Month: March 2024

China has renamed 30 more places in a disputed border region with India in an attempt to assert its claims in a bitter territorial dispute. On Saturday the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs published the country’s latest set of “standardised” names for places in Arunachal Pradesh, which China calls Zangnan, and says is part of the Tibetan autonomous region. The renaming covered 11 residential areas, 12 mountains, four rivers, one lake, one mountain pass and a piece of land, all given in Chinese characters, Tibetan and pinyin, the Roman alphabet…

Datenna uses open source intelligence (OSINT) to furnish governments with the data they need to make policy decisions on China. The company does not consult or advise, nor does it work with private businesses. It only provides state actors with unfathomable levels of detail on the business, administrative and technological landscape in the world’s second largest economy. Chief executive Jaap van Etten says his company Datenna provides “indispensable insights” into China’s techno-economic landscape. Photo: Handout And, as governments look to build out economic security policies designed to curb or catch…

A Chinese solar industry body has warned against “vicious” internal competition in the face of efforts by the United States to target overcapacity in the sector. Overseas trade barriers already pose a big challenge for Chinese solar panel makers, according to the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products, a semi-official organisation in Beijing, but it fears the situation will become worse. China’s solar industry experienced fierce competition in 2023, resulting in overcapacity and a general sharp decline in product prices, the chamber said…

It added that the production team “deliberately does away with the modern image of China depicted in the novel” while preserving the “yellow faces” of its villains. “The so-called pluralism and inclusiveness cannot hide their deep-rooted discrimination and hostility towards other civilisations,” the article said. The Hugo Award-winning sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem is the first book in a trilogy by Chinese author Liu Cixin. The trilogy, which also includes the novels The Dark Forest and Death’s End, is about humans combating alien civilisations across centuries, starting from China’s Cultural…

With Beijing’s increasing emphasis on food security, a new era for China’s seed industry began last year when regulators made a major push for the use of genetically modified (GM) food by approving large-scale, commercial planting of two staple crops. After over a decade of debate and prudent trial planting, China is accelerating commercialisation of higher-yielding GM crops as part of its efforts to improve agricultural efficiency in response to President Xi Jinping’s call for greater self-sufficiency to feed its 1.4 billion people. 1. What types of GM crops are…

H1 is made by Unitree, a start-up based in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou. Unitree posted the video on its website on March 20. “A backflip by an electrically powered humanoid robot represents a pinnacle of intricate posture control, touching on several demanding areas of technology,” a report on robotChina.com said. “Key among these are the modelling of dynamics, the planning of movement, the design of real-time control systems and the development of hardware.” Unitree says H1 can run as well as flip. Photo: Unitree Robot backflips are not…

LLMs are the deep-learning AI algorithms behind chatbots such as ChatGPT that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict, and generate content using very large data sets. Anhui-based iFlytek is one of the major Chinese firms that have launched their own chatbots, but its chairman admitted in October that Chinese LLMs have to bridge a “real gap” between its product and its US rival, but hoped his firm could become more competitive by the middle of the year. Export curbs on semiconductor chips, which are used to process the LLMs, are one…