Month: October 2023

At the same time, China also needs to strengthen the quality of its financial services to support key areas such as technology, advanced manufacturing, the green economy and small and medium-sized enterprises, which are crucial to job creation. The message came as China is struggling with multiple financial challenges, with foreign investors pulling capital from China’s onshore stock exchanges amid slumping equity prices, while the yuan’s exchange rate against the US dollar has fallen to a 16-year low. Some US$75 billion of capital exited the country in September, the largest…

Xi met California Governor Gavin Newsom last week and received a congressional delegation led by the US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier this month, despite the fact that they are not counterparts to the Chinese leader. Foreign defence chiefs met General Zhang Youxia and General He Weidong – two vice-chairmen of the PLA’s all-powerful Central Military Commission, which Xi chairs – on the sidelines of the forum, held from Saturday to Tuesday in the Chinese capital. The two CMC vice-chairmen, both members of the Communist Party’s Politburo, are senior…

“The audit targets should feel that auditing follows them like a shadow, and they feel someone is watching over their shoulder at all times,” he said, stressing the need to keep a close watch on all units that manage public funds, state-owned assets and resources. Xi highlighted five policy areas for auditors to focus on: finance, monetary policy, industry, technology and social affairs. He also urged them to pay greater attention to work that supports high-quality development and the exercise of power as well as keeping employment and prices stable.…

Chinese artificial intelligence start-up Baichuan has launched an AI model that it said can digest and summarise novels, making it the world’s most powerful model in handling long text prompts. The Beijing-based company, established by Chinese search engine Sogou’s founder Wang Xiaochuan, on Monday announced its Baichuan2-192k large language model (LLM), the latest iteration, saying its “context window” can handle around 350,000 Chinese characters. A context window is the combination of input and output text that a model can process during conversations with users. For comparison, Claude 2, introduced in…

On Chinese social media, there are many posts discussing China’s rules on marriage and divorce. In the past three years, Beijing has introduced a flurry of amendments and moved towards pronatalist policies. Among directives about child custody and matrimonial assets, the authorities now require divorcing couples to undergo mediation meetings, and a divorce can only be granted when both sides agree. The marriage law itself has been integrated into China’s first civil code, a comprehensive legal framework that covers everything from inheritance to civil rights. Effective from January 2021, the…

“Currently, 80 per cent of China’s technology companies and half of [AI] large [language] model companies run on Alibaba Cloud, Tsai said on Tuesday at the opening of the annual Apsara Conference in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province. The three-day tech event concludes on November 2. “We aim to be the most open cloud in the era of AI,” he said. “We hope that through this cloud [platform], it will become easier and affordable for everyone to develop and use AI.” Alibaba Cloud, the digital technology unit of Alibaba…