Some random thoughts on NYC and Shanghai Auto Show and "不跪"。
I spent last week in NYC, talking to friends and catching up. Here are some numbers:
Subway "token" is $2.90 and it was $0.25 30 years ago.
East village government projects are totally gentrified and privately owned, which provide "rent-controlled" ($1300 per room) lease to some targeted residents while market-priced rental is $2000 per room.
A large cup of HeyTea costs >$9.
A fast-food meal costs > $15.
The NYC residential market has approximately 3.6 million housing units, among which 2.357 million units are for rental.
The whole city is cleaner and better developed than 5/10/15 years ago. Some gentrified neighborhoods look really nice such as East Village and SOHO. Even the China Town looks cleaner and more walkable than before.
Young and newcomers cannot afford marriage or having kids.
Shanghai Auto Show is going on without any major surprise to me. It is quiet primarily due to the recently release L3 regulation, which specifically prevent NEV vendors from proclaiming exaggerated features. So far, AFAIK, only Huawei ADS 4.0 announces L3 ready for highway. The China NEV market officially enters into the consolidation phase. This tranquility during Shanghai Auto Show fits my expectation for the China NEV evolution: there is no straight-line development; things do evolve over phases. The upshot is that the gap in technological innovation and manufacturing advancement between China and World is widening. It becomes an accepted fact that China NEV industry is leading the world.
"不跪" is an interesting phenomenon. It is somewhat uncharacteristic as far as CeeCeePee governing culture is concerned. My take is simple: it is a conclusion as well as a decision at its central committee level that they are going to fight in Trump admin 2.0 instead of placating during Trump admin 1.0. It also indicates that, at least at the CeeCeePee central committee level, they believe there is no show-stopper. One immediate implication is that they have got 5nm going. DeepSeek-R2 and Qwen3 on 5nm CPU/GPU probably is their cushion. The rest of this game is on tier-2 players such as EU, Canada, Mexico, Japan, Brazil etc.
Last but not the lease, there still is 9.2T due this year and 6T due this June. Again, my central point since the Trump admin 2.0 was released: where is the money?
