This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

There’s a decent chance you’ve heard of hydrogen-powered vehicles but never seen one. Over 18,000 are in the US, almost exclusively in California. On the outside they look just like traditional vehicles, but they are powered by electricity generated from a hydrogen fuel cell, making them far cleaner and greener.  

So when I learned that in parts of China, companies are putting hydrogen-powered bikes on the road for anyone to ride, it was a real “the future is here” moment for me. I looked deeper into it and wrote a story. 

These bikes have water-bottle-sized hydrogen tanks, which can make them easier than regular bikes to ride, though the tanks have to be swapped out every 40 miles. But they haven’t exactly been getting rave reviews. One rider in Shanghai told me the speed boost from hydrogen felt lacking, and the user experience was hurt by hardware and software design flaws. Many people on social media agree with him. 

Youon, one of the largest players in China’s bike-sharing industry, has thrown its support behind hydrogen energy. It has put thousands of hydrogen-powered bikes in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, in the hopes of kick-starting a trend. 

But for clean energy experts, it’s a head-scratcher as to why these hydrogen bikes are being promoted in the first place: Hydrogen bikes are less efficient than ordinary e-bikes, and they won’t make much economic sense in the long run.

It’s not just one company taking this path. The collective appetite for hydrogen bikes has been much bigger than I expected. By my own counting, Youon has half a dozen competitors in the hydrogen bike field, and several cities have embraced the idea. While the future of hydrogen-powered shared bikes is uncertain, their proliferation represents a much larger trend happening in China: exploring how hydrogen can be used in transportation. 

It’s no secret that China has already become a world leader in producing affordable and capable electric vehicles, but the Chinese government and companies aren’t stopping there. A significant number of local policies have been set up in recent years to subsidize the production of hydrogen vehicles, waive toll fees for them, and build more refuel stations for hydrogen. Now China has about 21,000 hydrogen vehicles on the road and more than 400 refuel stations.

It’s worth having a reality check about China’s push for hydrogen: While using hydrogen as a fuel for vehicles comes with no carbon emissions, that’s not the case for actually producing hydrogen. In China, the vast majority comes from fossil fuels, which cost much less than producing hydrogen with water and renewable energy. (To learn the difference between “gray,” “blue,” and “green” hydrogen, read this piece by my colleague Casey Crownhart.) 

The sad truth is that China will rely on coal and natural gas for making hydrogen for a while. The fact that hydrogen is a byproduct of processing coal explains why many cities in China with abundant coal resources are also at the frontier of the hydrogen industry. For them, the economic argument for hydrogen can trump the environmental costs, and as a result, even though hydrogen vehicles create a pathway for the transportation system to further decarbonize in the future, they are doing very little to address climate change now. 

The same issue applies to electric vehicles in China: Yes, electricity is cleaner than gas as a car fuel, but the majority of electricity in China still comes from fossil fuels, so how much cleaner is it really? 

But hydrogen vehicle companies need to answer an additional question: If China is already pretty good at making batteries for EVs, why should it bother spending any time or resources on hydrogen vehicles?

For now, the Chinese companies have come up with one good answer, and it’s not bikes. It’s heavy trucks. 

“Hydrogen passenger vehicles are kind of a dead end here … I think for fleet vehicles, trucking, long-distance cargo, hydrogen is competitive with long-range electric vehicles. Maybe it’s a toss-up?” says David Fishman, a senior manager at the Lantau Group, an energy consulting firm.

If you think about it, cargo trucks bump up against some of EVs’ biggest limitations today: They need to go ultra-long distances while being refueled quickly to save time. Meanwhile, the limitations of hydrogen vehicles, like the lack of refuel stations and the higher production costs, make them much more suitable for commercial fleets than for individual car buyers.

As a result, Chinese hydrogen trucking companies are feeling confident, says Fishman. If hydrogen really becomes a next-generation mainstream fuel, it will probably start with trucks in China.

Do you think hydrogen or lithium batteries are the future of clean transportation? Let me know your pick at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

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Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. In China, private companies are responsible for verifying peoples’ identities on social media. Now the government is trying to take back that control by introducing a new “national internet ID” system, a move that became instantly controversial. (New York Times $)

2. Record-high temperatures in southern China are pushing the grid to its limit. On August 2, the power demand of Shanghai was more than the entire capacity of the Philippines. (Bloomberg $)

3. Honor, a smartphone maker once owned by Huawei, is getting ready to go public. Documents show that the local government of Shenzhen has given it “unusually” large support, including a dedicated city hall team with a “no matter left overnight” policy. (Reuters $)

4. App developers in China can circumvent Apple’s high fees by charging users through Tencent’s and ByteDance’s super apps. Apple now wants to close that loophole. (Bloomberg $)

5. The Biden administration is planning to ban the use of Chinese software in US autonomous vehicles. (Reuters $)

6. The new R-rated Disney movie Deadpool & Wolverine had to take out references to cocaine and homosexuality and replace “vibrator” with “massage gun” to pass China’s censors. (Wall Street Journal $)

7. A university in Beijing has started offering the country’s first bachelor’s degree in “marriage services and management.” It will teach everything from matchmaking to divorce counseling. (CNBC)

Lost in translation

Cheap knockoff phones defined made-in-China gadgets in the 2000s, but they disappeared after domestic brands like Xiaomi brought their prices down significantly. Now, these knockoffs are making a comeback in livestream shopping channels, according to the Chinese publication IT Times. 

On Douyin and Kuaishou, cheap domestic 5G phones that look like Apple or Huawei products are trying to attract low-income consumers with promises of high-end specs and dirt-cheap prices as low as 298 yuan (a little over $40). Once consumers receive these phones, they usually realize that the claims about the specs are misleading, and the companies making the phones don’t even have proper business registrations. While stricter regulations in China and abundant domestic competition have pushed knockoff phones out of brick-and-mortar stores, they seem to thrive in the less-regulated online markets.

One more thing

Readers of China Report, hi! This is Zeyi. It’s been almost two years since I sent out the first edition of this newsletter, and sadly this will be my last, as I’m leaving MIT Technology Review. 

I’ve had a lot of fun writing this newsletter. I was able to wander off and talk about so many different things, from the weirdly terrifying customer service center of Tencent to my frustrations about the TikTok ban, from newsletter after newsletter talking about electric vehicles (not sorry about that) to the fun deep dives into social media and digital culture. And I’m very thankful to everyone who replied with insightful or heartfelt feedback.

Stay tuned, as MIT Technology Review will bring back China Report shortly. Meanwhile, I hope you will enjoy our other newsletters, or this incredibly petty response by Pizza Hut Hong Kong to the win over Italy for an Olympics fencing gold. And yes, I’m all for pineapples on pizza.

HK won a fencing gold over Italy & the Italian olympic committee submitted an official complaint claiming that the judges (from Taiwan & S Korea) were biased because of geographical closeness. In response, Pizza Hut HK is offering free pineapple on pizza until 6pm tomorrow lmaoo pic.twitter.com/DhEfYtL8je

— Hannah (@hannahchrstina) July 30, 2024

If you are in China and looking to ride a shared bike in the city, you might find something on the bike that looks a little different: a water-bottle-size hydrogen tank.

At least a dozen cities in China now have some kind of hydrogen-powered shared bikes for their residents. They offer an easier ride than traditional bikes and a safer energy source than lithium batteries. One Chinese company is betting that this will be the next big thing in public transportation, while others are riding on a national trend toward government policies that encourage the development of the hydrogen industry.

Yet the reception has been mixed. Riders have reported unsatisfactory experiences with current hydrogen bikes, and energy experts doubt whether it makes economic sense to replace e-bikes with hydrogen-powered ones. Even though hydrogen could be a great power source for long-distance transportation in the future, it may not be suitable for urban biking, a completely different task.

While there are companies in other countries that are working on hydrogen-powered bikes—and one French company already has a mature product—China stands out for putting these bikes to use as public transportation. Bike-sharing became hugely popular in the country during the 2010s tech boom. With support from deep-pocketed companies like Alibaba and Meituan, standardized, internet-connected shared bikes have filled urban streets since, sometimes resulting in incredible waste. 

Youon, a Chinese company with over 1 million bikes on the streets of over 300 cities, is one of the main players in the bike-sharing industry. Facing fierce domestic competition, the company has chosen to differentiate its brand by investing in hydrogen bikes since 2018, with four models now available to buy or rent.

A hydrogen bike is not very different in concept from an e-bike. The difference is in whether the energy is stored in a lithium-ion battery or a hydrogen tank.

Each of Youon’s hydrogen bikes stores 20 grams of hydrogen in the form of metal powders, which can absorb and release the gas in a tank at low pressures (less than 10 bar). When the rider starts pedaling, the hydrogen is fed to a fuel cell under the seat, where a chemical reaction takes place to produce electricity. At its peak, a hydrogen bike can go as fast as 23 kilometers (14 miles) per hour. One tank of hydrogen lasts 40 to 60 kilometers (25 to 37 miles), and replacing the tank takes a few seconds.

Why hydrogen?

E-bikes have existed in China for a long time. According to the official figures, there are around 350 million in China today, and they are commonly used by everyday commuters and professional delivery workers. 

However, many of China’s largest cities have shied away from commissioning e-bikes as part of the public transportation network or even banned them, because lithium batteries pose a fire risk. In 2023, Chinese fire departments received a total of 21,000 reports of e-bikes catching fire, a 17.4% increase from the previous year. 

That created a supply vacuum for Youon. It’s positioned itself as a safer alternative thanks to its use of hydrogen. The hydrogen is stored in a low-pressure state, and if there’s any leak, it will dissipate quickly without causing an explosion, the company says on its website.

It’s a strategy that’s worked: These bikes have been more readily accepted by local governments. In 2022, Youon sold 2,000 of its hydrogen bikes to Lingang, a new high-tech district in Shanghai; in 2023, the company sold 500 hydrogen bikes to the Daxing district of Beijing. Today, its hydrogen bikes can be found in over six Chinese cities. 

Youon has since doubled down on its investment in hydrogen. The company has launched a product that lets users generate hydrogen at home with solar power and water. It also worked with the local government of Jiangsu, where its headquarters are, to publish a set of industry standards covering safety requirements, hydrogen tanks, and more. “Hydrogen energy is also an essential pathway to achieving carbon neutrality,” said Sun Jisheng, the CEO of Youon, at an industry conference in June.

The problem

However, that’s about where the advantage of hydrogen bikes ends.

David Fishman, a China-based senior manager of the Lantau Group, an energy consultancy, says he struggles to see the advantage. “Maybe the safety angle is a relevant factor for someone who doesn’t like carrying around lithium-ion batteries and storing them in their house,” he says. Other than that, hydrogen bikes are less energy-efficient than battery-powered bikes, and it costs more to produce hydrogen in the first place.

The main advantage of hydrogen as an energy source is that it has much higher energy density, meaning a hydrogen tank with the same weight as a lithium battery would produce more energy and power the vehicles to go farther. However, that advantage only kicks in for trips over 800 kilometers, says Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

That means hydrogen is a more economical choice for long-distance transportation like ships, planes, and trucks. Bikes, however, are almost on the exact opposite end of the transportation spectrum. Few people would bike for long distances, let alone those who are only renting a public bike for a short time. For anything shorter than 800 km, battery-powered vehicles are more energy efficient, says Jacobson. He estimates that a battery-powered bike consumes only 40% of the energy of a hydrogen-powered equivalent and also takes up less space.

On top of that, the company’s hydrogen bikes have failed to impress many of the early adopters. 

Gu, a resident of Lingang who only wishes to use his last name for this story, tells MIT Technology Review that he tried the bikes several times and they never felt effort-saving to him. Instead, the bike, along with the hydrogen tank and fuel-cell-powered motors, felt heavy and hard to maneuver. As a user, he has no idea whether the bike was running as expected or if the difficulty he encountered was due to its running out of hydrogen, although the company is supposed to block any bike with low hydrogen reserves from being unlocked.

Another common complaint is the inconvenience of finding and returning the bikes because there are only a limited number in the city and they have to be returned to specific locations for easy retrieval or tank replenishment. 

“The bike has to be returned to a designated spot. But even if I put the bike at that very location, there’s GPS drifting, and I’d be charged a very high fee for them to move the bike,” Gu says.

On social media, hydrogen-bike users have complained a lot about similar experiences. Youon has found itself caught up in headlines at least a couple of times recently, with stories where users question whether their bikes are really useful for their daily commutes. 

Youon didn’t respond to questions sent by MIT Technology Review.

The future of hydrogen bikes

Despite all these issues, there are at least half a dozen more companies in China working to launch hydrogen-powered shared bikes. These are often startups operating small-scale pilot projects in cities that have sizable hydrogen industries, like Foshan or Xiaoyi. 

Many of these cities have even bigger plans—they are vying to become the hub of the hydrogen economy in China, which is increasingly betting on it as the future of clean energy. 

This year, for the first time, hydrogen energy was mentioned in an annual official report from Beijing, which summarizes government work. The Chinese government said it vows to “accelerate the development of hydrogen energy … after enforcing the lead in smart, connected new energy vehicles.” The mention injected a boost of confidence into the hydrogen industry in China, which already produces more hydrogen every year than any other country.

Not all of this is good news for the environment. About 80% of hydrogen produced in China actually comes from burning coal or natural gas, and some of the fiercest government support for hydrogen comes from coal-mining cities looking to transition. While the country is moving in the direction of green hydrogen (hydrogen generated with renewable energy and water), the fuel will remain polluting for a long time.

When a technology is still in the early stages, finding the best use case for it is key. There are plenty of companies in China working on developing hydrogen-powered trucks and other long-distance forms of transportation, but considering the size of the bike-sharing market in the country, it’s no surprise that turning their attention to bikes seems like a profitable idea to some. 

However, if there’s no way to dramatically improve the performance or economics of hydrogen bikes, it’s hard to imagine the current batch of experiments lasting for long. As companies move from piloting their new products to seeking adoption and profits, they will have some serious questions to answer.

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

Back in 2018, it was my colleague Antonio Regalado, senior editor for biomedicine, who broke the story that a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui had used CRISPR to edit the genes of live human embryos, leading to the first gene-edited babies in the world. The news made He (or JK, as he prefers to be called) a controversial figure across the world, and just a year later, he was sentenced to three years in prison by the Chinese government, which deemed him guilty of illegal medical practices.

Last Thursday, JK, who was released from prison in 2022, sat down with Antonio and Mat Honan, our editor in chief, for a live broadcast conversation on the experiment, his current situation, and his plans for the future.

If you subscribe to MIT Technology Review, you can watch a recording of the conversation or read the transcript here. But if you don’t yet subscribe (and do consider it—I’m biased, but it’s worth it), allow me to recap some of the highlights of what JK shared.

His life has been eventful since he came out of prison. JK sought to live in Hong Kong but was rejected by its government; he publicly declared he would set up a nonprofit lab in Beijing, but that hasn’t happened yet; he was hired to lead a genetic-medicine research institution at Wuchang University of Technology, a private university in Wuhan, but he seems to have been let go again. Now, according to Stat News, he has relocated to Hainan, China’s southernmost island province, and started a lab there.

During the MIT Technology Review conversation, JK confirmed that he’s currently in Hainan and working on using gene-editing technology to cure genetic diseases like Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). 

He’s currently funded by private donations from Chinese and American companies, although he refused to name them. Some have even offered to pay him to travel to obscure countries with lax regulations to continue his previous work, but he turned them down. He would much prefer to return to academia to do research, JK said, but he can still conduct scientific research at a private company. 

For now, he’s planning to experiment only on mice, monkeys, and nonviable human embryos, JK said.

His experiment in 2018 inspired China to come out with regulations that explicitly forbid gene editing for reproductive uses. Today, implanting an edited embryo into a human is a crime subject to up to seven years in prison. JK repeatedly said all his current work will “comply with all the laws, regulations, and international ethics” but shied away from answering a question on what he thinks regulation around gene editing should look like.

However, he is hopeful that society will come around one day and accept embryo gene editing as a form of medical treatment. “As humans, we are always conservative. We are always worried about new things, and it takes time for people to accept new technology,” he said. He believes this lack of societal acceptance is the biggest obstacle to using CRISPR for embryo editing.

Other than DMD, another disease for which JK is currently working on gene-editing treatments is Alzheimer’s. And there’s a personal reason. “I decided to do Alzheimer’s disease because my mother has Alzheimer’s. So I’m going to have Alzheimer’s too, and maybe my daughter and my granddaughter. So I want to do something to change it,” JK said. He said his interest in embryo gene editing was never about trying to change human evolution, but about changing the lives of his family and the patients who have come to him for help.

His idea for Alzheimer’s treatment is to modify one letter in the human DNA sequence to simulate a natural mutation found in some Icelandic and Scandinavian people, which previous research found could be related to a lower chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease. JK said it would take only about two years to finish the basic research for this treatment, but he won’t go into human trials with the current regulations. 

He compares these gene-editing treatments to vaccines that everyone will be able to get easily in the future. “I would say in 50 years, like in 2074, embryo gene editing will be as common as IVF babies to prevent all the genetic diseases we know today. So the babies born at that time will be free of genetic disease,” he said. 

For all that he’s been through, JK seems pretty optimistic about the future of embryo gene editing. “I believe society will eventually accept that embryo gene editing is a good thing because it improves human health. So I’m waiting for society to accept that,” he said.

Do you agree with his vision of embryo gene editing as a universal medical treatment in the future? I’d love to hear your thoughts. Write to me at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

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Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. There’s a new buzz phrase in China’s latest national economy blueprint: “new productive forces.” It just means the country is still invested in technology-driven economic growth. (The Economist $) 

2. For the first time ever, Chinese scientists found water in the form of hydrated minerals from lunar soil samples retrieved in 2020. (Sixth Tone)

3. In June, Chinese electric-vehicle brands accounted for 11% of the European EV market, reaching a new record. But tariffs that went into effect in July could stop that trend. (Bloomberg $)

4. Chinese companies are supplying precision parts for weapons to Russia through a Belarusian defense contractor. (Nikkei Asia $)

5. China is looking for international buyers for its first home-grown passenger jet, the C919. Airlines in Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia and Brunei are the most likely customers. (South China Morning Post $)

6. Hundreds of Temu suppliers protested at the headquarters of the company in Guangzhou. They said the platform is subjecting the suppliers to unfair penalties for consumer complaints. (Bloomberg $)

Lost in translation

Since Russia tightened its import regulations early this year, the once-lucrative business of smuggling Chinese electric vehicles has almost vanished, according to the Chinese publication Lifeweek. Previously, traders could leverage the high demand for Chinese EVs in Russia and the low tariffs in transit countries in Central Asia to reap huge profits. For example, one businessman earned 870,000 RMB (about $120,000) through one batch export of 12 cars in December.

But new policies in Russia drastically increased import duties and enforced stricter vehicle registration. Chinese carmakers like BYD and XPeng also saw the opportunity to set up licensed operations in Central Asia to cater to this market. These changes transformed a profitable business into a barely sustainable one, and traders have been forced to adapt or exit the market.

One more thing

To prevent drivers from falling asleep, some highways in China have installed laser equipment that light up the night sky with red, blue, and green rays to attract attention and keep people awake. This looks straight out of a sci-fi novel but has been in use in over 10 Chinese provinces since 2022, according to the company that made the system.

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

I’ve talked a lot about Chinese large language models in this newsletter, and I’ve managed to try out quite a few of them in the past year. But many people, especially those who aren’t very familiar with China or the Chinese language, probably don’t even know how to start if they want to test these models themselves.

The good news is it’s actually not that hard! I recently dug around and realized that many Chinese AI models are much more accessible overseas than I expected. You can access the majority of them either by registering accounts on their websites or using popular open-source AI platforms like Hugging Face. So I published this practical guide today that lists a dozen of the top Chinese LLM chatbots you can use and the methods to easily access them in minutes, from anywhere in the world.

During my experiments with these models, one thing soon became clear: While most Chinese AI companies have set a higher bar for access to their products than their Western counterparts, a trend toward open-sourcing AI models is making them ever more accessible to an overseas audience. 

Take Qwen (or Tongyi Qianwen, as it’s called in Chinese), for example. This is Alibaba’s flagship AI foundation model. Unlike the company’s domestic competitors like Baidu, ByteDance, or Tencent, Alibaba has chosen to offer Qwen as an open-source model and allow developers and commercial clients to use it for free. 

The model, which just received a major 2.0 update this June, has received a lot of international recognition. In Hugging Face’s most recent ranking that compares the performance of all major open-source LLMs, Qwen2 was ranked at the very top, surpassing Meta’s Llama 3 and Microsoft’s Phi-3.

Similarly, a few Chinese startups, like DeepSeek and 01.AI, have also decided to make their models open source, and the performance of their LLM products also earned them a high ranking on the leaderboard. Companies like them are giving their models out for free to people both inside and outside China. 

The natural question to ask is, why? What does open-source AI mean, and why are these companies betting that making their models more open and accessible will be a good business decision?

For Alibaba, it’s a strategy to grow its cloud business, says Kevin Xu, a tech investor and founder of Interconnected Capital. “The simple economic consideration is that if their open-source model becomes popular, more people will use Alibaba Cloud to build AI applications using Alibaba’s open-source models, and that obviously benefits Alibaba Cloud as a business,” he says.

Everything Alibaba has done in open-source AI—releasing its own models to the public and building an open-source platform mimicking Hugging Face in hopes of gathering the AI community in China—serves the purpose of getting more people to sign up for Alibaba Cloud and pay to use its servers.

Even for Chinese AI startups that aren’t in the cloud business, open-source AI still offers a tried-and-true playbook for faster commercialization. On the development side, it allows them to adapt established open-source models like Meta’s Llama to accelerate their product development process. On the market side, it pushes them to think of alternative model architectures that can help them stand out from the mainstream. 

“Right now, AI in the West tends to have a very fixed view of how to make an AI model better, [which] is just to add more data or to scale it up larger,” says Eugene Cheah, the San Francisco–based founder of Recursal AI, an open-source AI platform. It’s extremely hard for smaller latecomers in the LLM industry to play this game and develop a model that will rival GPT-4 or Gemini when OpenAI and Google have an outsize advantage in computing resources. 

The problem is even more acute for Chinese companies, since US export controls mean they can’t easily access cutting-edge chips. “Because they are constrained by the GPU shortages,” says Cheah, “I see Chinese groups as being willing to experiment on wild ideas to improve the model. And some of these things are bearing results”—they have led to more efficient models that are cheaper to train and use, which can appeal to budget-conscious clients and help the Chinese firms find a niche market alongside the AI giants.

Why does it matter? For one thing, these open-source AI models present an alternative future where the industry isn’t just dominated by deep-pocketed players like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. And they also show that Chinese scientists and companies are able to create state-of-the-art open-source LLMs that can even surpass products from their Western counterparts. 

Xu notes that Abacus AI, a San Francisco–based startup, released a model this year that’s adapted and fine-tuned from Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model. It’s even referred to as “Liberated Qwen.” 

The Chinese AI companies’ introduction of high-performing models that US startups can build upon is an example of the best-case scenario of open-source AI, “where everyone builds on top of each other like a positive development loop,” Xu says. ”It’s not just a single direction where the Chinese companies are taking all the best stuff from the US, but things are now [also] going back the other way.”

Do you believe that open-source AI models will be able to compete with private, closed-source models in the future? Let me know your thoughts at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

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Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. While a Windows system outage disrupted computers across the world on Friday, China was largely unaffected. Instead of the CrowdStrike software that caused the chaos, Chinese companies usually use domestic cybersecurity software. (CNBC)

2. Nvidia is working on yet another flagship AI chip, known as B20. It’s designed to sell to the Chinese market without violating US export controls. (Reuters $)

3. In a recent interview, Donald Trump accused Taiwan of taking the semiconductor industry away from the US and asked it to pay more for American military equipment. (New York Times $)

4. Guo Wengui, a self-exiled tycoon from China who has in recent years become an ally to US right-wing figures, was convicted for defrauding over $1 billion from online followers to fund his lavish lifestyle. (Mother Jones)

5. China recently withdrew from Top500, an international forum that ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers. The new secrecy will make it harder to understand China’s supercomputing advances from the outside. (Wall Street Journal $)

6. China is now mining and selling so many rare earth elements that the global prices of them have plunged 20% in the past year. (Nikkei Asia $)

7. The supply chain of fentanyl precursor materials in China consists of thousands of small chemical manufacturers. And the intense competition among them has driven them to continue selling to drug cartels in Mexico without worrying about the consequences. (Foreign Policy)

Lost in translation

China is experiencing one of the most extreme summers in its climate history, marked by severe drought and flooding across the country. In fact, these weather events are happening so often this year that nonprofit organizations working in disaster rescue and climate change response are facing significant funding shortages, according to the Chinese publication Phoenix New Media. 

Despite government efforts to allocate disaster relief funds and supplies, the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events have stretched resources thin for organizations like the Shuguang Rescue Alliance. By July, Shuguang had used up 80% of its budget for the entirety of 2024. Additionally, fundraisers noted that with more disasters happening, the public is experiencing fatigue when asked to donate to another cause. This year, public and corporate donations have declined to 1/10th their previous levels after disasters, exacerbating the funding difficulties.

One more thing

Aspiring drivers in Beijing will now have to pass a day-long virtual-reality driving course before they’re allowed behind the wheel of a real car. It almost looks like a huge arcade with realistic driving games. To be honest, this might be one of the better uses of VR?

My wife is getting her driver's license in Beijing. After she passed the first two tests she is now doing one day of virtual reality driving before she begins driving a real car tomorrow.

This is her school: pic.twitter.com/y6MG1KH5ZC

— Jason Smith – 上官杰文 (@ShangguanJiewen) June 21, 2024

MIT Technology Review’s How To series helps you get things done.

Hundreds of Chinese large language models have been released since the government started permitting AI companies to open up their models for the general public to play around with in the summer of 2023. 

For users in the West, finding these Chinese models and trying them out can feel challenging, owing to language barriers and registration requirements. And indeed, there are still hoops to jump through if you don’t have a valid Chinese phone number.

But in fact, a lot of the chatbots support conversations in English and are surprisingly easy to access. Whether you’re just curious to find out how well they perform or want to conduct more serious experiments for work, there are lots of ways to access Chinese LLM-powered chatbots. 

Here’s how anyone can try one out in minutes. 

If you have a Chinese phone number

First of all, if you have a Chinese phone number, there’s little trouble accessing any of the models we describe. In China, a domestic phone number is often a proxy for identity verification, and with it, you can basically access any online service, including AI chatbots. You just go to the model’s website and use the number to register an account. 

In our tests, we found that while some LLMs are accessible for users outside China, a few major ones, including models developed by Huawei, the cybersecurity firm 360, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, can only be accessed with a Chinese phone number. Unfortunately, if you are outside China, getting a local phone number can be close to impossible. Luckily, there are other ways.

Accessible without a Chinese number

A small number of Chinese AI platforms allow users outside China to access their chatbots directly. All you need to do is sign up, enter your phone number, and then enter the verification code you’ll get in a text message.

These chatbots include Doubao, an AI made by ByteDance that can generate text and images, search the internet, and make a summary of the documents you upload. ChatGLM, a multimodal tool developed by the newly emerged Chinese AI unicorn Zhipu, offers a similar set of features and is also available to non-Chinese numbers. 

Finally, DeepSeek, an AI company that’s barely a year old, is known in the industry for how cheap its model is. (It’s free for casual users but costs $0.14 per million tokens for business users. OpenAI’s similar model, GPT4-Turbo, costs $10 per million tokens.) You can easily test out its text chatbot and coding chatbot on its website by registering with an email address.

Hugging Face

Hugging Face is probably the largest global AI community right now, and it acts as a sort of GitHub for AI. Many open-source LLMs have put their code and applications on Hugging Face’s website. 

Chinese companies are no exception. A few have shared their code on Hugging Face for AI developers to use. Some have also set up a demo on the website so that less tech-savvy people can get instant access to the model without having to write any code of their own. Since Hugging Face doesn’t require a Chinese number to register, it becomes a workaround for testing out many Chinese models.

Most notably, there’s Qwen, an LLM made by Alibaba that recently topped Hugging Face’s Open LLM Leaderboard, a ranking that compares the results of different LLMs and assesses their qualities. Qwen surpassed models made by Meta, Microsoft, and other Chinese peers. You can easily have a text-based conversation with Qwen’s 2.0 version here.

Another Chinese tech giant, Tencent, also uploaded an AI model to Hugging Face; called Hunyuan-DiT, it can generate images based on text prompts. Other models based on the Hunyuan foundation, however, are not accessible on this website.

Yi, also called 01.AI, was founded by the famous Taiwanese AI investor Kai-Fu Lee. Yi put a chatbot version of its model (which seems to be down at the moment) and another AI tool that can analyze and understand images on Hugging Face. DeepSeek, the aforementioned startup, put a similar visual analyzing tool on the company’s platform.

ModelScope

In November 2022, Alibaba released a platform called ModelScope. It’s sort of a domestic version of Hugging Face, where the Chinese AI community can congregate, access open-source models, and discuss trade. 

And because ModelScope allows users to register with a non-Chinese number, it acts as another useful workaround for accessing Chinese LLMs. A few Chinese companies—like Baichuan, another buzzy AI startup with Alibaba’s backing—have made their models available on ModelScope for anyone to test.

But what’s most useful on the platform is an “LLM Arena” application put together by Open Compass, an AI lab in Shanghai that works on evaluating different models. The arena, as its name suggests, lets users pit two models against each other and directly compare how they respond to the same prompt. Conveniently, since this application has integrated 11 Chinese models, it offers easy access to several AI tools that are otherwise off limits for non-Chinese users.

Beyond the Chinese models mentioned above, the Arena can generate answers from Baidu’s Ernie Bot and iFlytek’s Spark, as well as Minimax, Moonshot, and InternLM, all of which are heavyweights in the Chinese industry. Right now, you can’t generate photos or upload photos to the models this way, even if the models themselves support these multimodal capabilities. But for comparing text generated by Chinese models, as well as a few Western models like Llama 3 and Cohere’s Command R+, this seems like a very handy tool.

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

This week, we are taking a short break from China and turning to its neighbor South Korea instead. As K-pop sweeps the world and accumulates a massive, devout fan base, these fans have been turning their power into action. Today, I published a story about Kpop4planet, a group of volunteers who are using K-pop’s influence to hold large corporations accountable for their carbon footprints.

One of the most interesting (and also successful) campaigns Kpop4planet has organized shines a light on the carbon footprint of music streaming. Aware that K-pop fans stream significantly more than average (sometimes over five hours a day!) to support their favorite artists, the group successfully campaigned to get Korea’s largest domestic streaming platform to pledge to use 100% renewable energy by 2030.

I have to admit, before working on this story, it didn’t really cross my mind that streaming music could be so polluting. Streaming an album more than 27 times uses more energy than it takes to produce a CD, according to researchers, but it’s surprisingly hard to draw a conclusive answer on whether streaming is more polluting than CDs or records overall. What we do know is that since the carbon emissions associated with streaming are produced in faraway data centers and through invisible data transmissions, the problem is harder to pin down.

During my reporting, I talked to several experts about how to correctly understand the climate impact of music streaming, and one thing became clear: It all comes down to how we stream—the content, the device, the length, etc. They also recommended a bunch of things that any music streaming user can do to leave a smaller carbon footprint.

So here are the things you can do if you are a heavy music streamer:

1. Use small devices instead of big TVs. 

A major part of streaming’s carbon footprint comes from the device that’s used to play the music or video. And some are much more power hungry than others. A 50-inch LED TV consumes 100 times more electricity than a smartphone when used for streaming, according to the International Energy Agency. It also consumes more electricity if the screen stays on, displaying videos or lyrics, rather than just playing the audio. So using a smartphone to stream cuts energy consumption to a minimum.

2. Wait longer to buy a new phone. 

Yes, smartphones are designed to be pretty energy-efficient to use, but manufacturing them is another story. “In the life-cycle analysis of a phone, 85% to 90% of its lifetime energy occurs in its production,” says Laura Marks, a professor in media art and philosophy at Simon Fraser University. The manufacturing process usually involves fossil fuels, plastics, and minerals that could pollute the environment.

“So if I were to make a couple of recommendations, one of them would be to keep your devices for as long as possible, because that’s a huge, huge component of streaming that’s often overlooked,” she says.

3. Return to digital downloads, and only use streaming in selected situations.

While few people still download music files today, experts have agreed that one of the most climate-friendly ways to listen to music is to keep a digital file of your favorite song and return to it repeatedly. 

We also need to change our mindset about treating streaming as the only way to listen to music, says Joe Steinhardt, an assistant professor in the music industry program at Drexel University. “The first and the easiest [suggestion] is to think about streaming music like Styrofoam plates or plastic forks. It doesn’t mean I never use those; it’s just that I don’t eat every meal off of them,” he says. If you are listening to a large variety of music, maybe streaming is the best choice; if you are listening to a few songs repeatedly, go for a digital download or even an old-fashioned CD.

4. Push for streaming platforms to do their part.

Climate action is not just about individual responsibility—it also means pushing corporations to do better. Just as Kpop4planet chased after Melon, Korea’s largest domestic music streaming service, you can also hold your favorite music streaming service accountable. 

A big part of that is figuring out where the platforms’ data centers are, as these can account for a third to a half of streaming’s carbon footprint, according to Marks. These gigantic facilities draw significant amounts of electricity. If they can switch to using renewable energy, that will be much more meaningful than any action one individual can take. It’s also important not to fall for empty promises, and to seek specific plans on where and how they plan to source renewable energy.

5. Cherish music and resist overconsumption.

Many experts mention the Jevons paradox, which states that increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used can lead to more total consumption. In the case of streaming, this means that even if the technology can become more energy-efficient on a per-song basis, the business model and the sheer convenience often encourage users to listen to more and more songs without considering the climate consequences.

To resist that mindset, Marks suggests, we should cherish listening to music more. “Instead of streaming all day, it could mean really enjoying the performance of a song—just listening to it a couple of times and then talking with your friends about it,” she says.

My conclusion? It’s never too late to become aware of the climate impact of music streaming and think about what we can do to make it even just a little greener. 

What’s your relationship with music streaming? Tell me more about it at zeyi@technologyreview.com.

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Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. CATL, the world’s largest EV battery maker, is flush with cash. But China’s strict control of capital means it has to seek external investment to build up its supply chain outside the country. (Financial Times $)

2. China is asking the World Trade Organization to settle its dispute with the US about EV tariffs. (Reuters $)

3. US-China trade conflicts are spreading to the mattress market, where US retailers say the domestic market is being flooded by Chinese products. (Wall Street Journal $)

4. A new movie in China used AI face-swapping technology to make Jackie Chan look decades younger. Critics hated it. (South China Morning Post $)

5. The failed assassination attempt at a Trump rally not only boosted support for the former president but also caused the price of a Chinese stock to soar—all because the name of the company sounds like “Trump Wins Big” in Chinese. (Bloomberg $)

6. China denies it’s building a naval base in Cambodia. Satellite images show that it is. (New York Times $)

7. Claw-machine arcades are cropping up in Hong Kong—but it’s a result of the failing retail market and low demand for commercial property. (Nikkei Asia $)

Lost in translation

Morowali, a remote, agricultural community in Indonesia, has been transformed into a hub for heavy industry by the entrance of a Chinese company, according to the Chinese magazine Sanlian Lifeweek. Tsingshan Holding Group, a Chinese steel and nickel company, was instrumental in investing in and setting up the Indonesia Morowali Industrial Park (IMIP), where a rich local reserve of nickel ore is converted into high-purity nickel sulfate that’s essential for electric vehicle batteries. 

IMIP has created at least 100,000 jobs and contributed significantly to Indonesia’s economy, but it has also led to environmental and health challenges for local communities. Concerns about air and water pollution, garbage disposal, and worker safety have intensified following an explosion in 2023 that killed eight Chinese workers and 13 Indonesian workers. Now, local workers are organizing to sit down with management and push for changes in worker welfare.

One more thing

If you want a guaranteed sighting of a UFO, come to Shenzhen. Last week, a Chinese company tested an electric helicopter that looks just like a UFO. Flying at a low height and able to land on water, the vehicle is designed for transporting tourists and displaying ads in the future.

Manned UFO looking eVTOL by Shenzhen Smart Drone Co making maiden flight
Flying saucer is low altitude UAV operating @ 10-30 m & can land safely on water surface
Designed for sightseeing & advertising performances
Use 6-axis & 12-propeller duct design that's entirely contained… pic.twitter.com/kUiaRKPnAY

— tphuang (@tphuang) July 13, 2024

On Valentine’s Day 2023, five K-pop fans came to a bustling street in the center of Seoul, one of them in a bee costume. Then they started dancing to “Candy” by the boy band NCT Dream and unfurled a banner with a message for Korea’s largest domestic music streaming platform: “Melon, let’s use 100% renewable energy and happily be together with Kpop for the next 100 years.”

KPOP4PLANET

A few weeks later, Melon, which has over 4 million active users in Korea, promised to do just that—pledging to adopt 100% renewable energy for its data centers by 2030.

It was the culmination of a campaign organized by Kpop4planet, a small group of volunteers that is achieving surprising success in mobilizing K-pop fans to act against the energy-intensive practices of the music industry. In recent years it has led a series of actions for climate causes, secured pledges to reduce the carbon footprint of music streaming, and pressured international brands to turn their supply chains away from fossil fuels.

K-pop fans have for years been known for their incredible organizing power. As their numbers have grown around the world, they have become influential political forces, shaping elections and advocating for social change. It was these actions that inspired two young fans, Dayeon Lee from South Korea and Nurul Sarifah from Indonesia, to found Kpop4planet in 2021. Particularly concerned about environmental issues, they began to think about how some aspects of K-pop culture can exacerbate environmental degradation. For example, excessive music streaming can generate carbon emissions at every step, from the data centers that process requests to the devices that play the music. 

“I [initially] thought the physical-album-waste issue was much more important,” says Lee, who is a 21-year-old university undergraduate, currently living in Japan. “But I was really surprised when I did some background research … [and] realized that the streaming issue is much more serious because it is a long-term issue.” 

While producing and selling physical recordings does, of course, have a carbon footprint, most of the environmental issues end after the initial purchase. That’s not the case with digital distribution. Streaming an album more than 27 times, according to 2019 research at Keele University in the UK, will likely end up using more energy than it takes to produce a CD. This kind of listening happens frequently in K-pop culture, which often encourages fans to host “streaming parties” where they play the same song on repeat. 

Buoyed by the success of its streaming campaign, Kpop4planet has recently targeted companies outside the music industry that have benefited from working with K-pop idols; it’s asked them to make similar pledges on renewable energy or other climate goals in order to secure continuous support from the fans. The group has put pressure on Tokopedia, Indonesia’s largest e-commerce company, to set up a decarbonization plan. And it’s gone after Hyundai—which uses the K-pop band BTS as brand ambassadors—over a business deal to source aluminum from a company relying on a new coal power plant. This led to another big victory: In March 2024, Hyundai agreed to seek alternative suppliers for its aluminum.

These wins may be surprising for a group with just 10 full-time members. Hyundai and Melon did not immediately respond to requests for comment, so it’s hard to know exactly why they changed course. But for her part, Lee believes the group’s success comes from how it is able to represent the genuine feelings of a massive fan base and draw companies’ attention to those demands. In total, Kpop4planet’s online petitions have collected signatures from nearly 60,000 fans in 223 countries. And the group doesn’t stop until it gets what it wants. 

“We have to be the messenger between corporations and K-pop fans,” Lee says. “We also want to expand our campaigns to more global corporations, because we believe that K-pop fans have enough power and influence to make our society more sustainable.”

The carbon footprint of “streaming parties”

Even as streaming has become the dominant way to listen to music, its energy consumption—in faraway data centers or via invisible telecommunication transmissions—remains hard for the end user to recognize.

“I think streaming is especially nefarious because those negative impacts are happening so far away and in such an invisible way,” says Joe Steinhardt, an assistant professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia who studies the music industry and is the author of the book Why to Resist Streaming Music & How. He calls streaming music “a disposable listen” because of the way an app keeps pulling data from the cloud and not storing it locally. 

Still, it’s hard to draw a definitive conclusion on whether streaming damages the environment more than buying physical copies; its actual carbon footprint depends on many factors. For example, streaming a music or lyrics video on a TV consumes significantly more electricity than using an energy-efficient device like a smartphone. But then smartphones present their own problems; they are very energy intensive to manufacture, and people often abandon them after a short time. 

While the overall climate impact of streaming is still being studied, many of the problems it presents are undoubtedly exacerbated by the K-pop industry. The number of times a song is streamed is factored into music ranking charts, televised competitions, and awards. Artists with the highest streaming numbers are seen as more successful and consequently get more resources and exposure from the recording companies, incentivizing fans to keep streaming. 

As a result, many K-pop fans stream significantly more than listeners of other genres. In the streaming parties, fans play newly released songs for long periods of time in order to show their support, boost traffic numbers, and hopefully attract more fans to the songs. In 2022, Kpop4planet surveyed 1,097 fans (more than 75% of whom were in Korea) and found that the majority of them spent more than five hours per day in streaming parties. That is almost double the amount of time an average music consumer would spend listening to streamed songs, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). In extreme cases, streaming parties may push people to play the same song on multiple devices at once—sometimes muting them, so the music is not even being heard.

“Fandom at this level, whether it’s K-pop or any fandom, is an inherently wasteful concept. It’s based on how much can I waste to show that I love you,” says Steinhardt. In any musical genre, fans are used to expressing their love through excessive purchases because it’s a financial transfer to the artists. Streaming introduced new and less expensive ways to achieve the same goal, but they are nevertheless wasteful. 

The practical solution, he says, is probably not to ask fans to stop being so devoted. “I recognize there’s a real value in that,” says Steinhardt. “So the question is, is there a way to do that that doesn’t involve overconsumption?” 

Accountability for the streaming platforms

Instead of trying to change the individual actions of fans, Lee believes, it’s more important to hold big companies responsible for their behavior. “We believe that the environmental problems that the K-pop fans are suffering from are caused by the corporations,” she says. “They have the main keys to solving the climate crisis, as they are emitting lots of carbon emissions in the supply chain.”

So when Kpop4planet started its music-streaming campaign in 2022, it set its eyes on one particular solution: demanding that streaming companies switch to renewable energy.

A large portion of streaming-related emissions depends on the specific resources that power the data center a streaming company uses. “The actual streaming process is using electrical energy, so like electric cars, it comes down to how we are producing that electric power,” says Simon George, a lecturer in sustainability and green technology at Keele University. A server based in a region dependent on fossil fuels, for instance, will generate more carbon emissions than one powered by renewable energy. 

And South Korea has very little renewable energy. In 2022, fossil fuels generated 63.6% of the electricity there, compared with 52.5% for the average OECD country. Renewables account for less than 10%. Because of that, Korean domestic streaming platforms are consuming more fossil fuels to power their data centers than their counterparts in other countries. “The more we can push to decarbonize the grid, then the better we can feel about streaming music,” George says.

Not many K-pop fans appear aware of this. Lee, too, was in the dark until she formed Kpop4planet and started doing her own research. In August 2022, she made a comic explaining why streaming can be an environmental concern and posted it on Twitter, where it was retweeted more than 18,000 times. “Everyone was so shocked. So that was the point that our streaming campaign went viral,” Lee says.

#알티추첨 #알티이벵
케이팝포플래닛ver.그것이 알고싶다
실물음반vs 음악스트리밍
탄소배출 맞짱뜨면 누가 이길까요??#멜론은탄소맛 캠페인에 함께해 주세요!https://t.co/5UwusTDowB에서 온라인 청원+본 트윗을 알티해주신 분들 중 추첨을 통해 기프티콘을 드려요 pic.twitter.com/fuKfdqRYvw

— KPOP 4 PLANET (@kpop4planet) August 12, 2022

After initially calling upon all streaming platforms to act, Kpop4planet homed in on Melon. In a fan survey that year, nearly half the respondents said they used Melon to host streaming parties and that they also expected Melon to take the lead on climate actions. Plus, 71.2% of the fans said they would move to a different streaming platform if it adopted more climate-friendly practices.

“We want to make Korean streaming platforms more sustainable so that the K-pop fans do not feel guilty by listening to our favorite idol songs,” Lee says.

Lee and her crew set a clear if ambitious goal: Get Melon to commit to using 100% renewable energy for its data centers by 2030 instead of 2040, which was the original pledge by its parent company, the Korean tech giant Kakao. Over the next year, Kpop4planet collected the names and contact information of thousands of fans, and got their backing for a public letter it sent to Melon outlining its demands. Kpop4planet also worked to establish connections with Melon employees and repeatedly invited company representatives to attend the group’s offline events aimed at raising awareness about the impact of streaming.

Finally, Kpop4planet invited Melon to attend the Valentine’s Day dance; the company declined because of scheduling conflicts but agreed to meet for a private discussion. That’s when it made the promise to “move all the data to the cloud that does not emit any carbon emissions by 2030,” Lee says. Melon didn’t respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment.

K-pop idols are not tools for greenwashing

Kpop4planet’s actions are part of a broader evolution in K-pop fandom, which has “slowly moved from sending gifts to idols to donating or volunteering in the names of their idols,” says CedarBough Saeji, an assistant professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at South Korea’s Pusan National University. 

In recent years, these volunteering activities have become much more political and direct—like organizing, she says, “to fund the escape from Gaza for individual Palestinian K-pop fans and their families and boycotting certain K-pop products or groups because of concerns around Israel-Palestine issues.” Kpop4planet, she notes, has also spoken directly to South Korea’s National Assembly about “how to make the K-pop businesses more environmentally friendly.” 

This advocacy is no longer focused just on streaming companies. Kpop4planet has organized nine campaigns in total, including several involving Korean and international brands that have been tapping into the large K-pop fanbase to promote their products. 

Its targeting of Hyundai was a particularly high-profile example. The Korean automaker has been working with BTS as brand ambassadors since 2018, and the group has more recently represented Hyundai’s electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles. So when Kpop4planet learned in 2023 about a deal between Hyundai and an Indonesian aluminum supplier, the advocates decided to call out what they saw as hypocrisy. The metal supplier has plans to build a new coal power plant for aluminum smelting and wasn’t planning on using renewable power until late 2029 at best. If carried through, this deal would have increased the carbon emissions associated with Hyundai and delayed the automaker’s goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2045. (Hyundai did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.)

So Kpop4planet worked closely with BTS fandoms in Indonesia to highlight the local impact of a coal power plant like this one. Initially, fans worried that campaigning against Hyundai would give BTS a bad rep, but Lee and her group explained that the campaign was about protecting BTS from being associated with potential greenwashing activities. Kpop4planet collected  signatures from 11,000 K-pop fans in 68 countries and delivered an open letter to Hyundai’s office in Jakarta. It also invited indigenous fans in the country to show up for offline campaigns—dancing to BTS songs, sharing how they would be personally affected, and expressing their demands directly.

The message broke through. Hyundai agreed to meet with Kpop4planet in Seoul twice over the last year. “I was a little bit nervous before meeting them, because these are very big corporations,” Lee says. “But they are just like us, and they used to love K-pop culture when they were young as well.” In their conversations, Lee says, Hyundai told Kpop4planet that “they care about the K-pop fans because the influence of the K-pop industry is getting bigger and bigger around the world.”

In March, Hyundai announced it would terminate the deal and seek alternative sources of aluminum.

Also this year, the group has collaborated with five international Blackpink fan groups to campaign against four major luxury brands that the band’s members represent. Lee says they’re now talking to Kering (the owner of Gucci and Saint Laurent) and Chanel about reducing emissions and using 100% renewable energy across their supply chains. Lee says that in a Zoom meeting with Kering, the company echoed Hyundai in saying it cared about K-pop fans as its customers, and called Kpop4planet’s strategy of leveraging the influence of K-pop idols both modern and creative. (Kering and Chanel did not immediately respond to a request for comment from MIT Technology Review.)

Indeed, not many climate activist groups probably approach their demands the way Kpop4planet does—with lots of joyous dancing. “I watched some videos on TikTok and YouTube of lots of Thai K-pop fans doing some K-pop dance covers to protest for democracy,” Lee says. “It was really impressive, because it is one of the most creative and also peaceful ways to deliver their opinions. So we want to show and highlight that kind of fun element of K-pop fandoms.” 

At the heart of all the campaigns, after all, is the love for K-pop music: “We [take] climate actions because we want to love and support our K-pop idols for a longer time.”

This story first appeared in China Report, MIT Technology Review’s newsletter about technology in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.

There’s been so much news coming out of China’s autonomous-vehicle industry lately that it’s hard to keep track.

The government is finally allowing Tesla to bring its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature to China. New government permits let companies test driverless cars on the road and allow cities to build smart road infrastructure that will tell these cars where to go. In short, there are a lot of changes taking place. And they all point in the same direction: There’s an immense appetite to make autonomous cars a reality soon. And the Chinese government, on both the central and local levels, has been a major force pushing for it.

So what’s happened lately?

First of all, Tesla got the approval for its FSD feature (rather misleadingly named, since it still has lots of restrictions) after it entered into a deal with the Chinese AI company Baidu to map the country. 

As I reported last summer, in the absence of Tesla FSD, Chinese EV makers were already starting to offer their own driver-assistance programs to help the cars navigate in cities, but they still often look to Tesla for assurance on what technology or strategy to use. The official entry of FSD, which is reportedly set to be rolled out in China sometime later this year, will surely bring another round of competition to the country’s auto market.

Then, the government also handed out the permits that allow companies to test and experiment with driverless cars. On June 4, the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued nine permits for testing a more advanced version of autonomous driving technologies on the road. 

The companies that got the permits include prominent EV makers like BYD and NIO, but they also had to collaborate with companies that sell services like ride-hailing, freight trucks, or public buses to test the technology. The idea seems to be to test autonomous vehicles in realistic use cases to see how the technology performs.

And most recently, on July 3, the central government announced a list of 20 cities that will pilot the building of smart, connected roads. The idea is that if a road has various kinds of sensors, cameras, and data transmitters built into it, it can communicate with self-driving vehicles in real time and help them make better decisions. 

A few of the cities on the list have already commenced the work. Wuhan recently budgeted 17 billion RMB ($2.3 billion) for an infrastructure project that will involve building 15,000 smart parking spots, transforming three miles of roads, and building an industrial park for making autonomous-vehicle chips.

To be honest, I start to get numb about yet another new policy or new permit. The list of news could go on longer if I also included actions taken on the municipal level to give companies more approvals to test on the roads or to expand their services. 

To China, autonomous cars represent one potential way to combine new advantages in car-making and AI and take the lead in a cutting-edge field. And while some foreign companies like Tesla are partaking in the campaign, there are lots of Chinese companies responding to the government’s call, and they’re eager to show off their technological prowess.

But I think the takeaway here is clear: The Chinese government is willing to pour its support into the autonomous-vehicle industry and is eager to come out on top while other countries take a more cautious approach. 

The industry has not agreed on the best way to approach fully self-driving cars, and that’s why there are so many different forms of the technology in experiments: autopilot functions, Tesla FSD, robotaxis, smart connected roads. But it’s telling that all of them are receiving so much regulatory and policy support. 

It’s possible that this could all change overnight in the event of an incident like Waymo’s accident in the US last year, but for now, it feels as if China is opening up its roads to make way for more driverless cars, and gearing up to lead the industry.

What are your takes on the endless stream of news from China about self-driving cars? Let me know by writing to zeyi@technologyreview.com.

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Now read the rest of China Report

Catch up with China

1. An underground network is paying travelers to smuggle Nvidia chips into China, where its chips are in high demand because of the US export ban. (Wall Street Journal $)

2. The Chinese EV leader BYD will spend $1 billion to build a factory in Turkey. (Financial Times $)

• This will probably help BYD avoid some of the tariffs that Europe has imposed on made-in-China EVs. (MIT Technology Review) 

3. OpenAI’s recent decision to cut off access to its services in China won’t affect its business clients much, because they can still access ChatGPT through Microsoft’s cloud service. (The Information $)

4. Can you imagine Microsoft telling its employees to use only iPhones for work? Yep, that just happened in China as part of the effort to improve cybersecurity defenses. (Bloomberg $)

5. A Chinese academic recently revealed that the country currently has over 8.1 million data-center racks and a combined processing power of 230 exaflops—as much as 200 of the most advanced supercomputers today. And China wants to increase the total by 30% next year. (The Register)

6. Chinese factory owners are turning into TikTok comedians to find new business partners overseas. (Rest of World)

7. China is spending twice as much as the US on researching fusion energy. (Wall Street Journal $)

Lost in translation

At the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), held last week in Shanghai, humanoid robots were the star of the show, according to the Chinese publication Huxiu. The event saw a significant increase in exhibitors and panels, driven by a surge of new AI startups. But it was the concept of “embodied AI,” which integrates deep learning with robotics, that received the most attention from the audience.

At the conference, one company presented Galbot, a humanoid robot capable of performing complex tasks like opening drawers and hanging clothes, aiming for applications in elder care and household chores. Another introduced AnyFold, which can fold a blanket. Other robots can perform gymnastics, help users lift heavy objects, or just show very nuanced facial expressions.

One more thing

Who says multimodal AI has no real uses? People have figured out that ChatGPT’s image interpretation function is surprisingly good at one task: finding the most ripe and tasty watermelon out of a bunch of them. Now I’m hopeful about AI again.

GPT 选的
甜过初恋 pic.twitter.com/xiL173cSuX

— supermao (@buaaxhm) June 19, 2024