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Tech

Sunken Cargo Ship Full of iPhones Deflates the Scalper Premium on Apple's Foldable

Sunken Cargo Ship Full of iPhones Deflates the Scalper Premium on Apple's Foldable

After a container ship burned and sank in the Strait of Hormuz with iPhones aboard, fishermen salvaged brand-new handsets from the sea — and China's scalper premium on Apple's new foldable collapsed within a day, from 58,000 yuan to a few thousand.

A Day After Tesla's Flying Roadster, Wall Street Shrugs and China's EV Founders Applaud

A Day After Tesla's Flying Roadster, Wall Street Shrugs and China's EV Founders Applaud

The day after Tesla's Roadster leapt off the ground, JPMorgan and HSBC counted the years to production and the billions off Elon Musk's fortune, while NIO's Li Bin paid the demo the sincerest compliment a rival can — and China's car bloggers asked whether a 2028 promise is a product at all.

JD Pledges to Back Its Employee in a Defamation Suit Brought by Douyin

JD Pledges to Back Its Employee in a Defamation Suit Brought by Douyin

A procurement employee's WeChat posts accusing a rival platform of rigging its trending topics have drawn a defamation suit from Douyin — and a company-wide promise from JD.com to help him sue back, as China's e-commerce giants head into the Double 11 shopping festival.

The president's inspection tour of an Inner Mongolia prefecture put a spotlight on the coal-and-grassland region rebranding itself as China's green data-center belt, where wind power and cold air are meant to run the country's AI.

Xi Jinping Tours Ulanqab, the Wind-Powered Edge of China's AI Computing Map

16 Oct 2026

The Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Science and Technology opened public comment on a revision of China's catalogue of technologies prohibited or restricted from export, with new entries expected in artificial intelligence, biomedicine and photovoltaics. Exports of the technologies proposed for addition face temporary registration from now, and the ministry is already reassuring the world that most AI technology will remain freely exportable.

China Moves to Add AI, Biotech and Solar Technologies to Its Export-Control Catalogue

16 Oct 2026

On Friday noon, Japan's Meteorological Agency told millions to brace for a magnitude-9.9 earthquake — stronger than any ever recorded — then withdrew the alert eight minutes later. The real quake, near Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula, was a 6.9. The withdrawal was the first of its kind in the history of Japan's alert system, and the spectacle became one of the day's biggest conversations on Chinese social media.

Japan's First-Ever Cancelled Quake Alert Overshot a Real Earthquake by Three Magnitudes

16 Oct 2026

Chinese palaeontologists have described the earliest known bird that could not fly — a ground-running, 821-gram species from Jurassic Fujian published in Nature — evidence that bird evolution was not aimed at flight from the start.

An 821-Gram Jurassic Bird From Fujian Reshapes the Story of Bird Flight

16 Oct 2026

A token-consumption disclosure showing 55% of China's AI compute going to short dramas and video generation, against 15% to research, has set off a national argument about what the country's artificial intelligence is for — and investors are backing the dramas.

Half of China's AI Compute Is Busy Making Short Dramas

16 Oct 2026

At its long-delayed Roadster launch on October 16, Tesla showed a supercar that lifts briefly off the ground on SpaceX-derived cold-gas thrusters — and Chinese car watchers, who pushed the demo up three separate trending boards, spent the day working out what it can actually do.

Tesla's Roadster Debuts by Hovering Off the Ground

16 Oct 2026

Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory says its scientific multimodal model Shusheng-S2 helped prove the three-dimensional Ghys conjecture, open for more than three decades — then handed the result to Peking University mathematicians, who verified it with a formal proof-checking framework.

A Chinese AI Model Helped Crack a 30-Year-Old Math Conjecture

15 Oct 2026

A Czech car critic's post arguing that China's big electric SUVs at the Paris Motor Show are now copies of each other — not of Western cars — has turned into a week's argument on Weibo, complete with a Li Auto executive's deadpan reply: 'They're only copying one company.'

Seven SUVs, One Template: A Czech Critic's Paris Post Starts China's Copying Debate

15 Oct 2026

As China's biggest online shopping festival opens its pre-sales, the most shared advice on Weibo is not where the discounts are but how to escape them: paste your cart into a chatbot and let it write a do-not-buy list. The platforms, meanwhile, are answering with AI-made dramas and AI livestream hosts of their own.

The Do-Not-Buy List: How China's Shoppers Turned AI on Double 11

15 Oct 2026

DeepSeek's chatbot and developer API went down for nearly five hours on Thursday, the Chinese AI lab's second service failure in three days. The company responded with a gesture few Chinese internet services have made: refunding every API customer's spending from the past week, in credit, automatically.

DeepSeek Refunds Users After Its Second Outage in Three Days

15 Oct 2026

Tencent has released TenPayGo, a standalone payments app that lets foreign visitors register with an email address, link an overseas card and scan the same QR codes everyone else does — no WeChat account required. It is the latest move in China's campaign to make the country spendable for the tourists it is courting.

Why Foreign Visitors Can Now Pay in China Without WeChat

15 Oct 2026

ByteDance's Doubao assistant can read a phone's screen and tap through apps like a human. On October 14 its public-comment period closed with 151 apps — WeChat, Taobao, Alipay among them — formally refusing to let it operate, drawing the battle lines for AI agents in China.

WeChat, Taobao and 151 Other Apps Block ByteDance's AI Phone Agent

14 Oct 2026

A new hire screenshotted her boss's welcome message and the group chat instantly announced it to everyone. Behind the joke lies a default setting in WeChat Work and DingTalk — anti-leak screenshot alerts — that Chinese office workers learn to navigate before they learn anything else.

China's Workplace Chat Apps Announce Every Screenshot to the Group

14 Oct 2026

The iPhone Duo reaches Chinese stores on October 23 from 15,999 yuan, and Apple has already published repair prices that read like a warning: 7,998 yuan for the inner screen. Its long-awaited China AI paperwork arrived the same week.

Apple's First Foldable Lands in China at 15,999 Yuan, With 7,998 Yuan Screen Repairs

14 Oct 2026

Tencent has quietly launched Green Bubble, a free short-drama service built into WeChat rather than shipped as an app — its fourth attempt at the genre since 2021, and its most direct challenge yet to ByteDance's Hongguo and the 168 million people who open it every day.

Tencent Launches 'Green Bubble' Short Dramas Inside WeChat to Crack ByteDance's Hongguo

14 Oct 2026