@DerrickArthor@RnaudBertrand “We accuse you of whatever we are already guilty of. Because we do it, you are definitely doing it too. Not only do we do it, but we do it to a far greater extent than whatever we accuse you of.”
This campus has a direct connection to the also under construction Shenzhen Metro Line 15. This is how tech company campuses should be built but the Lesser Bay Area in California is not serious compared to the Greater Bay Area in China.
If you want to effectively & quickly search the Chinese internet without a mainland phone number, good news: just use the Tencent Yuanbao mini-app inside WeChat. Partly powered by DeepSeek R1, it's super fast, and is great with English.
Unlike most Chinese AI tools, it doesn’t require a +86 mainland number, just an active WeChat account.
I still search mostly in Chinese, but I tried some English searches just now and it seems quite good (minus the sometimes awkward translations of industry jargon). It's also fully annotated if you are wary of hallucinations.
Maybe I'm biased because at @AlphawatchAI we have built and sold enterprise AI search capabilities as part of our agentic platform, but I honestly can't understand why anyone would NOT use AI search. Even if all you're doing is reading the sources, it's much faster at making your research much more focused.
If we look at Chinese restaurants in America that are owned by immigrants specifically from Taiwan Province, we'll find that the majority of them are run by waishengren (those whose families arrived to Taiwan after 1945/49) as opposed to benshengren (Taiwan locals). Why? 🧵
About 200 years ago, during the Qing Dynasty, China exported a large amount of inexpensive porcelain, silk and other raw materials to the West, but rarely imported Western goods (the self-sufficient peasant economy model did not require imports), so it obtained a huge trade surplus (especially with Britain, France and other countries), and the flow of silver to China made the West dissatisfied. They thought of a good way: selling opium to the Chinese, and the large amount of imported opium offset the trade surplus. When the Chinese government was ready to ban the opium trade, Western robbers launched two invasion wars against China. This is the shameful "Opium War" in Chinese history (a total of two times), and all Chinese people will never forget that history.
Today, 200 years later, China has manufactured the most comprehensive and extensive commercial products in the world with large-scale machines and manpower and exported them to the world. Western robbers are once again ready to use hegemony and war to reverse the situation, isolate, blockade and "tariff stand" China. Will the humiliating history repeat itself?
1.4 billion Chinese people will not agree. The Communist Party of China understands this truth. Surrender and kneeling cannot exchange for dignity and equality. Only when you are strong can you have the right to speak.
China built this mega bridge in Xinjiang to connect the closed-off region. Roads lead to prosperity. This bridge costs ¥240 million (3.4 million/meter). This is real human right guaranteed.
The largest fast-food chain in the world by store count isn’t McDonald’s (42k) or Starbucks (40k).
It’s Mixue, a Chinese tea and ice cream chain with 45k locations that is IPO-ing in Hong Kong this week (and eyeing a ~$10B valuation).
Founded in 1997, the brand’s popular sub-$1 items blew up in large part thanks to a mascot: a snow-man (combined with a mind-numbing jingle).
With thousands of locations around Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and South Korea, the Mixue Snowman is now on par with Colonel Sanders or Ronald McDonald’s as a corproate mascot for Asia.
The brand is so popular that individual investors have have submitted applications to borrow over $200 billion to invest in an offering of only ~$500 million.
Mixue runs a franchise business model but its revenue mix is quite different than the most similar well-known F&B chains. In 2024, over 90% of its $3B+ in sales was from selling ingredients (milk, coffee, syrup) and equipment to franchisees (which pay a low franchise fee).
One wild stat: Mixue is China’s largest buyer of lemons (more than 100,000 tonnes, which are used in ~10B drinks sold a year).
The massive buying volume means the chain can procure raw ingredients at 20%+ discounts.
Mixue really is a logistics and supply chain story…and also a pretty absurd mascot story.
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WSJ: https://t.co/PbBcbTVsB3
SCMP: https://t.co/NRNpWpfzk5
What is the world’s largest fast-food chain?
It’s not McDonald’s, Starbucks or KFC.
Say hi to Mixue from China.
45,000 stores selling bubble tea and ice cream for $1.
Now it’s gone IPO in Hong Kong, and the shares are up 40%.
When I was taking the Chengdu Metro with a relative from Canada, they asked me how old the system was. I told him the 1st line opened in 2010. "So they built all of this while Toronto built nothing?" They asked. "Yes all 630km of it." I added....
I am very familiar with this biological drug from China & can confirm that it is a highly innovative, game-changing cancer treatment. Essentially, it has dual arms-one mobilizes the immune army against the tumor, while the other starves the cancer by cutting off its blood supply.