Executive Summary: President Xi Jinping unveiled the “2025 Action Plan to Stabilize Foreign Investment” and met with leading entrepreneurs for the first time in seven years, in an effort to reinvigorate the private sector and court foreign investment. The plan seeks foreign investment in sectors... MORE

Executive Summary: Beijing’s economic control of port operations at strategic chokepoints across the world, many of which are part of the Maritime Silk Road initiative, pose a threat to the United States and its allies. Two Chinese state-owned firms, COSCO and China Merchant Ports, control... MORE

Executive Summary: The “Eastern Data Western Computing” plan is a multiagency strategy that coordinates cloud computing data centers and energy infrastructure across the People’s Republic of China. These are increasingly relevant with the rise of artificial intelligence. This cloud infrastructure buildout likely will not rival that... MORE

Executive Summary: DeepSeek and its parent company, High-Flyer, are embedded in the vibrant—and heavily state-subsidized—“Hangzhou Chengxi Science and Technology Innovation Corridor,” which aims to create a Chinese answer to Silicon Valley in the companies’ hometown. DeepSeek claims that its models are not trained on GPUs... MORE

Executive Summary: Predicting artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek’s recent successes within a highly competitive AI ecosystem may have been possible by observing factors such as government recognition, proximity to top-tier national research institutions, and a complex network of corporate affiliates with proven technology expertise. Indicators... MORE

Executive Summary: The PRC is tempering its criticisms of the United States and other powerful countries in the early part of the Trump administration in a seeming attempt to foster a stable external environment while it continues to enhance its national power. Official PRC media... MORE

Executive Summary: The People’s Republic of China (PRC) plans to create over 100 “trusted data spaces” by 2028 as part of a strategy to dominate data governance internationally. The plan aims to break through current barriers obstructing the streamlining of data sharing and utilization and... MORE

Executive Summary: Chinese open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) perform better than Western ones, according to a recent report from an artificial intelligence evaluation organization SuperCLUE. Chinese LLMs also excel in cost-efficiency, scalability, and localized applications, with advancements in edge devices and use cases in the... MORE

Executive Summary: The contrasting fates of foreign companies in two recent fraud cases suggest that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) treats firms differently depending on their political utility. AstraZeneca has been guilty of widespread medical insurance fraud but has probably been treated leniently by... MORE

Executive Summary: Smuggling, a critical tool of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to acquire technology to enhance its defense industrial base, is reemerging in the wake of the US Government’s technology controls. Diversion—falsifying the end-user—is another common tactic that the Party has successfully used to... MORE