#chinese-workers

#chinese-workers

In 1959, the woman who brought me into this world bundled me in a basket and placed me in a Hong Kong stairwell near Sai Yeung Choi Street, a bustling region of the British colony. I was 4 days old. A passerby called the police, who transported me to St. Christopher's Home, the largest non-government-run orphanage on the island.

Guangdong's complete industrial ecosystem and first-class business environment have made Shein's fast growth possible. He boasted that Shein currently supports over 600,000 jobs in the Chinese province, and pledged to invest over 10 billion yuan ($1.5 billion) to fortify its local supply chain.

We have very specific concerns regarding our cooperation, which we want to improve and make fair, said Merz, in an acknowledgement of the strain faced by Germany's manufacturing sector from Chinese competition.

The lowered growth figure reflects China's economic slowdown, triggered in part by the collapse of the country's property sector, which once accounted for between 25 and 30 percent of GDP. The growth target is quite realistic, the Economist Intelligence Unit's China economist Tianchen Xu said, noting the figure reflected China's trend towards more conservative expectations.

Nvidia's Q3 FY2026 earnings call revealed China data center revenue grew sequentially on "export-compliant copper products," but CFO Colette Kress noted it "remains well below levels prior to the onset of export controls." Nvidia has been selling export-compliant chips to China for two years, and China previously represented 20-30% of revenue share. NVDA is up 0.77% over the past week while Advanced Micro Devices ( NASDAQ:AMD) surged 12%. Nvidia's stock has shown limited movement following the news, while AMD has captured significant momentum.

Xu credited the "world-class business environment" that local officials have built and the region's "complete industrial ecosystem" as a reason that companies like his have thrived. For Shein, local support has helped the firm grow to support more than 600,000 jobs in the area, Xu said.

Instead of paralyzing China's AI sector, these controls have promoted domestic self-reliance. With no choice but to develop indigenous workarounds and architectural innovations, Chinese businesses are decoupling AI progress from sheer hardware volume. U.S. policies have undoubtedly bought time, but they have also ushered in a parallel innovation ecosystem totally independent of Western influence.

Open source - that might be the clearest signal of how China wants artificial intelligence to reshape its economy. Hisham Alrayes, the group CEO of Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group, said China is prioritizing open models and broad deployment to spread AI's gains across the economy, instead of funneling them to a few tech giants. Speaking at a Davos panel on China's "AI+ Economy" strategy on Wednesday, Alrayes said the country's approach reflects a fundamentally different economic philosophy.

The EU's European Commission said Tuesday that it has opened "formal proceedings" against Shein under the Digital Services Act, which sets ground rules for online services that Europeans use. In the announcement, the commission says it is targeting Shein over worries that the shopping platform is addictive by design, powered by opaque algorithms, and engages in the sale of illegal goods, including weapons and child sexual abuse material in the form of "child-like sex dolls."

A decade ago, China's political leaders laid out an ambitious industrial plan: By 2025, they pledged, their country would be a world capital, with the goal of moving from "Chinese speed to Chinese quality, the transformation of Chinese products to Chinese brands." This is the difference, they wrote, between "Made in China" and "Created in China." At WIRED, we never take what the government (ours or anybody else's) says at face value.

In case you didn't get the memo, everyone is feeling very Chinese these days. Across social media, people are proclaiming that "You met me at a very Chinese time of my life," while performing stereotypically Chinese-coded activities like eating dim sum or wearing the viral Adidas Chinese jacket. The trend blew up so much in recent weeks that celebrities like comedian Jimmy O Yang and influencer Hasan Piker even got in on it. It has now evolved into variations like " Chinamaxxing" (acting increasingly more Chinese) and " u will turn Chinese tomorrow " (a kind of affirmation or blessing).

At the current rate, China's population could drop as low as 800 million by the year 2100, according to the United Nations. China's population fell for the fourth year in a row in 2025 after the country's birth rate dropped to its lowest point since records began almost 80 years ago, according to figures released by the national statistics office in Beijing on Monday.

In China, consumerism appears to outweigh nationalism regardless of how testy relations have become in recent diplomatic spats with countries like Japan and the United States. It has been common practice for the ruling Communist Party to whip up nationalist sentiment and deploy propaganda condemning countries deemed to be violating China's stance on territorial issues as Taiwan and Tibet. At times, Beijing targets companies that make ideological missteps in their maps or advertising.