News on China's scientific and technological development.

hullopilllw

Junior Member
Registered Member
I am an avid investor in this field, holding direct equities of startups ranging from anything like Space X, Grab, Just Eat(cultured meat), Revolut(UK/EU fintech wallet) to RoboSense.

The quoted article is pure fantasy. An overwhelming portion of startups in Europe are mainly catering towards the gig economy sector, those provide no real value to economic progress in the long term. Some of the most promising ones I come across so far mostly focus in sustainability like vertical farming etc and fintech arenas. In term of startups with heavy focus on STEM, especially those tied with upcoming fields of automation/AI/chip(4th industrial revolution), China is only rivaled by the US. EU is pretty much a token player in this field.
 

Topazchen

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The US will put SenseTime, the Chinese artificial intelligence company that specialises in facial recognition software, on an investment blacklist on Friday, the same day that it prices its Hong Kong initial public offering. The action against SenseTime, which Washington says enables human rights abuses against Muslim Uyghurs in Xinjiang, will be part of a package of sanctions against a number of countries to mark Human Rights Day, according to three people familiar with the decision. The US Treasury will place SenseTime on a list of “Chinese military-industrial complex companies”.

In June, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that barred Americans from investing in companies on the list, following a Trump administration policy intended to tackle national security threats. The decision to blacklist SenseTime will coincide with the last day of the Democracy Summit that Biden has convened with more than 100 countries. The US president held a virtual meeting last month with Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, in which they discussed ways to ensure that tensions between the countries did not veer into conflict. But Biden has stressed that he will not stop criticising China over human rights abuses.

The White House declined to comment on SenseTime or the sanctions. The Treasury did not respond to a request for comment. SenseTime did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The blacklisting could be problematic for US shareholders in SenseTime. Silver Lake, the US private equity firm which has a 3 per cent stake in the company, has agreed to lock up some of the shares for six months after the IPO. Fidelity and Qualcomm own smaller stakes. HSBC is the only western investment bank involved in the IPO. Others avoided the listing after SenseTime was placed on a US commerce department blacklist, known as the entity list, in 2019.

The sanctions against SenseTime mark the latest effort to punish China for the repression of more than 1m Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities who have been subjected to detention and forced labour in camps in the north-western Xinjiang region. China denies the claims and says the sites are education camps. The White House this week announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The UK, Australia and Canada followed suit. The US House of Representatives on Wednesday passed a bill by 428-1 to bar companies from importing goods from Xinjiang unless they proved that no forced labour was used in the manufacturing process.

Wendy Sherman, deputy secretary of state, told the Financial Times in an interview that Biden would continue to look at targets for Xinjiang-related sanctions. Asked if the US would try to prosecute Chinese officials implicated in the policy, she said: “We should consider every option that makes sense.” Chinese state-backed investors feature prominently in the SenseTime IPO, which is expected to be the biggest listing in Hong Kong in months. Of the $450m of planned cornerstone investments, $200m will come from the Mixed-Ownership Reform Fund, which was created in late 2020 by state-run China Chengtong Holdings Group and other investors under the auspices of Beijing’s state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

SenseTime depends on China for a big portion of its business, with sales of facial recognition, predictive policing and other AI tools to cities contributing 40 per cent of the total last year. The importance of government sales to its future has increased as Chinese tech groups have pursued the development of their own internal AI systems.
 

weig2000

Captain
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Here is the Harvard Belfer Center Report (PDF version of the report inside the link):

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In the past two decades, China has risen further and faster on more dimensions than any nation in history. As it has done so, it has become a serious rival of what had been the world’s sole superpower. To paraphrase former Czech president Vaclav Havel, all this has happened so quickly that we have not yet had time to be astonished.

To document what has actually happened in the competition between China and the U.S. in the past twenty years, Professor Graham Allison has directed a major study titled “The Great Rivalry: China vs. the U.S. in the 21st Century.” Originally prepared as part of a package of transition memos for the new administration after the November 2020 election, these reports were provided to those leading the Biden and Trump administrations’ strategic reviews. They are now being published as public Belfer Center Discussion Papers. The major finding will not surprise those who have been following this issue: namely, a nation that in most races the U.S. had difficulty finding in our rearview mirror 20 years ago is now on our tail, or to our side, or in some cases a bit ahead of us. The big takeaway for the policy community is that the time has come for us to retire the concept of China as a “near peer competitor” as the Director of National Intelligence’s March 2021 Global Threat Assessment still insists on calling it. We must recognize that China is now a “full-spectrum peer competitor.” Indeed, it is the most formidable rising rival a ruling power has ever confronted.

In Washington, the first question officials ask about an issue is: What to do? “Don’t just stand there, do something,” however, is a political reflex, not strategic guidance. Strategy insists that diagnosis precedes prescription. The specific assignment to which the Papers on the “Great Rivalry” respond is “to document what has actually happened in the past two decades in the array of races between China and the US.” The goal was to provide an objective database that could serve as a foundation for policy makers who would undertake a fundamental strategic reassessment of the China challenge. Five Papers drill down on the rivalry in five core arenas of power: technological, military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological.

News about China overtaking us and even surpassing us in some races is unsettling. Indeed, as students of international security, we recognize that the international order the United States has led for the seven decades since World War II provided a rare “long peace” without war between great powers, and larger increases in health and prosperity worldwide than in any equivalent period in history. The impact of China’s meteoric rise on that order is thus a matter of deep concern. But as John Adams repeatedly reminded his compatriots as they fought for freedom against the most powerful nation in the eighteenth-century world: “facts are stubborn things.”

Contrary to those for whom these findings lead to defeatism, the authors of the Papers do not believe that this means “game over” for the United States. Recognizing the magnitude of the challenge posed by what Singapore’s founding leader Lee Kuan Yew predicted would be “the biggest player in the history of the world” is the starting point for crafting an effective and sustainable China policy. We believe it should—and will—lead the United States to mobilize a response proportionate to the challenge.
 

gadgetcool5

Senior Member
Registered Member
So apparently people with Chinese WeChat accounts are now being forced to upload their Chinese ID to use the payment system? This in addition to the fact that non-Chinese WeChat accounts can't use the system. It will make it tough for a lot of overseas Chinese to use their payment system to pay people in China. I feel this belongs in this thread because WeChat is a part of China's tech industry.

China should be working to expand WeChat and its software appeals more overseas, rather than restricting them. Perhaps there can be some sort of bridge established where overseas WeChat users can pay people in China and even open bank accounts in China. In my view WeChat should be expanding overseas similar to TikTok.
 

Overbom

Brigadier
Registered Member
It will make it tough for a lot of overseas Chinese to use their payment system to pay people in China. I feel this belongs in this thread because WeChat is a part of China's tech industry
A better suited thread for this topic:
 

Godzilla

Junior Member
Registered Member
So apparently people with Chinese WeChat accounts are now being forced to upload their Chinese ID to use the payment system? This in addition to the fact that non-Chinese WeChat accounts can't use the system. It will make it tough for a lot of overseas Chinese to use their payment system to pay people in China. I feel this belongs in this thread because WeChat is a part of China's tech industry.

China should be working to expand WeChat and its software appeals more overseas, rather than restricting them. Perhaps there can be some sort of bridge established where overseas WeChat users can pay people in China and even open bank accounts in China. In my view WeChat should be expanding overseas similar to TikTok.
Not sure what you are on about. Spreading false rumours. I just used my wechat pay to top up my chinese mobile account with 50rmb, just to fact check this. Went through like any other time. You always had to get real name verification done, like once a year on wechat since years ago. Kinda annoying for us overseas folks since it means taking a photo of yourself holding your passport and uploading that as proof lol.
 
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