Interested readers can view the full itinerary and sign up here:

When an economy slows, a specific investment strategy emerges: focus on what is still being built and identify sectors backed by genuine demand and order over the next few years.

In China right now, the reality check is straightforward. Property is still finding the bottom. Consumer stimulus is real but small. Local government balance sheets are in repair mode. In our last monthly view of Chinese equities, we noted that, given the macro, we approach Chinese equities less as a broad market allocation and more as a targeted bet on a handful of resilient sectors.

In today’s issue, we explore one such example: the power grid. Unlike many other policy-driven themes that quickly became speculative trades, this one comes with greater certainty: target numbers in the 15th Five-Year Plan, a national commitment to grid infrastructure buildout, and transparent bidding data you can check every month.

Subscribe now

The context: what’s in the 15th Five-Year Plan

On 15 January 2026, State Grid Corporation of China announced that fixed-asset investment over the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) would reach RMB 4 trillion, up roughly 40% from the 14th FYP — about RMB 800bn a year. China Southern Power Grid followed with RMB 180bn for 2026 alone and roughly RMB 1tn over the plan period. Together, the two biggest utilities point to close to RMB 5 trillion, compared with RMB 2.85tn actually spent in the 14th FYP and RMB 2.64tn in the 13th.

Within that, State Grid has committed to commissioning 15 UHV DC projects, lifting inter-provincial transfer capacity by 35%, and supporting no less than 200GW of new renewable interconnection annually.

We think this is particularly important because historically, inclusion in China’s Five-Year Plan signifies a strategic direction that has been thoroughly vetted and backed by strong central consensus—especially when accompanied by explicit numeric targets. For investors, this provides crucial visibility: we know the power grid will benefit from guaranteed orders and sustained capital expenditure across the supply chain for at least the next five years.

This is not fiscal spending committed by the central government. So it is legally required to be in anyone’s budget. Rather, the 4 trillion fixed asset investment is done through SOEs’ corporate capex, funded by “the enterprise’s own capital (100%) or finance-lease funds. (State Grid, for example, carries an AAA credit rating and generates sufficient cash flow to fund these commitments.)

That distinction matters in both directions. Because funding doesn’t rely on NPC approval, it remains insulated from national deficit constraints. But it is also governed by return-on-capital logic rather than political will — which, as we’ll see, means not every company across the supply chain offers the same structural growth opportunity.

Why State Grid wants to spend RMB 4 trillion

China regulates transmission and distribution the way most developed markets do, through a permitted revenue framework. Stripped to its essentials, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC)’s pricing rules — revised in late 2025 and effective for ten years from January 2026 — say this:

Permitted return = effective assets × permitted return rate

The return rate is set by the regulator. State Grid cannot move it. Which leaves exactly one lever for growing profit: make the asset base bigger. At a 5% permitted return, every additional trillion renminbi of invested assets is worth roughly RMB 50bn a year.

This is not a Chinese peculiarity — it’s why every rate-regulated utility on earth, America’s included, is currently announcing record capex. State Grid’s RMB 4 trillion is first and foremost a commercial decision. The policy alignment is real, but the incentive would exist without it.

The other half of the formula works in the opposite direction. Permitted cost is not a pass-through of whatever State Grid spends. The regulator sets ceilings on materials, repairs and other operating costs, and anything above the ceiling cannot be recovered in tariffs. Savings, meanwhile, are split evenly between the utility and its customers.

Put simply, spend above the ceiling, and State Grid absorbs all of it. Spend below, and it keeps half. The only way to improve that arithmetic is to pay less for what it buys.

So the rational strategy is to build as many projects as possible and pay as little as possible per unit of equipment. Volume is structurally supported. Price is structurally suppressed.

Two more misconceptions could lead to an overly optimistic view of the project’s scale.

Misconception 1: “It’s in the Five-Year Plan, so it will happen”

A Five-Year Plan target is an expectation, not a statutory obligation. State Grid’s RMB 4tn is a corporate announcement with multiple audiences — suppliers, bondholders, the regulator, the market.

The 14th FYP planned 24 AC and 14 DC UHV lines. It delivered a fraction of that. For investors, this mismatch creates a real risk: beneficiary companies often trade at elevated valuations on high expectations, leaving them vulnerable to sharp corrections when targets slip. For instance, when approvals for the “3 AC, 9 DC” package slipped in 2025, revenue growth at core suppliers like XD Electric and Pinggao decelerated starting in Q3 2025.

The correct adjustment is to treat “written into the plan” as moving probability from roughly 40% to roughly 70%. Not to 100%.

Misconception 2: “AI data centers are driving Chinese power demand”

This one is worth killing carefully, because it is doing a lot of work in the current narrative.

China’s H1 2026 electricity data, from the National Energy Administration:

Internet data services grew rapidly at 44%, but they only represent 0.97% of national consumption. At that base, even 44% growth contributes roughly 0.3–0.4 percentage points to a 5.3% headline.

The real load-bearing wall is the 65% of consumption in secondary industry—that is, manufacturing and export (as current strong exports are also largely supported by high-tech products driven by the global AIDC build-out and AI supercycle).

Over the 14th FYP, electricity consumption grew at a 6.6% CAGR against 5.4% GDP growth — an elasticity above 1.2, driven by electrification substituting for oil and coal in transport, heating and industrial process heat. That continues even if GDP slows, because it’s a substitution, not a function of growth.

The real worry is demand-side weakness. Residential consumption grew just 3.1% in H1. AIDC build-out won’t materially save it if demand keeps slowing.

Subscribe now

To sum it up so far: While China’s power grid expansion is a rare area of reliable structural growth—backed by explicit national targets and clear commercial alignment for major utilities like State Grid—the core operational incentive is to maximize equipment volume while squeezing pricing. As a result, benefits will not accrue equally across the supply chain.

Furthermore, with residential electricity consumption on a decelerating trend and AI Data Centers (AIDCs) unlikely to materially alter national power demand structure in the near term—despite all the capital market narrative and hype—slowing demand remains a very real risk.

We must be highly selective on sub-sectors.

What we are selecting for

Filter one: we want to look at segments where the buyer cannot squeeze or has relatively higher margins. State Grid is a monopsonist — one buyer facing hundreds of sellers — with a regulatory mandate that incentivizes cutting its procurement bill. In most of the supply chain it wins that fight easily. In 2025, a single batch of ordinary substation equipment produced 272 winning bidders; a 2024 batch split RMB 15.3bn across 579 lots among 283 companies, averaging RMB 26.7m per lot. That is not a market with pricing power.

One meaningful exception is ultra-high-voltage (UHV). In UHV main equipment, only three to five suppliers qualify. Across the first four UHV equipment tenders of 2026, thirteen brands took 87.2% of RMB 29.26bn.

Filter two: we want to look at segments whose growth is relatively insulated from electricity consumption growth. Most grid equipment demand depends on load. If consumption decelerates — and the residential numbers suggest it might — that demand decelerates with it.

But one category of spending is driven by something else entirely: the physical difficulty of absorbing renewable generation that has already been built. This demand depends on installed capacity, not consumption (at least for the next couple of years).

The absorption problem

At the end of 2025, China’s wind and solar capacity reached 1,842GW — overtaking thermal for the first time. Renewables hit 2,337GW, or 60.1% of total capacity. By mid-2026 wind and solar were around 1,950GW, over 48% of everything installed.

The grid cannot absorb it. The utilization rate of the solar and wind capacity has declined for the third consecutive year.

Provincially, it is worse: in Jan–Feb 2026, solar utilization ran at 60.8% in Tibet, 78.7% in Qinghai, 82.5% in Gansu and 85.6% in Xinjiang. These are sparsely populated regions characterized by amplified seasonality, where local markets cannot absorb the massive excess of renewable generation, nor can it be exported to high-demand load centers in eastern China.

Two things follow.

First, this is an economic problem with powerful owners. Each percentage point of curtailment costs a renewable project roughly 0.8–1.2 points of IRR. Several trillion renminbi of installed assets — owned by the Big Five gencos, local governments and their lending banks — are watching returns erode.

Second, the problem breaks down cleanly into two engineering questions, and the State Grid Energy Research Institute has quantified both. By 2030, roughly 80% of curtailment in State Grid’s territory will sit in the “Three Norths” (China’s wind- and solar-rich northern regions); within the year, 74% will fall in spring and autumn; within the day, 74% at midday.

• Spatial mismatch — generated in the northwest, consumed in the east. Addressed by transmission.

• Temporal mismatch — generated at noon, consumed at night. Addressed by storage.

That gives us our two themes: ultra-high voltage is where the supply chain retains pricing power. Storage and grid-forming are where demand is mandated. The rest of this piece works through each.

Note: Our objective is to establish a clear framework that tracks and expresses this trend, rather than relying on stock-picking to generate alpha. In other words, a company can stay on our list as long as its core operations align closely with the underlying thesis, even if the business is currently struggling or shows suboptimal financials.

Theme one: Ultra-high voltage

Read more

• Xi heads to Washington. Xi Jinping is set for his first US state visit since 2015, capping his busiest travel stretch since 2019. Expectations for the Trump-Xi meeting itself are low — stabilization, not a reset — though a Chinese business delegation is plausible and worth watching for who is (and isn’t) on it.

• AI drama goes long-form, regulation follows. Mango TV has released what it calls China’s first full-length AI-generated drama, a 30-episode sequel made in five months instead of a year-plus.

• A labor dispute goes global. Auto-lighting supplier Xingyu rescinded roles for about 100 new graduates; when a domestic complaint stalled, the graduates took their case straight to Xingyu’s European automaker clients, triggering investigations at Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz.

• Moonshot moves toward an IPO. Kimi-maker Moonshot is reportedly preparing a dual Shanghai/Hong Kong listing. Robert discusses how China’s frontier AI labs are unusually collaborative with each other because they see the competition as global, not domestic.

• Anthropic disclosure meets Moonshot dispute. A new Anthropic threat report details a China-based dating-app scam network built on Claude, landing alongside an unresolved dispute over Moonshot allegedly rerouting Kimi queries to Claude.

Xi’s State Visit to Washington

Low Stakes, High Symbolism

This has been Xi Jinping’s busiest travel stretch since 2019: stops in Kazakhstan and Egypt and at the BRICS summit in New Delhi, with a first state visit to Washington since 2015 still to come later this month. Robert Wu is skeptical that the Trump-Xi meeting itself will produce much: “the expectation is not very high.” He argues its main function is simply to keep principal-to-principal contact happening, not to reset the relationship. Unlike last year’s meeting in South Korea, which came amid an active trade dispute and drew intense speculation, this year’s meeting draws relatively little domestic Chinese attention — Wu says even policy circles are only lightly engaged, because China feels it has “found its own pace” in dealing with Washington. He does not rule out a narrow trade agreement or selective easing of controls, but cautions against reading Xi’s other stops as building toward the US visit; Chinese leaders typically bundle overseas trips together for logistical reasons rather than strategic sequencing, citing Xi’s 2013 stops in Mexico and Costa Rica ahead of a US visit as precedent.

Will Xi bring business leaders?

One open question is whether Xi will bring a delegation of Chinese executives, something he has mostly avoided since around 2020. Reuters and SCMP reporting suggests he might this time, and Wu thinks it plausible given that Trump’s own May visit to Beijing included Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Jensen Huang. Nothing is confirmed. Wu specifically hopes to see China’s frontier AI founders included, though he calls this “very unlikely,” and flags that ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming was a conspicuous absence from the equivalent delegation during Trump’s Beijing visit despite ByteDance’s high stake in the relationship. Looming over the visit: Huawei’s criminal trial has just opened in New York, and Shenzhen hosts APEC in November — China’s largest hosting moment in over a decade.

“I think right now it’s just good that the leaders of two countries get to meet every now and then in person and have this principal-to-principal communication. This really can help stabilize the relationship.”

— Robert Wu

China’s First Full-Length AI Drama Lands

Appetite for more than micro

Mango TV has released what it calls China’s first full-length AI-generated drama: a 30-episode sequel to Journey to the West, produced in five months versus the year-plus a conventional production would take. Mango’s stock rose in the days after release. Olivia frames this against the prior episode’s discussion of Niu Lai, an unpolished, human-made viral film that succeeded partly because audiences craved something authentic — raising the question of whether audiences now want the opposite.

Robert doesn’t see AI and human content as being in conflict. He compares the current spread of AI-generated micro-dramas — now visible everywhere on China’s subways and in elevators — to the early mass-adoption phase of short video in China. He doesn’t think the government opposes the trend, reading it instead as an emerging industry Beijing is willing to let develop even as it disrupts incumbents: “many small-time actors and actresses lose a lot of their jobs” as some production sites lose work. His forecast is a split market: a large, cheap, always-available content tier that AI fully occupies, alongside formats built on the audience’s ability to physically meet or interact with real performers — concerts, tours, fan events — that AI cannot replace. He expects a middle category of AI-enhanced human performance to grow too, describing a friend’s account of a human-acted, choice-driven interactive drama filmed like a branching game, where the actors resisted being replaced by AI specifically because they wanted in-person contact with fans; he speculates AI could eventually make branching-script productions like this commercially viable by handling the otherwise unmanageable number of narrative paths.

Olivia connects this to a physical-world parallel: a reconstructed palace complex she visited in Ordos, Inner Mongolia (formerly nicknamed a “ghost city”), built at large expense purely as a filming location — the kind of capital investment that could increasingly be replaced by virtual, AI-generated sets, with data centers taking the place of studio backlots.

“There will be a mass market, really cheap, you-can-access-anytime type of content, and that will be completely occupied by AI. But then there’s also some work, some projects where humans are actively involved.”

— Robert Wu

A Labor Dispute at Xingyu Goes International

Don’t test these recent grads

Xingyu, one of China’s largest automotive lighting suppliers and a vendor to global automakers, hired roughly 400 new university graduates and then reportedly moved to terminate about 100 of them — offering the option to resign voluntarily or accept lower-paid assembly-line roles. A domestic complaint to China’s labor bureau reportedly went nowhere, so the affected graduates took their case directly to Xingyu’s European clients. Volkswagen Group China has opened a special investigation; Mercedes-Benz has confirmed it referred the matter to a specialist team. Xingyu has apologized, suspended its HR director, and offered a compensation package including a job-search subsidy and accommodation support. The company is already listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and is reportedly planning to add a Hong Kong listing.

Robert calls the underlying dynamic simply sad: trust between Chinese employers and employees is low right now, and he says it runs in both directions — he separately describes a friend, also a founder, whose signed offers to two strong candidates were declined at the last minute, partially because the candidates didn’t trust the company to honor them. He’s unambiguous that Xingyu’s conduct was wrong (“clearly not ethical, not a professional thing to do”), but he’s struck by how effectively the affected graduates organized: escalating to the company’s biggest overseas clients was, in his words, “really smart,” and the incident became national news specifically because of how well-organized the response was.

The bigger pattern, per Robert, is that Chinese companies now selling into global supply chains carry global reputational exposure that most of them have not internalized.

“You can see that young people today are very innovative and creative in how they seek their own rights. Like this going-to-the-EU thing — it’s really smart, I have to admit.”

— Robert Wu

Moonshot’s IPO and a Rare Truce Among China’s AI Labs

Competition looks different these days

Moonshot AI, maker of the Kimi model family, is reportedly preparing a dual Shanghai and Hong Kong listing. The episode cites Moonshot running at roughly $1 billion in annualized revenue currently, targeting a $2 billion annualized run rate by year-end (figures as stated in the episode, not independently verified here) — still small next to the revenue levels reported by OpenAI and Anthropic, but Moonshot’s pitch, per Olivia, is growth and the durability of Kimi K3 as a commercial platform. Robert reads the implied valuation as roughly in line with China’s other already-listed frontier model companies, Zhipu and MiniMax, which he says now function as a market benchmark for what a Chinese frontier lab is worth, at “only a fraction” of US peers’ valuations. He notes one of those peers announced a large secondary fundraise just last week even with its share price underperforming — in his reading, every Chinese lab is racing to build a capital war chest now, in case “the AI bubble bursts in a few months or a few years.”

Asked to compare competitive intensity with the US, where Robert calls the frontier-lab rivalry “almost petty,” he makes an unexpected argument: China’s AI labs are, if anything, less rivalrous with one another than in previous domestic “tech wars” (food delivery, bike-sharing, and earlier super-app rivalries such as Alibaba and Tencent blocking each other’s links). His explanation is that AI is the first Chinese tech sector born global rather than domestic, so Chinese labs see Anthropic and OpenAI as the competition, not each other. He describes talent and even informal support flowing between Chinese labs and their founders’ former employers in a way that would have been unthinkable during the super-app era, crediting this partly to the founders’ generation (millennials and Gen Z, globally oriented from day one) and partly to the industry’s global-facing origin.

On Moonshot’s business model, Robert points to a licensing arrangement attached to its open-weight releases: large commercial users monetizing above a certain threshold are asked to pay Moonshot a licensing fee, and he believes compliance is improving because bigger companies increasingly care about their reputation among researchers and peers. Some cloud providers reportedly want to support the arrangement directly because stronger underlying models improve their own businesses — in his framing, an ecosystem-building logic rather than a purely transactional one.

“This is probably the first ever industry in China where, when it was first born, it’s a global competition.”

— Robert Wu

Anthropic’s Scam Report

Time to get off the apps

Anthropic’s newest threat-intelligence report includes a case the hosts single out: a China-based app studio accused of using Claude to build and operate more than 20 dating apps, all marketed as staffed entirely by real people. The report describes nearly 5,000 distinct AI personas that messaged roughly 25,000 real users over a two-week window in April, with real gig workers mixed in at roughly a 3-to-1 AI-to-human ratio to cover tasks the AI could not yet handle convincingly, such as live video calls used to pass authenticity checks. Anthropic says it banned the associated accounts and worked with other AI labs to shut the network down. These figures are as reported in Anthropic’s own disclosure; the hosts do not independently verify them.

Robert connects this to China’s broader, worsening scam landscape, illustrating the government’s aggressive countermeasures with a personal anecdote: two of his personal investors, who are neighbors, had their bank accounts automatically frozen for several hours after each sent him a similar amount of money the same day — an anti-scam algorithm flag he had to spend time getting unwound. He argues telecom and romance scams (China’s “pig butchering” schemes) are especially hard to stop because they exploit psychology rather than force, and because the more sophisticated operations are cross-border — he cites the earlier Myanmar scam-compound cases as the precedent that first forced international enforcement cooperation. He doesn’t expect the trend to fade and thinks user education, not enforcement alone, is the realistic response, since scam operations can now be produced at a scale no police force can individually chase down.

On Anthropic itself, Robert is candid about being conflicted: disclosing client usage behavior is something he feels Anthropic “maybe shouldn’t disclose,” even though making a genuine scam network public plausibly serves the public good. He links this report to a separate, earlier Anthropic accusation that Moonshot secretly routed some Kimi user queries to Claude and presented Claude’s answers as if Kimi had generated them — by Anthropic’s own count, a large number of chats, though nothing close to Kimi’s total user base. Robert’s read is that this is not equivalent to stealing a rival’s underlying model or algorithm — “you can only send the questions and get the answers” — and is better understood as a shortcut to save on data costs than outright theft. But he thinks Moonshot should have anticipated the exposure and reputational cost: “they should have known that Anthropic would use this as a means of attack.” Given the timing — Anthropic’s scam disclosure and its routing accusation both landing as Moonshot pursues its IPO — Robert suspects deliberate strategy on Anthropic’s part, describing what he sees as a form of commercial warfare. He separately mentions an unconfirmed claim circulating that someone possibly linked to the PLA uploaded sensitive material into Kimi without realizing it could be rerouted to Claude — he is explicit that he does not know the details and cannot confirm this account, so it should be read as unverified.

“It does feel to me that this is very strategic. That there is some fierce commercial warfare.”

— Robert Wu

Last call: Apply for the Autumn 2026 Baiguan China Tour before this Sunday (Sep 13) to claim early-bird discounts.

Check out the last remaining available trips here.

Recently, we have invited several industry experts to talk about robotics, new energy, and supply chains in China. Today, we have invited another real industry heavyweight, who goes by “Dr. Joe,” to talk about one of the most strategically important industries of today: semiconductors.

Dr. Joe was an early co-founder of perhaps the most consequential semiconductor foundry business in China, and is still actively involved in the industry.

In this conversation, Dr. Joe will share an insider account of exactly how far China’s semiconductor industry still lags behind the Western world and what a self-sufficient Chinese semiconductor industry would mean for the rest of the world.

Baiguan: Most discussions of China’s semiconductor industry begin from the premise that its foundries still lag behind TSMC. But people disagree about the size and cause of that gap. Is the main constraint capital, talent, equipment, process know-how, or simply the time required to accumulate experience?

Dr. Joe: There is no simple answer because there are many kinds of semiconductor products. When people speak of “the gap,” they are usually referring to leading-edge CMOS technology, particularly at the five-nanometer and three-nanometer nodes. In that specific area, the single biggest and perhaps the only constraint is access to EUV lithography equipment, which is not available in China.

But most semiconductor products do not require EUV. In those areas, China is moving very quickly, and in some cases it is already leading. CMOS image sensors are one example. The major global suppliers include Sony, Samsung, and OmniVision, while Chinese companies have also become highly competitive in specialized applications. In areas such as security cameras and satellite imaging, some Chinese CIS products are already among the best in the world.

The picture is therefore very different from the common perception that China is behind across the board. In many specialized segments, the gap has already reversed. China’s semiconductor exports have also reached record levels over the past three years. The real lag is concentrated in leading-edge CMOS manufacturing, not in the semiconductor industry as a whole.

Baiguan: So your argument is that, wherever EUV is not essential, China is either already competitive or likely to become competitive relatively soon. The remaining gap is concentrated at the most advanced logic nodes.

Dr. Joe: That is correct. The clearest limitation today is advanced CMOS at five nanometers, three nanometers, and beyond. Even there, however, alternative architectures are becoming more important. Huawei’s Tau Scaling Law, 3D integration, and heterogeneous integration are all attempts to improve system performance without relying exclusively on conventional transistor scaling.

In the near term, these approaches can produce chips with performance comparable to products made with more advanced process nodes. They do not mean that EUV will never be needed. But they can reduce the importance of EUV for a period of time and create other routes to comparable system-level performance.

Baiguan: When you say China will eventually need EUV, how far away is “eventually”?

Dr. Joe: My prediction is that within five years, and possibly sooner, China will have an EUV solution or an alternative technology that serves the same purpose.

Baiguan: That’s a strong statement.

Dr. Joe: It is important to remember that the current ASML architecture is not the only possible way to generate EUV light. Elon Musk has recently signaled interest in free-electron laser, or FEL, technology for the proposed Terafab in Texas. This would still use EUV wavelengths, but the source architecture would be different. Instead of pairing an individual light source with every lithography machine, a very large accelerator-based or synchrotron-like source could potentially serve an entire fab, or even several fabs.

Both China and the United States are exploring this general direction. There is no law of nature that says advanced lithography must follow ASML’s present technical path. ASML’s system is the result of decades of successful engineering and iteration, but other engineering solutions are possible. ASML itself is a Dutch company, not an American or Chinese one, which is another reminder that this remains a global technological competition. That is why I am optimistic that EUV will become less of an absolute bottleneck within five years.

Baiguan: In other words, public debate may be too fixated on one company and one present-day architecture.

Dr. Joe: Exactly. Technology is not static. The semiconductor industry works with roadmaps that extend five to ten years into the future, and there are usually several proposed solutions to each major technical problem. The market ultimately decides which approach wins. Outsiders often take the most impressive technology of the present moment and assume it will remain the only viable path indefinitely. That is rarely how this industry develops.

AI chips, the memory wall, and 3D integration

Baiguan: Is this progress in alternative chip architectures one reason Chinese AI models such as Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek have advanced so quickly?

Dr. Joe: That is a separate issue.

An AI model is primarily an achievement in algorithms and software. Hardware is another part of the system. Both the United States and China combine computing infrastructure with model development, but they do not necessarily have the same balance between the two.

If access to the strongest chips is limited, developers can compensate by simplifying models and reducing the amount of computing power required. That is part of what Chinese model developers have been doing, up until now.

If more advanced 3D and heterogeneous-integration chips become available, however, they will give those developers a stronger hardware platform and allow them to build more capable models.

Baiguan: So the potential of these alternative hardware technologies has not yet been fully reflected in the performance of Chinese AI systems?

Dr. Joe: Not yet. I expect the first important results to appear next year. I am directly involved in the development of a chip based on 3D integration, so I have been following this very closely.

NVIDIA’s GPUs are extremely powerful, and the memory capacity around them is very large. But the movement of data between memory and the processor remains constrained by what the industry calls the “memory wall.” A GPU may spend a large share of its time waiting for data rather than performing calculations. My own estimate is that this waiting time can reach roughly 70 percent in some workloads.

If 3D integration substantially shortens those data paths, much more of the GPU’s theoretical computing capacity can be utilized. In my view, a well-designed system based on this approach could match or exceed the performance of NVIDIA’s highest-end chips, even if the underlying logic is not manufactured on the world’s most advanced process node.

Baiguan: Jensen Huang has made the point that the rest of the industry is not standing still either. TSMC and other leading companies are also investing heavily in advanced packaging and 3D integration. Does China really have an advantage here, or is everyone moving in the same direction?

Dr. Joe: Everyone is moving. The question is not whether other companies are progressing, but who is ahead in a particular architecture and who controls the relevant intellectual property.

For instance, today’s HBM systems are generally based on 2.5D integration and chip-to-chip connections. The next step is wafer-scale 3D integration using wafer-to-wafer bonding. That is a more advanced form of integration. I believe the industry will need wafer-to-wafer technology by the HBM5 generation.

There is at least one Chinese company with important intellectual property in wafer-to-wafer stacking. I do not want to name the company here, but it is an example of a field in which a Chinese company may be ahead rather than behind. If the rest of the industry eventually adopts the same route, major international memory companies may need access to Chinese intellectual property.

Same thing is actually happening in memory. Historically, DRAM cell area moved from roughly 12F² to 9F² and then to 6F². The next generation is 4F², which is close to the theoretical lower limit for a conventional DRAM cell. Samsung, SK hynix, Micron, CXMT, and other companies are all working on this.

One company in China announced a 4F² product in 2024 and began delivering products in 2025. Samsung, by comparison, is targeting production around 2028. If that timetable holds, the Chinese company will be two or three years ahead. Combine 4F² cells with wafer-to-wafer integration, and China could become a leader in some next-generation DRAM technologies without first solving every problem in EUV lithography.

Baiguan: It doesn’t seem this type of information gets reflected in today’s market consensus at all.

Dr. Joe: Indeed. But engineers who attend the relevant technical conferences can see these developments, but many people in finance and the broader public still use an older picture of the industry. I expect that picture to change substantially over the next two years.

Baiguan: How much does China’s wider manufacturing ecosystem contribute to this progress?

Dr. Joe: China is already the world’s largest manufacturing center, and semiconductors are the most technologically advanced extension of that base. Different provinces have their own semiconductor programs, while the national Fifteenth Five-Year Plan identifies three especially important four-character concepts: 存算一体computing in memory, 三维堆叠3D integration, and 光电融合optoelectronic integration.

These are not uniquely Chinese ideas. The entire industry is moving in these directions. What matters is that they have been elevated into a national technology strategy, and Chinese companies are moving quickly in all three.

Computing in memory and 3D integration are intended to address the memory wall. HBM is extremely important today, but technically it is an awkward and transitional solution. The industry needs a more direct way to place memory and computing together. I expect samples based on a new approach next year and volume production the year after that.

Samsung, SK hynix, and Micron are also pursuing these technologies. My point is not that they will stop innovating, but that one Chinese company is currently ahead in a particular implementation. The same kind of intellectual-property dynamic has already appeared around YMTC’s Xtacking NAND architecture. In the future, some global leaders may need to license or otherwise work with technology developed in China.

Baiguan: Does the same optimism apply to semiconductor materials, including photoresists and silicon wafers?

Dr. Joe: Japan remains the leader in many semiconductor materials, and this is still an area of Chinese dependence. But there are now a very large number of Chinese companies conducting materials research. I expect another fundamental change within several years.

My broader prediction is that around 2032, the overall picture will flip. That is only six years away. In some categories China will still be catching up, but in others the direction of the gap will reverse.

In the paid sections below, Dr. Joe will continue to answer questions on:

• How global talent flows have shaped and will shape the semiconductor industry

• Why Dr. Joe returned to China

• The triumphs and mistakes of SMIC, China’s largest domestic foundry

• What a self-sufficient Chinese semiconductor supply chain would mean for the rest of the world.

• Will China bring “over-capacity” for semiconductors as well?

Read more

The catalyst was 《后西游记》(”Journey to the West: After”)— a 30-episode, 40-minutes-per-episode mythological series that aired August 31, 2026, simultaneously on Mango TV and Hunan Satellite TV’s prime-time slot. There are no human actors, no film crew, no on-location shoots; every character, set, and frame is generated by AIGC. Per the production team, the cost came in at roughly one-tenth of a traditional drama of comparable length [*].

Hunan TV—commonly nicknamed “the Mango TV” because its logo resembles a mango—holds a very special place in the childhood memories of Chinese people born in the ‘80s and ‘90s. It has always been a pioneer, introducing reality television, variety entertainment, and talent competitions while most traditional Chinese networks stuck to old-fashioned programming. And now, it is placing a new bet: AI-generated dramas.

Subscribe now

Seedance, and a regulatory green light

The show was built on ByteDance’s Seedance 2.0 / 2.5 models, delivered through Mango TV’s in-house AIGC Innovation Content Center [*]. That alone is a notable vote of confidence in a domestic video model from a tier-one broadcaster.

But the more interesting unlock is regulatory. The show is the first project to run under the National Radio and Television Administration’s “边审边播” (review-while-broadcasting) mechanism, rolled out under the NRTA’s so-called the “21 Articles” [*].

Issued in August 2025, the 21 Articles are the clearest signal yet of Beijing’s shifting posture on audiovisual content:

• The 40-episode cap on TV dramas is gone.

• Overseas IP adaptation is explicitly encouraged.

• “Review-while-broadcasting” is piloted — but only for series, seasonal, anthology, and sitcom formats (the structurally modular kinds that don’t need a fixed ending locked before air).

In other words, the regulator is simultaneously loosening format restrictions and embedding AI-native production into the compliant mainstream. For a year that I earlier called 2026: Year One of China’s AI Film Industry, this is the moment the establishment stopped treating AI video as a fringe experiment.

While people debated “does it look real,” China started getting paid

AI animation is among the first categories to reliably generate cash flow. Prior to Mango TV airing the show, Chinese netizens were already watching AI shorts online. For instance, ‘AI anime drama 漫剧’—anime series created purely by AI—has become the addictive phenomenon known as ‘mealtime shows’ due to its ability to pack addictive hooks and memes into short episodes

While the discourse is still stuck at “but does the AI hand look right?” or “can AI writing really replace a human?”, in China, AI video has quietly become a cash-flow business. As I wrote back in my AI film industry piece, we’ve moved well past the “toy project” phase. The monetization isn’t theoretical anymore — it’s showing up in platform payouts, in recharge numbers, and in overseas app-store receipts.

The most important mental model: AI video models are engineered to spike dopamine, not to be philosophically profound. A vertical short-drama viewer is on a subway scroll looking for a 20-second emotional hit — the slap, the reveal, the underdog comeback. They don’t care if the glass-physics is slightly off. It’s the visual equivalent of junk food: cheap to make, irresistible to watch, but highly profitable.

Let me show you the receipts.

Where the money actually is: three working models

1) AI 漫剧 (AI “anime dramas”)

AI anime-dramas are the sleeper hit of 2026. Production is startlingly cheap: a 3D AI anime runs about ¥2,000–2,500 per minute versus six figures for traditional animation [*]. Platforms have built explicit monetization rails — Douyin, 红果 (Hongguo, micro drama platform owned by Bytedance), and Tencent’s 火龙漫剧 (Huolong) have launched dedicated anime revenue-share plans.

Per-episode payouts can reach thousands of yuan for shows crossing 10 million views [*]. Some verified accounts report personal AI-content incomes above ¥200,000/month without selling courses — purely from platform share and novel affiliates [*].

2) AI live-action short dramas — already topping the charts.

Since the start of 2026, multiple AI live-action short dramas have become breakout hits: 《斩仙台 AI 真人版》 (Zhan Xian Tai AI Live-Action) crossed 100 million views in six days; 《嫡女泣血》 (The Legitimate Daughter Weeps Blood) surpassed 230 million views to top industry charts [*].

Period-costume and Chinese fantasy-adventure are already very popular formats of micro-dramas in China and have become the “guilty pleasure” of many. Even before the emergence of AI, an entire “assembly line” already existed for producing these fast-paced, addictive series. They bypass A-list stars, instead licensing novel scripts from the internet and sign internet influencers or lesser-known actors. Now, AI has simply driven production costs—which were already squeezed—down to rock bottom.

3) The “B2B” model: “legitimate” film and TV integration.

Early this year, the acclaimed Chinese director Jia Zhangke released an AI film built on Seedance 2.0, starring an AI version of himself — a signal moment of a top-tier professional embracing the stack [*]. Similarly this year, Kuaishou’s Kling was integrated into the popular historical drama 《太平年》 (Swords Into Plowshares), where AI-assisted storm-and-naval-war sequences improved efficiency 8–10x while holding cinematic quality [*].

That’s what I call the “B2B” model: sell the model and workflow into professional pipelines, not just to consumers.

The micro drama export: almost every AI short drama abroad is Chinese

If you’ve been watching the overseas short-drama charts, you’ve probably noticed something: the AI video short plays flooding foreign app stores are almost entirely made by Chinese companies. This is the direct sequel to the Chinese-made short-drama boom abroad I covered when ReelShort first topped the US App Store — except now the marginal cost of a new title has fallen off a cliff.

According to Sensor Tower’s Q1 2026 statistics, out of the $750 million global in-app purchase (IAP) market for that quarter, DramaBox (Dianzhong Technology) and ReelShort (Crazy Maple Studio) each generated nearly $140 million in IAP revenue, tying as global dual oligopolies. Together, these two China-backed leaders captured nearly 37% of total direct consumer spending worldwide for the quarter.

It is, in a sense, the video equivalent of the “token export” wave I wrote about earlier: Chinese AI capability leaving the country as finished, monetizable product.

Investment implications

Read more

Don’t miss out — claim your early-bird discount and secure your spot now.

Still open for registration

Weekday Industry Tracks

• Robotics & AI Executive Tour in collab with Caixin Data, Beijing, Oct19-23 (5days)

• Advanced Manufacturing, Foshan/Shenzhen, Oct 26-30 (4.5 days)

• Next Energy & Industrial Cycle, Shanghai/Suzhou/Hangzhou, Nov 2-6 (4.5 days)

Weekend Immersion Tracks

• Datong: where China became China, Oct 24-25

• Yiwu: Hidden Engine of Global Commerce, with David Fishman, Oct 31 - Nov 1

• Nanjing: A People-First Weekend in the “Southern Capital”, Nov 13-14

For pricing and discounts, click here.

If you are unable to join us on this autumn series of tours, feel free to email Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with your interests. We also offer bespoke study tours and board retreat services tailored to your needs.

Learn more about the tours and tour leaders

• How would Chinese technology look like five years from now?

• After solar and EV, what’s next for China’s energy sector?

• What does the “most capitalist” city in China tell about the future of globalization

WHY BAIGUAN CHINA TOUR

Click here to read a Q&A of regularly asked questions

Navigating China’s complex economic landscape requires more than just a standard itinerary. The Baiguan China Tour is designed to deliver three core pillars of value:

• Deep-Diving Engagement, with Curation: We move beyond surface-level observations into the engine rooms of industry. Through structured dialogues with C-suite executives curated by Baiguan and our sector specialist partners, and through on-the-ground audits of companies, smart factories, AI labs, and supply chain hubs, we unpack the operational realities and technological breakthroughs that underpin China’s new economic trajectory.

• Unfiltered Access and Crucial Context: We strip away the corporate PR and political spin to reveal the ground truth. Of course, the relationships and senior access matter. But a company visit on its own is only one data point. Every company has a story it wants visitors to hear. Our job is to explain how that story fits into the broader industry, what the company did not say, where its incentives lie, and which claims deserve more skepticism.

• High-Quality Community: You won’t be touring with tourists. Our groups are intentionally kept small and selective, comprising global investors, entrepreneurs, multinational executives, and scions of business dynasties. This ensures a high-trust, peer-to-peer learning environment where insights are enriched by diverse perspectives, forging lasting connections with like-minded global leaders.

Some of the past participants of the Baiguan China Tour include:

• Founder of one of Germany’s most successful technology companies

• Head of corporate venture capital at a major US industrial company

• Singapore-based Chief Investment Officer at a large family office

• American investing family rooted in China and early backer of Alibaba

• Research Analyst at a top Europe-based hedge fund

• Former Senior Researcher at a leading high-frequency trading house

• Member of a prominent Latin American business family and entrepreneur

• Former board director of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

• Silicon Valley venture investor in the fintech field

• Influential Thai family member with years of experience across VC, PE, and investment banking in Southeast Asia

• Malaysian Founder of a multi-billion Asia-based investment fund

• Senior Engineer at a major US Mag7 company

• Former APAC Payments Analytics Lead at a major global payment company

• Singapore-based private Investor with years of experience and ongoing interest in China’s capital markets

• Business Consultant to Fortune 500 company

• Researcher at an Australia-based long-only investment fund

Disclaimer

Weekday Industry Tracks

🤖 Robotics & AI Executive Tour | Oct 19-23 | Beijing

Curated by Baiguan and Caixin Data, this tour cuts through the noise to take you deep into the industrial value chain—from mass-production lines for core hardware and R&D hubs for foundational models to the frontlines of national standard-setting and advanced application testing. Rather than assessing technologies in isolation, we help you decode the underlying infrastructure and economic logic driving this transformation, equipping you with the hard-edged judgment needed to distinguish where capital is truly flowing from where the headlines merely suggest.

A key highlight of this tour that you won’t easily find anywhere else is that, leveraging Caixin’s deep network, tour participants can have closed-door meetings with C-level executives and founding team members of AI and robotics enterprises, including Moonshot (Kimi) and Zhipu AI (GLM). Beyond AI and robotics, participants can also enjoy a rare glimpse into China’s commercial space industry.

⚙️ Advanced Manufacturing & Supply Chain Tour | Oct 26-30 | Foshan → Shenzhen

This journey reveals Chinese manufacturing not as a static cost center, but a dynamic engine of reinvention. From Foshan’s industrial titans to Shenzhen’s deep-tech disruptors, we trace how legacy giants and frontier startups share the same supply chain soil—driving the national “New Quality Productivity” agenda across smart home appliances, biotech, humanoid robots, and AI. This is not a site visit to assembly lines; it is an investigation into the strategy that allows China to scale from home appliances to humanoid robots with unmatched speed.

This tour is uniquely curated by Family Office Insight, the same partner in our very first, and highly successful Baiguan China Tour last year.

♻️ China’s Next Energy & Industrial Cycle: Power, AI & How China Builds | Nov 2-6 | Shanghai → Suzhou → Hangzhou

China has already reshaped the global economics of solar, batteries and electric vehicles. In 2025 alone, it added roughly 430 GW of wind and solar, taking total installed capacity to around 1.84 TW. But the more interesting question is no longer how China scaled the last energy cycle, but what comes next, how China builds the next energy system, and what durable industry moats and investment opportunities could emerge?

Over five days across Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, we will go inside the frontier of China’s energy by meeting senior executives and C-level founders, seeing operating assets and technologies firsthand, and speaking directly with the investors and institutions deciding what gets built, funded and scaled next.

Taken together, the program will move across:

• an established renewable-energy champion defending and extending its moat

• frontier nuclear fusion technology

• EV infrastructure becoming part of the power system

• state capital allocating into new industries

• a local government ecosystem that has repeatedly scaled companies

• hidden thermal-management and critical AI infrastructure layers

• AI-driven electricity demand

• and the next generation of frontier startups.

Weekend Immersion Tracks

🚄 A Weekend in Datong: Where China Became China | Oct. 24-25 | Datong, Shanxi

Datong isn’t on most itineraries. That’s the point. In the 5th century, Datong was the capital of the Northern Wei — a dynasty founded by the Xianbei, a non-Han nomadic group from China’s northern frontier, who chose to assimilate into Chinese civilization rather than rule over it as outsiders. That choice, and the century of upheaval and reinvention it triggered, is carved directly into the cliffs at Yungang Grottoes.

But history is never just history here; it is an economic lifeline. Beneath the ancient cliffs runs a second, more urgent story: Datong itself. Once a coal powerhouse that hit an economic wall, the city gambled its survival on a controversial bet—tearing down the new to rebuild the old. Today, that gamble is being stress-tested by a surge in domestic “heritage tourism,” accelerated by a surprise catalyst: a hit video game, Black Myth: Wukong. We won’t just admire the temples; we will sit with the tension between preservation and progress, examining how a controversial mayor’s vision is playing out on the ground.

Datong is a miniature of the Chinese model: resilient, contradictory, and constantly rewriting its future by reclaiming its past. It is a perspective no boardroom or briefing deck can replicate.

This tour is led by Steven Xiao, who would be no stranger to the participants of our second tour. Steven was born and raised in Beijing, and somewhere along the way to a decade-plus career in finance across New York and Shanghai, picked up a second, far more consuming interest: the Buddhist art carved into cliffsides and caves centuries before anyone thought to build a spreadsheet. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University, which he has never once used to explain any of this. History and Buddhist art are his real vocation, pursued not from an armchair but from the caves themselves, tracing early Buddhist civilization across the furthest reaches of the Silk Road. This October, he trades the boardroom for a cliffside in Datong, leading the tour’s extension there.

🎁 The Hidden Engine of Global Consumption-How Small Commodities Move the World | Oct. 31-Nov 1 | Yiwu, Zhejiang

Yiwu is the pulse point of global micro-multinationals. Often overlooked by traditional investors, this city in Zhejiang province supplies over 80% of the world’s Christmas decorations, 70% of Christmas trees, and a dominant majority of the small commodities found in dollar stores from Ohio to Oslo. It is the physical manifestation of China’s supply chain dominance—where a $0.10 hairclip can move across continents with algorithmic precision. Yet, beneath the surface of “low-end” goods, Yiwu is undergoing a radical transformation into a high-efficiency, digital-first logistics and new-energy export hub.

This tour is led by David Fishman, a Principal at The Lantau Group (TLG), a leading Asia-focused energy consultancy based in Shanghai. Having lived and worked in China for 15 years, David specializes in China’s energy sector, industrial development, trade, and political economy. His work has included advising multinational corporations, financial institutions, and industrial clients on topics ranging from power markets and manufacturing competitiveness to supply chains and regional development.

Beyond his professional work, David has traveled extensively throughout China and has a longstanding interest in economic geography, local development, and social ethnography. His research and writing explore how Chinese communities, businesses, and institutions interact with broader trends in globalization, industrialization, and international trade. Combining policy expertise with extensive firsthand experience, he offers a grounded perspective on how China’s economy functions beyond the major coastal cities and financial centers.

🍷Curious China: A People-First Weekend in China’s Southern Capital | Nov 13-14 | Nanjing, Jiangsu

Nanjing served as the capital of six dynasties, the Republic of China, and remains a regional center today. Its city walls, lakes, Republican-era neighborhoods and everyday street life reveal how different layers of Chinese history continue to shape contemporary life.

Rather than moving through a checklist of landmarks, this weekend is designed around people, conversation and a slower rhythm. Shared meals, local encounters and thoughtfully paced walks create space to understand the city through those who live there.

The experience is led by Michelle Wei, a Nanjing native who spent 17 years living and working across the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Germany. Cornell-trained in hospitality, with a professional background spanning private equity, real estate investment and cross-border capital raising, Michelle brings both local roots and an international perspective. She will introduce participants to a curated circle of local thinkers, practitioners and friends, turning the city itself into a setting for exchange.

Pricing and Important Details

To maintain the quality of dialogue and ensure meaningful interactions among investors and industry leaders, participation is by application only (you may fill in the application form here), with each tour limited to 20 seats.

Pricing & Discounts

Each tour offers three pricing tiers:

• Standard Rate

• Early Bird Discount: 10% off-Valid through 11:59 PM Beijing Time on September 13, 2026

• Returnee Discount: 20% off-Available for previous Baiguan tour participants

Discount Policies:

• Early Bird and Returnee discounts are non-combinable. Both are calculated on the Standard Rate; in cases of dual eligibility, the lower of the two rates applies automatically.

• Multi-Tour Savings: Register for two or more tours to save even more. This deduction applies to your post-Early Bird or post-Returnee total:

  • Total < $10,000 USD → Deduct $500 USD

  • Total $10,000–$20,000 USD → Deduct $1,000 USD

  • Total $20,000–$30,000 USD → Deduct $2,000 USD

  • Total $30,000–$40,000 USD → Deduct $3,000 USD

  • Total >$40,000 USD → Deduct $4,000 USD

Illustrative Example:

Scenario: You are a Returnee registering for two tours during the Early Bird window.

1. Base Discount: Two tours at standard rate (2,500 +15000 = $17,500). We apply your 20% Returnee discount: $17,500* ( 1 - 20% ) = $14,000

2. Multi-Tour Credit: Your adjusted total qualifies for a $1,000 deduction.

Final Fee: $14,000 - $1000 = $13,000

What’s Included:

• Five-star Hotels (eg., Sheraton, Westin, InterContinental) or character-filled equivalent stays on weekend immersion to enhance the local experience (if you select the accommodation-inclusive package)

• Travel insurance

• All scheduled company visits and seminars

• All breakfast, lunch and some dinners

• All ground transportation during the tour

What’s Not Included:

• International/domestic flights to/from the destination city

• Chinese visa application fees

• Personal expenses

• Certain dinners are not included in the standard program and will be clearly marked in the final detailed itinerary.

Applications, Refunds & Cancellations

• Cancel ≥30 days prior to the tour start date: Full Refund

• Cancel between 15~30 days (inclusive of Day 15) before the tour start date: 50% Refund

• Cancel <15 days before the start date (any reason, including visa issues): No Refund

• All time references shall be based on China Standard Time (Beijing Time, GMT+8)

• Requests must be sent in writing to Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com

• Refunds will be processed minus a non-refundable administrative/service fee, the exact amount of which is subject to the applicable payment platform’s charges.

To apply, please click or scan to fill out this form: Baiguan China Tour Application Form - Autumn 2026

What to expect next:

• Upon reviewing your application, we will notify you of the outcome within 3 business days. If accepted, we will contact you to arrange payment and discuss next steps.

• We understand that emails can sometimes end up in your spam folder. If you don’t hear from us within 3 business days, please check your spam folder.

• Once your payment is processed, your seat will be officially secured. We will follow up with an email to gather additional details to enhance your experience, such as arrival information, dietary restrictions, or any special accommodation needs.

• About one week before the program begins, we will reach out with the exact daily schedules, meeting spots, and an introductory brochure about the companies we will be visiting. We will also create a designated WeChat group for participants and invite you to join.

Notice: Early bird pricing for Baiguan China Tour will end on September 13.

Check the full program, and the Q&A on top questions.

Also read this interview transcript with Mr. Gao Erji, executive president of Caixin Media, on the AI & Robotics leg of the tour.

Episode in Brief

• Alibaba’s $10B Hong Kong share placement (closed Aug 26) buys AI runway but reads as a strain signal, not a strength signal: the company is raising equity for AI while still funding a costly local-delivery fight, and founders’ post-news insider buying landed as weak reassurance because it was priced below what public investors had just paid.

• Robert sees ByteDance, not Tencent, as Alibaba’s most underrated AI rival: it is privately held, so it can absorb losses without market pressure; it has a profitable core business funding its AI bets; and its short-video AI products are already generating meaningful revenue.

• A crudely animated, five-year, zero-marketing-budget independent film (‘Niu Lai’) became the breakout hit of the summer precisely because it is not AI-polished — this is seen as a genuine hunger for authenticity that a pre-AI production timeline made possible, and that they expect will be very hard to repeat.

• Beijing’s new 2026–2030 “going global” action plan for cyberspace enterprises (issued Aug 21) is read as the government formalizing and promoting a trend companies already started on their own — partly in response to unregulated conduct abroad, such as the Didi/Meituan food-delivery fight with iFood in Brazil.

• China’s new rules restricting emotionally manipulative AI “companion” features (effective July) pushed ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent to pull related features even though nothing was formally banned.

• Justin Sun’s public dispute with actress Jing Tian — including his own admission that he uses Claude for major daily business decisions — has turned into a genuine reputational liability for him.

Alibaba’s AI Investment and the Competitive Landscape

A $10B raise that reads as a strain signal

Alibaba closed a roughly US$10 billion Hong Kong share placement on August 26, selling more than 700 million newly issued shares to non-US investors. The company said about 60% of proceeds will fund computing infrastructure, with the rest going to AI data centers and cloud upgrades. The raise followed a reported ~75% year-on-year fall in net profit, which Alibaba attributed to increased AI spending. Olivia opened the discussion by asking why Alibaba chose to issue new equity rather than fund the AI buildout from operating cash flow, debt, or asset sales.

Robert Wu’s reading: the “best case” would be for Alibaba’s profitable legacy e-commerce business to fund the AI buildout directly. That is not what is happening, because Alibaba is simultaneously fighting a costly local-delivery and shopping-cart war, largely against Meituan. That war has cooled since government intervention and mutual exhaustion, but it has not ended — so Alibaba cannot redirect that cash to AI. At the same time, AI investment cannot wait. The result, in Robert’s view, is a company fighting on multiple fronts at once rather than concentrating resources, which is why the equity raise landed badly with the market: Alibaba’s stock fell after the news, in part because Alibaba had been repurchasing its own shares before the raise, raising the question of why it needed to issue new equity so soon after buying stock back.

“They are really stretching themselves all over the place. And that’s what got the market... worried about.”

— Robert Wu

Insider buying that undercut its own signal

Immediately after the placement news, Joe Tsai, Jack Ma, and acting CEO Eddie Wu each bought shares personally, together totaling roughly HK$1 billion — an apparent attempt to show the market they have “skin in the game.” Steven Xiao and Robert both judged the signal as weak, and Robert identified a specific reason: the founders bought back in after the equity-issuance news, at a lower price than the investors who had just been asked to buy into the placement.

Robert also offered a structural explanation for why Alibaba’s leadership appears unusually reactive to short-term stock moves: the company sits in an unusual position where its founder-class shareholders (Tsai, Ma, and others) are not in day-to-day operating control, but still care deeply about the share price, while the operating management team runs the business day to day. He contrasted this with founder-led-and-controlled companies, or with companies under clean management-board mandates, where leadership would be less sensitive to daily price swings. This dynamic, in his view, is a reason for caution about Alibaba’s near-term decision-making — a view he said is shared by “most of the market investors” the two hosts talk to.

Where the AI strategy has already pivoted — and where it should go next

Asked which part of Alibaba’s AI strategy is most likely to generate revenue first, Robert pointed to a recent pivot away from consumer-facing ambitions. Earlier in the year, emphasis was on Qwen, Alibaba’s ChatGPT-equivalent consumer AI app, which was meant to integrate with e-commerce and food delivery, reportedly generating headline-grabbing order volumes before fading. Robert’s explanation was cultural rather than strategic: much of the visible campaign activity, he argued, is aimed at impressing internal management rather than the market, which produces flashy but poorly thought-through launches.

Robert’s own preference is for Alibaba to concentrate on enterprise cloud and AI — following the model he attributes to Microsoft, Amazon, and Google — leveraging Alibaba’s existing cloud business and in-house chips, rather than continuing to chase consumer integrations. He added a personal, clearly labeled opinion that the company “can be much better run if they are broken up into vertical dedicated arms.”

The wider field: why ByteDance may be the strongest contender nobody is discussing

Asked to compare Alibaba’s AI investment with Tencent and other players, Robert described China’s AI landscape as more fragmented than the US, where he sees OpenAI and Anthropic as the only two frontier labs that matter. In China, independent AI labs (the transcript names Kimi/Moonshot AI, DeepSeek, and MiniMax; one further name was not clearly transcribed) compete alongside the older internet platforms, and he flagged Tencent specifically as a strong contender in its own right — Steven added that Tencent’s cloud business runs neck and neck with Alibaba Cloud.

The conversation then turned to workplace collaboration tools: Steven compared Alibaba’s DingDing (钉钉) with ByteDance’s Feishu (飞书), noting both are widely adopted by businesses, small enterprises, and even government agencies for a similar mix of office-automation and messaging functionality.

Robert added that an upcoming Baiguan field trip to an AI and robotics lab will include a visit to ByteDance’s cloud service arm, which powers many of ByteDance Group’s key AI initiatives — and from there made the broader case for why ByteDance is a stronger AI contender than its public profile suggests, for three reasons:

First, its Doubao/TikTok-adjacent consumer AI products are already “in great use, generating a lot of revenues,” helped by the company’s existing base of short-video content to train on. Second, ByteDance has strong cloud and B2B service infrastructure. Third — and most distinctively — ByteDance is privately held, which Robert argues insulates it from the quarterly pressure that pushes public companies toward short-term, headline-driven moves. He cited an internal letter reportedly circulated about a month earlier by ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming, arguing against sacrificing long-term model quality for shortcuts like distilling other companies’ models, as evidence the company can genuinely take a longer view because its profitable core business funds its AI bets.

“They are not bound by quarterly results, and also they have a very profitable cash flow, positive main business to fund their own AI ventures.”

— Robert Wu

On Tencent specifically, Robert was more skeptical: he described it as trying to do everything itself (models, cloud) without leading in either, with one bright spot in WorkBuddy, its workplace/productivity AI agent tool — an area Tencent has not historically been strong in but where he says it is quietly performing well without heavy marketing — a deliberate cultural contrast, in his telling, to Alibaba’s more public promotional style. He declined to comment on Baidu’s AI position at all.

Investor implication: Robert’s framing suggests that reported AI progress across China’s listed internet majors should be read skeptically when it is heavily marketed, and that ByteDance’s private status is itself a competitive advantage worth tracking even though it limits external visibility into ByteDance’s actual AI financials.

‘Niu Lai’: An Amateur Film Beats AI in the Battle for Attention

An 86-minute animated film about a young calf, made by a mother-and-son duo over roughly five years with minimal resources, opened August 5 with no marketing, trailer, or promotional assets. It has since generated close to US$7 million in ticket sales and become one of the summer’s most talked-about films — not for its quality, which the hosts and online audiences describe as crude, but for how it went viral. Robert had seen the film in a theater; Steven had not.

Robert described the filmmaker as a former interior designer who reportedly built the animation using interior-design software, a detail other designers recognized online. Robert framed the film’s appeal as rooted in authenticity that cannot be manufactured: audiences in theaters laugh, curse, and film clips to share online — behavior actively discouraged at most screenings but implicitly embraced here. He linked this partly to timing: the film was made before generative AI existed as a viable shortcut, a five-year, fully manual production window that he does not expect to be replicated.

“The whole point of being authentic is it cannot be repeated. If it’s repeated, then... it’s not authentic anymore.”

— Robert Wu

Steven connected the film’s popularity to a broader social mood: an appetite for imperfection and unpolished authenticity as a counterpoint to what he described as an over-curated, over-censored media environment. He and Robert both noted the reaction has not stayed confined to China, framing it as a shared global response to “perfectly curated, crafted” content.

“People are looking for absurdity. People are looking for things that is off the track... there’s still holes in the systems that you could see something that is truly real.”

— Steven Xiao

Olivia drew a contrast with The Odyssey, another high-profile film of the summer that demands historical and philosophical context to appreciate — the opposite of this film’s no-analysis-required appeal. Robert added that the film’s marketing vacuum became part of its identity: the cinema he visited had no official poster, only a hand-drawn one made by staff, with a disclaimer describing the film as “trash” that patrons watch “at your own peril.”

On whether this can happen again, both hosts were skeptical, for the same reason: the pre-AI production window that made the film possible is closing fast, and any deliberate attempt to recreate the phenomenon would undercut the authenticity that made it work in the first place. Olivia raised a counter-possibility — that proving a project was made entirely by hand, without AI, could itself become a new kind of flex or marketing hook — which Robert allowed as “possible” without fully endorsing it.

Beijing’s Going-Global Playbook: Formalizing a Trend It Didn’t Start

On August 21, the Cyberspace Administration of China released a 2026–2030 action plan for cyberspace enterprises — covering AI labs, e-commerce platforms, cybersecurity firms, and software SMEs — that explicitly supports “orderly” overseas expansion in areas where China has identified competitive strengths: computing power, cloud services, AI, digital infrastructure, and e-commerce. Olivia asked what kind of support this actually signals and how it should be interpreted.

Robert’s core interpretation: Chinese government policy in this area is typically reactive, not directive. Companies such as ByteDance (TikTok), Xiaohongshu, Tmall, and BYD expanded overseas on their own commercial initiative, not because Beijing told them to. Once a trend is established and generating successful cases, government policy tends to formalize and promote it — which is the stage he believes this action plan represents.

He argued more policy documents like this one are coming, driven by a genuine regulatory gap: Chinese companies operating domestically face extensive regulation, but there is no clear framework for how their overseas operations should be governed, either from Beijing or in coordination with local jurisdictions. He pointed to a concrete consequence already visible: in Brazil, Chinese firms Didi and Meituan are competing fiercely against each other and against local incumbent iFood in food delivery, with reports of unfair practices and commercial espionage. Robert framed this pattern as unsurprising given how cutthroat competition already is inside China, but warned it risks exporting negative perceptions of Chinese business practices to new markets faster than Beijing can build tools to manage it.

“There hasn’t been a really good regulatory framework of the Chinese companies going global.”

— Robert Wu

Asked why the plan focuses on digital and AI firms specifically rather than consumer brands or automakers also expanding abroad, Robert noted the practical reason — the plan comes from the Cyberspace Administration, whose remit is internet, data, and AI — but added a substantive one: data, media, and AI carry more geopolitical sensitivity than, for instance, coffee, milk tea, or plush toys, which is why this category draws more regulatory attention first.

On whether this dynamic increases foreign-market mistrust of Chinese companies, Robert’s answer was more equivocal: he expects critics to read stricter oversight as evidence of state control over Chinese businesses operating abroad, but argued some coordination between home-country and local regulation is inevitable and, in cases like the Brazil food-delivery dispute, potentially welcomed by affected local competitors. His clear framing: local law always governs first, but following only local law is likely “not enough” going forward.

Investor and operator implication: expect more sector-specific “going global” policy documents, with digital/AI first in line given its sensitivity, and watch for whether Beijing follows with actual enforceable rules on outbound conduct rather than encouragement alone — particularly if more overseas disputes like the Brazil case draw international attention.

AI Guardrails at Home: Beijing Curbs Emotional AI Companions

China introduced nationwide rules, effective July, governing AI’s emotional interactions with users — restricting products designed to cultivate emotional dependency, manipulate users emotionally, or substitute for real relationships. The rules do not explicitly ban AI companion features, but ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent all pulled related features anyway, prompting backlash from users who had formed attachments to AI chatbots. Olivia noted the timing coincides with Meta’s roughly $16 billion US settlement over allegations it knowingly designed Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to children and teens.

Robert reads Beijing’s posture here as a deliberate departure from its usual “trial and error, wait and see” approach to emerging technology: because this category touches directly on how users’ minds and emotional attachments work, he expects a more conservative stance, with Beijing likely watching how the issue develops overseas (implicitly, in markets like the US) before formalizing further rules of its own.

Steven went further, endorsing the restriction outright as good policy, extending it to a broader critique of attention-optimized digital products and screen time, including limits on minors’ social media use.

“I genuinely believe that’s unhealthy for not only kids, but... the grown ups and the society... this is overall going in the right direction. I actually cheer for this kind of limitation.”

— Steven Xiao

Business implication: platforms should not read the absence of an explicit ban as safe harbor — the fact that major players self-removed features ahead of enforcement suggests the regulatory gray zone itself is being treated as high-risk. Companies building consumer AI products with emotionally engaging design will likely need to build compliance margin into monetization plans rather than wait for bright-line rules.

Unitree’s post-IPO swing

Unitree’s Shanghai listing valued the humanoid-robotics maker at roughly $9 billion at IPO, but shares surged as much as nearly 630% intraday, briefly implying a valuation of roughly $50–60 billion, before falling about 45% from that first-day peak within days.

Robert’s view, consistent with comments he says he made on a prior episode: China’s humanoid robotics sector is in a bubble, and that bubble will likely burst — but he also believes the sector needs successive bubbles like this one to progressively fund the industry’s development. He does not read the post-IPO slide as a good sign for other robotics companies preparing to list, since it demonstrates the valuation was not supported by fundamentals; if anything, he expects it to accelerate other robotics firms racing to list before sentiment cools further.

“We are, when it comes to robotics and especially humanoid robotics, in a bubble and this bubble could burst. But then... we probably need more bubbles like these, one after another, to really help bring the robotics industry in China to another level.”

— Robert Wu

Justin Sun and Jing Tian Breakup Blowout

Cryptocurrency entrepreneur Justin Sun and actress Jing Tian are at the center of a multi-layered public dispute following their breakup: an alleged surrogacy arrangement, a lawsuit from Sun seeking the return of RMB30 million from Jing and her parents, and a widely circulated online essay about the relationship — written by Sun and described as a fictionalized “novel” that nonetheless uses real names and details — that has since spawned viral micro-drama adaptations. Separately, Sun has said he uses Claude to make business decisions worth tens of millions of dollars daily, a claim that has become part of the online reaction to the story.

Robert noted the unusual origin of the scandal — ignited by an essay Sun wrote himself, rather than leaked footage or reporting — and pointed out Sun previously won a top prize in a Chinese high-school literary competition, which he says explains the essay’s polish in the original Chinese. Robert characterized Sun’s decade-plus public image as an “anti-hero” figure: not conventionally heroic, but not previously cast as a villain either, known for finding loopholes and self-promoting. This episode, in Robert’s reading, is the first time public sentiment has cast Sun as an outright villain, in a controversy he brought on himself.

“For more than a decade he is always this kind of anti-hero type of person... but in this specific case, made entirely by himself, he was finally seen as a villain.”

— Robert Wu

Steven focused on the public’s alignment with Jing Tian and on how the affair intersects with existing suspicion about her rapid rise in major productions at a young age (“who’s her godfather, who’s the backer”), which he says made her an easy object of public sympathy once the story broke. He was direct that the values on display — “crypto money, quick money, and using AI or social media to bully or outweigh another party” — run against what Chinese cultural and political norms want promoted to younger generations, and judged that Sun has likely done lasting reputational damage to himself with no way back.

Closing Note

The hosts closed the episode by acknowledging the recent tragedy at the Nepal–Tibet border, describing the reported events as horrific and offering condolences to victims. Robert tied the episode’s earlier discussion of unusually humid, extreme weather in Beijing to a broader point: that accelerating climate change is making previously impossible events possible, and that he sees a commercial and, in his words, “historical mission” for companies, industries, and governments to invest further in clean technology.

David is a Principal at The Lantau Group (TLG), a leading Asia-focused energy consultancy based in Shanghai. Having lived and worked in China for 15 years, David specializes in China’s energy sector, industrial development, trade, and political economy. His work has included advising multinational corporations, financial institutions, and industrial clients on topics ranging from power markets and manufacturing competitiveness to supply chains and regional development.

Beyond his professional work, David has traveled extensively throughout China and has a longstanding interest in economic geography, local development, and social ethnography, and has documented many fascinating human stories and observations at .

In this interview, we will ask David what’s so amazing about Yiwu and what lessons about US re-industrialization and the future of globalization we can learn from it.

A county-level city with global reach

Baiguan: David, in the upcoming Baiguan China Tour, you will lead a weekend visit to Yiwu. For readers who know little about the city, where is it, and what is it?

David Fishman: Yiwu is a county-level city under the jurisdiction of Jinhua金华, a prefecture-level city in central Zhejiang Province. It’s south of Hangzhou and easy to reach by high-speed rail. In most ways, it looks like a regular Chinese city. What makes it exceptional is the enormous small-commodities trading business that has grown there.

Baiguan: China’s city-tier system can be confusing to outsiders. Where does Yiwu fit?

David Fishman: The best-known tier ranking comes from Yicai’s Rising Lab, not an official designation. It ranks prefecture-level and higher cities, rather than county-level cities, so Yiwu does not receive its own position. It is folded into Jinhua, which is generally ranked as a second-tier city, after the “first tiers” and “new first tiers”.

So, you could use Jinhua’s ranking as a rough proxy, but that hides the most interesting feature of the region. Jinhua’s urban core is actually not that much larger or stronger than the county-level cities beneath it. Yiwu or another nearby city like Yongkang永康 both have substantial populations and economies, and their strength contributes to Jinhua’s aggregate ranking.

Suzhou is similar to this, because a lot of its overall strength comes from very strong county-level cities like Kunshan昆山.

In the Chinese administrative system, ‘county-level’ is just an administrative designation. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s small or poor.

Baiguan: Why visit Yiwu rather than one of China’s many other prosperous county-level cities?

David Fishman: Well, as someone who studied political economy, I would call Yiwu one of China’s greatest celebrations of state-backed private-market capitalism. Its small-commodities economy is built overwhelmingly by private manufacturers and distributors. These companies make products that are not strategic sectors requiring participation by state-owned enterprises, so the private sector dominates

But what makes the model fascinating is the way the municipal government participates. It does not need to operate the factories or distributors. Instead, it builds the giant marketplace and supports the surrounding ecosystem with fast business registrations, easy cross-border settlements, digital platforms, and other support services. So, the state builds and maintains a platform on which private firms can succeed.

In that sense, the municipality is kind of like an incubator or an angel investor, except that its investment is in an entire class of businesses rather than a chosen startup. It backs the general concept of small-commodity trade in Yiwu and trusts that the beneficiaries of that support will go on to make the city successful.

Baiguan: That can sound almost contradictory: an active local state enabling a highly private market.

David Fishman: Many countries support private-sector champions. I guess what’s unique about Yiwu is that the beneficiary is not one or two national champions; it is the small commodities private sector as a broad category. The city has organized itself around making thousands of small private businesses more competitive…that’s the city’s brand, and the source of its success.

The economics of a ten-cent hair clip

Baiguan: Yiwu is known for products that can look almost absurdly simple: socks, toys, Christmas decorations, and hair clips. Why might a ten-cent hair clip tell us as much about China’s industrial capabilities as a smartphone does?

David Fishman: If someone can sell a hair clip for just ten cents and remain in business, the producer has somehow covered raw materials, labor, rent, taxes, logistics, distribution, and a profit margin within that price. If you think about it, that’s an amazing achievement in production efficiency.

When the unit price is so low and the item is so commoditized, tiny differences are actually huge. The gap between ten cents and 9.9 cents may look like nothing to a consumer, but at manufacturing scale it can mean a lot. Each incremental reduction in price requires another improvement somewhere in the system.

There is also no brand premium to hide behind. This kind of product is nameless and interchangeable. It competes with production efficiency and ruthless low prices. Building that capability is, in its own way, as impressive as building a brand for which consumers will willingly pay a large premium.

Baiguan: For at least two decades, people have argued that rising wages should erode China’s advantage in lower-end manufacturing. Why has that not happened in the way many expected?

David Fishman: Wages certainly did rise. So, the mistaken assumption was that wages would always be the key component of competitiveness. Twenty years ago, that may have been closer to the truth for some really labor-intensive products. If most of the cost of a pair of socks was labor, then higher wages should have pushed production elsewhere.

But now the China experience is making it clear that there are so many other variables that matter too, like financing costs, automation level, supplier proximity, logistics depth and speed, reliability…even the returns producers are willing to accept. If firms keep compressing those costs while labor costs rise, they can remain the most competitive producers.

And buyers are not always looking only for the lowest cost. They also care whether a shipment can arrive within 48 hours, whether a supplier is reliable, or if the factory’s sales representative answers on WeChat within five minutes. China has spent all these years refining that whole package. Now their advantage comes from the whole accumulated system, not a single cheap labor input.

Manufacturing is an ecosystem, not a factory

Baiguan: During the tour, what will allow participants to see those efficiency gains rather than simply hear about them in the abstract?

David Fishman: Depending on the factory we visit, participants will probably see a substantial amount of automation. But the more important lesson is the seamlessness of the entire production process. Productivity is not just people working inside a factory. Raw materials, labor, capital, and production equipment all have to come together. Packaging must be ordered and delivered. Finished goods have to leave the factory, enter a logistics network, reach a distribution center, and then continue to the buyer.

In Yiwu, all of those functions are compressed into the same ecosystem. You can visit an automated factory and then a logistics zone that operates 24/7 with remote-controlled cranes and smart autonomous vehicles. Seeing the whole chain makes it clear that the goods are cheap because every part of the process has been coordinated efficiently, not simply because labor is cheap.

Baiguan: When Americans talk about bringing manufacturing back, they often imagine reopening a factory. What does Yiwu reveal about what that ambition actually entails?

David Fishman: First, it is important not to exaggerate. The United States has not forgotten how to make things. It still has a substantial high-tech manufacturing base and workforce. But what has weakened is the broader public understanding of the connections among all the components of productivity.

A productive factory needs machines, industrial robots, laser cutters, CNC equipment, and raw materials. It needs experienced workers and technicians and schools that are training them. It needs capital, sometimes patient capital if returns will not appear immediately. It also needs sales channels, distribution channels, and a reliable, robust logistics solution.

Many Americans are now really disconnected from the business of making things as a complete system. Even much of the workforce that works with its hands is concentrated in trades like HVAC installation or electrical work, rather than manufacturing. Those are valuable skills, but they do not necessarily provide the same view of the entire productivity ecosystem that a factory manager or procurement manager develops.

In Yiwu, you can watch wholesale become retail and see how logistics connects the labor and capital equipment in the factory to the final user. The relationships suddenly click. You appreciate how difficult the system is to assemble, how precious it is once it exists, and how difficult it can be to recover after it has been lost.

Why reliable energy matters

Baiguan: You are primarily an energy specialist. How much of China’s manufacturing competitiveness is really an electricity or energy story?

David Fishman: It varies by sector, of course. But in any energy-intensive business, whether the main input is electricity, coking coal, natural gas, or something else, a procurement manager cares about two things: whether the supply is stable and whether the price is stable. Can the company obtain enough energy at an attractive and predictable price?

China does very well on both dimensions. A manufacturer can build out a cost structure for one year, three years, or even longer in advance and discuss it with a financier. Energy is a bankable input rather than a moving target. The same logic applies very obviously these days to something like a data center, which consumes large amounts of electricity to sell data services. The developer and financier need to know that the electricity supply and price are dependable.

Ideally, energy should be boring. It should not be the input that occupies management’s attention or creates a persistent headache. China has done a very good job of making energy a reliable part of the operating environment.

Baiguan: So predictability can matter even more than absolute cheapness?

David Fishman: Yes. Even if the price is somewhat higher than a manufacturer might have originally hoped, a predictable price allows the company to know what its costs will be years from now. It can then look for efficiencies elsewhere. When energy costs are volatile, they become an X factor in every plan. Stability removes that uncertainty.

The Global South and a new geography of trade

Baiguan: China is exporting less to the United States but more to many parts of the Global South. Is that diversification mainly defensive, or are we seeing the creation of a genuinely different geography of globalization?

David Fishman: Well, my most basic thought is that any export revenue is unit price multiplied by volume. If an exporter can sell fewer units at a higher margin to wealthier customers, that is easier from a sales perspective. Replacing the same revenue by selling more units at lower margins to less wealthy markets requires more work. But you can do it.

Companies will do that work because their survival, their health, and their employees’ jobs depend on it. Chinese exporters have already proved that they are entirely capable of doing it. But I would not go so far as to say it was their preferred plan. A solar panel manufacturer does not naturally want to spend 30% more effort or time selling lower-priced products simply to earn the same amount of money.

I would therefore describe the shift as a defensive, second-best strategy rather than an intentional first choice. Nevertheless, the outcome is real. It is reshaping global trade flows and commercial relationships, even if that was not the original objective.

Baiguan: Who will participants actually encounter in Yiwu’s markets and streets?

David Fishman: The most visible foreign traders tend to come from the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America. There are Western European and American buyers as well, but they are not the dominant visual presence in the market, walking around on the streets.

Some visitors come for a week to procure goods, but many foreigners have also settled in Yiwu. They move their families there, buy cars, open stores, and establish trading companies because Yiwu has become the center of their working lives. So, besides the visiting traders, the city has a substantial permanent foreign community. Relative to its size, downtown Yiwu feels like one of the most visibly international places in China.

The food options you have in Yiwu make its international characteristics especially obvious. Yiwu does not merely have one or two good international restaurants. It has multiple strong Turkish restaurants, as well as Afghan, Syrian, Georgian, Armenian, and many other global options. In my view, it has the best Middle Eastern food in China. Those restaurants exist because the international community is durable, not superficial, and they demand authentic food from their own cultures.

Baiguan: If the world becomes more protectionist and fragmented, does Yiwu become less important, or can fragmentation create more opportunities for a place built on matching thousands of suppliers with thousands of markets?

David Fishman: Actually, I would question the premise here. With the exception of a small number of countries that have pulled back from certain international trade flows, the world may be becoming more interconnected, not less. If China replaces one large market such as the United States with ten Global South markets, the number and density of connections increase.

China did not necessarily choose this outcome. It has been forced to replace a few markets with many markets. But the result is that trade relationships are realigning around China rather than disappearing. That makes Yiwu more important as a matching, procurement, and distribution hub.

Buyers do not need to visit Yiwu physically. I heard from vendors in Yiwu that Western European and American customers often work through agents or use online B2B channels. On the other hand, Global South buyers are more likely to come themselves, walk the market for several days, touch the products, and say, ‘I like this one, but I want it in blue and I want my brand name on it.’ Yiwu is still important to everyone, but the physical market provides tangible, visible evidence of the Global South’s role in contemporary trade.

Baiguan: Finally, what will participants see in Yiwu that they are unlikely to grasp from trade data or a conventional factory visit?

David Fishman: One of the most striking features is the Muslim ecosystem that has developed around the city’s international trade. Because so many traders from the Middle East and North Africa seek halal food and services, Yiwu has this huge network of halal restaurants, mosques, and businesses with signs in Arabic.

That demand has also attracted Chinese Muslims from other parts of the country to work in restaurants and related service businesses. Foreign traders settle in the city and form families there. During my visits, I have seen many intercultural couples and families of a kind that I do not often encounter elsewhere in China.

Yiwu is therefore not only a trade hub. It is a wealthy, developed, modern city with unusually cosmopolitan street life for a place of its administrative size. People often assume that international China means Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen. Yiwu is an example of a different model, built from wholesale trade and everyday interaction between Chinese residents and visitors and settlers from the Global South.

In some way, it might be a glimpse of a future China with more immigration and deeper integration with the rest of the world. Yiwu is not merely a place where China sells to the world. It is also a place where you can see what a more diverse, internationally integrated China might look like.

Subscribe now

If you want to know more details about the upcoming Yiwu tour in collaboration with David, RSVP and get full details below.

To ensure the best experience, space is limited to 20 seats for each leg.

Early-bird pricing ends September 13.

To read a previous Q&A with Mr. Gao Erji of Caixin, our partner in the AI & Robotics leg, read here:

You can also check out the Q&A of regularly asked questions below:

Please feel free to contact us at Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with any questions.

1.The August decline was not simply about “foreign capital leaving China”

There is a common view that China’s capital markets and other emerging markets have a seesaw relationship, especially with tech-heavy markets such as South Korea and Taiwan. When those markets fall, capital rotates into China; when they rebound, capital flows back out. This is also one reason why indices such as EMXC (Emerging Markets ex-China) exist.

Why? Some argue that it comes down to AI exposure versus a lack of AI exposure—in other words, that Chinese companies do not have enough AI. I also think this conclusion is wrong, and I will come back to that later.

The reality, however, is that genuine foreign inflows into China’s A-share market have already become very limited, while incremental capital in Hong Kong has mainly come from mainland China through southbound flows. Even in July, I did not see strong interest among foreign investors in increasing their China exposure. If anything, they continued to stay underweight. Based on my conversations with institutional investors, the two investor bases may overlap far less than people assume. Put simply, many investors are just not interested in China and are not paying much attention to it.

If they never really came back, they could hardly be “leaving” again.

The pessimism in August was not mainly about investors focused on the US, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan suddenly turning bearish on China again. In my view, the reasons were much more specific to Chinese companies themselves than to the external environment or global sentiment. I will focus mainly on Chinese companies listed in Hong Kong and the US, because they illustrate the point more clearly. After all, foreign investors still face certain barriers when investing directly in A-shares.

2. Chinese companies’ second-quarter results were actually not that bad

Looking at the second quarter alone, many companies broadly met expectations. They were not strong; they were simply in line with already-low expectations. Tencent, Alibaba, Meituan, Xiaomi, Kuaishou, and others broadly maintained the trends seen in the first quarter, and their core businesses did not collapse. Because China’s consumer and e-commerce activity is extensively tracked by third-party data providers, the market already knew that the second quarter would be fairly weak. There was therefore no major rebound in expectations; companies were simply grinding forward against a low-expectation backdrop.

Some companies even came in slightly above expectations:

1. Take JD.com. As spending on food delivery declined and losses narrowed, the rebound in profit was clear. Adjusted net profit rose 21% year on year to nearly RMB 9 billion.

2. Take Meituan. The market had originally expected the company to remain loss-making throughout 2026, with the food-delivery business not reaching a quarterly profitability inflection point until 2027. But in reality, the food-delivery business had already turned profitable in the second quarter this year. The company as a whole reported more than RMB 2 billion in adjusted net profit in Q2—it made money. It is also expected to remain profitable in the third quarter, meaning the inflection point arrived roughly six months earlier than the market had generally expected.

3. Take Xiaomi. In investor communications, the company explicitly mentioned that “the rise in memory-chip prices is slowing,” which matters because memory has been one of its biggest sources of cost pressure. In addition, according to my channel checks, smartphone makers including Xiaomi and OPPO rejected Samsung’s request for a substantial increase in memory prices. Why did they have the confidence to push back? Because they now have a backup plan: China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies has already become the world’s fourth-largest memory-chip supplier.

There are many other examples like these. Taken together, they suggest that the financial condition of Chinese companies in the second quarter was broadly stable.

3. But will the third quarter of 2026 be worse?

Read more

Before today’s post — a quick note. Applications are open for the 2026 Autumn Baiguan China Tour, a month-long “marathon” of modular expeditions across October and November: Robotics & AI in Beijing, advanced manufacturing from Foshan to Shenzhen, the next energy cycle across Shanghai–Suzhou–Hangzhou, and premium consumption in Shanghai — plus weekend immersions in Datong, Yiwu and Nanjing. Early-bird pricing through September 13.

Market commentary: the August tape

August brought the bulk of Q2 reporting, and the pattern was consistent: results were broadly fine, but guidance was poor.

Hong Kong gave back July’s gains, and in our reading the proximate cause was capex. The large platforms disclosed heavy AI spending, and the market immediately asked what the return on it looks like. China is running out of phase with the US here: global investors are now interrogating AI capex ROI, and that is precisely the moment Chinese companies have begun to spend. An already-cheap market took another leg down.

The extreme sentiment can be read off individual names. For instance, Kuaishou has fallen to roughly the level of its cash, with the value ascribed to Kling now close to nil — a revenue-generating business that the market has effectively decided is worth nothing. That was the mood of the Hong Kong market.

But there could be upside surprise worth watching. Open-source models keep taking global share from closed-source ones, and the large majority of those open-source models are Chinese. We cannot say when this turns, but if the narrative shifts to Chinese open-source models capturing a meaningful slice of the global token market, that is a genuine re-rating catalyst — and it would make today’s levels an entry point rather than a warning.

Given the macro, we would frame China less as an allocation to “the Chinese market” and more as an allocation to a handful of strong sectors within it — and at the index level, we do not see much comparative advantage at this time of the year. We will expand this in today’s monthly view below.

Aaron from our team will follow up later this week with a separate market commentary that goes considerably deeper on the August selloff — what it was and was not about, where the Q3 guidance pressure is concentrated, and the non-consensus case for where the upside surprise could come from.

Our Views This Month

Subscribe now

Read more

Yijing also writes at

Baiguan: China won enormous global market share in solar panels, batteries and EVs. If that was phase one, what is phase two?

Yijing: Phase one was hardware scale. Phase two is system intelligence.

China has already demonstrated its ability to manufacture clean-energy technologies at extraordinary scale and drive down their cost. The next challenge is to make renewable power, storage, electric mobility, industrial demand, and computing infrastructure operate as one increasingly complex system.

The scale of that achievement also explains why the bottleneck is changing. In 2025, China added 438 GW of grid-connected wind and solar capacity, taking cumulative wind and solar capacity to 1.84 TW, or about 47% of the country’s total generating capacity. Wind and solar generation accounted for about 22% of total electricity consumption, while renewables as a whole supplied 38.5%. The gap between the share of installed capacity and the share of electricity actually generated illustrates the next challenge: converting abundant but variable assets into power that is available when and where it is most valuable.

Location and timing are increasingly important also because China’s renewable resources, industrial demand and population centers are not evenly distributed. In 2025, cross-provincial and cross-regional electricity trading reached 1.59 trillion kWh, while continuous provincial spot-market operation achieved near-national coverage. These mechanisms allow prices to reflect periods of surplus and scarcity more accurately and give generators, storage operators and users stronger incentives to change their behavior.

For investors, the question is no longer simply: Who can manufacture at scale? It is: Who controls the critical points that make the whole system work?

Those critical points may include forecasting renewable output, routing electricity across regions, shifting demand between hours, aggregating distributed assets and responding to real-time prices. As these functions become more important, the industry’s profit pools can migrate away from the largest physical assets and toward the companies that coordinate them.

That moves value toward grid flexibility, power electronics, energy management, storage monetization, and the integration of energy with AI and advanced manufacturing.

Baiguan: In which areas can we find next clean-tech winners?

Yijing: When hardware becomes abundant, value often moves toward the control points. The next major winner may be less recognizable than a solar-panel or EV manufacturer, but more deeply embedded in how the entire system functions.

Cooling determines how efficiently AI infrastructure can operate. Power electronics control how electricity is converted and managed. Energy trading and virtual power plant platforms connect distributed assets to electricity markets. Thermal management systems influence the performance of EVs, batteries, and data centers.

These companies may be less visible to consumers, but they can control performance, reliability, and operating economics.

China is beginning to formalize markets for these coordination functions. National policy now defines virtual power plants as market participants that can aggregate distributed generation, storage and flexible loads, with nationwide regulation-capability targets of more than 20 GW by 2027 and more than 50 GW by 2030. Subject to local rules, they can participate in medium- and long-term electricity markets, spot markets and ancillary-service markets.

This is particularly relevant to the tour’s NIO Power visit: charging and battery-swap infrastructure can begin as mobility infrastructure and gradually acquire a second role as a distributed power-system asset.

Moreover, frontier technologies such as perovskite solar cells and controlled nuclear fusion may also give rise to new winners. We will also cover them in the upcoming tour as well.

Baiguan: Does AI infrastructure create a burden for the energy transition, or a new investment opportunity?

Yijing: AI is not simply creating another source of electricity demand. It is forcing energy and computing infrastructure to be designed together.

Data centers require reliable power, grid connections, cooling, storage and backup capacity. These constraints are creating opportunities across the infrastructure stack.

The expected increase is substantial. In the International Energy Agency’s base case, electricity consumption by Chinese data centers rises by around 175 TWh between 2024 and 2030, an increase of about 170%. Data centers are also geographically concentrated loads, so their pressure on a particular grid connection, substation, or local power market can be much greater than their share of national electricity use would suggest.

The most interesting companies will not merely sell more electricity or more computing equipment. They will solve the points where the two systems meet: power availability, thermal efficiency, intelligent load management and the integration of generation and storage.

AI could become one of the greatest new demands on the power system—and one of the strongest catalysts for modernizing it. We will explore these questions during our visits to AliCloud and Sanhua.

Baiguan: If many Chinese companies can scale, where can an industrial company still build a durable moat?

Yijing: Scale is a capability. It is not necessarily a moat.

In China, one of the most difficult—and most critical—advantages is the ability to survive and compound across cycles. Many companies can grow during an industry upswing. Far fewer can continue investing, retaining customers, and protecting their economics amid price competition, policy changes, technology shifts, and demand cycles.

That resilience may come from proprietary technology, manufacturing quality, customer qualification, capital discipline, system integration capability, or the ability to identify the next growth curve before the existing one matures.

In many industrial markets, the moat is created by a combination rather than a single protected technology. A mission-critical component may be relatively inexpensive compared with the final product, but replacing it can require renewed testing, system redesign, reliability validation and changes to the customer’s production process. Companies that combine product performance with manufacturing yield, application engineering, customer certification, service networks and the ability to support clients globally can therefore retain pricing power even in markets characterized by intense headline competition.

Another increasingly important advantage is the ability to move from selling an individual product to solving a system-level problem. A company that understands how its component affects energy consumption, operating reliability, and the economics of the customer’s full system may be able to capture more value than a competitor that sells largely on unit price.

The real test is not simply whether a company can become large. It is whether it can remain strategically relevant, financially healthy, and commercially competitive across multiple cycles. In the Chinese market, that long-term adaptability is exceptionally difficult to build—and absolutely critical to survival. One case we will examine during the tour is GCL, a first-generation Chinese solar company that has remained strategically relevant through multiple industry cycles.

Baiguan: What is most often misunderstood about China’s industrial policy?

Yijing: China is often viewed from outside as a predominantly top-down system. Policy direction matters, but it explains only part of how industries actually develop.

Central policy can establish strategic priorities. State capital can support infrastructure and absorb early risk. Local governments compete to attract companies, talent and supply chains. Private companies then compete intensely on technology, cost, customers, financing and execution.

Research mapping more than 768,000 Chinese industrial-policy documents issued between 2000 and 2022 illustrates this division of labor. Only 13% were issued by the central government, compared with 45% at the provincial level and 39% at the city level. Central authorities were more likely to set strategic priorities and use regulatory tools, while local governments relied more heavily on infrastructure, subsidies, labor support, and industrial clustering to attract companies.

If you truly understand this market, you also see its highly market-driven—and in many sectors intensely capitalist—side. Companies must commercialize quickly, win customers, raise capital, recruit talent and defend market share. Policy may help create the playing field, but it does not determine which company ultimately wins.

China’s industrial system is thus best understood as a combination of strategic direction, local experimentation, private entrepreneurship and intense market competition. That interaction—not policy alone—is what international investors need to understand.

One of the best places to visit in order to have a good grasp of these central-local-business dynamics is Suzhou Industrial Park, one of China’s very first industrial parks, which we will also visit thoroughly this time.

Baiguan: What can investors understand during five days in Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou that they cannot learn from reports or conferences?

Yijing: Reports can tell you what China has built. Being on the ground shows you what it looks like at scale.

Participants will enter real operating environments—not simply conference rooms—and see technologies, production facilities, energy assets and infrastructure in context. The physical scale, speed of deployment and integration across supply chains are difficult to understand from data alone.

More importantly, site visits make it possible to test the operating assumptions behind the data. Is a storage asset actually being dispatched, and how is it paid? Is a manufacturing advantage based on automation, yield, supplier density or simply lower labour and capital costs? Is a data center constrained by chips, grid access, power quality or cooling? Is a startup’s demonstration connected to a repeatable customer need? These questions are difficult to answer from a corporate presentation alone.

The second difference is access. Through 2060 Advisory’s long-standing relationships, participants will engage directly with senior leaders and decision-makers behind the selected institutions—the people responsible for strategy, technology, investment and operations. These conversations are difficult to access independently, and even harder to assemble across multiple leading institutions in five days.

Together, the site access and senior-level dialogue allow investors to understand not only what companies have achieved, but how their leaders think, what they are building next, where the real constraints lie and where future value may emerge.

If you want to know more details about the upcoming energy tour in collaboration with Yijing, RSVP and get full details here:·

To read a previous Q&A with Mr. Gao Erji of Caixin, our partner in the AI & Robotics leg, read here:

You can also check out the Q&A of regularly asked questions below:

Please feel free to contact us at Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with any questions.

Last week, the 2026 World Robot Conference (WRC) concluded in Beijing. ICYMI, Amber published her own field notes about the event yesterday.

Today, we are delighted to invite someone who was deeply involved with the WRC as well as the broader China’s tech industry, Mr. GAO Erji, executive president of Caixin Media and managing director of Caixin Data, to pick his brain on his takeaways about WRC, his own views about AI and robotics in general, and what to expect in the upcoming AI & Robotics tour in Beijing that Caixin Data and Baiguan collaborate on in October.

Mr. Gao (Linkedin) also writes a personal newsletter at Gao’s Substack.

Q: Mr. Gao, please introduce a bit about yourself and Caixin Data.

A: I am Gao Erji. Before joining Caixin, I spent a decade as an investment banker and led the execution of more than 50 cross-border M&A transactions. For the past twelve years, I have been with Caixin, where my original mission was to upgrade our financial databases with AI. Through five strategic acquisitions, we built Caixin Data into what it is today. In 2017, Caixin founded its AI Lab to drive the technological infrastructure underpinning our intelligence services. I also serve as a strategic advisor to several institutions, and I have written some two hundred novels.

Caixin has been ranked ninth worldwide in the newly released 2026 Global Digital Subscription Report, with 1.2 million paid subscribers, confirming its position as the largest subscription-based news organization outside the U.S. and U.K. Our journalism is defined by depth, rigor, and professionalism. Beyond news, we host more than twenty high-end global forums each year, attended by heads of state, central bankers, and global business leaders. Caixin Data sits at the intersection of this editorial heritage and artificial intelligence, transforming decades of proprietary content and structured financial data into AI-ready assets.

That combination has become increasingly important with the rise of generative AI. General-purpose models can absorb enormous quantities of public information, but professional financial applications require a different layer of infrastructure: structured company and industry data, traceable sources, consistent taxonomies, and information whose provenance can be verified. In this sense, the development of financial AI is not simply a race to build larger models. It is also a race to connect those models to reliable professional knowledge.

Q: Would you want to share some takeaways about the WRC?

A: August 2026 has cemented Beijing as the global hub for robotics. Hot on the heels of the annual World Robot Conference, the 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games unfolded in quick succession. I attended both events in full. I have several takeaways to share.

First, both the conference and the Games have set new records in overall scale.

The expansion is visible in the numbers. The second World Humanoid Robot Games brought together 666 teams and 2,056 robots from 16 countries, compared with 280 teams and more than 500 robots at the inaugural event in 2025. Chinese participation alone included 641 teams and 1,975 robots representing 157 companies and 200 universities and research institutions.

Second, we are witnessing tangible leaps in robotic performance. Moves such as spinning back kicks have become standard capabilities for humanoid robots. Robots have comfortably shattered human world records in sprinting, high‑jump, long‑jump, and long‑distance running, while demonstrating competence in tennis, badminton, and other sports.

But athletic records are arguably less important than the increasing emphasis on practical tasks. This year’s competition expanded scenario-based events covering factories, hotels, homes and logistics, including assembly, housekeeping and emergency-response tasks. More than 40% of the tests require full autonomy. In other words, the benchmark is gradually shifting from whether a robot can perform an impressive movement to whether it can perceive, decide and complete useful tasks reliably without human intervention.

Third, World Action Models are gaining broader adoption across industries. This signals rapid, mutual iteration across algorithms, data architectures, generalization capabilities, robot hardware‑software stacks, and supply chains.

The significance is that robotics development is increasingly becoming a full-stack optimization problem. Improvements in models can generate better training data and control policies; better actuators and sensors make more complex behaviors possible; deployment then generates new real-world data that can be fed back into the models. The speed of progress therefore depends not on any single breakthrough but on how quickly these layers can iterate together.

Fourth, traditional industries are rapidly integrating into robotics value chains and flagship robotics events. Incumbent enterprises are rolling out robotic‑related use‑cases for exhibition. For instance, telecom operators have launched their own robotics offerings; automotive OEMs and component suppliers are releasing either complete humanoid robot units or robotic hardware components. For our part, Caixin brought our AI-powered financial tool suite to demonstrate at the event.

Lastly, participation by 16 nations in the Robot Games underscores China’s use of AI and robotics as instruments of international outreach. Indeed, AI and robotics are emerging as pivotal pillars for China’s global technological cooperation.

Q: Let’s wind back a bit. DeepSeek last year changed the international perception of Chinese AI almost overnight. But was DeepSeek really an exceptional breakthrough, or was it simply the moment outsiders finally noticed an ecosystem that had already become much stronger?

A: DeepSeek was not an overnight miracle but the inevitable result of years of foundational investment. Liang Wenfeng and his team at High-Flyer Quant had spent years building underlying algorithms and talent density long before the world took notice. The international sense of surprise simply reflects how little outsiders had been tracking China’s AI ecosystem. DeepSeek was the moment the world finally noticed a system that had already grown formidable.

This is not hindsight. Even if you just read us, for example, Caixin was tracking DeepSeek well before the global spotlight arrived. On August 31, 2022, Caixin published a report on DeepSeek titled DeepSeek’s Rise Sparks Arms Race Among Major AI Model Developers. In May 2024, we reported on the release of DeepSeek-V2 and its industry-shaking pricing strategy—dubbed the “Pinduoduo of AI”—which forced major tech firms into a price war. In late December 2024, weeks before the R1 sensation, we covered the launch of DeepSeek-V3, noting its training cost of merely $5.58 million and its performance on par with GPT-4o.

Q: China appears to be producing an extraordinary number of AI models, robotics companies and embodied-AI startups. How much of this represents genuine technological differentiation, and how much is simply capital and policy creating too many similar companies?

A: In the early stages of any technological revolution, dense capital and policy support are prerequisites for breakthroughs. After the initial “hundred-model war,” the foundation-layer LLM landscape has consolidated significantly. Survivors are now accelerating into vertical scenarios, while robotics firms are differentiating along world models, joint modules, and force-control algorithms.

For LLMs, the important change is not simply that fewer companies remain at the foundation-model layer, but that competition is moving to different layers of the stack. Some companies are competing on reasoning and multimodality; others on inference cost, long-context processing or open-source ecosystems.

As for robotics, China’s dense manufacturing ecosystem reinforces this process. Robotics companies can draw on existing supply chains in motors, reducers, sensors, batteries, automotive electronics and precision manufacturing rather than building every component ecosystem from scratch. That lowers the cost and time required to experiment with different hardware configurations. But it does not eliminate the fundamental problem: many companies can build a robot; far fewer have yet demonstrated a repeatable, economically valuable application.

Q: In the upcoming tour that we collaborate on together, we are going to hold meetings with C-level and even founding-level people of Moonshot (Kimi) and Zhipu (GLM). What do you expect visitors can seek answers about?

A: With Kimi, visitors should press on two fronts: first, how Moonshot converts its long-context advantage into a sustainable business model in a Chinese consumer market that remains cautious about paying for software; second, how that capability will integrate with serious professional use cases beyond chat.

With Zhipu, the critical questions are how its aggressive open-source strategy translates into commercial returns, and how it balances technological ambition with the immediate demands of enterprise and financial clients in on-premise settings.

These are deliberately different questions because the two companies represent different routes toward commercialization. The interesting comparison for visitors is therefore not simply which company has the stronger model, but how different technical strengths, product strategies and customer bases translate into durable businesses.

Q: China seems particularly strong at taking technologies out of the laboratory and turning them into cheap, manufacturable products. Does that give China an unusual advantage in embodied AI compared with purely software-based AI?

A: Manufacturing scale is an important part of China’s DNA, but we believe the current wave of AI and embodied intelligence is driven less by supply-chain cost advantages than by sustained R&D investment and the research density created by a massive engineering talent pool.

A mature supply chain can reduce the cost of actuators, sensors, batteries, controllers and mechanical components, and it allows prototypes to be redesigned and manufactured quickly. China’s existing strength in automotive electronics, industrial automation and precision manufacturing clearly provides a favorable environment for robotics; the country’s dense and vertically integrated supply chains are widely regarded as one reason Chinese humanoid companies can iterate rapidly and reduce hardware costs.

But cheap hardware alone does not produce embodied intelligence. The harder frontier increasingly lies in perception, planning, manipulation, generalization and the accumulation of high-quality interaction data. That requires research organizations, algorithms and engineering talent capable of making the hardware progressively more intelligent. China’s real advantage, therefore, may lie in the combination: a large research and engineering workforce operating inside a manufacturing system where ideas can move unusually quickly from model to prototype to physical deployment.

The upcoming tour will allow you to take a close look at how exactly this unique combination creates synergy.

Q: Robotics seems to develop really rapidly in China. Are you afraid this could be a huge bubble? What would the upcoming tour help answer this question?

A: Some valuation inflation is normal in the early phase of any technology wave. Caixin has recently launched an Embodied Intelligence Long-Term Value Index precisely to warn against applying traditional valuation frameworks to this sector.

The difficulty is that technological progress and investment excess can coexist. The existence of speculative valuations does not mean the underlying technological transition is unreal; conversely, rapid improvements in robot performance do not guarantee that every company participating in the boom will generate attractive returns.

That is why commercialization matters. Visitors should distinguish between demonstrations and repeatable deployments: Who is actually paying for the robot? What task does it replace or augment? How reliable must it become before the economics work? How much human supervision is still required? And does each additional deployment generate data that improves the product?

This distinction is becoming particularly visible at the Robot Games themselves. Athletic performances attract attention, but scenario-based tests such as factory assembly, restaurant service and EV charging expose much harder problems involving perception, precise manipulation and recovery from errors.

The upcoming tour will allow visitors to verify underlying technical strengths firsthand, and assess for yourself the level of froth in current valuation levels.

Q: China’s technology policy frequently creates intense competition rather than protecting national champions. Is this deliberate? And does the resulting overcompetition ultimately accelerate innovation or destroy returns?

A: This reflects a deliberate preference for market competition over industrial policy protectionism.

In practice, this creates an unusual combination of policy direction and decentralized competition. The central government may identify a strategic sector, but numerous cities, funds, universities and private companies then pursue competing technical routes and commercial models. Local governments and enterprises frequently collaborate through “tournament” mechanisms such as technology challenges and competitive grants. (One part of our upcoming tour will take us to Yizhuang, a key high-tech zone in Beijing, and see how that central-local relationship works in practice.)

The result can look inefficient from the outside: duplicated factories, overlapping research programs and periods of severe price competition. Yet similar competitive dynamics have appeared in industries ranging from solar and batteries to electric vehicles. Competition forces companies to reduce costs, shorten development cycles and continuously improve products.

For venture investors, high uncertainty is the price of entry. In Chinese tech, one must accept that the winner may take all, yet identifying that winner early is exceptionally difficult.

On the other hand, this intense competition may produce interesting “picks and shovels” plays. Just as in the EV industry, the better investment may not be EVs but batteries, overcompetition in robotics in general does not rule out the possibilities of bottlenecks in the supply chains. And you can only find those bottlenecks by seeing it with your own eyes.

Q: If you had to choose one part of China’s AI or robotics ecosystem that international investors are currently overestimating, and one that they are underestimating, what would they be?

A: Overestimated: Vertical applications of foundation models. Many investors assume LLMs can rapidly penetrate vertical industries, yet acquiring high-quality proprietary data, mastering complex domain knowledge, and closing commercial loops are far harder than the narratives suggest. A number of vertical-application stories are overblown.

Underestimated: The upside from combining traditional industry assets with AI. Take Caixin as an example. Decades of accumulated content assets, financial databases, and analytical expertise, when augmented by AI, can unlock value far beyond market expectations. The “traditional professional asset + AI” model—in content verification, financial analysis, and industrial research—offers substantial headroom that investors have largely ignored.

The key distinction is between possessing information and possessing information that has already been accumulated, structured, and repeatedly tested inside a professional workflow. A financial database assembled over decades contains not only raw records but classifications, entity relationships, historical series and institutional knowledge about how professionals actually use the information. Similar advantages exist in law, medicine, engineering and other knowledge-intensive industries.

AI can lower the marginal cost of interrogating those assets dramatically. Tasks that once required an analyst to search multiple databases, read dozens of documents and manually reconcile information can increasingly be performed through natural-language interfaces and agentic workflows. That does not make the underlying professional asset less important. It can make it more valuable, because AI dramatically expands the number of ways in which that asset can be queried and recombined.

Q: If we return to Beijing five years from now, which of today’s seemingly futuristic industries do you think will have become completely ordinary, and which ones will probably still be mostly demonstrations?

A: AI-powered automation will become as ordinary as water and electricity—ubiquitous infrastructure across business and government. Special-purpose robots for specific industrial and service scenarios will also be deployed at scale. General-purpose humanoid robots in households, however, will likely remain constrained by safety, ethics, and technical feasibility, still largely confined to showrooms. The same applies to high-level autonomous driving in complex urban environments.

The important distinction is between generality and economic usefulness. A robot does not need human-level general intelligence to create significant economic value. Machines optimized for warehouses, factories, inspection, hospitality or other bounded environments can become commercially important much earlier precisely because the range of situations they must handle can be constrained.

Another key area to watch is commercial space, which our upcoming tour will also touch on: Low-earth-orbit satellite constellations and their downstream applications—satellite broadband, remote-sensing analytics, and IoT connectivity—will likely have shifted from experimental to operational. However, commercial human spaceflight and space tourism will probably remain in the demonstration phase, constrained by cost, regulation, and crewed-safety requirements.

Q: China has severe constraints on access to cutting-edge AI chips. Yet Chinese AI development has continued remarkably quickly. Has the semiconductor constraint actually changed the trajectory of Chinese AI, and where are its effects most visible?

A: The constraints have indeed altered the trajectory. On one hand, they have accelerated domestic AI chip R&D; the gap with global leaders persists, but iteration continues. On the other, investment has structurally shifted upstream—toward chip design, advanced packaging, and compute leasing—to build supply-chain redundancy and resilience.

It’s not just GPUs. Constraints alter engineering decisions throughout the AI stack. Developers have stronger incentives to improve model efficiency, optimize inference, use mixture-of-experts architectures, make better use of available accelerators and reduce the amount of compute required for a given level of performance. DeepSeek became an internationally visible example of this broader pressure toward efficiency.

At the same time, substitution is incomplete. The performance gap at the frontier remains important, particularly for training the largest models and for workloads dependent on mature software ecosystems. The result is therefore neither “export controls have stopped Chinese AI” nor “export controls have failed completely.” They have raised costs and changed investment priorities while simultaneously strengthening the incentive to develop domestic alternatives.

Q: AI is increasingly becoming an information problem rather than merely a model problem: who owns reliable data, who can structure it, and who can let agents use it safely. Does China have an underappreciated advantage here because of the enormous digitization of its economy, or does fragmented and restricted data remain a weakness?

A: China possesses abundant data resources, yet vertical-domain data remains fragmented across institutions. Systematic integration is the next critical hurdle. For example, Caixin Data has invested heavily in proprietary economic and financial databases, and we currently provide RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) services to major LLM companies. At the same time, we observe that some model builders rely on crude, low-cost data acquisition, which is degrading output quality. Professional-grade verification and quality-assessment services for model outputs represent a significant frontier—one that Caixin is actively exploring.

The distinction between quantity and quality will become increasingly important as AI moves into professional applications. The open internet provides enormous amounts of training material, but finance, law, medicine and industrial research depend on information that is accurate, current, structured and attributable to a reliable source. In those environments, a plausible but unverifiable answer is often not useful at all.

RAG is one way of addressing this problem by allowing a model to retrieve relevant information from controlled knowledge bases at the time a question is asked rather than relying exclusively on what was embedded during model training. But retrieval alone does not solve the problem if the underlying database is incomplete, poorly structured or unreliable.

This creates a new value chain around professional AI: acquiring and structuring proprietary data; maintaining entity relationships and historical records; retrieving the appropriate evidence; and finally verifying whether the model’s output is supported by that evidence. For institutions that have spent decades building professional information assets, AI represents not merely a threat to the traditional information business but also a potential new distribution layer for those assets.

If you want to know more details about the upcoming Robotics & AI Executive Tour in collaboration with Mr. Gao’s team at Caixin, RSVP and get full details here:

To ensure the best experience, space is limited to 20 seats. Early-bird pricing ends September 13.

You can also check out the Q&A of regularly asked questions below:

Please feel free to contact us at Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with any questions.

Subscribe now

1. Motion capability visibly improved over last year

The 2nd World Humanoid Robot Games ran alongside the conference, and the numbers speak for themselves. Tien Kung Ultra won the large-group 400m in 38.15 seconds — faster than the human world record (43.03s), and nearly 50 seconds faster than last year’s winning time of 1:28 (Global Times).

The winning robot has also become internet’s favorite meme with its funny running posture: a Tien Kung Omni won the small-group 400m while running with its hands held up next to its face. The developers confirmed the gait was not designed — it emerged during reinforcement learning. While the engineers input a normal human running posture, the robot somehow figured out that fast arm-swinging overheats its shoulder joints and that it’s more efficient to run in this funny manner.

At the Unitree booth, G1 and H2 demonstrated new combat routines — combination punches, dodges, kicks — with clearly more force and continuity than last year, and one robot sparred a professional human boxer in real time. Running speed, stability, and dynamic balance have all taken a visible step up.

Subscribe now

2. But the commercial landing seems less new than headlines suggest

Beyond the demos, the scenarios with real commercial traction were largely the same categories as last year: retail food service (coffee, juice, pancakes), sorting, robot dogs, companion robots — almost none of them humanoid.

Tea and coffee automation is genuinely landing in China: Chagee's intelligent tea machine produces a cup in 8 seconds with 0.2% flavor error; Nayuki's auto milk-tea machines are in all its stores, lifting capacity ~40%; and Cotti's tea brand Cha Mao runs dual-robotic-arm collaboration stores. Despite not being related to humanoid robots, these automation solutions still tagged along with the spotlight at the conference and, based on my observations, attracted many commercial leads, including buyers from foreign countries.

Meanwhile, industrial arms and wheeled robots — the less ‘fancy’ systems — remain where actual deployment happens. This isn’t particularly disruptive innovation, given that China’s industrial automation has been expanding for a decade.

Some promising new commercial applications are starting to emerge for quadruped robots, which are being deployed in industrial sectors like construction, mining, and security (such as hazardous response, inspection, and search etc).

Dexterous-hand demos (folding clothes, supermarket sorting) are still too slow to imagine rolling out at scale in the Chinese labor market.

3. A new layer of companies addressing the data bottleneck

Another viable business model emerging is from companies that don’t build robots at all — they collect, curate, and sell training data alongside training software. As I wrote in my earlier piece on China’s robotics startups, the bottleneck for embodied AI is high-quality real-world interaction data. This year, that thesis was clearly visible on the exhibition floor, with several startups specifically targeting real-machine data collection, data governance, model training, and simulation evaluation.

A national standard for tactile data collection — the “last millimeter” of embodied intelligence — was also initiated at the conference. It’s not as sexy an idea as a general humanoid for your house, but it’s a real business model and a bottleneck today.

4. A very “China-specific” scenario: TCM pulse-diagnosis robots

The longest queue I saw at the conference wasn’t just for the boxing ring — it was for the Traditional Chinese Medicine pulse-diagnosis robots.

An AI TCM screening terminal runs face, tongue, and pulse diagnostics plus a questionnaire in 3–5 minutes and produces a health report. The machine has been deployed in primary care clinics, wellness centers, and nursing homes since mid-2025.

I tried a similar device at a shopping mall in Beijing myself — the diagnosis quality was genuinely impressive. The machine serves as a customer-acquisition tool, and monetization comes from customized wellness services attached to the diagnosis, such as herbal teas, supplements, follow-up consultations. Given the cultural trust in TCM and China’s booming wellness spending, I do think this is a model that can spread quickly in China.

Subscribe now

5. Exoskeletons: a credible near-term landing point

Again not humanoid — but possibly the closest thing to a real consumer robot market in China right now. What caught my attention is that mature consumer brands and home appliance giants are entering this market: Haier showed three generations of AI sports exoskeletons (flagship W3: ~2kg, ¥15,999) and reportedly sells nearly 1,000 units a month through 16 offline stores; outdoor-apparel brand Toread sells the ¥7,699 Crest C3; CETC’s 21st Research Institute and medical specialists like ChengTian Technology also exhibited, showcasing systems trained and optimized on real-world clinical and rehabilitation data.

The demand side backs this up: our online sales data at BigOne Lab shows that exoskeleton sales have started to ramp up since 2025. Consumer-grade exoskeletons are promising for an aging society, with China already counting roughly 300 million people over 60. Hip-assist exoskeletons are becoming not just a nice-to-have, but a necessity for many.

The same hardware extends to rehabilitation: companies like Fourier (which we visited on the Baiguan tour this April) target sub-¥100k rehab exoskeletons, which could make rehab treatment affordable at community-clinic scale.

Want to go deeper? Join the Beijing Robotics Tour this October

China shipped over 40,000 humanoid robots in H1 2026 — 97% of the global total, per the industry report released at the conference. While that share reflects manufacturing scale, what does the overall technology leadership or commercialization scenario really look like?

Based on my observations at the conference, while technology is advancing, business models are still taking shape — especially for humanoid robots. The real money is still coming from automation equipment, training data, and non-humanoid consumer robots.

If you’d like to look behind the exhibition floor, our Beijing Robotics & AI Executive Tour (October 19–23, 2026) does exactly that: closed-door sessions with C-level and senior management teams at embodied-intelligence companies like Galbot, Linkerbot, and Noetix Robotics, visits to the Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center and the Yizhuang L4 robotaxi zone, plus sessions with Moonshot AI and Zhipu AI.

To ensure the best experience, space is limited to 20 seats. Early-bird pricing ends September 13. RSVP and full details here:

You can also check out the Q&A of regularly asked questions. Please feel free to contact us at Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with any questions.

Related Reads

Before today’s post — a quick note. Applications are open for the 2026 Autumn Baiguan China Tour, a month-long “marathon” of modular expeditions across October and November: Robotics & AI in Beijing, advanced manufacturing from Foshan to Shenzhen, the next energy cycle across Shanghai–Suzhou–Hangzhou, and premium consumption in Shanghai — plus weekend immersions in Datong, Yiwu and Nanjing. Early-bird pricing through September 13.

Please feel free to contact us at Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with any questions.

Subscribe now

In Today’s Data Update

China’s two-speed economy continues. In H1, goods sales rose just 1.1% while services rose 5.3%. Exports and industry have held up; the household wallet has not. July brought further pressure, as a historic run of typhoons disrupted foot traffic and an equity market in deep correction weighed on sentiment among consumers who were already cautious.

In today’s Data Update, we look at the most recent data to see how consumer brands are holding up in a softer domestic consumption environment. In particular, we examine LV’s July sales — the first full month after its trademark lawsuit against local tea brand Molly Tea won in court but lost the Chinese public.

With BigOne Lab’s proprietary offline payment data as of July 2026, we cover:

• Luxury goods: which brands kept growing through a soft July and which did not — and whether the split is better explained by the overall economy or specific brands.

• Gold & jewelry: Laopu’s July print, set against a choppy gold price and a thin promotional calendar outside SKP. We also read the secondhand market, where transaction volumes and premiums say something about who still believes in the price.

• Tea & coffee: delivery platforms are pulling back their subsidies. We look at what that meant for third-party delivery sales in July, normally the peak summer month, and at how brands funding their own in-store discounts, such as Luckin and Guming, fared against those that are not.

• Pop Mart: we update July’s year-on-year growth and what the collab-heavy 2026 slate means for Pop Mart’s IP concentration risk.

• Sportswear & footwear: a traditional low season with no holiday catalyst, and typhoons disrupting outdoor demand. We look at brand-by-brand performance, particularly whether Lululemon’s completed fiscal Q2 (May–July) supports management’s mid-to-high-teens China guidance after the Great Wall drum scandal.

At BigOne Lab, we curate data highlights, analyze them, and deliver insights trusted by 100+ top institutional and corporate clients worldwide.

🔒 The following content is available to Baiguan Pro subscribers.

1. Luxury brands

Subscribe now

Read more

This post highlights some of the most important questions. Part 1 covers the tour’s content, and Part 2 addresses practical and logistical concerns.

Part 1: the questions that matter most

1. There are already many China tours. Sellside banks also organize tours. What makes Baiguan’s different?

The simplest answer is that access is only the raw material, but interpretation is the product.

Baiguan did not begin as a tour company. We began as a data and research company serving institutional investors and global companies that needed to understand the Chinese market. This newsletter came later, and the tours grew out of readers asking us to take them into the companies, industries, and cities we had been writing about.

That unique background shapes your experience. Of course, the relationships and senior access matter. But a company visit on its own is only one data point. Every company has a story it wants visitors to hear. Our job is to explain how that story fits into the broader industry, what the company did not say, where its incentives lie, and which claims deserve more skepticism.

Some of the best parts of our previous tours happened between formal meetings: on the bus, over dinner, or after a factory visit, when participants and the Baiguan team debated whether the company we had just seen was telling the whole truth. That layer of context is difficult to reproduce on a standard tour, especially the ones that are organized by investment banks.

“Baiguan” in Chinese means “100 perspectives.” The purpose is not to give you one approved view of China. It is to give you enough perspectives to construct your own.

Another unique aspect of our tour that you don’t easily find on investment bank tours is the strong bonding among our participants. More on this in the question here.

2. How do you stop the trip from becoming a sequence of polished corporate presentations?

We treat what a company says as evidence, not as a conclusion. Before and after visits, the Baiguan team and our specialist partners frame the industry, identify key questions, and debrief on what we heard.

We also design the itinerary around bottlenecks rather than spectacles. In robotics, for example, we are not interested in taking participants around Beijing merely to watch humanoid robots dance. We want to look at the hard parts: dexterous hands, mass production, cloud infrastructure, standards, deployment and data. In energy, we want to ask a fusion founder which technical milestones have been demonstrated and which remain aspirational. In manufacturing, we want to understand why one ecosystem can automate soy sauce bottling and scale advanced robotics at the same time.

The tour is not designed to show off China’s strengths, nor do we avoid its weaknesses. The point is to see the system closely enough to form an informed judgment.

3. How senior and unusual is the access?

On the industry tracks, most planned meetings are with senior managers, C-level executives, or founders. On the Beijing Robotics & AI track, our collaboration with Caixin Data gives us access to senior management and founding-team members at leading foundation-model companies such as Moonshot AI (Kimi) and Zhipu AI (GLM). The planned itinerary also goes down the robotics stack, including companies working on dexterous hands, and into commercial space, an area that is rarely accessible to foreign visitor groups.

The same principle applies elsewhere. The manufacturing track includes senior dialogue with established industrial leaders and younger deep-tech companies. The energy track brings participants into discussions with operators, investors, industrial parks and a controlled nuclear fusion startup.

Any planned meeting can be affected by last-minute scheduling or security changes. Where necessary, we will provide alternatives of equivalent caliber. But the level we design for is decision-maker access, not showroom access.

4. Who typically joins the tour?

We cap every track at 20 people, and our previous groups have usually had between 15 and 20. That is small enough for everyone to ask questions, get to know one another, and continue discussions outside the formal program.

Roughly half of participants come from investment backgrounds: family-office principals, institutional investors, and private investors with existing or prospective exposure to China. The other half are entrepreneurs, corporate executives, senior managers and engineers from large and small companies.

Geographically, past cohorts have been genuinely international, with substantial participation from Southeast Asia, the Americas and Europe, along with guests from India and elsewhere. The common denominator is not nationality or job title. It is intellectual curiosity and a willingness to engage seriously.

A good cohort is one of the three main sources of value, apart from access and curation. Participants not only learn from the companies and from us; they also learn from each other’s questions, disagreements, and professional experience.

5. Is this a business-development or sourcing trip? Will this be like, for example, Canton Fair?

It is a study tour. It is designed to help you understand how an industry works, how a company fits inside it, and how China’s broader economic machinery operates.

That makes it a very different animal from the Canton Fair. A sourcing trip begins with a product or supplier requirement. Our trip begins with a question: What is actually happening in this sector, and why? If a commercial relationship emerges naturally, that is excellent, but the program is not built around transactions.

This distinction also changes the conversation inside a company. We are not there simply to ask for a quotation or a product catalog. We can ask about strategy, technology, margins, bottlenecks, capital allocation, global expansion and the assumptions behind management’s story.

6. China’s robotics sector looks bubbly right now. Why make Robotics & AI the flagship?

Chinese robotics may be in a bubble, but it may be, in Robert’s words, a “necessary bubble”.

Getting from impressive prototypes to genuinely useful, general-purpose robots requires enormous investment, manufacturing scale, real-world deployment and data collection. A great deal of capital will be wasted along the way. That does not mean the process is meaningless. It means investors need a better way to distinguish technical progress and industrial capability from staged demonstrations.

The Beijing track, curated with Caixin Data, is designed around that distinction. Following the above-mentioned meeting with foundation-model founders, participants will inspect the embodied-intelligence supply chain, closely examine bottlenecks such as high-DOF dexterous hands, and examine the infrastructure for deployment, including cloud systems, autonomous driving, and industrial standards.

The program also extends into commercial space, a sector often off-limits to most foreign visitors. China is moving quickly in private launch, reusable rockets and space commercialization, but foreign visitors rarely get to see the industry up close. Putting AI, robotics, mobility and commercial space together makes Beijing the clearest window into how China is trying to turn frontier technology into an industrial system.

7. What does the advanced manufacturing track show that a factory tour cannot?

The central question is not whether China can manufacture a particular product, but how the Pearl River Delta turns manufacturing itself into a general-purpose capability.

That is why the Foshan-Shenzhen track spans both traditional and frontier sectors. At Haitian, a century-old condiment company, participants can see how a consumer-staples business applies automation, logistics and digital production at enormous scale. At Midea, the story moves from home appliances into industrial robotics, building technology and overseas acquisitions. In Shenzhen, the itinerary reaches sensors, collaborative robots, AI drug discovery, gene sequencing and other deep-tech fields.

Huaqiangbei brings the system together. A decade ago, the district was internationally notorious for counterfeit electronics. The same ability to disassemble, copy and source components has evolved into an extraordinary rapid-prototyping network. A hardware team can arrive with an idea, return within days with a working model, and then find suppliers capable of scaling it.

This is why the track is not simply about “advanced manufacturing companies.” It is about how manufacturing logic spreads across industries, from soy sauce to healthcare to humanoid robots.

8. China already dominates solar, batteries and electric vehicles. What is left to learn on an energy tour?

The interesting question is no longer how China scaled the last energy cycle. It is what comes next, who will finance it, and which capabilities will become durable moats.

The Next Energy & Industrial Cycle track follows several layers of that answer. At GCL, participants will see how an established renewable-energy group survives multiple cycles while investing in next-generation perovskite solar technology. At a controlled nuclear fusion startup, we will press the founders on the milestones, bottlenecks and financing needed to move from frontier science to industry. The itinerary also looks at battery-swap infrastructure as a power asset, thermal-management components, state capital, Suzhou’s industrial ecosystem and the physical energy demands of AI infrastructure.

This is intentionally a frontier-oriented program. We will not spend five days repeating the familiar story that China is large in solar panels and EVs. We want to understand how companies, capital, and local ecosystems are positioning for the next curve, including the bets with very high upside and very high uncertainty.

9. Why visit Yiwu if I am not in the import-export business?

Because Yiwu is one of the clearest places to see how global commerce works from the bottom up.

It is officially a smaller Chinese city, yet its skyline and commercial infrastructure surprise almost everyone. An enormous share of the world’s everyday light-manufactured goods pass through its markets and trading networks. The city also has a remarkably international social fabric, shaped by merchants from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and elsewhere who have spent years sourcing and doing business there.

Yiwu is useful even if you never intend to place an order. It shows how Chinese private enterprise coordinates factories, logistics, payments, traders and overseas demand at street level. , an American energy consultant and writer who has lived in China for many years, will lead this weekend tour. He is unusually good at translating the fine-grained mechanics of Chinese cities for a Western audience.

In Beijing or Shanghai, one can easily mistake China’s largest companies for the whole economy. Yiwu is an antidote.

10. Why spend precious weekends in Datong and Nanjing instead of adding more company visits?

Because industry meetings explain only part of China. Cities, history and social memory explain the rest.

Datong sits at the meeting point of the Chinese heartland and the northern steppe. Its Buddhist art and surviving wooden architecture show how Chinese identity was built through centuries of exchange and absorption. Its modern history offers a very different case study: a coal city that hit an economic wall and tried to reinvent itself through an aggressive, controversial reconstruction and a turn toward heritage tourism. The city is a compact lesson in energy transition, urban policy, culture and the Chinese state’s capacity to remake places.

Nanjing offers another layer. It was a capital under several dynasties and the capital of the Republic of China before 1949. Ancient walls, Republican history, contemporary neighborhoods and ordinary urban life sit unusually close together. The weekend is designed to be people-first, with cultural sessions and local encounters, not a procession through monuments.

These weekends are softer than the industry tracks, but they are still study tours. They provide the cultural and historical context that helps an investor or executive interpret what they hear in a boardroom.

Part 2: practical questions

11. Do I need prior knowledge of China?

No. We have had participants whose tour was their first experience of China, and others who had visited repeatedly or lived in the country. Both groups found value.

A first-time visitor benefits from the structure and the explanations around each meeting. A China veteran benefits from access, sector depth, and the chance to compare existing assumptions against new evidence.

What matters is curiosity. We will provide participants with background materials and frame the key questions so that participants with different levels of prior knowledge can contribute to the same discussion.

12. How will language and translation work?

The Baiguan team is bilingual, and many founders and senior managers in the technology tracks speak strong English.

Where a meeting is conducted in Chinese, we will supplement it with real-time written AI translation via dedicated hardware and software solutions we have tested.

There is a fitting Huaqiangbei story here. A participant from an earlier tour had tried several well-known translation devices without being satisfied. While visiting Huaqiangbei, he bought an obscure, unbranded device that turned out to work better than all of them. He recommended it to us, and after testing it ourselves, we like it too.

That small anecdote captures the ecosystem surprisingly well: an apparently nondescript product, discovered in a chaotic electronics market that used to be the counterfeit center of the world, can embody a great deal of practical manufacturing intelligence.

13. Should I book one track or combine several?

The program is modular. You can join a single weekday industry track, add the adjacent weekend immersion, or combine several programs into a longer China learning journey.

If your schedule allows, I strongly recommend pairing at least one industry track with a weekend. The weekday program gives you sector depth; the weekend gives you social, historical, or commercial context. The contrast makes both more valuable.

A participant interested in frontier technology might combine Beijing Robotics & AI with the Datong weekend. Someone focused on supply chains could join Foshan-Shenzhen and then continue to Yiwu. An investor considering energy and consumption could shift from Shanghai-Suzhou-Hangzhou to a weekend in Nanjing.

Multi-tour discounts are available. The Nanjing weekend is offered twice, with substantially the same program, to make combinations easier.

14. How are travel and accommodation handled?

Connections between adjacent modules will be coordinated according to the fastest practical route. Beijing to Datong is about two hours by high-speed rail and offers a striking ride from the capital toward the northern plateau. For a longer connection such as Shenzhen to Yiwu, flying is more practical than spending many hours on the train.

For weekday tracks, participants can choose a package with accommodation or arrange their own hotel, provided they can reach the designated meeting points on time. Weekend immersions are built around selected local stays and a more integrated group experience.

Full inclusions, exclusions and current prices are listed on the tour page.

15. How do I apply, and when does a track close?

All tracks are application-only. We review applications and normally respond within three business days. If accepted, your seat is secured once payment is completed.

The hard cap is 20 participants per track. Once a track reaches 20 confirmed and paid participants, we close it. We do not expand the group to squeeze in additional seats because the small cohort is central to the experience.

Early-bird pricing is available through 11:59 pm Beijing Time on September 13, 2026. If you are seriously considering a track, apply early rather than waiting until the final weeks.

Ready to see China for yourself?

The Autumn 2026 program runs from October 19 to November 14. Early-bird pricing ends at 11:59 pm Beijing Time on September 13, 2026.

Full program and pricing: 2026 Autumn Baiguan China Tour ‘Marathon’

Application: Baiguan China Tour Application Form

Questions or bespoke group requests: Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com

Subscribe now

Episode in brief

• Unitree had a blockbuster IPO, confirming intense demand for a sector Robert Wu calls “a necessary bubble”: capital has to fund years of loss-making data collection before humanoid robots have a real commercial use case. Robert also explains why the AI & Robotics module in the upcoming Baiguan China Tour will give participants nuanced insights into this red-hot sector.

• Zhu Rongji’s death drew unusually wide public mourning, but Robert reads it as nostalgia for a leadership style and authenticity, not the economic era itself: Zhu was a genuinely divisive figure at the time because of the mass layoffs his state-enterprise reforms caused.

• Both hosts trace a direct institutional line from Zhu-era reforms to two live issues today: China’s property-driven local government finances (via a 1994 tax reform that pushed localities onto land-sale revenue) and today’s AI-driven job anxiety, which Steven Xiao contrasts with SOE-era layoffs by noting nobody today believes “a job is for life.”

• Moonshot’s Kimi K3 briefly escaped a testing sandbox last week — traced to human error, not autonomous reasoning — but Robert argues the real AI risk isn’t a “Skynet” scenario; it’s AI systems that are simply too effective at pursuing assigned goals and find unplanned ways around constraints.

• Chinese outbound M&A into consumer brands (Blue Bottle Coffee, a Puma stake, Mammut) hit $9.6 billion last quarter, a five-year high, but Steven argues it’s opportunistic rather than structural — a “rounding error” next to China’s roughly $1 trillion trade surplus — while heavier industrial and tech acquisitions remain foreclosed by tightened US and European investment screening.

• Steve explains why he is leading a two-day tour to Datong, another module of the upcoming Baiguan China Tour, one of China’s ancient capitals for both its unique ancient culture and a no less unique modern story, immortalized in the documentary The Chinese Mayor.

About this episode’s guest

Steven Xiao is a longtime friend of Baiguan and an investor and businessperson with a particular interest in Buddhist arts and Chinese history. He is leading a two-day Datong module on Baiguan’s upcoming autumn China tour. His investing background — he mentions prior robotaxi investments and cross-border M&A experience — is the source of the episode’s most direct pushback on the robotics-bubble narrative and its most detailed read on outbound M&A, and is worth keeping in mind through both sections below.

Unitree’s IPO and robotics’ “necessary bubble”

The listing

Unitree, the humanoid robot maker behind the dancing robots at this year’s Spring Festival Gala, priced its Shanghai IPO at a $9 billion valuation, raising about $904 million. Formal listing was set for August 19, the day after this recording. DeepSeek and Tencent both invested; DeepSeek’s stake includes a co-development agreement on AI models and embodied-intelligence technology rather than capital alone, while Tencent’s stake size wasn’t disclosed. Meituan is a pre-IPO investor. Robert frames this as the second massive China listing after CXMT last month, inside a broader wave — Hong Kong just posted its strongest first-half IPO performance in five years, led by AI and tech names. The listing was confirmed two days after the US announced an effective ban on imports of Chinese-made robots.

The demand signal, and the data-bottleneck argument

Robert says pricing on “hyperliquid” markets — a venue trading perpetual contracts linked to pre-IPO stocks — already puts Unitree at four to five times its IPO price; he applied for shares himself and received none, calling the listing “highly oversubscribed.” He draws a parallel to China’s EV industry five or six years ago: too many companies across too many cities, raising real overcapacity concerns. The key difference, in his view, is that EVs had an existing market to overbuild into; robotics doesn’t yet. Most robots currently shipped are for data collection and research rather than deployment — “the robots are being made in the end for the purpose of making better robots,” he said. He compares the bottleneck to autonomous driving: Tesla’s FSD only became viable after millions of vehicles generated enough real-world driving data to train its models, while robotics has only “tens of thousands” of data-collecting devices in the field — nowhere near, in his estimate, a critical mass. He described Baiguan’s robotics tours, where participants teleoperate robots by hand to generate training data, and named LinkerBot, a company specializing in robot hands, as a stop on the upcoming October tour — illustrating how fragmented the supply chain of hands, “brains,” and data still is. As Robert put it, physical AI hasn’t yet had “a real ChatGPT moment.”

Steven’s pushback

Steven challenged the framing directly, pointing to earlier waves of “robot” hype that didn’t sustain elevated valuations: Roborock (石头科技), the floor-cleaning robot maker, has fallen from roughly 300 to under 100, and SenseTime’s machine-vision technology — once positioned to extend from security cameras into autonomous driving — also disappointed. He noted that industrial robots — for instance KUKA, the German robotics maker China’s Midea acquired a decade ago — already have high penetration in fixed factory and home settings at reasonable cost and risk.

“A necessary bubble”

Robert’s response was unusually direct about the sector’s risk. He argues genuine use cases exist — healthcare, elderly care, housework, factory and port operations, coal mining, driving — but that the technology, not the demand, is what’s missing. Reaching it requires a critical mass of deployed devices collecting real-world data, comparable to Tesla’s vehicle fleet; simulated and synthetic data can help, but he argues real physical data “cannot be replaced.” Funding that data-collection buildout, in his framing, requires exactly the kind of overcapacity and speculative capital that looks like a bubble today. Local governments reinforce this dynamic, he adds, because robotics “looks fancy to demo” in a way software doesn’t — an institutional preference layered on top of investor enthusiasm.

“I don’t think it will sustain. Everyone know this is a bubble... but to be honest, this is a necessary bubble.”

— Robert Wu

Steven, while skeptical of the near-term case, agreed there’s a longer-term one: an aging society will eventually need labor substitution, 15 to 20 years out. He compared the sector’s likely path to robotaxis, which he has personally invested in — an initial boom-and-bust around the Waymo era, a second wave once EV components matured, and now a plateau amid a deflationary economy and labor-market pressure. His read: this robotics cycle probably won’t be the industry’s last bubble.

The US ban, in practice

On the US import ban, Robert thinks its impact is “over-estimated” for leading Chinese humanoid-robot makers, since most units are sold domestically or into non-US export markets. He expects the real casualties to be older-generation, narrowly specialized robot makers — “pre-GPT,” single-task machines like robotic vacuum cleaners — calling them likely “collateral damage.” He separately noted that Chinese robotaxi companies Pony.ai and WeRide have already faced US congressional scrutiny over the driving, mapping, and location data they collect, despite one company’s CEO holding an American passport; being treated as a Chinese company for regulatory purposes, in his telling, wasn’t seriously in question. Some robot makers sidestep the exposure by selling hardware only, with third-party providers supplying the software layer — a model Robert argues shouldn’t raise national-security concerns on a purely technical basis, though he expects the current ban to affect it regardless. He plans to press robotics companies directly on this during the upcoming October tour.

Implications

The episode’s most investable distinction is between humanoid-robot platform leaders — where Robert and Steven agree the near-term economics don’t yet work, even as capital keeps flowing — and the supply-chain layer around them, including data collection, teleoperation, and specialized components like robot hands, which both speakers treat as more clearly monetizable today. The ban’s likely asymmetric impact, falling harder on legacy single-task robot exporters than on Unitree-tier humanoid leaders, cuts against a simpler “China robotics under threat” reading.

Zhu Rongji’s death and what the mourning reveals

Who he was

Zhu Rongji died on August 12 at age 97. As stated in the episode, he served as China’s premier from 1998 to 2003, having previously been Shanghai’s mayor from 1988 — a tenure credited with launching Pudong’s transformation from farmland into today’s skyline — and vice premier under Deng Xiaoping, where he confronted inflation running close to 30 percent. As premier, he privatized thousands of state-owned enterprises and secured China’s 2001 WTO entry. Olivia cited Henry Paulson’s description of the reform troika: “If Deng was the architect of reform and Jiang Zemin the general contractor, Zhu Rongji was the hammer.” Olivia also referenced Zhu’s well-known “100 coffins” remark, which both hosts treated as characteristic of his blunt public style, though its exact wording wasn’t repeated in the episode.

Personal memory versus historical reassessment

Robert and Steven were both children when Zhu left office; neither claims first-hand political memory of his tenure. Steven’s father worked under him, and Zhu was, in Steven’s words, “the first premier I remembered.” Both describe coming to appreciate his impact only in retrospect. Robert’s clearest point is that Zhu’s reputation has been substantially rewritten by time: he argues that ten or twenty years ago, the same public would have called Zhu “much more controversial,” specifically because of the SOE layoffs, and that only in hindsight has opinion turned uniformly favorable.

“Now, today is all the laurels and the praise. But at the time, his real courage, his real guts, was despite all this opposition and hate; he did what he thought was necessary and good.”

— Robert Wu

Is the mourning about the man, or the moment?

Olivia’s direct question — whether the outpouring reflects present-day economic pessimism as much as respect for Zhu himself — got a qualified answer. Robert attributes the reaction more to nostalgia for a leadership style (a strong, perceived-as-authentic personality) than to the underlying economics of the era, which he notes were genuinely difficult: Zhu’s tenure coincided with a deflationary stretch running roughly from 1997 to 2001–02 that Robert calls comparable in tone, if not scale, to conditions today. Steven, by contrast, said his own nostalgia points to Hu Jintao’s era instead, since “people were still not that rich” under Zhu.

“Liberal reformer” is a Western label

Asked whether Western media conflated Zhu’s communication style with Western-style liberalism, Robert pushed back on the framing itself. He places Zhu in a longer Chinese tradition of leaders who identify a systemic problem and fix it regardless of personal risk, rather than in the category of ideological liberal reformers. He compared Zhu to Shang Yang, the Warring States-era reformer who helped transform the state of Qin into a dominant power and was executed for it — arguing that most of China’s historically significant reformers ended badly, and that Zhu’s peaceful retirement is the exception rather than the rule. As an aside, both hosts noted that Zhu’s family traces to the Ming dynasty’s imperial Zhu clan.

The throughline to today

Steven draws a direct causal line from Zhu’s 1994 tax reform to a live structural problem: pushing revenue-raising authority toward land sales left local governments dependent on land finance, which he connects to real estate now representing roughly 65 to 70 percent of Chinese household wealth. Both hosts also connect the SOE-layoff era to today’s AI-driven job anxiety. Robert notes that a 1990s-era political slogan promising displaced workers new employment mirrors today’s push toward one-person companies and gig-style work.

“A lot of people lost their jobs, but a lot of people were liberated to trade freely and integrate themselves into the global supply chain.”

— Steven Xiao

Steven’s sharper distinction: SOE-era workers believed employment was a lifetime guarantee, backed by state provision of healthcare and education, and the shock came from that belief breaking — “nobody now is that delusional that a job is for life,” he said, so today’s disruption, while real, lands differently. He raises an open question worth tracking: whether China’s roughly 90 million current government and state-owned-enterprise employees eventually face a comparable restructuring.

Implications

For investors and leaders parsing Chinese political sentiment, the episode’s clearest signal is that public reverence for a reform figure can coexist with, and even follow, genuine controversy in real time — a useful check against reading commemorative social-media activity as straightforward economic nostalgia. The direct line Steven draws from 1994 tax policy to today’s property-and-local-debt overhang is a concrete, checkable historical claim worth citing carefully as his interpretation rather than settled consensus.

Lightning round: AI jobs, a sandbox escape, and $9.6 billion in outbound M&A

Micro-dramas and AI job loss

China’s micro-drama industry — 60-to-90-second dramatic episodes, often 60 to 90 episodes per series — exceeded $6.9 billion in 2025. Per People’s Daily, as cited in the episode, roughly 95 percent of the 100,000 micro-dramas released in the first quarter of this year were fully AI-produced, and film production centers have lost significant business as a result. Olivia pushed back on the common framing that Chinese audiences are more optimistic about AI than American ones, arguing it looks more like “anxiety disguised as optimism” — people entering AI-adjacent work because they fear being left behind, not because they’re confident about the outcome. Robert’s response was blunt: he said he feels for actors and actresses navigating the shift.

Kimi K3’s sandbox escape

Following an earlier incident in which an OpenAI model broke out of its testing sandbox and accessed Hugging Face, Moonshot’s Kimi K3 reportedly did something similar during a third-party evaluation last week — though Robert and Olivia note this instance traced to human error (an unfortified sandbox), not autonomous model reasoning. Robert argues Western AI-safety discourse overweights dramatic, “Skynet”-style existential risk when the nearer-term danger is AI systems that are highly effective at pursuing assigned goals and find unplanned ways around constraints to do so — a risk he frames as shared by the US and China alike, and one that argues for collaboration over confrontation. Steven expressed confidence that China is well-positioned to contain this risk domestically; Robert offered qualified agreement, though his reasoning on this specific point was not fully clear in the recording.

Outbound M&A into consumer brands

Chinese firms spent $9.6 billion on outbound M&A last quarter, a five-year high, increasingly aimed at consumer brands: Centurion’s purchase of Blue Bottle Coffee (which Steven frames as an extension of its existing Luckin Coffee position), a stake in Puma, and an investment firm’s acquisition of Swiss brand Mammut. Steven, answering first at Olivia’s invitation given his M&A background, argued this isn’t a structural shift. Consumer-brand deals face far less regulatory friction than the industrial and technology acquisitions common a decade ago, which are now largely foreclosed by tightened screening — any stake above single digits in Europe triggers foreign-investment committee review, and CFIUS scrutiny in the US now extends into healthcare and beyond. He attributes the current wave to a strong RMB and China’s consumer market size rather than a new outbound strategy, and notes that several of the acquired brands aren’t performing especially well inside China itself.

“This is like a rounding error for everybody.”

— Steven Xiao, on $9.6 billion in outbound consumer M&A against China’s roughly $1 trillion trade surplus

Robert added a methodological caveat: the “five-year high” framing depends heavily on the comparison window, since a six- or seven-year look-back would tell a different story. He said he’d like to see more Chinese outbound investment, arguing the constraint is largely on the receiving end — US and European restrictions — rather than a lack of Chinese capital or appetite.

Coda: Datong, and an unplanned echo of Zhu Rongji

The episode closed with Steven previewing the Datong leg of Baiguan’s autumn China tour, which he is leading. Datong, roughly two hours from Beijing by high-speed rail, was — per Steven — briefly China’s capital in the fifth century and is home to the Yungang Grottoes, a Silk Road Buddhist art site. Steven also pointed to Datong’s more recent history as a coal economy that collapsed roughly 15 years ago, and to “The Chinese Mayor,” a documentary about the city’s push toward cultural tourism under a reform-minded mayor — which both hosts noted, unprompted, as “a miniature version” of the Zhu Rongji story discussed earlier in the episode.

We’re hosting two live info sessions with open Q&A: Wed, Aug 19 (9 pm Singapore / 9 am ET / 2 pm London) and Thu, Aug 20 (4 pm Singapore / 9 am London / 4 am ET). Interested participants can join via the Zoom link here.

Please also note we have just added a “no accommodation” option for the pricing table, you may check about it here.

*On April 1, we officially launched Baiguan Pro, our professional-tier subscription designed for investors seeking deeper, more specific coverage of Chinese equities. Baiguan Pro delivers the Baiguan team’s monthly view on overall Chinese equity assets, our focus on themes and sectors, richer company-level analysis, and data follow-ups on the ideas and companies previously presented in the newsletter.*

This is the fourth deep dive of themes & baskets we are tracking, after China’s robotaxi, China Global Champions 30, and Total Shareholder Return. This one is about the shift from goods to experience, service, and digital consumption — why we think it is durable, why it is unusually hard to own, and the twelve-name basket we have built to track it.

In May 2026, China’s total retail sales fell 0.6% year on year — the weakest print since the post-reopening period began in 2023. Read on its own, that number describes a consumer who has given up.

In the first half of 2026, Chinese residents took 3.46 billion domestic trips, up 5.4% [*]. Box office revenue recorded RMB 30.4 billion, up 9.4% — and inside that, RMB 17.1 billion went to concerts and festivals above 5,000 seats, up 17.7% [*]. They spent RMB 188.5 billion on gaming, up 12.2% [*].

Service retail grew about 5.3%; goods retail grew about 1.3%. The gap between them is the whole thesis: it has now widened for four consecutive reporting periods, which is long enough to stop calling it a durable trend.

Where the money went

The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) service-retail breakdown for H1 2026 is clear about where the growth sits:

Catering — the biggest services category, and the one with the most listed vehicles attached to it — is unfortunately dragging the average down.

The spending is landing in three different-looking places that turn out to be similar behavior.

Great demand came from people’s desire to go out of the house: to be somewhere and experience something. This contributes to the burgeoning market for tourism.

Spending also went into content and screens. The gaming numbers deserve a second look, because the headline hides the interesting part. According to the CADPA industry report released at CDEC on 30 July, domestic game revenue grew 12.2% in H1 2026 while the user base grew 0.82% to 684 million—revenue grew because existing users paid more. PC and client games up 27.9%, mini-program games up 36.0%, with in-app purchases up 38.1% and now two-thirds of that segment’s revenue.

The same pattern appears in long-form audio, a market that grew roughly 15% to around RMB 28.7 billion in 2024 and is estimated to have reached the low thirty-billions in 2025, with Chinese podcast listeners at 134 million and forecast to approach 180 million by 2027 — of whom nearly two-thirds are between 21 and 35, and most say they subscribe for substance rather than background noise. As “paying for knowledge” becomes a rising trend, durable subscriptions on music and streaming platforms are increasingly generating recurring revenue.

Some spending went into IPs and personal interests. Pop Mart’s revenue grew 184.7% in 2025 and another 75–80% in the first quarter of 2026, with China alone doubling. That is a single company, but the category around it is broader — guzi retail, card games, IP toys, IP-licensed collaborations. Purchases of these products are driven purely by interest, and the object has almost no functional utility at all.

Our previous piece about the emerging “Guzi economy”:

Three destinations, one behavior: people paying for meaning, interest, and identity rather than for objects and utility. The fan who buys the album also buys the membership tier that grants priority ticketing, then the ticket, then the merchandise at the venue.

A trend that mostly isn’t listed

We intend to construct a theme basket to track this structural trend, but do acknowledge that many fastest-growing sub-sectors are simply not investable via listed instruments at this stage. For instance, museums, scenic, and cultural sites are overwhelmingly administered pricing, and concerts and festivals are dominated by private, unlisted operators. And the long tail of new formats, from escape rooms and script-murder to live-houses and immersive theatre, is spread across hundreds of thousands of SMEs.

What is listed sits at the platform level: ticketing & booking platforms, hotel franchisors, and OTAs. They mostly don’t create the experience, but they benefit from this broader trend.

We aim to explore four subcategories that directly benefit from this trend. We define “experiential” spending as capital allocation that is:

• Chosen by the consumer, not obligatory.

• Purchased for identity, passion, or experience—not pure utility.

• Reflected in corporate core business models. We ensure each candidate company’s revenue mix genuinely captures this structural shift.

Our objective is to establish a clear framework that tracks and expresses this macro view, rather than relying on stock-picking to generate alpha. In other words, a company can stay on our list as long as its core operations align closely with the underlying thesis even if the business is currently struggling or presents sub-optimal financials.

In other words, the core question is not “which of these individual names will outperform,” but rather: given the scarcity of pure-play secondary market names, what is the most accurate listed expression of this shift available today?

Companies we are watching

Subscribe now

Read more

Frankly, this is a lot of tours! To help you unpack and avoid information overload, we invite you to 2 online info sessions where we’ll walk you through the program and open the floor for a live Q&A.

Session 1

• Wednesday, Aug. 19

• 9 pm Singapore / 9 am ET / 2 pm London

• Meeting Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85232827349?pwd=znYbS32pEsLsoE74SxuWarUh8KC15A.1

Session 2:

• Thursday, Aug. 20

• 4 pm Singapore / 9 am London / 4 am ET

• Meeting Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82363623800?pwd=rrI8dkb8RoTWjVGRdWNTdVy7Lc1dS8.1

Both sessions are identical in content; select the time that works best for your location.

If you can’t make these two time slots but have questions, please feel free to contact us at Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com

We look forward to sharing this journey with you.

Baiguan Team

Aug 21 update: Click here to read a Q&A of regularly asked questions

We are witnessing a paradigm shift in global interest around China.

For many years, China was only understood through the lens of a “big market.” Tales and books were written about how foreign executives came to China seeking the adventure of “one billion consumers.”

Today, after a brief shutdown of communication channels during the COVID years, China has suddenly emerged as something else — a technologically advanced, economically alternative, and socio-politically complex entity that defies any single line of definition.

Most importantly, for the first time in many hundreds of years, China once again appears to be somewhere that the world can learn something from.

To learn, does not mean to follow blindly. Learning about something unfamiliar involves understanding it in its own terms and reflecting on which parts of it will apply, or not apply, to one’s own condition. In China, we have an exact concept about it, called 借鉴 Jiejian: using someone else as a mirror to look at oneself.

This is what we thought about when we launched the Baiguan China Tour last year. It is not about showing off China’s strength, nor do we shun its many weaknesses. But to really use China as a mirror - to reflect on yourself - you have to see it with your own eyes, listen to it with your own ears, and touch it with your own hands. (Not to mention, Chinese food also smells and tastes great!)

Since then, several successful previous tours have built our confidence in our ability to deliver unfiltered, on-the-ground realities of China to the global audience, and we are constantly amazed by the level of interest shown by past participants.

This is why, for Autumn 2026, we have decided to partner with several specialist partners and vertical experts to try something that has never been attempted before: a month-long menu of modularized, vertically intensive learning expeditions throughout October and November, spanning AI, robotics, energy, advanced manufacturing, premium consumption, and, of course, culture.

Our new architecture seamlessly integrates Weekday Industry Tracks with Weekend Immersion Tracks to decode the underlying logic of the Chinese economy:

• Weekday Industry Tracks (Hard Logic): Tightly sequenced thematic weeks targeting the frontiers of new quality productivity—covering Beijing (Robotics & AI), Foshan-Shenzhen (Smart Manufacturing), and Shanghai-Suzhou-Hangzhou (Energy).

• Weekend Immersion Tracks (Soft Power Decoded): Exclusive, customized experiences in three unique cities from cultural, social, and economic perspectives: Datong (Shanxi), Yiwu (Zhejiang), Nanjing (Jiangsu), designed to provide critical context. From Datong’s energy transition and cultural renaissance to Yiwu’s global SME trade networks and private economic mechanisms, and onward to Nanjing’s ancient city walls, these journeys decode the social fabric and consumer psyche underpinning today’s China.

The Autumn 2026 Baiguan China Tour offers flexible, modular options. You are free to pick whichever items on the menu. The Baiguan team, alongside our partner institutions and featured experts, stewards each expedition from initial design and curation to on-the-ground execution, delivering continuous, end-to-end accompaniment.

Clearly, this is not just any tour. It is a marathon of tours. It is ambitious. But we invite you to help us fulfill this ambition.

Join us to validate assumptions on the ground, build your own informed conviction about where China is heading next, and judge for yourself which knowledge you would like to “distill” from China’s experience.

BAIGUAN CHINA TOUR MENU — AUTUMN 2026

Weekday Industry Tracks

• Robotics & AI Executive Tour in collab with Caixin Data, Beijing, Oct19-23 (5days)

• Advanced Manufacturing, Foshan/Shenzhen, Oct 26-30 (4.5 days)

• Next Energy & Industrial Cycle, Shanghai/Suzhou/Hangzhou, Nov 2-6 (4.5 days)

Weekend Immersion Tracks

• Datong: where China became China, Oct 24-25

• Yiwu: Hidden Engine of Global Commerce, with , Oct 31 - Nov 1

• Nanjing: A People-First Weekend in the “Southern Capital”, Nov 13-14

If you are unable to join us on this autumn series of tours, feel free to email Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com with your interests. We also offer bespoke study tours and board retreat services tailored to your needs.

WHY BAIGUAN CHINA TOUR

Navigating China’s complex economic landscape requires more than just a standard itinerary. The Baiguan China Tour is designed to deliver three core pillars of value:

• Deep-Diving Engagement, with Curation: We move beyond surface-level observations into the engine rooms of industry. Through structured dialogues with C-suite executives curated by Baiguan and our sector specialist partners, and through on-the-ground audits of companies, smart factories, AI labs, and supply chain hubs, we unpack the operational realities and technological breakthroughs that underpin China’s new economic trajectory.

• Unfiltered Access and Crucial Context: We strip away the corporate PR and political spin to reveal the ground truth. Of course, the relationships and senior access matter. But a company visit on its own is only one data point. Every company has a story it wants visitors to hear. Our job is to explain how that story fits into the broader industry, what the company did not say, where its incentives lie, and which claims deserve more skepticism.

• High-Quality Community: You won’t be touring with tourists. Our groups are intentionally kept small and selective, comprising global investors, entrepreneurs, multinational executives, and scions of business dynasties. This ensures a high-trust, peer-to-peer learning environment where insights are enriched by diverse perspectives, forging lasting connections with like-minded global leaders.

Some of the past participants of the Baiguan China Tour include:

• Founder of one of Germany’s most successful technology companies

• Head of corporate venture capital at a major US industrial company

• Singapore-based Chief Investment Officer at a large family office

• American investing family rooted in China and early backer of Alibaba

• Research Analyst at a top Europe-based hedge fund

• Former Senior Researcher at a leading high-frequency trading house

• Member of a prominent Latin American business family and entrepreneur

• Former board director of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange

• Silicon Valley venture investor in the fintech field

• Influential Thai family member with years of experience across VC, PE, and investment banking in Southeast Asia

• Malaysian Founder of a multi-billion Asia-based investment fund

• Senior Engineer at a major US Mag7 company

• Former APAC Payments Analytics Lead at a major global payment company

• Singapore-based private Investor with years of experience and ongoing interest in China’s capital markets

• Business Consultant to Fortune 500 company

• Researcher at an Australia-based long-only investment fund

Disclaimer

Weekday Industry Tracks

🤖 Robotics & AI Executive Tour | Oct 19-23 | Beijing

Curated by Baiguan and Caixin Data, this tour cuts through the noise to take you deep into the industrial value chain—from mass-production lines for core hardware and R&D hubs for foundational models to the frontlines of national standard-setting and advanced application testing. Rather than assessing technologies in isolation, we help you decode the underlying infrastructure and economic logic driving this transformation, equipping you with the hard-edged judgment needed to distinguish where capital is truly flowing from where the headlines merely suggest.

A key highlight of this tour that you won’t easily find anywhere else is that, leveraging Caixin’s deep network, tour participants can have closed-door meetings with C-level executives and founding team members of AI and robotics enterprises, including Moonshot (Kimi) and Zhipu AI (GLM). Beyond AI and robotics, participants can also enjoy a rare glimpse into China’s commercial space industry.

Official Partner

As China’s most influential and independent financial media outlet, Caixin is recognized as an unrivaled producer of investigative journalism and an indispensable source of information for business leaders, investors, and policymakers. Caixin has been ranked ninth worldwide in the newly released 2026 Global Digital Subscription Report, with 1.2 million paid subscribers, confirming its position as one of the largest subscription-based news organizations outside the U.S. and U.K.

Caixin Data leads Caixin’s data operations and AI technology development. As a registered financial information service provider in China, it supplies data to major global financial information platforms and provides proprietary financial, corporate, industry and macroeconomic datasets. Its products also include macroeconomic indices and AI-powered investment research. Caixin Data works with leading Chinese AI and technology companies, including Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI and Volcengine.

The Caixin Data Platform serves financial institutions, investors and AI applications through APIs, the Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-ready Skills, providing flexible access to data and analysis on China’s economy, industries and financial markets.

Core Highlights

• Foundation Models & Cloud Infrastructure:

  • Moonshot AI (Kimi) & Zhipu AI (GLM): Closed-door strategy session with senior management of two of China’s most consequential foundation-model players.

  • Volcengine (ByteDance) & Tencent Cloud: Benchmark the tech stacks fueling China’s AI surge with divisional leaders from the country’s two most consequential cloud powers: Volcano Engine, the fast-rising inference-and-MaaS backbone behind Doubao and the default AI cloud for ByteDance’s private-market juggernaut, and Tencent Cloud, the top IaaS/PaaS incumbent.

• Embodied Intelligence & Hardware Scale-Up:

  • Galbot: Debrief with the C-levels of the industry leader in wheeled dual-arm humanoids. Discuss their “Embodied Brain” roadmap and securing thousands of pre-orders from CATL, Bosch, and Toyota.

  • Linkerbot: Examine the “hands” of the robot revolution. Visit the startup claiming >80% market share in high-DOF dexterous hands and witness their mass production scaling from 10k units shipped in 2025 to 4k units in a single month (April 2026).

  • Noetix Robotics: Debrief with the founding team on corporate strategy and the bipedal–bionic dual-product matrix, followed by a deep dive into multi-base capacity expansion and scaled delivery.

• Future Mobility & Space Commercialization:

  • Yizhuang L4 Autonomous Driving Demo Zone: Experience a live Robotaxi ride in China’s most advanced driverless zone. Participate in a closed-door discussion on the “Vehicle-Road-Cloud” integration architecture.

  • CAS Space & Galactic Energy: Site visits to China’s leading mixed-ownership commercial space firms. Review solid/ reusable rocket technologies and the suborbital space tourism commercialization prospects.

• National Strategy & Industrial Ecosystem:

  • Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center: Understand national standardization efforts (led by Xiaomi, Jingcheng Machinery Electric, & UBTech) and the fast-track policy for foreign investment in embodied AI.

  • Yizhuang Robotics Park: Explore a ~250,000 sqm industrial hub. Unlock end-to-end foreign JV landing services, IP localization, tax incentives, and ecosystem synergy with 300+ firms.

⚙️ Advanced Manufacturing & Supply Chain Tour | Oct 26-30 | Foshan → Shenzhen

This journey reveals Chinese manufacturing not as a static cost center, but a dynamic engine of reinvention. From Foshan’s industrial titans to Shenzhen’s deep-tech disruptors, we trace how legacy giants and frontier startups share the same supply chain soil—driving the national “New Quality Productivity” agenda across smart home appliances, biotech, humanoid robots, and AI. This is not a site visit to assembly lines; it is an investigation into the strategy that allows China to scale from home appliances to humanoid robots with unmatched speed.

This tour is uniquely curated by Family Office Insight, the same partner in our very first, and highly successful Baiguan China Tour last year.

Official Partner

Founded in January 2021, Family Office Insight is a leading think tank and community serving China’s family office sector. Through high-quality research, original content, and closed-door exchanges, it has built in-depth connections with more than 400 Chinese family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals in China and abroad, offering services including research, study tours, and curated events.

In 2025, Family Office Insight launched the Insight Circle, a membership initiative designed to foster learning, collaboration, and long-term relationships among Chinese family offices and has served nearly 50 members, supporting Chinese family offices and ultra-high-net-worth individuals in making wiser long-term decisions and building enduring legacies.

Core Highlights

• Foshan: The Legacy Giant’s Reinvention

  • Midea Group HQ (300.HK): Deep dive into one of China’s most globally successful appliance makers. Beyond the showroom, we dissect Midea’s transformation into an industrial AI and building-tech conglomerate—from robotic arms and HVAC intelligence to overseas M&A strategy—via a closed-door exchange with senior management.

  • Haitian Flavoring Factory (3288.HK): A rare look inside the world’s largest condiment plant. Observe how a century-old FMCG brand runs fully automated bottling, AGV logistics, and digital twin production—a masterclass in scaling traditional manufacturing.

  • HeYou International Hospital – Proton Center: Visit a privately funded, top-tier medical infrastructure project backed by Midea’s founder. Understand how Chinese industrial capital is flowing into high-end healthcare and what “manufacturing-grade precision” means in oncology.

  • Art & Taste Interlude: A Museum of Art (和美术馆) tour, and a Chateau Mihope wine tasting—designed to show how Guangdong’s industrial bourgeoisie blends craftsmanship, philanthropy, and lifestyle. A Shunde garden restaurant and a Michelin-advisory meal showcase local flavor meets curated Chinese aesthetics.

• Shenzhen: Frontier Deep-Tech & Robotics

  • RoboSense (2498.HK): On-site at the LiDAR leader powering autonomous driving and robotics. We walk the production line to benchmark China’s sensor ecosystem on cost curves and automotive-grade reliability, decoding its competitive moat against global peers.

  • Huayan Robotics: Formerly Han’s Robot, spun out of Han’s Laser and now HKEX-listed (1021.HK), is a Foshan-based full-stack collaborative-robot maker spanning 3–35 kg cobots, humanoid joint modules, and core motion components for industrial, medical, and logistics automation.

  • Huawei HarmonyOS Intelligent Driving: Hands-on trial drive at a flagship experience store. Assess Huawei’s “non-car-maker” strategy—how it licenses autonomous driving stacks to automakers and reshapes the EV supply chain without building a single factory.

  • XtalPi (2228.HK): Tour the quantum-physics + AI drug-design company’s R&D and automated lab. Decode how “silicon-to-molecule” platforms compress R&D cycles from years to months.

  • Salus Bio: Visit a 2020 Shenzhen-born deep-tech pioneer developing fully domestic gene sequencers (Salus Pro / Saluseq Nimbo), sub-micron spatial-omics platforms, and gene chips. By breaking Illumina’s long-standing monopoly on upstream tools, it enables broad applications across clinical diagnostics, precision oncology, and agricultural genomics.

  • Yiyuan Longevity Tech: Experience hyperbaric oxygen capsule manufacturing—where wellness, aging, and industrial design converge in a Shenzhen-style garage factory.

• Shenzhen Ecosystem Immersion

  • Huaqiangbei: A guided “component safari” through the world’s densest electronics bazaar. See how prototype-to-mass-production happens in 72 hours, and why this matters for hardware startups globally.

Huaqiangbei

♻️ China’s Next Energy & Industrial Cycle: Power, AI & How China Builds | Nov 2-6 | Shanghai → Suzhou → Hangzhou

China has already reshaped the global economics of solar, batteries and electric vehicles. In 2025 alone, it added roughly 430 GW of wind and solar, taking total installed capacity to around 1.84 TW. But the more interesting question is no longer how China scaled the last energy cycle, but what comes next, how China builds the next energy system, and what durable industry moats and investment opportunities could emerge?

Over five days across Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou, we will go inside the frontier of China’s energy by meeting senior executives and C-level founders, seeing operating assets and technologies firsthand, and speaking directly with the investors and institutions deciding what gets built, funded and scaled next.

Taken together, the program will move across:

• an established renewable-energy champion defending and extending its moat

• frontier nuclear fusion technology

• EV infrastructure becoming part of the power system

• state capital allocating into new industries

• a local government ecosystem that has repeatedly scaled companies

• hidden thermal-management and critical AI infrastructure layers

• AI-driven electricity demand

• and the next generation of frontier startups.

Official Partner

2060 Advisory is a leading China-based climate and industrial investment advisory firm connecting global capital with Chinese technologies, companies and market opportunities. It works across climate technology, energy transition, AI infrastructure, advanced industry and cross-border capital, advising investors, corporates, public-sector platforms and growth companies.

This tour will be led by its founder, Yijing Wang, who also writes at .

Core Highlights

• Half a Day Inside One of China’s Leading Renewable-Energy Groups: GCL Group + GCL Energy Technology(002015.SZ) + GCL Perovskite

  • One of the most distinctive parts of the program: approximately four hours across three businesses inside the GCL ecosystem. Instead of looking at one technology in isolation, we will use GCL as a deep case study in how a Chinese renewable-energy champion evolves through multiple industry cycles. How do you build and defend a moat in an industry where technologies, margins and competitive positions change so quickly? How do you keep finding the next growth curve? How do you turn China scale into global advantage?

  • We move from group strategy and senior-management dialogue → energy services, storage and emerging energy networks → next-generation perovskite solar technology. In one half day, participants see how an established energy company defends the present while building the next.

• Lotus (Nasdaq: LOT): Luxury EV, Chinese Industrial Power—and Yes, You Get to Drive It

  • Lotus, part of the Geely ecosystem (0175.HK), is one of the most enjoyable ways to understand Chinese industrial globalization: a legendary global performance brand, Chinese ownership and capital, one of the world’s deepest EV technology and supply-chain ecosystems, and the challenge of building a differentiated global luxury electric-performance brand.

  • We will meet senior management to discuss how Lotus is positioning itself inside China’s fiercely competitive EV market and internationally. Then we leave the meeting room to get behind the wheel and experience the product yourself.

• Dongsheng Fusion: C-Level Access to China’s Fusion Race

  • Nuclear fusion is rapidly becoming one of the most closely watched frontier-energy investment themes in China, attracting leading technology investors and significant new capital.

  • We will meet C-level leadership at Dongsheng Fusion to understand what is actually happening behind the headlines: Why now? What technical milestones matter? Where are the real bottlenecks? And how could China’s manufacturing capabilities accelerate the path from frontier science to an entirely new energy industry? A rare look at one of the highest-upside, highest-uncertainty bets in the future of energy.

• NIO Power: When EV Infrastructure Becomes a Power Asset

  • We start at a NIO delivery center and experience one of China’s most distinctive EV innovations firsthand: battery swapping. Then the story gets more interesting. We will meet the General Manager responsible for NIO Power’s electricity business to understand how battery-swap infrastructure can increasingly participate in virtual power plants, electricity trading and grid services as China’s power market evolves. The question shifts from:“Is battery swapping a good EV experience?” to “What happens when a mobility network also becomes a distributed energy asset?”

• SIIC Capital / SIIC Venture Capital: How Chinese State Capital Actually Invests

  • China’s state capital is enormously consequential, and often poorly understood from outside the country.

  • Participants will have a General Manager-level dialogue with the investment side of SIIC Group to ask how a major Shanghai state-owned investment platform actually thinks about technology, commercial returns, strategic priorities, emerging industries and global expansion: What gets funded? What does not? And how does state capital see the next generation of energy and industrial technology?

• Suzhou Industrial Park: How China Builds an Industrial Ecosystem

  • If GCL shows how a company builds a moat, Suzhou Industrial Park shows how an entire ecosystem builds one.

  • Through senior-level dialogue and an on-the-ground visit, we will examine how government, infrastructure, capital, industrial platforms, multinational companies and start-ups combine to create one of China’s most internationally oriented innovation and manufacturing clusters. This is the machinery behind “how China builds.”

• Sanhua Intelligent Controls(002050.SZ)(02050.HK): The Hidden Infrastructure Behind Electrification and AI

  • Some of the strongest industrial moats sit inside components most consumers never see.

  • Sanhua provides a window into the thermal-management layer behind EVs, HVAC, energy systems and increasingly AI infrastructure—an increasingly strategic bottleneck as electrification and compute density rise.

  • A chance to understand how Chinese industrial companies build global leadership in the less-visible but mission-critical layers of the technology stack.

• Alibaba Cloud: When AI Becomes a Megawatt Problem

  • AI is normally discussed through models, chips and applications. But at scale, AI becomes physical: data centers, cooling, electricity, grid capacity and infrastructure CAPEX.

  • Alibaba Cloud gives us a way to follow the AI boom all the way down to the energy system and asks: What does AI look like when translated into megawatts?

• Meet the Startups: 2060 Advisory × I4C × Climate KIC

  • A curated session bringing together 5–7 selected frontier startups, program participants, investors and local ecosystem guests.

  • No generic demo day. The discussion will focus on the questions that actually matter for investment: What has been validated? Who is paying? What needs to happen before scale? Where are the real bottlenecks? Who finances the next stage? Can the company build a durable moat—and can it travel beyond China?

  • It gives participants a compressed view of the companies that could become the next generation behind the industrial leaders visited throughout the week.

Program institutions, speakers, test-drive arrangements and sequencing remain subject to final scheduling. Where necessary, equivalent-caliber institutions or experiences may be substituted.

Weekend Immersion Tracks

🚄 A Weekend in Datong: Where China Became China | Oct. 24-25 | Datong, Shanxi

Datong isn’t on most itineraries. That’s the point. In the 5th century, Datong was the capital of the Northern Wei — a dynasty founded by the Xianbei, a non-Han nomadic group from China’s northern frontier, who chose to assimilate into Chinese civilization rather than rule over it as outsiders. That choice, and the century of upheaval and reinvention it triggered, is carved directly into the cliffs at Yungang Grottoes.

But history is never just history here; it is an economic lifeline. Beneath the ancient cliffs runs a second, more urgent story: Datong itself. Once a coal powerhouse that hit an economic wall, the city gambled its survival on a controversial bet—tearing down the new to rebuild the old. Today, that gamble is being stress-tested by a surge in domestic “heritage tourism,” accelerated by a surprise catalyst: a hit video game, Black Myth: Wukong. We won’t just admire the temples; we will sit with the tension between preservation and progress, examining how a controversial mayor’s vision is playing out on the ground.

Datong is a miniature of the Chinese model: resilient, contradictory, and constantly rewriting its future by reclaiming its past. It is a perspective no boardroom or briefing deck can replicate.

This tour is led by Steven Xiao, who would be no stranger to the participants of our second tour. Steven was born and raised in Beijing, and somewhere along the way to a decade-plus career in finance across New York and Shanghai, picked up a second, far more consuming interest: the Buddhist art carved into cliffsides and caves centuries before anyone thought to build a spreadsheet. He holds a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Columbia University, which he has never once used to explain any of this. History and Buddhist art are his real vocation, pursued not from an armchair but from the caves themselves, tracing early Buddhist civilization across the furthest reaches of the Silk Road. This October, he trades the boardroom for a cliffside in Datong, leading the tour’s extension there.

Core Highlights

• Yungang Grottoes — The Evolution of Identity:

  • Spend a full day at this UNESCO site to witness 60,000 Buddhist statues. We decode the visible stylistic shift—from Central Asian and Gandharan forms to distinctly Chinese aesthetics—which serves as the clearest physical record of how Chinese identity was built through absorption, not purity.

• History Becomes Tactile

  • Studio Simulation: Within a working studio, observe masters tending fragile heritage. Guided by their hands, we attempt careful brushwork on replica surfaces, feeling our pulse sync to the quiet rhythm of history.

• Architectural Continuity — Liao-Jin Dynasty Temples:

  • Walk through history at Shanhua Si and Huayan Si, two of China’s best-preserved wooden structures from the Liao and Jin dynasties. These sites anchor Datong’s status as a millennium-long nexus of religious and architectural innovation.

• The Economic Pivot — Coal to Culture:

  • Investigate Datong’s fraught transition from a declining coal hub to a heritage tourism hotspot. We analyze the legacy of controversial urban reconstruction and the “video game dividend”—the surge in domestic tourism driven by pop culture—to understand the risks and rewards of betting a city’s future on its past.

• Unscripted Local Life & Gastronomy:

  • Eat as Datong eats. Start with hand-pulled Shanxi noodles and mutton shaomai at a bustling morning wet market, then wander the old city’s night market. With ample unstructured time, engage directly with residents to grasp the human dimension of this industrial and cultural metamorphosis.

🎁 The Hidden Engine of Global Consumption-How Small Commodities Move the World | Oct. 31-Nov 1 | Yiwu, Zhejiang

Yiwu is the pulse point of global micro-multinationals. Often overlooked by traditional investors, this city in Zhejiang province supplies over 80% of the world’s Christmas decorations, 70% of Christmas trees, and a dominant majority of the small commodities found in dollar stores from Ohio to Oslo. It is the physical manifestation of China’s supply chain dominance—where a $0.10 hairclip can move across continents with algorithmic precision. Yet, beneath the surface of “low-end” goods, Yiwu is undergoing a radical transformation into a high-efficiency, digital-first logistics and new-energy export hub.

This tour is led by David Fishman, a Principal at The Lantau Group (TLG), a leading Asia-focused energy consultancy based in Shanghai. Having lived and worked in China for 15 years, David specializes in China’s energy sector, industrial development, trade, and political economy. His work has included advising multinational corporations, financial institutions, and industrial clients on topics ranging from power markets and manufacturing competitiveness to supply chains and regional development.

Beyond his professional work, David has traveled extensively throughout China and has a longstanding interest in economic geography, local development, and social ethnography. His research and writing explore how Chinese communities, businesses, and institutions interact with broader trends in globalization, industrialization, and international trade. Combining policy expertise with extensive firsthand experience, he offers a grounded perspective on how China’s economy functions beyond the major coastal cities and financial centers.

Core Highlights

• The Commodity Matrix: Yiwu International Trade City

  • The World’s Largest SME Showroom: Navigate the sprawling 5.5 million sqm marketplace, and experience the immense scale of the world’s top wholesale market in person.

  • New Energy Products Hall: Conduct impromptu interviews with exporters shipping solar panels, lithium batteries, and EV components to emerging markets, gauging real-time export sentiment and margin structures.

  • Mock Sourcing: A mock sourcing exercise across the vast halls of the Yiwu International Trade City. You’ll walk the floor, pick products, ask questions about pricing and lead times, and experience the thrill—and the pressure—of making sourcing decisions on the spot.

• Next-Gen Commerce: Yiwu Global Digital Trade Center (GDEC)

  • The Physical-Digital Nexus: Exclusive access to Yiwu’s flagship “city of the future,” launched last year. We tour the integrated complex where physical showrooms meet the Digital Trade Hub. Understand how the integration of physical showrooms, the Digital Trade Hub, and AI-powered matchmaking compresses transaction cycles for millions of SMEs.

• Logistics Under the Lens: The Bonded Zone & China-Europe Railway

  • Bonded Zone Deep Dive: Enter the world’s busiest cross-border e-commerce trade zone. Analyze Customs Innovation—specifically the “bonded display and trade” model—and dissect the cold-chain and high-value logistics chains that fuel Yiwu’s import-export flywheel.

  • Continental Railhead: Stand atop the China-Europe Railway Terminal to witness the “iron camel caravans.” Observe container sorting at scale and decode the multimodal (rail-sea-air) transport strategies.

• Production Reality Check

  • The Factory Floor: Step inside a Yiwu factory floor to trace the product journey from raw materials to finished goods, gaining firsthand insight into China’s export engine.

🍷Curious China: A People-First Weekend in China’s Southern Capital | Nov 13-14 | Nanjing, Jiangsu

Nanjing served as the capital of six dynasties, the Republic of China, and remains a regional center today. Its city walls, lakes, Republican-era neighborhoods and everyday street life reveal how different layers of Chinese history continue to shape contemporary life.

Rather than moving through a checklist of landmarks, this weekend is designed around people, conversation and a slower rhythm. Shared meals, local encounters and thoughtfully paced walks create space to understand the city through those who live there.

The experience is led by Michelle Wei, a Nanjing native who spent 17 years living and working across the United States, Hong Kong, the United Kingdom and Germany. Cornell-trained in hospitality, with a professional background spanning private equity, real estate investment and cross-border capital raising, Michelle brings both local roots and an international perspective. She will introduce participants to a curated circle of local thinkers, practitioners and friends, turning the city itself into a setting for exchange.

Core Highlights

• Welcome Dinner

  • The weekend begins with an intimate dinner bringing together participants and selected local guests. Over a warm, unhurried meal, conversations introduce Nanjing through personal stories, lived experience and different perspectives on the city.

• A Layered Immersion in Nanjing

  • Walk along the City Wall and Xuanwu Lake, where monumental history meets the routines of contemporary urban life.

  • Explore the Qinhuai River and its surrounding neighborhoods in the evening, encountering the waterways, architecture, food and social traditions that have shaped the city for centuries.

  • Stroll the sycamore-shaded boulevards of Yihe Road, where Republican-era villas whisper the quiet elegance of old Nanjing.

  • Discover Nanjing’s gold-leaf tradition through a hands-on cultural session. Participants will learn how this highly refined craft has been preserved and adapted, and create a personal keepsake connected to the city’s living heritage.

• Reflection and Connection

  • Unstructured time, shared meals and moments of reflection are deliberately built into the itinerary. These pauses allow conversations to develop naturally—about history, identity, cultural difference and the changing rhythms of life in China.

  • This is not simply a weekend of sightseeing. It is an invitation to experience Nanjing as a living city, through the relationships, memories and everyday practices that give it meaning.

Pricing and Important Details

To maintain the quality of dialogue and ensure meaningful interactions among investors and industry leaders, participation is by application only (you may fill in the application form here), with each tour limited to 20 seats.

Pricing & Discounts

1Each tour offers three pricing tiers:

• Standard Rate

• Early Bird Discount: 10% off-Valid through 11:59 PM Beijing Time on September 13, 2026

• Returnee Discount: 20% off-Available for previous Baiguan tour participants

Discount Policies:

• Early Bird and Returnee discounts are non-combinable. Both are calculated on the Standard Rate; in cases of dual eligibility, the lower of the two rates applies automatically.

• Multi-Tour Savings: Register for two or more tours to save even more. This deduction applies to your post-Early Bird or post-Returnee total:

  • Total < $10,000 USD → Deduct $500 USD

  • Total $10,000–$20,000 USD → Deduct $1,000 USD

  • Total $20,000–$30,000 USD → Deduct $2,000 USD

  • Total $30,000–$40,000 USD → Deduct $3,000 USD

  • Total >$40,000 USD → Deduct $4,000 USD

Illustrative Example:

Scenario: You are a Returnee registering for two tours during the Early Bird window.

1. Base Discount: Two tours at standard rate ($2,500 + $ 15000 = $17,500). We apply your 20% Returnee discount: $17,500* ( 1 - 20% ) = $14,000

2. Multi-Tour Credit: Your adjusted total qualifies for a $1,000 deduction.

Final Fee: $14,000 - $1000 = $13,000

What’s Included:

• Five-star Hotels (eg., Sheraton, Westin, InterContinental) or character-filled equivalent stays on weekend immersion to enhance the local experience (if you select the accommodation-inclusive package)

• Travel insurance

• All scheduled company visits and seminars

• All breakfast, lunch and some dinners

• All ground transportation during the tour

What’s Not Included:

• International/domestic flights to/from the destination city

• Chinese visa application fees

• Personal expenses

• Certain dinners are not included in the standard program and will be clearly marked in the final detailed itinerary.

Applications, Refunds & Cancellations

• Cancel ≥30 days prior to the tour start date: Full Refund

• Cancel between 15~30 days (inclusive of Day 15) before the tour start date: 50% Refund

• Cancel <15 days before the start date (any reason, including visa issues): No Refund

• All time references shall be based on China Standard Time (Beijing Time, GMT+8)

• Requests must be sent in writing to Baiguan_ChinaTour@bigonelab.com

• Refunds will be processed minus a non-refundable administrative/service fee, the exact amount of which is subject to the applicable payment platform’s charges.

To apply, please click or scan to fill out this form: Baiguan China Tour Application Form - Autumn 2026

What to expect next:

• Upon reviewing your application, we will notify you of the outcome within 3 business days. If accepted, we will contact you to arrange payment and discuss next steps.

• We understand that emails can sometimes end up in your spam folder. If you don’t hear from us within 3 business days, please check your spam folder.

• Once your payment is processed, your seat will be officially secured. We will follow up with an email to gather additional details to enhance your experience, such as arrival information, dietary restrictions, or any special accommodation needs.

• About one week before the program begins, we will reach out with the exact daily schedules, meeting spots, and an introductory brochure about the companies we will be visiting. We will also create a designated WeChat group for participants and invite you to join.

Testimonials from Previous Tours

“About halfway through the tour, we went out to dinner, and it was a notable turning point where everyone loosened up. One great aspect of this tour is that the interest and domain is specific enough to draw out a diverse set of backgrounds, all of whom you’re interested in getting to know, and beyond getting the opportunity to pick everyone’s brains, you can become friends as well.” — Tech industry expert

“Came with intention to learn more about China, ended up with not only succeeding the original intention but also meeting new friends with diverse backgrounds.” — Family office 2nd generation leader

“Robert and Amber were awesome hosts. The trip is extremely insightful regardless if it’s your first time in China, a China-curious repeat visitor or even an an investor living in Shanghai.”— Investor, VC

I just want to thank Robert, Amber and both the Baiguan + FO Insights team for organizing this China Tour. It has been such a wonderful experience for me. One memorable experience was visiting Yowant’s X27 mall. Just mind-blown by the sheer scale of livestreaming in China. This is unlike any other “investor trip” and I really got to meet many interesting companies, analysts and other financial experts on the ground. Thank you so much! :)— Investor & entrepreneur

Deep Robotics demonstration of their robots, visitng Alibaba cloud center and Xi hu university

It was an incredible opportunity to gain first hand exposure to the Chinese consumer market and witness how homegrown tech companies are playing a crucial role in AI/robotics space. The Baiguan and FOI team deep connections and expertise in the market definitely helped contextualized some of the market nuances. — Fintech Senior management, personal investor

Baiguan’s tour has provided independent, objective and insightful perspectives for global investors. — CIO private wealth

The Baiguan China Discovery Tour provided a unique opportunity to meet with a number of businesses from different industries. The presentations and discussions gave a good idea about the business models and how they deal with the current situation in the Chinese market. It was an action packed program that gave us many new insights.

But the best was how the group spirit evolved, fueled by the hosts’ organizing skills and hospitality. We came as individual professionals interested in getting to know China on the ground. We left as a group of friends sharing an exceptional experience. — Founder, AI-based cloud solution

Amber and Robert were incredible hosts and curated a great tour of uniquely chosen companies and a gathering of diverse attendees with whom there was truly great chemistry. I would love to do this conference again next year. — Managing Partner, PE

For more details about our previous programs and field trip notes, visit here

We helped him translate and edit this piece, originally written in Chinese.

My family is from Weihai, Shandong Province. Both of my parents grew up in one of the area’s well-known fishing villages. Education and the national college entrance exam carried them into civil-service jobs and a local middle-class life, but they kept some of a fisher’s skills and equipment, including a boat. When they went out to sea, the catch was more than food. It was the best gift they could send their children and a direct expression of love.

Of all catches, eel ranked above all. In the past, when the family caught one, they were often reluctant to eat it. Good eel went mainly to Japanese buyers and had obvious cash value. Sending one to a child was a serious gesture. We tasted the fish, but also the scarcity behind it: the sea, the season, human skill and luck.

Years later, “鳗鱼饭eel rice” was easy to find on Weihai’s streets. A fish once considered too valuable for the family table, and often destined for Japan, had become a bowl of rice sold in shopping malls and neighborhood restaurants.

RedCan’s 2025 report on Japanese dining in China described eel rice as a niche category gaining attention. As of March 2025, China still lacked a national leader in this sector, but regional specialists had emerged, with representative brands operating more than ten outlets. Videos tagged “eel rice” had accumulated 820 million views on Douyin, while Xiaohongshu carried roughly 340,000 related posts. Earlier industry reports said domestic eel consumption at one point rose by more than 50% year on year after the pandemic, and that one Shanghai specialist sold more than 400 bowls a day. Clearly, eel is moving from an expensive item on Japanese menus toward a restaurant category that can sustain specialist shops and regional replication.

The change looked ordinary, but it rested on an industrial system.

Eel became an everyday restaurant dish because many unglamorous links matured together, not because of one miraculous invention. The relevant unit here is not a fishing village, but the chain from glass eels and grow-out ponds, processing plants, cold storage, and finally to exports and domestic restaurants.

Commercial eel farming has not closed the full loop from reproduction to grow-out. Farms still begin with wild-caught glass eels or elvers, then raise them in ponds or indoor systems. But what China’s experience shows is that China’s industrial capacity connects the parts that engineers can improve. Scarce juvenile eels encourage farms to raise survival rates. Inventories and cold storage can buffer volatile output. Processing can turn fish of different sizes into standardized products.

Sauerkraut fish took a similar route earlier. Boneless fillets of consistent size, including basa, worked with central kitchens and standardized seasoning packs to make the dish easier to reproduce across outlets. Tai Er, part of listed company Jiumaojiu (9922.HK), later became a national brand.

And this industrialization of eel farming is nationwide. Although Weihai and nearby Rongcheng have deep fishing traditions, China’s eel industry today extends far beyond Shandong. Fujian, Guangdong and Jiangxi also have large farming, processing and export bases. Fujian has long been important in eel aquaculture, grilled-eel processing and exports to Japan.

Dams, eldercare robots and caviar

Yichang of Hubei Province is usually associated with the Three Gorges Dam and Gezhouba. They belong to a monumental phase of Chinese industrialization: organizing water, electricity, navigation and construction along the Yangtze, then converting a natural drop in elevation into dispatchable energy and transport capacity.

What struck me in Yichang also operated at a smaller scale. While there, I visited an eldercare institution where I found a Fourier Intelligence companion robot. Fourier says it began with rehabilitation robotics and now serves more than 2,000 institutions and hospitals across more than 40 countries and regions. [Baiguan note: Fourier was also one of the robotics companies we visited during our last Baiguan China Tour.]

I previously argued that, although most embodied robots in China remain toys and exhibition pieces, eldercare institutions may be an early entry point for embodied AI.

At the care center, residents and staff are already willing to treat the robot as part of the service environment. Not that it could already provide full care for older people. But its value as a companion to residents is being warmly felt.

While we were still absorbed by the robot, staff served high-grade caviar as a local specialty and told us, to our great surprise, that Yichang had become an important center for caviar farming and processing.

The juxtaposition was hard to miss. One city is home to giant water dams, an eldercare robot and a food once reserved for luxury tables, all at once.

Caviar begins with sturgeon. The fish grow slowly and prefer cold, flowing, stable water. Supply once depended more heavily on wild waters, low temperatures and years of waiting. Industrial aquaculture breaks the problem into variables that can be monitored: temperature, water quality, dissolved oxygen, feed, the age structure of the stock, processing temperature, hygiene certification and cold-chain transport.

Net cages, purpose-built pools and container-like recirculating systems keep sturgeon in more stable cold-water environments. Electricity powers aeration, water circulation, monitoring, processing and refrigeration, approximating some conditions of cold, moving natural water. Public materials I saw describe age cohorts designed to maintain a stable supply. A Yichang municipal report this year said daily caviar output was about 200 kilograms and that orders for the first half were fully booked.

Caviar remains expensive. It has not become an everyday condiment. But its scarcity now comes from a different mix of constraints. Supply depends less exclusively on wild catch and chance, and more on farming cycles, facility capacity, processing, electricity and refrigerated logistics. Once production is divided into stages that can attract investment, depreciate and expand, costs have room to fall.

The Three Gorges, eldercare robots and caviar share a method. A dam manages water and power. A farm manages water quality and biological time. A care institution manages attention and human time. The objects differ, but each problem is being divided into equipment, processes, standards, and trackable data.

Industrializing healthcare into a fulfillment system

Healthcare has long faced an “impossible trinity”: good doctors, low prices and easy access are difficult to provide at the same time. I examined that tension in my first article at Baiguan, China may attain healthcare’s Holy Grail: cracking the “impossible trinity”.

In healthcare, I see the same pattern that I observe in eel and caviar: industrialization turns premium products and services into parts of a system that can be scheduled and connected.

Large imaging machines, domestically produced CT and MRI systems, centralized procurement and import substitution have lowered the cost of capabilities that were once expensive and spread them to more hospitals.

Online consultations, pharmaceutical e-commerce and home delivery connect work once scattered across hospital counters, pharmacies and patients’ waiting time.

Ant Group’s Afu Health offers one example of an AI health entry point: public reports put monthly active users at about 30 million and daily health questions at about 10 million by January 2026.

JD Health shows the scale of online healthcare and pharmaceutical retail, and Meituan’s on-demand pharmaceutical retail shows how platforms, pharmacies, courier networks and payment systems are reorganizing fulfillment.

Services once tied to doctors’ time, patients’ waiting, physical counters and pharmacy inventories are being split into entry points, models, medical records, payments, inventories, delivery and follow-up.

People remain central, but repetitive search, documentation, movement, and preliminary screening now run through devices, servers, terminals, and delivery networks.

Civilization runs on energy

Economic activity is conventionally divided into three sectors. Primary industry extracts or grows natural resources. Secondary industry transforms those resources into manufactured goods. Tertiary industry provides services.

This taxonomy tells us what an industry produces. It says less about how production is organized.

For that, I find another lens more useful: the extent to which a society can use energy and engineering to make its output controllable, repeatable, and scalable.

Seen through this lens, China’s three sectors are undergoing what I call a “三合一three-to-one convergence.”

I do not mean that agriculture and services are literally being reclassified as manufacturing, or that farmers and caregivers are becoming assembly-line workers. I mean that primary and tertiary industries are increasingly adopting the operating logic of secondary industry: standardized inputs, specialized equipment, repeatable processes, measurable outputs and logistics organized at scale. And all logic is rooted in energy, the first principle underpinning all human‑production activities.

The eel farm, the caviar producer and the healthcare platform therefore belong to the same story.

Aquaculture remains a primary industry, while healthcare remains a service. But an eel farm seeking higher survival rates, a sturgeon farm managing water quality and age cohorts, and a healthcare platform coordinating consultations, pharmacies, payments and delivery all increasingly resemble production systems. Their formal classifications differ, but the method by which they overcome constraints is converging.

Energy is what makes this convergence possible.

Scarce land creates pressure to produce more from each unit of land or water. Scarce labor creates an incentive to transfer repetitive work to machines. Biological variability is managed through pumps, sensors, temperature control and cold storage. Distance is overcome through warehouses, refrigeration and transport networks. Waiting time is reduced through software, servers and delivery systems.

In every case, a constraint once borne primarily by nature or human labor is partially converted into demand for equipment, organization and energy. Circulation pumps, processing lines, robots, servers, warehouses and transport networks may look unrelated, but ultimately they all appear as electricity and equipment costs.

This is the central fact of industrial civilization. The more constraints a society can reorganize in this way, the more energy it must be able to mobilize, and the more reliably it must be able to deliver that energy where it is needed.

Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev once proposed classifying civilizations according to their command of energy. The science-fiction rankings matter less here than the intuition behind them. Energy use is not merely an outcome of development. It determines how much of the natural and human environment a civilization can bring within the reach of engineering.

China’s power system shows the scale of this transformation. According to the Our World in Data Energy Dataset, China accounted for less than 10% of global electricity generation in 2000, but roughly one-third by 2024, well ahead of the United States, the European Union, India and Japan.

This enormous power system does not support only steel mills, chemical plants and car factories. It also runs aquaculture systems, cold chains, warehouses, hospitals, robots, servers and delivery networks.

China is not merely industrializing manufacturing, but is extending industrial methods into agriculture and services.

Yichang makes the connection visible. The Three Gorges Dam and Gezhouba wrote energy engineering into the landscape. Caviar production and eldercare robots bring the same engineering habit into agriculture and services.

The dams do not directly produce caviar or robots. The connection lies in the capabilities accumulated over decades: building infrastructure, manufacturing equipment, training engineers, managing complex processes and directing energy at scale. The sturgeon farm and the eldercare institution are smaller expressions of the same industrial logic that built the dams.

Industrialization does not abolish every constraint. Eel farming still depends on wild-caught juveniles. Sturgeon still take years to produce roe. Eldercare robots remain immature. But industrialization changes the character of these constraints. Problems once accepted as scarcity, chance, distance or unavoidable demands on human time become variables that can be measured, managed and gradually improved.

Lower prices and more storefronts are the visible results. Underneath them, natural resources, manufacturing equipment, energy networks and service processes are being connected into a single production system.

That is what I mean by “three-to-one convergence”: three sectors in economic statistics, but one increasingly industrial logic running beneath them.

As Laozi, one of the most famous philosophers in the world, said in his great work Tao Te Ching: “The Dao generates the One, the One generates the Two, the Two generates the Three, the Three generates all things.”

Here in modern China, the Dao is energy, and through engineering, it generates all the products and services that we need.

Subscribe now

The Chinese word 姥姥 (lǎolao) refers specifically to one’s maternal grandmother in northern dialect— a figure who, in many Chinese’s memory, evokes a particular constellation of associations: rural village life, wood-fired stoves, handmade textiles, pickled vegetables, and an unhurried rhythm of existence that feels increasingly alien in China’s hyper-accelerated urban centers.

“Digital grandmas & grandpas”: China’s hottest KOLs

Of course, today’s grandmas & grandpas are hardly confined to the countryside. Following the explosion of short-video platforms, a new breed of senior KOLs has taken the Chinese internet by storm—some rocking streetwear and high fashion even trendier (潮) than Gen Z. A generation of young Chinese are openly describing their favorite elderly content creators as their “digital relatives/cyber ancestors“ (电子亲人/赛博祖辈).

On Douyin, at least 77 silver-haired influencers have surpassed one million followers as of June 2025. Twenty of them have exceeded four million. The top “grandma” accounts command audiences that dwarf most celebrity accounts — and their fans are overwhelmingly young.

Tian Laolao (我是田姥姥), a 77-year-old from Anshan, Liaoning province, is the most-followed elderly creator on Douyin, with 34.5 million followers and 8.8 billion likes. Her content feels very unfiltered, mostly just her grandson filming her rapid-fire Northeastern dialect rants, but her funny comedy-style content has made millions of young netizens call her "National Grandma".

There are also many who break every stereotype of how an elderly person should live. The “high-energy nonagenarian” wave has become a real eye-catcher. Since late 2024, sped-up day-in-the-life videos of seniors who wake at 6 AM and don't stop until midnight have become a viral subgenre. The breakout star is Meiying Ama (梅英阿嬷), a 90-year-old in Fujian who grew to 1.13 million Douyin followers within months, with 46% of her fans aged 25–34.

Subscribe now

In contrast to the stereotype of elderly Chinese people as frugal minimalists, some senior KOLs take the liberty to express their fashion statement even more loudly than the youth. For instance, the Fashion Grandma Group (时尚奶奶团), an MCN founded in 2019, boasts over 15 million followers and 2,000 members nationwide, attracting a predominantly young female audience.

“Cyber ancestors”: when the shorts feed becomes family

The hashtags “cyber ancestors” and “digital relatives” have become increasingly popular on Chinese social media.

Many young viewers simply marvel at these creators’ health and fitness after a long workday, leaving comments like, “I’m a 20-year-old watching a 65-year-old athlete’s day.” This reflects their burnout from fast-paced city life, using these videos to vicariously experience the high-energy lifestyle they wish they had.

For others, these creators are a reminder of a simpler time—when spending a slow afternoon in the countryside was completely fine. Unfiltered clips of seniors speaking in local dialects and eating homegrown fruit offer a welcome break from daily stress.

In the comments, young followers often share major life updates, writing things like, “Grandma, I got into grad school!” and treating the influencers as stand-in grandparents.

China’s rapid urbanization pulled hundreds of millions of young people from villages into cities. The geographic separation is compounded by a communication gap: young people talk about workplace drama and internet culture that their grandparents don’t understand; grandparents repeat concerns about eating and sleeping that young people find tedious.

The “cyber-ancestors” fill this void — they speak in a language young people can engage with, on platforms they already inhabit, without the guilt of a real family phone call. The emotional transfer is real.

When “Grandma’s craft” becomes a brand

Subscribe now

Read more