The Wire China

Read this week's Q&A with Jake Sullivan on what he was trying to achieve in dealing with Beijing, where he thinks Trump 2.0 has taken a wrong turn on China and why the president concedes too much to Xi and Putin.
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How The Iran Conflict Could Hit China’s Oil Industry - The Wire China Small Chinese refineries face trouble if their supply of cheap Iranian crude is restricted.

Iran sends 100 percent of its oil to China, bringing in more than $40 billion annually.

Get the big picture on China's ties to Iran, and how the sanctioned oil trade has shaped their relationship:

Chasing the Chip Smugglers - The Wire China The exposure of a U.S.-based operation that smuggled Nvidia’s AI chips to China raises questions about the role of major companies and the authorities charged with enforcing export controls.

Last spring, U.S. agents discovered pallets of advanced chips sitting in a New Jersey warehouse. They were labeled with a fake company name, but were actually Nvidia chips — disguised and ready to be sent to China.

@eliotchen.bsky.social reports on a global chip-smuggling ring:

China’s Involution Trap: Profitless Growth Cannot Last - The Wire China Letting zombie companies fail will be painful, but is essential for building a healthier economy, argues Alicia García-Herrero in this op-ed.

Op-Ed: Some Chinese companies manage to survive — and even thrive — despite the brutal price competition...But this is only a small share of Chinese corporates.

@aligarciaherrero.bsky.social writes on why so many Chinese companies aren't making money:

Cambricon: China's Nvidia? - The Wire China Our latest one-page guide focuses on China's top chip designer, Cambricon.

Cambricon, often called "China's Nvidia," reported its first full-year profit since going public in 2020.

Learn more about the company:

China’s Rocket Deficit - The Wire China The country’s Starlink challengers are in a race against time to send more satellites into orbit. But is China’s fragmented commercial rocket industry up to the task?

This week's cover story: China aims to be a major space power by 2030, with ambitious plans for a lunar base, space exploration and space resource utilization.
Paddy Stephens writes on China's fragmented commercial rocket industry this week:

"Germany — as the most affected country in the Sino-European relationship — needs to go further, by offering a separate and totally new win-win offensive strategy."

Read Jörg Wuttke's op-ed in this week's issue of The Wire China: buff.ly/FUG7slI

Smugglers in Texas, New Jersey, and New York. A mysterious Hong Kong client. And a plot to illegally sell Nvidia AI chips to China.

Episode five maps out a chip smuggling network with @eliotchen.bsky.social and @andypeaps.bsky.social : pod.link/1873741567/

The Wire China’s Substack | Substack We cover China like no one else. The Wire China is a digital news magazine dedicated to understanding and explaining one of the biggest stories of our time: China’s economic rise. Click to read The…

🎧️ Don't miss our latest podcast drop every Friday morning EST! Subscribe on Substack to get the episode (plus transcript) delivered right to your inbox:

A Bitter Harvest - The Wire China Agriculture has traditionally been a fruitful area for China-U.S. cooperation, dating back to the two countries’ resumption of diplomatic relations in the 1970s. Now it is just another area marked by…

From the Archives: "Since the 1970s, the U.S. and China had nurtured close agricultural collaboration to mutual gain. Those ties are all but threadbare now."

Chinese AI Makes Its Sales Pitch - The Wire China China’s AI models dominated headlines during the new year holiday, but struggle to overcome low user adoption at home.

Even though China is highly online, with over 90 percent of the population internet users, the country’s top AI models have fewer regular users compared to U.S. models.

Get the big picture on China's AI adoption lag:

Who Is Moonshot AI? - The Wire China Moonshot AI — the Chinese tech company behind the popular chatbot Kimi — has some surprising links to 1970s rock music.

Who is behind the popular chatbot Kimi? Unlike some of its Chinese start-up peers that have developed LLMs for specific industries or tasks, Moonshot AI has maintained a generalist approach:

The Hong Kong Company at the Center of Panama’s China Problem - The Wire China A closer look at CK Hutchison, whose subsidiary operates ports on either end of the Panama Canal.

Panama seized back ports from the now-former Chinese operator of key parts of the Panama Canal. Take a closer look at CK Hutchison, a company with ties to one of Hong Kong's richest men:

Read the full interview with Frank Dikötter: buff.ly/PpCXbxf

The Answer to Germany’s China Problem: Open Up - The Wire China German leader Friedrich Merz has the chance to take advantage of his country’s reversal of fortunes with China.

"German exports to China have collapsed. In 2025 Europe’s industrial powerhouse sold more goods to neighboring Poland than to the People’s Republic."

Jörg Wuttke writes in The Wire China:

The Wire China will have no new issue this week, but you can catch up with our reporters and go behind the scenes of our latest investigation on the China connections in the Epstein files:
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Frank Dikötter on the Chinese Communist Party’s Troubled Early Years - The Wire China The historian on countering long-held narratives about the CCP’s role in the war against Japan and the legacy of those years on its rule today.

"There were vastly more Communists, as a proportion of the overall population, in almost any country in Europe than there were in China throughout the 1930s."

Frank Dikötter discusses his new book, Red Dawn Over China, with @jmchatwin.bsky.social for The Wire China:

🎧 We've sorted your weekend listening:

China's economic rise beckoned Jeffrey Epstein. Though no concrete deals ever materialized, the Epstein files demonstrate how power, connections, and opportunities flowed among the elite as China's star continued to rise.
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Washington needs a robotics strategy to keep up with China's advances. Read more: buff.ly/yCr9QzG

The Company that Refuses to Decouple - The Wire China Walmart should be in trouble in China, where its competitors are in retreat and its sourcing operations have been criticised by both Beijing and Washington. But the American retailer seems to have…

From the Archives: The U.S. company that refuses to decouple from China.

No, it's not in tech...It's Walmart.

Read more:

New year, new winner in the robotics race?

At China's annual spring festival gala, humanoid robots performing a complex martial arts routine captivated audiences. Is 2026 the year humans and bots finally live side by side?

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China's Arms Sales Hit A Snag - The Wire China As Noah Berman reports in this week's Big Picture, China’s weapons exports are in decline even as other countries ramp up sales.

Why did China's arms revenue sink in 2024?

Get the big picture on China's declining weapons exports:

"Even though the Chinese internet is still enclosed within this firewall, it has expanded beyond its borders."

@rachelcheung.bsky.social interviews @yilingliu95.bsky.social on her new book, "The Wall Dancers." buff.ly/I7eDuwh

The Wire China’s Substack | Substack The Wire China is a digital news magazine dedicated to understanding and explaining one of the biggest stories of our time: China’s economic rise, and its influence on global business, finance,…

Missed our latest podcast drop?

Listen to the latest The Wire China Podcast episode + transcript, and subscribe on Substack to get both delivered to your inbox each Friday.

In an adaptation of her forthcoming book, The New Tech Titans of China, Rebecca Fannin profiles Shanghai-based Qiming Venture Partners and its American founder, Gary Rieschel: buff.ly/WfxgcF8

Why Washington Needs a Robotics Strategy - The Wire China China is proving more adept than its rival at deploying robots as well as manufacturing them.

Op-Ed: China is already positioning itself to deploy robots at scale, in peace and in war.

Sunny Cheung and Nathanael Cheng write for this week's issue of The Wire China:

Documents recently released by the U.S. Department of Justice reveal how associates of Jeffrey Epstein sought to help him and his business partners build ties in China.

The Wire China maps the networks involved in the dealmaking:
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Epstein and China - The Wire China Jeffrey Epstein aspired to do deals in China, corresponding with Peter Mandelson and David Stern, a German associate who was close to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. The Wire China reviews email trails…

Jeffrey Epstein and a network of associates aspired to do deals in China. The Wire China reviews email trails from the Epstein files:

🎧️ A Tale of Two Exports: Tom Mitchell and Noah Berman explore why China's arms exports decreased in 2024 — and why Chinese EVs still might make their way onto U.S. streets.

Listen to The Wire China Podcast: pod.link/1873741567

China's Other Olympics - The Wire China At the Olympics of synthetic biology, 50 percent of the teams are Chinese — and counting. What does that mean for the future of the biotech industry?

Forget snow sports — China dominates at the lesser-known, but more consequential, olympics of biotech.

Cultivation of scientific talent has been instrumental to the rise of China’s biotech industry. Read more: