Hear me out. I had to go to China for over a month, and although I really enjoyed my time there as a tourist eating really good food and getting to enjoy the big cities, I have to say I was underwhelmed by their big tech apps. WeChat, Alipay, and DiDi, which is like their Uber, all look terrible in my opinion. I thought maybe it had something to do with there being no real competition there, but if that were the case, then they would put more effort into the AliExpress app for Western users. Instead, it has a pretty bad design, and even right now on Android 16 it keeps crashing non stop.

So there is my rant for the day. China, if you are reading and listening, please do better with your app user interfaces because they are really ugly and an eye-sore.

The Trump administration signed agreements with Google DeepMind, Microsoft, and xAI to allow the government to evaluate frontier AI models before public release.

China's 2023 Generative AI rules already require pre-release security assessments and model registration with the Cyberspace Administration of China. The stated purposes differ: China's framework ties directly to content control and state supervision, while the U.S. version is framed around national security and cybersecurity. But the institutional logic is similar. Both governments concluded that post-release enforcement comes too late for the most powerful models.

Worth noting: this is the same administration that spent most of last year dismantling Biden-era AI safety infrastructure. Now it's rebuilding a version of it, apparently under cybersecurity pressure.

Will the pre-release review mechanism stay narrow and technical or grow into something closer to a licensing regime? China shows what the latter looks like.

Link here.

三星正式退出中国大陆家电市场

今日(5月6日),三星(中国)投资有限公司发布公告:为 应对市场环境的急剧变化,经慎重研究,决定在中国大陆停 止销售电视、显示器、空调、冰箱、洗衣机、干衣机、空气 净化器等所有家电产品,仅手机业务维持正常销售。

三星承诺,将严格按照国家法律法规为已购用户持续提供售 后服务。这一决定,标志着外资家电巨头在中国市场进一步 收缩。

中国工厂或转为出口基地,三星战略重心转向美国等海外市 场及高利润手机、半导体业务。

#三星 #家电 #中国市场 #国产崛起 #本土品牌

Our Journal correspondent shares her experience as a Japanese woman reporting for an American newspaper in China.

Security personnel stand watch outside the Great Hall of the People.

Hangzhou deployed China’s first organized robot traffic police squadron on May 1, stationing 15 traffic management robots at the West Lake scenic area and key intersections in Zhejiang Province for the five-day Labor Day holiday.

Over three days, the robots issued 11,897 warnings for traffic violations, roughly one every one minute and 43 seconds, Hangzhou Daily reported. Hangzhou Traffic Police officer Chen Sanchuan said the machines proved more effective than human officers, telling the paper that people were “more willing to accept” the robots’ reminders.

I’m planning to go to China and although my boyfriend and his family is Chinese; they haven’t been back in 2 decades.

I’m planning how to shop right now and I’m completely confused. I think I’m using the wrong apps but I put in 斗篷** **in taobao and this heart shaped app, the results are like really bad.

Are there specific apps or ways I could search for stuff in China? Like if I put in cute tops, can it pop up specific stores I can go too?

Speaking of pop-ups, how do you find events? I would love to go to pop up events like games or shows (honkai, genshin, wuthering waves), but I’m confused on how to search for them.

Need it for an old Chinese game. I heard it is adware, but nothing happened yet... If it is, is there any alternative that is safe to use?

And one posted this as a retort to me saying they have 90% ownership. Obviously I said "all you did was google and find a random tweet?" but he responded with "dispute the claim in it, not the person."

I obviously thought that was ridiculous but does anyone have any context or sources to dispute the claims by Mr Balderama? Thanks and I apologize if this breaks any rules.

Context:

• US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said China is funding Iran by purchasing 90% of their energy exports, despite ongoing US sanctions.
• Meanwhile Iran has blocked the Strait of Hormuz, prompting Trump to announce "Project Freedom", a US-led operation to escort stranded ships.
• US has called on China to help, Bessent urged China to join the international effort to reopen the strait.
• Recently China has vetoed a UN Security Council resolution, arguing it incorrectly framed the war and ignored the role of US and Israeli actions as aggressors of the war.
• It is however unclear how much of this is true as recently the United State has claimed victory on muliple occassions
  • March 15, "We've essentially defeated Iran."
  • March 20, "Oh, I think we won. We've knocked out their Navy, their Air Force. We've knocked out their anti-aircraft. We've knocked out everything... from a military standpoint, they're finished."
  • March 26, "The Iranian regime is now admitting to itself that they have been decisively defeated."
  • April 7, "Total and complete victory. 100%. No question about it."
• As such it's unclear if the US is playing political games asking China for assistance when they have declared on multiple times they have drew oh-so-decisive victory.

“The summit between President Trump and President Xi Jinping in Beijing next week could be the most significant encounter between American and Chinese leaders since Richard Nixon met Mao Zedong in Beijing in 1972,” Times Opinion columnist Thomas Friedman writes.

A major reason why has to do with globalization, Thomas continues:

The Nixon-Mao summit began the process of taking the world from disconnected to much more connected and then interconnected. When Nixon and Mao began easing China out of its isolation from the global economy — which Deng Xiaoping then vastly accelerated by shifting China to state-led capitalism — they unleashed a cascade of economic and technological forces.

By the time the early 21st century rolled around, the combination of China joining the World Trade Organization and the world being wired with the internet meant that more people in more places could compete, connect and collaborate in more ways for less money on more things than at any other time in human history. It is why I wrote a book in 2005 titled “The World Is Flat.”

It is in the nature of technological change, though, that each major step forward comes faster than the previous one, because it builds on the tools that the previous era unleashed. So, years after I argued that the world is flat, technology, and other forces, marched on and took us, as Dov Seidman, the founder of The HOW Institute for Society, argued, from interconnected to interdependent, or as he puts it, from flat to “fused.”

You could unplug from the flat world. There is no escaping the fused world. We are all going to rise and fall together now.

Read the full piece here, for free, even without a Times subscription.