultivated versatility: Each individual could fill it with their own unwritten objections. This creative, evasive, multipurpose tool is representative of efforts to resist China’s tightening online discourse environment. The 2023 New Year celebration campaign of the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which asked netizens to submit online examples of “positive energy” (正能量) throughout 2022 — an arduous year in which millions of Chinese faced lockdowns — belied an intentional reluctance to read the room.

While its implementation has been far from seamless, speech control in China should not be understood as the ad hoc impulses of aggrieved authorities. In times of crisis, repression can be reactive. But, unlike less advanced censorship regimes elsewhere in the world, Chinese censorship is not limited to reactivity. Its ultimate ambition, intended to unfold in the coming decades, is to implement a grand strategy for creating, guiding, and rewarding online discourse that is favorable to the leadership and legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). To achieve such an ambitious goal, censorship is insufficient. The Chinese government is also cultivating an internet that offers a deluge of “positive energy” that is free from “harmful information,” supportive of the government, and capable of fostering economic growth. Recent technology policy documents, such as the State Council’s white paper titled “Jointly Build a Shared Future in Cyberspace,” frame the discussion of values on the internet in terms that are conspicuously amenable to CCP rule: “Cyberspace, like the real world, values both freedom and order. Freedom is the purpose of order, and order is the guarantee of freedom.”

Full paper available here.

Considering aggregate data, anecdotal accounts, and common sense, it is difficult to downplay the significance of Beijing’s sudden decision to reverse its once prized zero COVID policy, which Chinese President Xi Jinping had claimed as a national and personal victory.

On January 18, during a Lunar New Year message, Xi made his first public comments on the wave of infections that follow China’s reopening, saying that he was “most worried about its spread in China’s vast countryside, where medical services and resources are insufficient.” The following day, health authorities announced that critical COVID-19 cases have peaked in China’s hospitals.

But reliable data on the ongoing COVID-19 surge is hard to come by.

In the wake of the December 7 announcement that Beijing would abruptly abandon its zero COVID policy, relatively trustworthy data has been largely limited to the provincial level. On December 24, the National Health Commission halted its daily data release. During the first two weeks of the post-zero COVID era, the government released implausibly low case numbers (only thousands of new cases per day nationwide).

Full article available via The Diplomat here.

While CCP leaders have never been feminists, the party has historically advanced women's rights when doing so furthered its socioeconomic priorities. Today, Xi is so politically secure that he can afford a few more contradictions, freeing him from even tokenized inclusion.

Read the op-ed via Nikkei Asia here.

If zero-COVID ends, we should not expect the health codes that have become omnipresent in many parts of China to die along with forced quarantines. Per the State Council’s November 11 announcement on “optimized” COVID measures, “tenaciously pursuing” the dynamic zero COVID policy will continue, even as quarantine requirements are relaxed. The large-scale app-driven citizen monitoring in the name of zero-COVID helps normalize targeted surveillance of populations the government deems “threats”—and vice versa. For example, the broader population is now subject to movement limitation methods developed in Xinjiang, such as “closed management” (封闭式管理, fengbi shi guanli), which grants residents of apartment compounds just one way in and one way out. These methods of physical intrusion leave little leeway for citizens to worry about virtual intrusion. In the post-COVID era, the terror of the status quo evokes a hierarchy wherein digital privacy ranks relatively low.

Read full article via ChinaFile here.

Shen Yiqin and Shen Yueyue lack significant policy distinctions, in part because making it to the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party requires strategic political deference. But one of them will have the distinction of becoming the next — and likely only — woman in the Politburo.

Read the whole article via The China Project here.

Students in 1969 began what would be a decades-long quest to get Stanford to offer an Asian American studies major; in 1971, Gordon Chang, an advisor to the AAAI today, taught the school’s first Asian American history course. In 1989, students stormed the university president’s office, demanding the school hire more minority faculty members and create an Asian American Studies major.

The AAAI should be understood as the culmination of these efforts. Its focus on art history offers a particularly helpful paradigm through which to grasp an experience that is, literally, not black or white.

“If art is both abstract and concrete, referential and performative, so too is race. Art’s ability to embody this paradox makes it a potent site of investigation for a racialized subject,” Kwon writes in an introduction to a collection of essays on Asian American Art. “The ethical challenge of writing about Asian American artists is to respect, rather than to solve, the paradox of their existence.”

Read the full article via JoySauce here.

China today is no democracy, or even oligarchy. Since the days of Mao Zedong, control has been maintained by what the late chairman famously described as "the gun" (the military), "the pen" (propaganda) and "the knife" (the internal security apparatus).

Xi has ruthlessly seized and consolidated full control over all three in China's Leninist one-party state. He has lined up his most loyal acolytes to run each of the three levers of power for the foreseeable future. He no longer faces any serious mortal threat of dissent, either from the public or within the party.

This does not mean Xi faces no internal resistance, has made no enemies or will not face any political challenges at the 20th Party Congress. Resistance exists -- just not as any kind of foundational threat to Xi or the CCP.

Read the full article via Nikkei Asia here.

The government is inviting snitches to report on “historical nihilism.”

On Sept. 20, popular Chinese livestreamer Li Jiaqi, known as the “lipstick king” for his impressive ability to push sales of lipstick and other makeup products, reappeared on Chinese streams for the first time in three months. Li had disappeared from the Chinese internet for a mistake he probably had no idea he was making. In the middle of his summer sales push, on June 3, one of his employees brought out a cake in the shape of a tank. Alas, June 4 is the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, and the Chinese authorities relentlessly police any hint of commemoration.

Li and many of his fans were born after the massacre occurred. They may not have even been aware it happened. China has long policed historical memory, deleting and rewriting references to past atrocities and insisting on adherence to official narratives. As President Xi Jinping said in a speech last year, “know history; love the party.” Today, that relentless censorship is increasingly focused online.

Read the whole article via Foreign Policy here.

The bill is more about opposition to China than support for Taiwan, and is part of the broader securitization of Washington’s Taiwan policy.

Just as the fire lit by U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan and China’s predictable military retaliations has started to fade, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is revving up its blowtorch. The Committee last week advanced the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 (TPA), proposed by Senators Bob Menendez and Lindsey Graham in June, clearing it to move on to the Senate floor.

The bill is dominated by a values-based alignment with Taiwan and opposition to China that adheres to tropes of superpower struggle. These frameworks serve the narrative needs of hawks in both the U.S. and China. For its part, the leading Democratic Progressive Party in Taiwan has also relied on the rhetoric of democracy and freedom, and its relationship with the U.S., in its messaging on cross-strait relations. But Taiwan should matter to U.S. lawmakers principally because of what it is rather than what it is not.

Read the whole article via The Diplomat here.

At the opening for multidisciplinary ceramic artist Stephanie H. Shih’s latest solo show, on view at Harkawik Gallery in Manhattan through Aug. 6, the focus is on culinary collaboration. When gallery owner and director Peter Harkawik approached Shih about doing the show, she didn’t have a ready-made concept; instead, she sought inspiration from the gallery’s location in Chinatown.

Focused on Jewish and Chinese immigrants, once the two largest non-Christian minorities in New York, Shih’s work here explores the bicultural history of the neighborhood. “The show looks at what happens when immigrant populations grow up next to each other,” Shih explains. Her work lives at the nexus between this kind of cultural exchange, “moments of fusion and collision”—and the food that represents it.

Shih’s art, which has long been centered on Asian American diaspora culture (especially as expressed through food), expanded for “Open Sundays” to include quintessentially Jewish foods and the culinary crossovers that have occurred between the two groups on the Lower East Side over the last 100 years.

On first glance, a viewer might think any of her created food sculptures are the real deal (she mentions that people have reminded her to pick up her food, mistaking her works in progress for her groceries). But Shih’s 30 ceramic works for “Open Sundays” intentionally show the hand of the artist, via fingerprints and imperfect typeface. “I like the way it messes with your mind a little bit, not so unlike our memories,” she says.

The exhibit explores hyper-local food culture in a city whose immigrant groups have often been too close together in proximity and interests to avoid significant interchange. The Chinese and Jewish communities on the Lower East Side became a prime example of the positive cultural exchange America’s melting pot model has always touted, but which is harder to see in this era of division and emergency. “Open Sundays” is a welcome reminder of the best New York City has to offer: not only great food, but also a diverse, curious, and hungry community eager to eat it.

Full article available here.

I interviewed Joanna Chiu about her new book China Unbound: A New World Disorder, which traces the Chinese government’s attempts to spread its influence abroad.

Interview available via Young China Watchers.

Recent reforms instituted by Chinese president Xi Jinping—which shall affect the tech sector and the Chinese people's participation in the virtual economy at large—have been described as a turn to Maoism, a warning for rich capitalists, and the “Red New Deal.”

Full article available here.

Chinese modernisation has been described by generations of CCP leaders and civilians as both an intellectual and moral project. Both concepts are conveniently subjective.

In the early 20th century, student protestors behind popular uprisings, like the May Fourth movement, demanded that science and democracy become the main ingredients in China’s post-dynastic recipe for development. Maoist China, an outlying era which explicitly deviated from the pursuit of western modernity, was as opposed to intellectualism as to individual morality—the ever-shifting Maoist doctrine could make adherence to a personal moral code a lethal pursuit.

Full article via L’Atelier available here.

Along with a team from the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, I wrote a report based on a survey covering how the domestic political environment in both countries — and bilateral tensions — has affected the work of China experts in the U.S. The survey, commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, was sent to 125 leading international relations and national security organizations; the public, shortened, and anonymized version of the report conveys the results.

Read the full report via the National Committee here.

The first time I was asked to pay for something with my face, I was in the China-small city of Xuzhou (population: 8.577.225) in early 2019.

I was on a northern tour with a friend, having flown all the way up to Harbin in Heilongjiang province, bordering Russia, from Shanghai. We made our way back home by stopping at various northeastern cities for a couple nights each.

Full article via L’Atelier available here.

People define an economy. That does not change when the economy goes online, and ordinary people shape China’s rapidly-expanding digital economy in ways that suit their lifestyles and locations.

Urbanites—from Beijing, an ancient capital city, and one of China’s most surveilled; to Shenzhen, a newly-created “smart city” founded with advanced AI ambitions—contend with different socio-technical benefits and controls. In the countryside, rural farmers start e-commerce businesses, catering to viewers who discover products in monetised livestreams—which employ locals and stimulate village economies. Despite significant regional distinctions, the Chinese are exploring the boundaries of our physical and virtual economies.

Full piece available via L’Atelier here.

I interviewed Silvia Lindtner, associate director of the Center for Ethics, Society, and Computing (ESC) and an associate professor at the University of Michigan in the School of Information about her book Prototype Nation. The book traces how a growing distrust in Western models of progress, including Silicon Valley and the tech industry after the financial crisis, shaped the vision of China as a “new frontier” of innovation.

Full interview available here.

Note: Los Angeles Review of Books’ China Channel has been removed; photos of the article are available here.

I interviewed four specialists on their approaches to studying China’s AI development.

Full article available via New America’s DigiChina here

Recent moves by U.S. lawmakers shed light on what might be the only durable consensus in Washington, D.C. today: China is the United States’s most important competitor and the time has come for government intervention to better prepare Americans to combat this long-term threat.

Full article available here, via The News Lens International.

I interviewed Dr. Shapiro and Prof. Li about a book they co-authored, “China Goes Green” for Young China Watchers.

Full interview available here.

In the wake of the novel coronavirus outbreak, much has been written about how China’s poor handling of the outbreak is directly connected to the regime’s lack of transparency and repressive instincts. The centralization of power under Xi Jinping leads local officials to enter a kind of paralysis, as discussed in the New Statesman and The Financial Times. Nervous about their actions being viewed as out of line with Xi, local officials opt to take no action.

Full article available via The Diplomat here

Rebecca E. Karl is Professor of History at New York University. She is the author of “The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China,” “Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History” and “Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” This interview discusses her most recent publication, “China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History.”

The full interview can be found here.

Study abroad experiences encourage people-to-people exchanges, which motivate collaboration rather than unnecessarily adversarial postures. American authorities should not diminish Sino-U.S. collaboration by putting a target on the backs of those who are most well-equipped to develop it.

Full article available via ChinaFile here

Interview with Mareike Ohlberg about China’s social credit system available on Young China Watchers here

Big Kitty (BK for short) wanted to study in the U.S. because she loved Lady Gaga. She learned English by serving as the vice president of her China-based fan club, where she translated Gaga news and interviews into Chinese. BK’s love for Gaga was not disconnected to the pop star’s status as a gay icon; before leaving her home in Shanghai to attend high school in New York, BK knew she was queer. So she started dropping hints about her sexual orientation to her mother, trying to gauge how she felt toward homosexuality.

Full article available on SupChina here

Tucked away on a tree-lined street in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, Fou Gallery offers more than the usual openings, artist talks, and receptions. It’s also a space for relaxation and community, hosting private dinners, tea ceremonies, and a monthly performance series. Founded in 2013 by Echo Hé, the gallery defines itself against the mainstream New York art scene.

“Traditionally, commercial art galleries operate on a very simple business model: sell artworks to a very small group of collectors to support the gallery’s operation. Normally the gallery is in a simple white cube to make the business straightforward,” she says. “Collectors tend to buy works from big galleries with a track record of artists that have ‘investment value,’ and smaller galleries struggle to be part of the game.”

Full article available via Neocha here

In an environment of selective censorship, nationalist mobs are gaining traction and influence on the Chinese internet.

Selective censorship permits aggressive activity such as trolling and cyberbullying — as long as it is pro-government and “patriotic” — while eliminating inoffensive posts that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) deems politically inconvenient.

Full article on The Diplomat available here

"Do it first, regulate later," is how Danit Gal characterizes China's approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI). In this interview, she describes China's competitive advantages as large-scale commercial application, strategic planning and the lack of regulation.

Interview available on MERICS here

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies’s blog China Power, using data from the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, China is ranked 103rd globally for overall gender equality and 86th for equal economic participation and opportunity between genders.

The same article points out that, according to Human Rights Watch, 19 percent of national civic service jobs in China listed preferences such as “men only” or “suitable for men.” The pay gap is significant as well, with Chinese women earning an average of 22 percent less than their male coworkers. All of these numbers are from 2018, decades after China’s reform policies were implemented.

Full article available on SupChina here

When I first met Ting Ting Liang at her bar in Shanghai, she came across as fast but attentive, caring but assertive. Walking in, she lights a cigarette without pausing, and the bartender mixes her a cocktail, unprompted. She apologizes for being a few minutes late, as she was busy working on her next project: RIINK, a roller skating-themed bar in the local arts hub West Bund.

Liang owns and operates Roxie’s—the first and pre-eminent lesbian bar in Shanghai. She is one of four women I interviewed who stand at the center of Shanghai’s LGBTQ community. Each strives to strengthen visibility and support for the city’s queer community, in their own style and through their own means.

Full article available on Nüvoices here