How Hong Kong gave rise to Labubu and a designer toy movement now shaping global culture. The following sentence might make a globalist cry out for joy: A toy that is manufactured by a Chinese company in Vietnamese factories, designed by a Dutch artist in Belgium, inspired by indie toy culture in Hong Kong, and made viral thanks to a Thai K-pop star, has turned into the biggest Gen-Z cultural trend of 2025. That abomination of a sentence is the story of Labubu, the creepy-cute stuffed monster that swept the world this summer. You must have seen the trend by now, but most people are still unaware of the global, decade-long story that led up to it. Last week, I published a feature story about my journey into the heart of Labubu, how this cultural mania moment was created, and where it may go from here.

Chinese tech startup DeepSeek's new artificial intelligence chatbot has sparked discussions about the competition between China and the U.S. in AI development, with many users flocking to test the rival of OpenAI's ChatGPT. DeepSeek's AI assistant became the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple's iPhone store on Tuesday afternoon and its launch made Wall Street tech superstars' stocks tumble. Observers are eager to see whether the Chinese company has matched America's leading AI companies at a fraction of the cost. The chatbot's ultimate impact on the AI industry is still unclear, but it appears to censor answers on sensitive Chinese topics, a practice commonly seen on China's internet. In 2023, China issued regulations requiring companies to conduct a security review and obtain approvals before their products can be publicly launched.

Epidemic outbreaks can cause critical health concerns and severe global economic crises. For countries or regions with new infectious disease outbreaks, it is essential to generate preventive strategies by learning lessons from others with similar risk profiles. A Strategy Transfer and Decision Support Approach (STDSA) is proposed based on the profile similarity evaluation. There are four steps in this method: (1) The similarity evaluation indicators are determined from three dimensions, i.e., the Basis of National Epidemic Prevention & Control, Social Resilience, and Infection Situation. (2) The data related to the indicators are collected and preprocessed. (3) The first round of screening on the preprocessed dataset is conducted through an improved collaborative filtering algorithm to calculate the preliminary similarity result from the perspective of the infection situation. (4) Finally, the K-Means model is used for the second round of screening to obtain the final similarity values. The approach will be applied to decision-making support in the context of COVID-19. Our results demonstrate that the recommendations generated by the STDSA model are more accurate and aligned better with the actual situation than those produced by pure K-means models. This study will provide new insights into preventing and controlling epidemics in regions that lack experience.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI has kept its hit ChatGPT app off-limits to users in China, but the app is attracting huge interest in the country, with firms rushing to integrate the technology into their products and launch rival solutions. While residents in the country are unable to create OpenAI accounts to access the artificial intelligence-powered (AI) chatbot, virtual private networks and foreign phone numbers are helping some bypass those restrictions. At the same time, the OpenAI models behind the ChatGPT programme, which can write essays, recipes and complex computer code, are relatively accessible in China and increasingly being incorporated into Chinese consumer technology applications from social networks to online shopping. The tool's surging popularity is rapidly raising awareness in China about how advanced U.S. AI is and, according to analysts, just how far behind tech firms in the world's second-largest economy are as they scramble to catch up. "There is huge excitement around ChatGPT. Unlike the metaverse which faces huge difficulty in finding real-life application, ChatGPT has suddenly helped us achieve human-computer interaction," said Ding Daoshi, director of Beijing-based internet consultancy Sootoo.

Fox News host Bret Baier analyzes China's ambitions for agriculture dominance as it competes with the U.S. on Wednesday's'Special Report.' An unidentified civilian drone was shot down by the Taiwanese military Thursday after its entered its airspace by flying over one of Taipei's smallest islands which sits just a couple miles from mainland China. The drone reportedly flew over the waters of Shiyu Islet, also referred to as Lion Islet, which houses a small contingent of stationed Taiwanese military personnel. The incident comes as tensions between Taiwan and China continue to mount following Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taipei last month. Shiyu, or Lion Islet, which is part of Kinmen county, one of Taiwan's offshore islands, is seen in front of China's Xiamen, on Lieyu island, Kinmen county, Taiwan Aug. 20, 2018.

From spreading information to organizing mass protests, technology can be a powerful tool to create change. However, when used as a weapon, AI can be detrimental to the safety of protesters and undermine their efforts. In the past few years, the vast majority of international protests have used social media to increase support for their cause. One successful mass international protest was the 2019 climate strike. According to the Guardian, about 6 million people across the world participated in the movement.

A Chinese gene company selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country's military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations, a review of scientific papers and company statements found. U.S. government advisers warned in March that a vast bank of genomic data that the company, BGI Group, is amassing and analyzing with artificial intelligence could give China a path to economic and military advantage. As science pinpoints new links between genes and human traits, access to the biggest, most diverse set of human genomes is a strategic edge. The technology could propel China to dominate global pharmaceuticals, and also potentially lead to genetically enhanced soldiers, or engineered pathogens to target the U.S. population or food supply, the advisers said. Reuters has found that BGI's prenatal test, one of the most popular in the world, is a source of genetic data for the company, which has worked with the Chinese military to improve "population quality" and on genetic research to combat hearing loss and altitude sickness in soldiers. BGI says it stores and reanalyzes left-over blood samples and genetic data from the prenatal tests, sold in at least 52 countries to detect abnormalities such as Down's syndrome in the fetus. The tests -- branded NIFTY for "non-invasive fetal trisomY" -- also capture genetic information about the mother, as well as personal details such as her country, height and weight, but not her name, BGI computer code shows.

I made my first trip to China in late 2008. I was able to speak to developers and entrepreneurs and to get a sense of the then-nascent market for cloud computing. With over 900 million Internet users as of 2020 (according to a recent report from China Internet Network Information Center), China now has the largest user base in the world. A limited preview of the China (Beijing) Region was launched in 2013 and brought to general availability in 2016. A year later the AWS China (Ningxia) Region launched.

The year is 2029, and you wake up one morning living in a community called Hope, a dystopian dictatorship. "Everyone here wears the same outfit, lives the same repetitive routine, and is happy … For many, Hope is their entire universe. They are uninterested in the outside world. However, you are different--you have the ability to choose." This is how you are introduced to the game Name of the Will on Kickstarter.

In epidemiology, serial intervals are measured from when one infected person starts to show symptoms to when the next person infected becomes symptomatic. For any specific infection, the serial interval is assumed to be a fixed characteristic. Using valuable transmission pair data for coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in mainland China, Ali et al. noticed that the average serial interval changed as nonpharmaceutical interventions were introduced. In mid-January 2020, serial intervals were on average 7.8 days, whereas in early February 2020, they decreased to an average of 2.2 days. The more quickly infected persons were identified and isolated, the shorter the serial interval became and the fewer the opportunities for virus transmission. The change in serial interval may not only measure the effectiveness of infection control interventions but may also indicate rising population immunity. Science , this issue p. [1106][1] Studies of novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), have reported varying estimates of epidemiological parameters, including serial interval distributions—i.e., the time between illness onset in successive cases in a transmission chain—and reproduction numbers. By compiling a line-list database of transmission pairs in mainland China, we show that mean serial intervals of COVID-19 shortened substantially from 7.8 to 2.6 days within a month (9 January to 13 February 2020). This change was driven by enhanced nonpharmaceutical interventions, particularly case isolation. We also show that using real-time estimation of serial intervals allowing for variation over time provides more accurate estimates of reproduction numbers than using conventionally fixed serial interval distributions. These findings could improve our ability to assess transmission dynamics, forecast future incidence, and estimate the impact of control measures. [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.abc9004