AI, China, defense, national security, supply chains, the Protestant roots of Kim Il-sung’s Messiah complex, the lethality of ...

This is Part 2 of his two-part investigation of China’s Starlink challengers! ChinaTalk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid ...

Best of September!

This December, we’re teaming up with GiveDirectly to send cash to 800 impoverished families in the Bikara region of Rwanda. Studies show that direct cash transfers have a multiplier effect of 2.5x in ...

Over the course of this week, we are thrilled to share an in-depth, vivid journey through Taiwan’s drone industry in two parts. Ethan’s rigorous research and extensive on the ground reporting is a ...

The AI race between the U.S. and China will be decided in datacenters. But who has the advantage? Does the recent H200 ban lift change anything? Many pieces relate vague vibes that the U.S. has better ...

Manus claims to be the world’s first general-purpose AI agent. It ostensibly outperforms OpenAI’s ChatGPT Deep Research on the General AI Assistants (GAIA) benchmark. Currently in beta testing, access ...

Zilan Qian is a fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and an MSc student at the Oxford Internet Institute. What conditions made DeepSeek possible? Despite widespread debate, much of this discussion ...

Some notes of what struck me most from the instant classic of a pod. Are AI chip exports a red herring? The Trump administration has agency over the two variables most relevant to whether China will ...

TSMC makes over half of the world’s semiconductors. It gets two-thirds of contracts for semiconductor manufacturing, is one of the two companies that can make 5nm transistors and will be, for some ...