178001781
submission
hackingbear writes:
U.S.-China trade talks are continuing in London today with the focus on Beijing's export restrictions of rare earth magnets that threaten to hit the brakes on manufacturing of autos, high-tech and defense gear. U.S. President Trump authorized Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and fellow U.S. negotiators to walk back recent U.S. moves to suspend exports of jet engines, chip-design software and ethane. However, some on Wall Street think Beijing is in position to demand a much broader reversal of chip export controls. It's "unrealistic," wrote Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, "for Washington to assume that China is going to ease up controls on rare earths if the U.S. does not do the same as regards exports of U.S. tech products." China views U.S. export controls, some of which were dated as far back as 1996, on chips and chip equipment "as the equivalent of a declaration of economic war against China, since it amounts to a deliberate effort to prevent the upgrading of the mainland economy." The S&P 500 is edging back toward its record high as markets see little doubt that President Trump will get a deal done, given the disastrous consequences for the economy if he doesn't. Earlier this month, several carmakers, both traditional and electric, are considering moving part of the manufacturing process to China in order to secure supplies of rare earth magnets which are used by the dozen in every vehicle. This could include building electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping American-made motors to China to have the magnets installed. "U.S. efforts to diversify rare earth supply may gather pace, but building capacity outside China will take years and remains both costly and difficult to execute," the UBS strategist wrote.
177931564
submission
hackingbear writes:
In response to tariff imposed by the Trump administration to bring jobs back to the U.S., China has stopped nearly all trade on rare earth magnets in addition to counter tariff. Automakers warn that the blockade could stop all US car production in days. "Without reliable access to these elements and magnets, automotive suppliers will be unable to produce critical automotive components," a letter sent in May from the Alliance for Automotive Innovation to President Trump said. "In severe cases, this could include the need for reduced production volumes or even a shutdown of vehicle assembly lines." The materials, which were last built in the US at scale in the late 1990s, are scattered throughout vehicles. A modern, power-adjusting seat can use as many as 12 individual magnets. China has recently cracked down on rare earth smuggling by introducing a nation-wide tracking system and, imitating the U.S. secondary sanctions, China demands other countries from re-exporting Chinese rare earth products to the U.S. President Trump recently lashed out against Chinese officials for exploiting these gaps in American production. "China, perhaps not surprisingly to some, HAS TOTALLY VIOLATED ITS AGREEMENT WITH US," Trump said in a post on his Truth Social platform. China hit back on Monday, accusing the US of violating and undermining the agreements reached in Geneva in May. China’s commerce ministry said on Monday: “The US has successively introduced a number of discriminatory restrictive measures against China, including issuing export control guidelines for AI chips, stopping the sale of chip design [EDA] software to China, and announcing the revocation of Chinese student visas.” In addition to the long-standing blockading of advanced semiconductors like nVidia GPUs and semiconductor equipment even if made by European company ASML since as far back as 1996 Wassena Agreement, the U.S. paused sales of commercial jet engine Leap-1C to Chinese plane maker Comac last week, threatening to stop the production of China's C919 airliner. While in theory possible, starting rare earth mining and refining can take 10 to 15 years for a country. In light of the urgency, several carmakers, both traditional and electric, are considering moving part of the manufacturing process to China. This could include building electric motors in Chinese factories or shipping American-made motors to China to have the magnets installed.
177693739
submission
hackingbear writes:
Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. (CATL), the world’s largest maker of electric batteries and is on a U.S. Defense Department list of Chinese companies with military ties, raised $4.6 billion in the top initial public offering of the year. The offering in Hong Kong was executed under what’s called Regulation S. That means it forbids most U.S. citizens or entities from participating in the IPO. U.S. institutional investors with offshore accounts, however, could participate. CATL has the largest market share, ahead of BYD and LG Energy Solution as the supplier to companies including Tesla and Volkswagen. Amid the on-going Sino-US trade war and geopolitical rivalry, US politicians urge SEC to delist Alibaba and Chinese companies from American stock exchanges. "These entities benefit from American investor capital while advancing the strategic objectives of the Chinese Communist party... supporting military modernisation and gross human rights violations," they said in the letter to the SEC.
177061675
submission
hackingbear writes:
A research team at Fudan University in Shanghai, China has built the fastest semiconductor storage device ever reported, a nonvolatile flash memory dubbed “PoX” that programs a single bit in 400 picoseconds (0.0000000004 s) — roughly 25 billion operations per second. Conventional static and dynamic RAM (SRAM, DRAM) write data in 1–10 nanoseconds but lose everything when power is cut while current flash chips typically need micro to milliseconds per write — far too slow for modern AI accelerators that shunt terabytes of parameters in real time. The Fudan group, led by Prof. Zhou Peng at the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems, reengineered flash physics by replacing silicon channels with two dimensional Dirac graphene and exploiting its ballistic charge transport. Combining ultralow energy with picosecond write speeds could eliminate separate highspeed SRAM caches and remove the longstanding memory bottleneck in AI inference and training hardware, where data shuttling, not arithmetic, now dominates power budgets. The team, which is now scaling the cell architecture and pursuing arraylevel demonstrations, did not disclose endurance figures or fabrication yield, but the graphene channel suggests compatibility with existing 2Dmaterial processes that global fabs are already exploring. The result is published in Nature.
176690473
submission
hackingbear writes:
Chinese corporations have begun to improve the long working hours culture represented by the so-called "996" (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week). As the Chinese government asks them to address inefficient "internal competition," corporations that already needed management efficiency have started to eliminate overtime. DJI, the world's largest drone maker, has been implementing a "no overtime" policy since the 27th of last month. Accordingly, employees must leave the office after 9 p.m. [without requiring workrs starting at 9 a.m.] The company also eliminated transportation expenses paid for overtime and closed down facilities such as the gym, swimming pool, and badminton court, while also reducing team expenses, in order to foster an early leaving environment. Chinese appliance manufacturer Midea began enforcing a mandatory leaving policy at 6:20 p.m. for office workers. Midea has also initiated the simplification of work methods this year, implementing a "strict prohibition on meetings and formal overtime after hours," and has taken a step further with this policy. Another appliance manufacturer, Haier, mandated two days of rest on weekends starting last month and decided to allow a maximum of 3 hours of overtime during the week. The 996 practice is particularly prominent in large corporations and the internet industry. In 2021, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, one of China's largest e-commerce corporations, stated, "Being able to work 996 is a great blessing" and asked, "If you don't do 996 when you're young, when will you?" China's legislature, the National People's Congress, issued, for the first time, a call to comprehensively [reduce] "internal competition" broadly including chaotic expansion of production capacity, price wars, and zero-sum games. However, reactions from workers regarding these measures by corporations are mixed with some complaint these measures amount to wage cut as overtime pay disappears as well.
176617119
submission
hackingbear writes:
Tesla is currently rolling out its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, which allows driver-assist features on city streets, in China, marking a significant milestone for the electric vehicle maker in the world’s largest car market. Since the rollout began, Tesla drivers in China have been livestreaming their experiences with FSD, and many are reporting that the system struggles to adhere to Chinese traffic laws. One Tesla driver reportedly received seven tickets during a single drive while using FSD. China’s automated traffic enforcement system quickly penalizes such infractions, leaving FSD users frustrated. Others noted that the system sometimes misinterprets traffic signals, drives in restricted lanes, navigates incorrectly by failing to recognize turn-only lanes, or mistakenly identified red balloons as traffic lights. Elon Musk has previously said that both countries' regulations have complicated Tesla’s ability to train its system on local road conditions — due to ongoing trade war and arch-rivalry, the U.S. government prohibit the company from bringing its AI software to train in China, while in response China forbid the company from taking traffic data outside. Tesla engineers have been utilizing publicly available video footage of Chinese streets to refine FSD’s capabilities.
176287829
submission
hackingbear writes:
The main reason behind the United States' push to ban social media application TikTok is due to Israel’s image rather than fears of Chinese infiltrations, US Senator Mark Warner and Mike Gallagher have revealed during a panel the Munich Security Conference. Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee, introduced the TikTok ban bill in 2023 along with Gallagher,who is the current Palantir executive. “So we had a bipartisan consensus,” Gallagher said. “We had the executive branch, but the bill was still dead until October 7th. And people started to see a bunch of antisemitic content on the platform and our bill had legs again.” A memo produced by the State Department for its Near East Affairs diplomats, which Klippenstein obtained, describes how Israel's deputy director general for public diplomacy at the foreign ministry, Emmanuel Nahshon, blamed the youth’s opposition to the war on Gaza on TikTok’s algorithm. The memo added that Nahshon said the youth’s public opinion was shifting because “the Tik-Tok algorithm favours pro-Palestinian content”. Gallagher also said in Munich that TikTok had made a “huge miscalculation” in its attempt to circumvent the ban. When TikTok sent a notification to its millions of users urging them to call their members of Congress to oppose the bill, Gallagher said it “proved” that the social media company had “brainwashed” American youth. While President Donald Trump temporarily reversed his Democratic predecessor’s TikTok ban the day after he took office, the application’s future in the country, as well as the state of its pro-Palestine content, remains unclear. When the application was available to Americans again in late January, many users pointed out that phrases like “free Palestine” were being flagged as hate speech, raising concerns about potential censorship on the platform following its return to the US.
175971679
submission
hackingbear writes:
In a rare moment of direct contact between two online worlds that are usually kept apart by language, corporate boundaries, and China’s strict system of online censorship that blocks access to nearly all international media and social media services, a rare wave of U.S.-China camaraderie broke out in Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu — or RedNote — as “TikTok refugees” migrating to RedNote to protest a now-delayed ban on TikTok. While American opinion elites have raised concerns of politicized issues such as free speech and social values, down-to-the-earth netizens are conducting mutual “audit” of life from cat photos to stuff that matters such as salaries, rent, healthcare and educational expenses. These online discussions are challenging deeply held stereotypes about both countries. While the United States is often portrayed as a land of limitless opportunity, many American netizens have shared their struggles with high living costs, particularly in urban areas. One common theme is the exorbitant cost of healthcare. While some Chinese netizens celebrate the relative affordability of life in China, others acknowledge challenges such as rising housing prices in major cities and increasing competition for jobs. RedNote, which counts Western celebrities such as Mariah Carey, Kim Kardashian, and Elon Musk’s mother Maye Musk as longtime users, hasn’t released official data, but two versions of the TikTok refugee hashtag have over 24 million posts, since the app has reached No. 1 in free downloads on both iOS and Android, remaining in that spot for days.
175910957
submission
hackingbear writes:
As the threat of a TikTok ban looms, U.S. TikTok users are flocking to the Chinese social media app Xiaohongshu – making it the top downloaded app in the U.S. Xiaohongshu, which in English means “Little Red Book” is a Chinese social media app that combines e-commerce, short video and posting functions, enticing mostly Chinese young women from mainland China and regions with with a Chinese diaspora such as Malaysia and Taiwan who use it as a de-facto search engine for product, travel and restaurant recommendations, as well as makeup and skincare tutorials. After the justices seemed inclined to let the law stand, masses of TikTok users began creating accounts on Xiaohongshu, including hashtags such as #tiktokrefugee or #tiktok to their posts. “I like your makeup,” a Xiaohongshu user from Beijing comments one of the posts by Alexis Garman, a 21-year-old TikTok user in Oklahoma with nearly 20,000 followers, and Garman thanks them in a reply. A user from the southwestern province of Sichuan commented “I am your Chinese spy please surrender your personal information or the photographs of your cat (or dog).” “TikTok possibly getting banned doesn’t just take away an app, it takes away jobs, friends and community,” Garman said. “Personally, the friends and bond I have with my followers will now be gone.” Xiaohongshu doesn't even have an English user interface. In only two days, more than 700,000 new users joined Xiaohongshu, a person close to the company told Reuters. Xiaohongshu, which was found in 2013 and is backed by investors such as Alibaba, Tencent and Sequoia, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. U.S. downloads of RedNote were up more than 200% year-over-year this week, and 194% from the week prior, according to estimates from app data research firm Sensor Tower. The second most-popular free app on Apple's App Store list on Tuesday, Lemon8, another social media app owned by ByteDance, experienced a similar surge last month, with downloads jumping by 190% in December to about 3.4 million.
175768995
submission
hackingbear writes:
In something of a stunning development, without any official announcements or acknowledgement, China appears to already be flying a stealthy, high-performance sixth-generation crewed combat aircraft. Video and photos that began to circulate December 26 local time, also the memorial birthday of the country's founder Mao Zedong and the Christmas day on US timezone, on social media show the previously unseen aircraft conducting a daytime test flight, alongside a two-seat Chengdu J-20S fighter, serving as a chase plane. The tailess aircraft has twin-wheel main landing gears and a modified delta wing with chine lines extending all the way to the nose area, while its central fuselage section, at least the bottom of it, is loosely reminiscent of the J-20. The broad nose could even provide space for side-by-side crew seating, although the limited views of the canopy mean we cannot be sure whether the aircraft has a single-seat or two-seat arrangement, with tandem twin seats being another option. Its large size would seem to reflect an overarching concern with long endurance with comparatively massive internal volume to accommodate a very large fuel load, as well as weapons and sensors. Maybe the aircraft’s most unusual feature is its air intake arrangement. It appears to have an air intake on top of the fuselage, as well as twin intakes on either side of the lower fuselage. This has already led to speculation that the aircraft may have a highly unorthodox three-engine arrangement. “Its size and arrangement tentatively suggests that this is the long awaited J/H-XX ‘regional bomber’, designed to provide a low observable high-altitude precision strike capability against bases and possibly ships throughout the Indo-Pacific,” said Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for Airpower and Technology at the Royal United Services Institute. “However, it remains possible that this prototype represents China’s known 6th Generation fighter program.” Hours later, further social media posts revealed images and video of a second new Chinese combat aircraft, also in flight test. The images show a more traditional fighter design with a cranked arrow planform and possibly folding tailfins. It was not immediately clear when these images were captured, but one post marked the picture with a Dec. 22, 2024 time stamp.
175681983
submission
hackingbear writes:
Scientists in China have announced that a jumbo jet prototype with a rather bulky body had managed to reach the hypersonic speed of Mach 6.56 during a flight test in 2021. The test flight results had been kept a secret [for 3 years] by the institute and authorities in China owing to the sensitivity of the project until it is revealed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences through a post on social media in which they shared a video of the jumbo jet prototype’s lift-off. The unique bulk body design addresses a big problem of other supersonic/hypersonic aircraft designs [with typical slim body] that the usable interior space of the aircraft had to be decreased as the flight speed of the vehicle decreased, restricting those designs only for missiles, unmanned reconnaissance missions, and other military uses. Cui Kai, the project’s leader and a researcher at the Institute of Mechanics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is quoted as saying that his design was received with much skepticism when it was first unveiled. However, the team conducted several experiments a number of times to validate each uncertainty associated with the project before the final test flight. However, Cui or the Chinese Academy of Sciences did not reveal whether a full-scale model of the aircraft has been constructed, is under construction, or the time period for its first flight.
175642507
submission
hackingbear writes:
China has made a major technological breakthrough that will have Australia sweating as we head into the new year. One of Beijing’s most respected engineers developed a groundbreaking process known as flash ironmaking which could see the nation become far less reliant on importing Australian iron ore. By injecting finely ground iron ore into an ultra-hot furnace using a stick known as a “vortex lance”, a rapid “explosive chemical reaction” occurs, producing high-purity liquid iron droplets that can be used directly in steelmaking. The method “can complete the ironmaking process in just three to six seconds, [a 3,600-fold productivity boost] compared to the five to six hours required by traditional blast furnaces”, wrote the project team led by Professor Zhang Wenhai in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Nonferrous Metals. In 2022, Australia shipped 736 million tonnes – more than 80 per cent of iron ore exports – to China which steel production capacity is already more than the combined output of all other nations. Caught between the US-China geopolitical rivalry, Canberra's prior pro-US administration leveraged China's dependency on Aussie iron to play hard balls with China, though Canberra has recently recalibrated the relationship under Anthony Albanese. With this new patented method, China would not have to pay big bucks for the high quality ores from Australia, Brazil and Africa, because the method is particularly effective with low- or medium-yield iron ores that are abundant in China. On top of that, the new technology improves energy efficiency by over 30 per cent and eliminates [Australian steel-friendly] coal use [entirely], significantly reducing carbon emissions — which is a major long-term goal of Beijing’s. A reactor equipped with three lances, each capable of injecting 450 tonnes of iron ore particles per hour, can produce 7.11 million tonnes of iron annually. According to the paper, the lance “has already entered commercial production”. It’s not the first time Professor Zhang has made waves in China. He revolutionised copper production with a similar flash smelting technique he applied to the metal in the 1970s, boosting China's copper production to 60% of total world outputs.
175445869
submission
hackingbear writes:
Despite restrictions by the Wolf Amendment, a 2011 US law that prevents direct collaboration with China in space projects unless Congress gives special authorization, NASA has requested access to moon rocks retrieved by China's Chang'e-5 mission in 2020. In response, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) proposed a swap with Apollo lunar samples. Now, South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, reported that the hope for the swap is fading as NASA has sent no response to the proposal. "Basically, the Americans want our lunar samples, but we can't have theirs," said two Chinese planetary geologists, one based in Beijing and the other in Hong Kong, who spoke on condition of anonymity. After CNSA issued a global call for applications to study its Chang'e-5 moon samples last year, NASA worked with Congress to create an exception to the Wolf Amendment so that Nasa-funded scientists could apply. In April, 10 international applicants — five from the US — were interviewed by CNSA for their research proposals. NASA has not responded to the Post's request for comment.
175250837
submission
hackingbear writes:
Xinhua News Agency, the official Chinese news agency, reported on October 14 that U.S. intelligence agencies have been engaged in cyber espionage globally and have implemented "false flag" operations to mislead investigators and researchers and frame other countries, according to an investigation into the alleged cyber threat known as "Volt Typhoon." In May 2023, the United States and its "Five Eyes" allies released an advisory, claiming that a hacker they labeled "Volt Typhoon" had launched espionage activities targeting U.S. critical infrastructures and the organization was endorsed by the Chinese government. In its latest report, the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center (CVERC) disclosed more evidence of how U.S. government agencies fabricate the false narrative of "Volt Typhoon" and launch cyberattacks and "false flag" operations, as well as their tricks of accusing others to cover for their own guilt. The "Marble" framework, a stealth toolkit used in the operation, has the ability to insert strings in various languages, such as Chinese, Russian, Korean, Persian and Arabic, noted the report. This is clearly intended to mislead investigators and defame China, Russia, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Iran and Arab countries, said the report, calling the United States a "cyber-chameleon." It further disclosed the cyber espionage operations targeting China, Germany and other countries which were launched by the US and other Five Eyes countries. The report also noted that the "False Flag" operation is actually an important component of the US intelligence agency's "EFFECTS Operation," known as the "Online Covert Action" in the UK. Secret documents from the US and Five Eyes Alliance show that, the "EFFECTS Operation" includes two broad categories, "Information Operations" and "Technical Disruption Operations."
175175093
submission
hackingbear writes:
The Institute of AI at China Telecom, one of the country’s large state-backed telecoms operators, said in a statement on Saturday that its open-source TeleChat2-115B and a second unnamed model with one trillion parameters were trained on tens of thousands of domestically produced chips, marking a milestone amid tightening US restrictions on China’s access to advanced semiconductors, including Nvidia’s latest AI chips. China Telecom did not say who supplied its domestic chips, but the company has previously disclosed that it is developing LLM technology using Ascend chips developed by Shenzhen-based telecom equipment giant Huawei Technologies. In a related development, US-sanctioned Huawei has offered samples of its Ascend 910C processor to large Chinese server companies for hardware testing and configuration, according to two sources briefed on the matter. The chip, being offered to Chinese internet giants that are major Nvidia customers, has unknown specifications but is believed to outperform Nvidia B20 which is expected to be shipped to Chinese market in 2025. According to Wikipedia, the current publicly-known largest non-MoE LLM is Google's 540-billion-parameter PaLM, while the largest LLM is Google's 1.2-T GLaM followed by Huawei's 1.085T PanGu-Sigma. However, both GLaM and PanGu-Sigma are Mixture-of-Experts models which mean the individual LLMs inside being much smaller. The achievement [of training 1T LLM using domestic chips] “indicates that China has truly realised total self-sufficiency in domestic LLM training” and marks the start of a new phase for China’s innovation and self-reliance in LLMs, the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the AI institute said in a statement published to WeChat.
