The belief that China is a country only good at adopting technologies at scale has been a “misperception”, according to the author of The New Geography of Innovation, a recently published book that maps the rise of new tech powers around the world excluding the US. “The geography of innovation is shifting”, the book, which…
Underpinning the digital economy is a deep foundation of open-source software, freely available for anyone to use. The majority of the world’s websites are run using Apache and Nginx, two open-source programs. Most computer servers are powered by Linux, another such program, which is also the basis of Google’s Android operating system. Kubernetes, a program…
Misa Zhu Mingming, an engineer who had worked at Alibaba Group Holding, left in 2014 to found his own venture, Rokid. The start-up, which develops smart glasses, was backed by angel investors that included Vision Plus Capital, formed by Eddie Wu Yongming and others before Wu became CEO of Alibaba in 2023. A decade later,…
The first details of C949, a supersonic airliner project, have been quietly unveiled by Chinese state-owned aerospace giant Comac, signalling its ambitions to dominate the skies with the radical new jet that could redefine global air travel. In a recent academic paper, Comac engineers revealed the blueprint of a 1.6-Mach airliner designed to fly further…
A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world’s most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China – and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics. The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks….
As China’s political elite gather for the country’s annual legislative sessions in March, we examine the broader forces likely to influence policies for the coming year – and how decision-makers will respond to the unpredictable second term of US President Donald Trump. In the first part of this series, Frank Chen surveys the status of…
China’s southern tech hub of Shenzhen plans to “fully compete” in emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence, announcing 160 billion yuan (US$22.07 billion) in “new-type infrastructure” investment for the year as it called on the city to embrace challenges like a “seabird braving the storm.” When delivering the city’s work report on Tuesday, Shenzhen Mayor…
For years, Shenzhen has been synonymous with Chinese innovation. The southern megacity – and the firms it has spawned over the decades – have become the indisputable champions of the country’s drive for technological self-reliance, as well as its struggle against containment efforts led by the US. But as the tech race expands from chips,…
Shenzhen – often hailed as China’s Silicon Valley – has pledged to ramp up its investments in talent development with a particular focus on humanoid robotics, part of a growing global competition in tech that will see robots and artificial intelligence (AI) as major battlegrounds. The southern metropolis is gearing up to implement a “comprehensive…
The sudden success of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek comes as a morale booster for the country’s researchers and tech companies, who have been tasked by Beijing to push for breakthroughs in the face of US-led curbs on the trade, industry participants and analysts said. DeepSeek’s emergence has also changed perceptions among economists and…