#weibo

#weibo

The competitive landscape among AI apps in China is fierce. Companies have been dumping money into the market to try to win customers and show them how AI is useful in everyday life, in particular, for buying stuff.

This 'Black Paper' is a cultural exploration, not a trend report. The ethnographic research reveals how a community turns language into currency, ritualizes economic solidarity, and uses political engagement in daily survival.

According to the clip, the woman shouted in Cantonese: "You're making my heart race! You've got plenty to do, so what's the point of messing around with this? Are you freaking crazy?" The Unitree Robotics G-1 then appeared to do a "raise the roof" motion with both arms while she continued to shout.

Chinese users rushed to install OpenClaw on their devices, even forming long lines outside Tencent's headquarters in Shenzhen and Baidu's headquarters in Beijing to get engineers to help install the AI agent. Others paid strangers online to set it up for them.

ByteDance, TikTok's Chinese parent company, recently established a separate American entity to run the app's U.S. operations. This restructuring aims to separate U.S. TikTok from its Chinese parent, addressing concerns about data privacy and foreign control. The move came after years of pressure from lawmakers, who feared the Chinese government's potential access to Americans' data. In 2024, Congress enacted a law, mandating that TikTok's U.S. operations be separated from ByteDance.

For a brief moment in October, Alejandro Quintero thought he had made it big in China. The Bogotá-based data analyst owns and manages a website that publishes articles about paranormal activities, like ghosts and aliens. The content is written in "Spanglish," he says, and was never intended for an Asian audience. But last fall, Quintero's site suddenly began receiving a large volume of visits from China and Singapore.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. The new experience looks closer to how reblogs behave on X, Bluesky, and Threads. And the similarities haven't gone unnoticed by many Tumblr users who are now pushing back against the platform becoming another Twitter look-alike, and say the updated reblog chains are harder to follow.

Available for a one-time payment of the equivalent of $1.15 in US dollars, the app - with the evocative name of "Are You Dead?" - is basically a large countdown timer that you have to reset regularly, and which alerts an emergency contact if you let the time run out. As the BBC reports, the app's counter is set to two days by default. After downloading, a user simply has to open the app and tap a large button to reset it.