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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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

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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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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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

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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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