China’s July 2026 enforcement push on strategic mineral export controls has sent neodymium prices sixfold higher and left European firms with below-25% licensing approval rates.
Tag: China
Posted inWorld
Fire kills 28 at Jinjiang shoe factory after blocked stairwells trap workers
A fire at the Huiteng shoe factory in Jinjiang, China’s shoe capital, killed 28 workers on July 9 after goods piled in stairwells hampered their escape.
Posted inWorld
Australia and Fiji seal the Ocean of Peace Alliance in Pacific security push
Australia and Fiji signed a mutual defense pact and a A$1 billion economic treaty on July 6, the same day China test-fired a submarine-launched ballistic missile in the Pacific.
Posted inTech
China’s GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarks at a fraction of the cost
Z.ai’s open-weight GLM-5.2, trained on Huawei silicon by a US-blacklisted Chinese startup, has outscored OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 on two leading coding benchmarks and costs roughly one-sixth as much to run.
Posted inTech
Meituan’s LongCat-2.0 is the first frontier AI model trained entirely on Chinese chips
The Chinese food-delivery giant open-sourced a 1.6-trillion-parameter model trained on 50,000 domestic Huawei-class accelerators, challenging the core premise of US chip export controls.
Posted inWorld
Xi Jinping promotes two generals to rebuild China’s hollowed-out military leadership
Xi Jinping promoted Zhang Shuguang and Wang Gang to full general on July 3, filling the senior PLA roles left vacant by a sweeping corruption purge that gutted the Central Military Commission.
Posted inEconomy
China’s June manufacturing PMI beats forecasts at 50.3 on AI export demand
China’s NBS reported a manufacturing PMI of 50.3 in June 2026, beating the 50.1 consensus forecast, driven by surging demand for AI-related exports amid the global infrastructure build-out.
Posted inTech
Anthropic says Alibaba used 25,000 fake accounts to run 28.8 million Mythos queries for Qwen training
Anthropic disclosed that operators linked to Alibaba’s Qwen lab ran 28.8 million interactions through 25,000 fraudulent accounts over 45 days, harvesting its Mythos model’s outputs to train rival AI systems.
Posted inTech
Nvidia faces Warren’s chip-diversion deadline today as DOJ indictments pile up
June 18 is the deadline Senator Warren set for Nvidia to explain why DOJ indictments allege $670 million in GPU diversions to China that CEO Jensen Huang said never happened.
Posted inTech
Nvidia declines Senate hearing as Warren sets June 18 deadline on chip diversion probe
Senator Elizabeth Warren has set a June 18 deadline for Nvidia to explain its export control compliance after CEO Jensen Huang declined a Senate hearing invitation and DOJ alleged $510 million in diverted AI chips.