• Opportunities in media coverage gaps remain beyond the U.S.–China lens—especially in China’s relationship with the Global South

• Companies are moving more cautiously on the Chinese market, factoring in geopolitical and supply chain risk

• Organizations must adapt to AI-driven disruption and technological shifts, not just focus on revenue streams

Welcome to the latest edition of Nüora Global’s newsletter. I’m Solarina Ho, Editor of Research and Publications at Nüora, and a journalist and former Reuters correspondent with more than two decades of reporting experience across business, health, science, and more.

Growing up on firsthand family accounts of postwar China, the Cultural Revolution, and the country’s transformation into a global superpower, understanding China through a nuanced lens has been an indelible part of my life. Amid the volume of coverage and noise, I hope that lens can serve as a compass in this newsletter, as Nüora’s contributors distill complex issues and draw from multilingual sources to support your organizational and business needs.

Between the AI revolution and global tensions upending norms, the future feels more unpredictable than ever. Newsrooms are grappling with how to use (or not use) AI at a time when media trust in the U.S. has plunged to an all-time low.

Meanwhile, AI tools make manufacturing disinformation easier than ever. And all this comes amid rising geopolitical tensions, with more than a dozen countries pulled into the war in Iran so far. And let’s not forget the U.S. strike against Venezuela in early January.

Our managing partner, Joanna Chiu, spoke with Gina Chua, executive editor-at-large at Semafor, in Kuala Lumpur at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC)—the world’s largest gathering of investigative reporters. Their conversation explored how journalism is adapting in the age of AI, and how businesses are approaching China amid growing uncertainty.

Gina is a former executive editor at Reuters, where she oversaw editorial operations, including safety and security, and helped build its data journalism team. She previously served as editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and spent 16 years at The Wall Street Journal, including as deputy managing editor in New York and editor of its Asia edition.

The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

What do you think journalists and news organizations should think about and prioritize when it comes to not missing current opportunities to generate revenue?

Gina: So, it’s less about revenue and much more about what the moment is. I think we are on the edge of—or have passed the edge of—a technological revolution in how information is processed.

To be clear, I’m not saying this is a good thing—I’m just saying this is a thing. Generative AI is going to change how people come to information. It’s already changing how people are consuming information. We don’t have to like it. There are a lot of problems here. But we have to recognize that this is a moment, and we have to find ways to play in this space effectively if we want to fulfill our mission.

We were talking about Nüora’s mission to try to have more nuance in the China consulting space. As a former editor at Reuters and the Wall Street Journal, where do you see the current appetite for China-related news? And where do you see opportunities for journalists, in a crowded space, to still cover something fresh?

Gina: Of course it’s a crowded space—because it’s a huge story. I don’t have specific advice about what people should and shouldn’t cover. I will say there are huge opportunities for people who want to understand the U.S.-China relationship. But I think there are also huge opportunities for people who want to understand the “China and the rest of the world” relationship: China and Southeast Asia, China and Japan, for example. China and Africa, China and Latin America.

China’s a rising power one way or another. And leaving aside current U.S. policy, trying to understand China as a country, as a place, as a power that has its own interests and its own legitimate concerns about the world—and covering it from that point of view—I think is a real service. It helps people understand why China makes the decisions it does, exactly the same way we would cover why the U.S. does what it does.

You’ve been a business journalist for most of your career. Looking back, what’s the biggest shift you’ve seen in how Western companies approach the China market? Are we now seeing a more realistic view of Chinese consumers and on-the-ground realities?

Gina: I think there was a huge rush early on—25, maybe 30 years ago—where the original idea was, “If only we could sell one tube of toothpaste to every Chinese person, we’d be rich.” I think there’s been a real realization that that was a pipe dream all along.

That morphed into understanding China as a manufacturing center, then that morphed into understanding China as a market—but not an infinite market. And I think the moment has shifted one more time, just again, with U.S.-China relations.

People are now thinking about geostrategic risk and how much they want to put their supply chain out in the world, and what geopolitical shifts might mean for their companies. And so I think we just see a great deal more hesitancy about diving in, and more patience to look at how the world slowly shakes out over the next year or two.

When your new boss at work may not be human

Speaking of the AI revolution, while much of the conversation has focused on the displacement of entry-level jobs, a shift is happening higher up the ladder. In a recent piece for Al Jazeera, Joanna explores how AI agents—systems designed to plan, reason, and carry out multistep tasks—are moving into the territory of middle and senior management. Below is an adapted excerpt:

Qaiser Habib, the Toronto-based head of Canada engineering at Snowflake, an American cloud-based data platform, spends 20 to 30 hours a week interacting with five AI agents. Snowflake has built agents to review product design or to help on-call engineers to help during an outage or an incident, among other uses. Habib estimates the average engineer works with three or four agents daily, using them to carry out coding projects under human supervision.

“You don’t have to bother a human for basic questions any more,” Habib said, noting that he still collaborates with colleagues on more complex work, such as troubleshooting coding problems.

As companies experiment with AI agents the technology is beginning to reshape office hierarchies across the United States and Canada. Unlike chatbots, which respond to prompts, AI agents can adapt to changing contexts such as business goals and draw on reference tools including calendars, meeting transcripts and internal databases, to complete work with limited human oversight.

In some workplaces, AI systems are not just completing tasks but also assigning them to human workers. As the technology improves, AI agents are also beginning to manage each other.

These agent-to-agent workflows can help companies scale faster. But they also intensify concerns that AI is moving beyond assistance into supervision – and potentially, job replacement.

Read the full story here.

Thank you for reading and supporting Nüora Global Advisors. If you are a new reader, consider subscribing to hear more from our global network of specialist experts on topics including consumer culture, public policy, risk management, supply chains, and technology.

We’re also pleased to welcome new additions to Nüora’s core advisory team.

John Gruetzner joins as Senior Advisor, overseeing project peer review and contributing to client risk assessment and corporate strategy. We also welcome Dr. Mercy Kuo as Principal Advisor on geopolitical risk, specializing in U.S.–China strategic competition.

You’ll be hearing more from both in future newsletters. Contact us to learn how we can assemble a consulting team tailored to your needs.

— Solarina Ho, Editor, Research and Publications at Nüora

From Nüora’s Expert Network

• Elizabeth Donkervoort, “Supporting Cities and States on the Frontlines of Foreign Interference”, February, 2026

• TOTEM, 2026 China Marketing and Media Review

• Mercy Kuo, “China’s Interests in the Israel-US War With Iran.” The Diplomat, March, 2026.

• China’s biotech market is valued at $133 billion and is projected to reach $218 billion by 2034.

• Proprietary drugs are on the rise, with about one-quarter of innovative drug candidates under active development originating in China.

• Key opportunities for firms in the industry lie in leveraging China as a co-innovation hub while maintaining strong regulatory, data, and IP safeguards.

Lizzi C. Lee is a fellow on the Chinese economy at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis. An economist turned journalist, she holds a Ph.D. in economics from MIT and has reported on China’s business and technology, including as host of The Signal Live with Lizzi Lee.

Huiyan Li is a research assistant under the econ and tech pillar at ASPI’s Center for China Analysis, focusing on China’s biotech development and its talent and innovation ecosystem.

—

China’s rise in artificial intelligence and electric vehicles has dominated headlines over the past two years — but another transformation is quietly unfolding in biotechnology, with China emerging as a global contender.

For decades, China was known primarily as a producer of generics, chemically equivalent copies of patented drugs, as opposed to proprietary drugs which are developed and patented by the originating company. Chinese firms are increasingly embedded in global pharmaceutical pipelines, developing globally competitive drugs, biologics, and cell and gene therapies in a $133 billion market projected to reach $218 billion by 2034, according to IMARC Group.

This week, Lee and Li break down what has driven China’s biotech growth, its expanding global relevance, and the biggest risks ahead as competition intensifies.

Generic to Proprietary

Between 2005 and 2007, as many as 93% of all anti-cancer drugs approved in China were generics. By 2021, that share had fallen to 61.5%, while new drugs rose from 5% to 33.5%. Today, about a quarter of innovative drug candidates now under active development originate from China, reflecting the country’s growing capabilities in original drug discovery.

Homegrown firms are bleeding into the cutting edge. In oncology, the most active field in Chinese biotech, a wave of immunotherapy drugs have gained global traction:

• In 2023, Junshi Biosciences’ Toripalimab (Loqtorzi) became the first immune‑oncology drug approved by the United States Federal Drug Administration for nasopharyngeal cancer.

• The same year, Akeso’s Cadonilimab became the first PD‑1/CTLA‑4 bispecific antibody to receive global approval for cervical cancer.

Cell and gene therapy tell a similar story:

• Cilta‑cel (CARVYKTI), developed by Legend Biotech in partnership with Johnson & Johnson, became the first BCMA-targeted CAR-T approved for multiple myeloma (a cancer of the plasma cells) in 2022.

• This represents a broader trend in which China’s biotech sector has now surpassed the European Union to become the second-largest new drug developer, closing the gap with the long-leading United States:

• In 2024, China accounted for 20% of drugs in development globally, representing four of the top 25 pharmaceutical companies in terms of Research and Development.

• By 2024, the country’s clinical trial volumes matched 80% of those in the US, and exceeded those in Europe by 10%.

China’s biotech boom is also showing up in Hong Kong’s capital markets, which have become a primary offshore financing hub for Chinese drug developers. As of June 2025, the market capitalization of Hong Kong’s listed health-care sector reached $441 billion, triple the $144 billion recorded at the end of 2017. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Biotech Index rose over 80% for the year, outpacing broader Chinese tech and AI sectors. Hong Kong’s initial public offering market, a key venue for biotech listings, regained prominence after a prolonged post-COVID dip, leading the world in IPO fundraising in the first half of 2025.

While the surge was driven by mega-deals across multiple sectors, biotech offerings were especially strong: Four of the 10 most oversubscribed Hong Kong IPOs in the first three quarters of 2025 were biotech companies. Metabolic-disease drug developer Innogen ranked third, with subscriptions exceeding 5,300 times the shares offered.

WHAT’S BEHIND THE BIOTECH BOOM?

The explosion of Chinese biotech, which may have been surprising or mysterious to outsiders, represents a long-time-coming convergence of structural advantages on the mainland, such as:

Long-term policy design

For years, biotech has been a government-designated, strategic emerging industry, embedded in the Healthy China 2030 blueprint aimed at dealing with a rapidly aging population, a commitment that has translated into tangible support like financial subsidies, R&D tax incentives, and streamlined regulatory pathways to accelerate drug development.

China has also reformed its national reimbursement and procurement systems by lowering prices and procurement volumes for generics, freeing resources to support innovative therapies and pushing companies toward more high-value R&D.

Scale & efficiency across the value chain

On the manufacturing front, China leads the global market for Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, holding dominant shares in key categories like analgesics, antipyretics and antibiotics, reflecting decades of investment in chemical production, logistics networks, and export-focused industrial clusters.

Critical to this trajectory is the R&D speed, enabled by China’s vast clinical trial resources. Since the State Council’s 2015 regulatory reforms, China has been able to initiate trials quickly and recruit patients at scale.

Large, concentrated patient populations, especially in oncology, allow for much faster enrollment, sharply reducing development timelines and cost. This speed has become a decisive advantage in bringing new therapies to market.

Outsourcing platforms and talent

Underpinning China’s biotech boom are contract research organizations and contract development and manufacturing organizations, like WuXi AppTec, platforms handling everything from early-stage experiments to clinical-trial support and large-scale drug manufacturing, which allows biotech companies to outsource much R&D and production.

As global pharmaceutical companies confront looming patent cliffs, reliance on Chinese CROs and CDMOs has only deepened, and this cost-efficient infrastructure is further reinforced by talent: China now produces over 4.7 million STEM graduates annually, more than the US and Europe combined. Add to this a wave of US-trained scientists returning home following trade-war protectionist policies by the Trump administration.

AI is becoming biotech’s next multiplier

A 2024 WIPO report shows China filed 38,000 generative AI patents from 2014 to 2023, six times more than the US, with a significant portion in life sciences and drug discovery. While the US still leads in granted AI-driven drug-discovery patents, China’s application volume suggests it is catching up, a surge already translating into real-world applications, putting several Chinese companies out front:

• XTalPi leverages AI, quantum physics, and robotics to accelerate drug discovery, collaborating with Pfizer and many of the world’s top-20 global pharma firms.

• CarbonSilicon is attracting attention for AI tools that help researchers find promising drug candidates and prepare proteins and molecules for testing.

Beyond digital models, China is pushing ahead in embodied AI for biotechnology that integrates AI with physical laboratory infrastructure. In systems like BioMARS, developed at the University of Science and Technology of China, AI models design experiments, control lab robots, and manage quality checks, feeding back data in near-real-time.

THE RISKS

Homogenization

China’s innovative drug sector is increasingly homogeneous. Over the past decade, the top 20 drug targets in China’s new-drug pipeline attracted 716 Investigational New Drug filings, accounting for nearly 29% of all submissions. In 2019, 70% of clinical-stage innovative drugs clustered around just 21% of targets. Crowded fields such as cell therapies exhibit heavy duplication, limiting differentiated, first-in-class candidates.

This competition fuels price wars that undermine the profitability required to sustain future R&D. Negotiations around the National Reimbursement Drug List further squeezed margins: in the 2024 cycle, the average discount on listed drugs in China reached as high as 63%.

Geopolitics

Chinese firms became embedded in global pharma chains in part because China’s capital markets lack the kind of ultra-long-term, failure-tolerant capital available in the US. As a result, many companies license out global rights to their early-stage assets, which has deepened US reliance on China for APIs and critical manufacturing segments.

Some estimates suggest as much as 80% of US API imports originate in China, a dependence that has triggered political pushback in Washington, DC. Initiatives such as the BIOSECURE Act, enacted in December 2025, targeting several CROs and CDMOs, reflect a broader shift toward framing biotech as a national-security issue in the US.

At the same time, Beijing has asked state-owned drugmakers to cut reliance on the US for drugs and raw materials and prioritize domestic products in government procurement. Some policy advisors have even begun discussing the creation of a “closed loop” of domestic CROs, CDMOs, regulators, health insurers, and capital. But China’s biotech systems are far more dependent on global knowledge flows to make that viable, and far too essential to human health to remain isolated under the guise of nationalism.

A Strategic Crossroads

Chinese biotech, with all its strengths of speed, scale, cost efficiency, talent, and AI, have been indispensable to global pharmaceutical innovation. But these advantages leave it exposed to involutionary price competition at home, and growing geopolitical pressure in a fragmenting world economy.

Long-term growth still requires continued access to Western capital markets that provide patient, failure-tolerant funding, ongoing participation in global knowledge flows, multinational clinical development, and international regulatory frameworks.

How this balance is struck will shape more than the future of China’s biotech and thestructure of global pharmaceutical supply chains

Opportunities and Strategic Paths for Global and Domestic Firms

For international pharmaceutical companies, China is evolving from a sales market and manufacturing base into a co-innovation hub. Partnerships with Chinese biotech — through licensing and joint development — are becoming central to reinforcing global innovation strategies as firms face looming patent cliffs and pressure to replenish pipelines more efficiently.

For Chinese companies, the imperative is to move beyond crowded therapeutic areas toward differentiated, first-in-class innovation. Recent policy signals favor breakthrough drugs and discourage duplication, with regulations increasingly tied to clinical value. New exclusivity rules — including up to seven years of protection for eligible rare-disease therapies — strengthen incentives to pursue novel targets aligned with China’s demographic needs.

At the industry level, China is best understood as a key node in a global innovation network. Progress in biosciences depends on openness and cross-border collaboration in clinical research, data, and drug development.

That engagement, however, must be paired with clear guardrails: regulatory awareness, strong data security practices, and robust intellectual property protections. Sustained cooperation between trusted partners — grounded in openness but shaped by vigilance — will be critical to ensuring new therapies reach patients worldwide.

Authors Lizzi C. Lee and Huiyan Li are available through Nüora Global Advisors for bespoke analysis and research engagements. Edited by Dave Besseling, a Hong Kong–based guest media consultant to Nüora. Read Lee’s article in Nature, “China’s biotech boom: Why the nation must collaborate to stay ahead.”

• Washington is trying to box China out of Latin America. The Venezuela intervention signals a harder U.S. push to curb Beijing’s regional influence.

• Oil is the pressure point. Control of Venezuela’s reserves reshapes global energy flows, debt exposure, and China’s sourcing options.

• Beijing is using the episode to bolster its standing in the Global South while likely closely assessing the operational and strategic lessons for Taiwan.

Nüora Global Advisors operates through a hybrid model that combines an in-house consulting team with a global network of specialist contributors. We function both as a consultancy and an experts’ bureau, connecting clients with trusted specialists across sectors—from legal testimony and supply chains to consumer culture, technology, and public policy. This model allows us to quickly assemble tailored teams to tackle complex, high-stakes questions at the intersection of geopolitics, markets, and culture.

This week’s newsletter features Mercy Kuo, a Nüora guest consultant specializing in geopolitics, security, and U.S.–China strategic competition. She is a senior contributing author at The Diplomat and a former executive vice president at a U.S. business risk intelligence consultancy advising Fortune 500 companies. Her previous roles include senior positions at the Washington State China Relations Council and the National Bureau of Asian Research.

Her analysis takes on heightened relevance following Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, where he warned of a “rupture” in the rules-based international order, and urged middle powers to pursue greater strategic autonomy amid increasingly confrontational great-power competition (Ottawa is also pursuing stronger ties with Beijing). Recent events in Venezuela offer a timely illustration of these dynamics: following the Jan. 3 capture of Nicolás Maduro, U.S. President Donald Trump said Venezuela’s interim government would turn over up to 50 million barrels of oil to the U.S. at market price.

In this Q&A, Kuo examines what the U.S. capture of Venezuela’s president may signal for U.S.–China competition and raises broader implications for energy markets, the Global South, Taiwan, and global business risk.

— Joanna Chiu, Managing Partner, Nüora Global Advisors

What are the top three implications of the U.S. capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for U.S.-China geostrategic competition?

Kuo: First, the U.S. military’s capture of the former Venezuelan leader affirms Washington’s intention to reassert U.S. leadership in the Western Hemisphere. As stated in the 2025 National Security Strategy, “Non-hemispheric competitors have made major inroads into our hemisphere, both to disadvantage us economically in the present, and in ways that may harm us strategically in the future.” Though the strategy does not explicitly reference China’s growing influence in Latin America, the U.S. administration is clearly signalling its intent to curtail China’s agenda in the region.

Second, energy security is a strategic priority for both the United States and China. Expanding access to and production of Venezuela’s oil reserves is a critical driver of U.S.-China competition in the country and the region more broadly. Venezuela holds the world’s largest proven oil reserves, and China is its largest purchaser, with analysts estimating it buys between 50% and 89% of Venezuelan oil. The geostrategic rationale behind the U.S. ouster of Maduro was reflected in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks: “You can’t turn Venezuela into the operating hub for Iran, for Russia, for Hizballah, for China, for the Cuban intelligence agents that control that country. … You cannot continue to have the largest oil reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States.”

If Venezuelan oil exports to China are hampered, China could seek alternative sources of crude oil from Canada, Iran or Iraq. With Venezuela’s oil exports servicing debt repayment for Chinese loans, Chinese debt obligations represent less than 10% of Venezuela’s debt, which is estimated at between US$150 billion–$200 billion. Recent U.S. actions would likely prevent Venezuela’s debt repayment to China.

Third, by compelling Venezuela’s post-Maduro government to cooperate with the United States, Washington’s actions are testing the “all-weather strategic partnership” between China and Venezuela, which Beijing designated in 2023. Venezuela has been a pivotal partner in China’s “South-South Cooperation” strategy across Latin America and the Caribbean. U.S. intervention in Venezuela’s oil industry and efforts to realign Caracas’ agenda under interim President Delcy Rodriguez with U.S. interests pose a litmus test of Beijing’s economic leverage and political influence in Venezuela and potentially across the Global South.

How is Beijing using U.S. military operations in Venezuela to enhance China’s leadership position and narrative?

Kuo: Beijing is advancing a narrative that emphasizes China’s credibility as an upholder of a rules-based global order, a guarantor of stability and an enforcer of international law. By framing the United States as a source of disorder, instability and insecurity, China seeks to delegitimize U.S. leadership in the Global South and on the world stage. This narrative was articulated by Sun Lei, deputy ambassador of the People’s Republic of China to the United Nations, at a U.N. Security Council emergency meeting on Jan. 5, 2026: “The U.S. has placed its own power above multilateralism and military actions above diplomatic efforts, posing a grave threat to peace and security in Latin America and the Caribbean and even internationally. China firmly opposes this, and the international community has also expressed widespread grave concerns and strong condemnation. We urge the U.S. to heed the overwhelming voice of the international community, abide by international law and the purposes and principles of the U.N. Charter, cease infringing upon the sovereignty and security of other countries, stop toppling the government of Venezuela, and return to the path of political solutions through dialogue and negotiations.”

How might Washington’s intervention in Venezuela impact Beijing’s plans toward Taiwan?

Kuo: U.S. operations to remove Maduro demonstrated highly integrated coordination among U.S. military forces within an extremely tight timeframe. While these actions are unlikely to deter Beijing from considering military operations in the Taiwan Strait, they raise questions about whether the People’s Liberation Army and Navy could deliver similar outcomes in real time under complex conditions. If the PLA were to pursue a decapitation strategy — removing Taiwan’s leadership to force rapid surrender — Taiwan’s deeply rooted democratic system would likely ensure continuity of government and sustained public opposition to the Chinese Communist Party’s encroachment on Taiwan’s sovereignty. Beijing may also interpret Washington’s “Venezuela vector” as a recalibration of U.S. foreign policy toward the Western Hemisphere, potentially constraining U.S. military resources in the Western Pacific. China’s leadership is therefore closely assessing how Washington’s approach to a Rodriguez-led Venezuela could inform PLA planning for Taiwan.

Why should geopolitical risk be a core consideration in strategic planning and enterprise risk assessment for policy analysts, corporations, and global investors?

Kuo: Global companies must understand a country’s business risk environment, legal and regulatory frameworks, supply chain and sourcing vulnerabilities, insider risk, and geopolitical dynamics that affect bilateral business relations.

Business leaders should also align country-specific risk strategies with their broader enterprise risk management frameworks. Scenario planning, evacuation contingency planning, and crisis communications preparedness are all essential components of this approach.

As geopolitical uncertainty grows, the challenge for executives is to optimize opportunities while mitigating risks. The goal is to maximize returns while managing trade-offs, allowing corporate leaders to find their own equilibrium on the opportunity-versus-risk scale.

If you’re interested in joining our network as a guest consultant, apply here.
Contact us to learn how we can assemble a consulting team tailored to your needs.

Joanna is the author of China Unbound and a journalist with more than 15 years of experience covering China’s business and economic influence, both inside and outside the country.

Last month, I spoke at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Kuala Lumpur, an opportunity to reconnect with journalists doing some of the most rigorous reporting on China today. My panel, “Investigating China’s Foreign Investment and Supply Chains,” explored how Chinese companies operate across borders and amidst trade barriers.

My presentation focused on a simple reality: Despite U.S. tariffs and export controls, much of the world’s technology production still runs through China’s manufacturing systems — even as it has become harder to understand firsthand how tech innovation and manufacturing are evolving inside the country.

Speaking in one of the conference’s main halls, I argued that breakthrough reporting increasingly depends on teams with open-source intelligence (OSINT) skills and footprints in multiple countries — especially where Chinese firms operate manufacturing, assembly or R&D hubs.

At Rest of World, where I served as China technology editor, I worked with reporters Selina Cheng and Viola Zhou on January 2025 reporting that revealed Foxconn had halted transfers of Chinese staff and specialized equipment to factories in India’s Tamil Nadu and Karnataka states. The move was widely interpreted as Beijing asserting leverage as India’s role in global supply chains grows.

Work like this depends on years of trust with sources inside companies navigating geopolitics across markets such as China and India — and on the ability to verify sensitive information across borders.

That need is one reason I co-founded Nüora Global Advisors as a hybrid consultancy and research network. We help organizations, including newsrooms, connect with regional specialists who bring cultural and linguistic fluency across Asia. Our experts provide intel ranging from supply-chain risk to legal and corporate due diligence. This newsletter highlights some of the more accessible tools and approaches journalists and organizations can use to understand China’s tech supply chains.

China’s Tech Landscape: What’s Actually Changing

China’s leadership remains ambivalent about its longstanding reliance on low-margin manufacturing. The next Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) calls for “high-quality growth,” stronger domestic consumption and greater technological self-reliance, with AI as a central pillar.

Companies such as DeepSeek demonstrate how Chinese startups can enhance AI performance despite limited access to cutting-edge chips. Many senior engineers driving advances in Silicon Valley remain Chinese nationals, underscoring how global talent networks remain deeply intertwined. The difficulty of observing these dynamics firsthand inside China has contributed to persistent misunderstandings in Western debates — an issue I examined in a recent Monocle analysis on how Chinese innovation is often misread.

The U.S.–China tech rivalry predates the current trade war. China has spent years preparing for long-term competition through state subsidies and policies promoting technological self-sufficiency. Despite U.S. sanctions and export controls, supply chains have proven resilient.

China’s dominance in rare earths, mineral refining and trade infrastructure gives Beijing significant leverage. As Rush Doshi wrote in The New York Times, China has in some ways emerged stronger from the trade war by leaning on its control of critical minerals used in EVs, electronics and military systems, and by signalling it could restrict access under pressure.

Reality Check on Global Supply Chains

Despite frequent calls for decoupling, global tech production remains deeply interdependent:

• China dominates global manufacturing and mineral processing.

• The U.S. leads in AI software and chip design, while China excels in hardware and cost-efficient production.

• By deploying AI-driven factory optimization, tapping into Beijing subsidies, and shifting production into key markets, Chinese firms have strengthened their supply-chain resilience.

• Many U.S. tariffs ultimately raise costs for American consumers rather than Chinese producers.

Techniques for Investigations

Many Chinese companies engage in “China-shedding,” obscuring ownership, funding or leadership structures when expanding overseas. While some firms have become more open amid national pride over recent AI advances, strategic rebranding remains widespread among companies positioning themselves as global for Western audiences.

Reporters should be prepared to:

• Trace supply chains across jurisdictions

• Track how corporate structures shift or rebrand overseas

• Cross-check trade data, customs filings, sanctions lists and satellite imagery

• Work with regional journalists and researchers who can access local records

Recent examples include:

• “How China is Secretly Arming Russia”: Sophia Yan used battlefield sourcing and trade data to trace Chinese-made components sent to sanctioned Russian drone makers.

• “Chinese AI Companies Dodge U.S. Chip Curbs by Flying Suitcases of Hard Drives Abroad”: Reporters revealed how firms bypass export controls through meticulous sourcing.

Top Tips from Other GIJC Panels

• Chinese search engine Sogou can surface WeChat content

• Archive constantly; Chinese websites often disappear

• Central and local authorities post procurement notices on the Chinese Government Procurement Network (CGPN) website.

• GIJC and ChinaFile offer strong methodological guides for researching Chinese companies

Thank you, and Happy New Year! A heartfelt thanks to everyone who has supported Nüora’s launch, including our strategy and governance advisor, Elizabeth Donkervoort, those who generously shared their expertise — Andy Yan, John Gruetzner, Solarina Ho, Tony Atkins, Anita Law, Monica Wolter, Mohammad Jafari, Lucinda Biibbs — and this newsletter’s guest editor, Dave Besseling.

If you’re working on a China-related investigation or want to join our experts’ network, please reach out here, or write me anytime at joanna@nuoraglobal.com.

Joanna

Over the years, much of my work as a journalist has been shaped by my curiosity about concepts related to identity and belonging.

And with home — both in Canada and in Hong Kong — in mind, last week, my co-founder at Nüora Global Advisors Joanna, and I published separate sister op-eds on the recent Tai Po tragedy.

With 160 deaths, dozens injured, and thousands more displaced, the exact cause of Hong Kong’s deadliest blaze since 1948 has yet to be determined. In the immediate aftermath, bamboo scaffolding became an easy target — blamed across headlines and online commentary as the catalyst for the fire. But subsequent investigations suggest a more complex picture: flammable netting, faulty alarms, aging insulation, and documented warnings to contractors about unmet fire-safety requirements. Authorities have also cited “gross negligence” by the construction firms involved.

Beyond these immediate questions, the tragedy exposes long-standing issues. The fire has thrown into sharp relief Hong Kong’s challenges around affordability, liveability, and inequality — themes both Joanna and I sought to clarify amid early misconceptions about the role of bamboo.

We reflect on the Tai Po fire as an urgent reminder of the structural inequalities that shape Hong Kong and its diaspora — and the resilience of those who continue to call it home.

Below, you’ll find selected and lightly edited excerpts from our latest stories.

This week’s newsletter is also published in honour of matriarchs like my late grandmother Lau Ying, who was born in southern China, and lived in Tai Po until October of this year.

My grandmother was sold and trafficked as a young child. My great-grandmother, unable to provide for both her and her younger son, made the unimaginably difficult decision to find a new life for her daughter as a newly-widowed single mother at the time.

At the age of 15, my grandmother fled her owners (and husband, whose family she had been sold to), and moved to Hong Kong to start a new life. There, she met my grandfather at 19, and together, they started a family of nine children, including my mom.

Her story — like so many belonging to Hong Kong’s and China’s older generations — reminds us that questions of safety, dignity and belonging are never abstract. They live in the bodies of the people who built these cities, in the families they raised, and in the communities they held together despite everything.

At Nüora, we believe these stories require nuance (hence the nu in Nüora) — and that identity, diversity, and intersectionality must be understood in ways that reflect the realities of 2025 and beyond. We’re not outsiders offering abstract analysis on Asia. We work from fact-based narratives, bringing cultural fluency and lived understanding to global issues.

• EXCERPT FROM CRYSTAL’S PIECE IN TORONTO STAR

Until mid-October, just before she passed away, my grandmother lived in a public housing block across a small river from Wang Fuk Court, the site of the recent Hong Kong apartment fire tragedy in Tai Po district.

Tai Po is home to a mix of working and middle-class residents, known for its clean air and expansive green spaces. In the quiet mornings, I would awaken to the sound of traditional Chinese flute music emanating from the park below.

Each day, my grandma would wake up just after dawn for her daybreak walk or “san wan” as we call it in Cantonese. Looking down from the 14th floor window, I would see dozens of older folks assembling for tai chi and their daily walks.

It is heartbreaking to think about the pain and devastation that the 4,800 residents of Wang Fuk Court have endured. Over the course of a few days, the fire raged across seven tower blocks, engulfing a community that included many older residents — who, like my grandma in her final year, were unable to leave their homes easily…

Beyond immediate questions of negligence, the tragedy exposes deeper, long-standing issues. In the aftermath of the fire thousands of residents are now living in emergency shelters and transitional homes. Demand for public housing far outstrips supply. All told, it shines a harsh light on affordability, liveability and the widening wealth gap in a rapidly aging city.

In 2024, Hong Kong’s poverty rate reached 20 per cent at 1.39 million people in a city of 7 million, with single person households subsisting on an income of HKD 5,000 (~$880) per month. In a city where a one-bedroom apartment costs on average HKD 17,4300 $3100 per month, and where rents comprise up to 70 per cent of median household incomes, Oxfam Hong Kong reported that more than 580,000 elderly were living in poverty, a 42.9 per cent increase since the pandemic; meanwhile the region’s wealth gap has widened, with the poorest earning 81.9 per cent less than the richest centile.

This means many residents can only afford to live in cramped and potentially hazardous conditions: from “coffin” and parking space-sized sub-divided units (currently home to 200,000 people), to tiny studios for entire families where a bathroom doubles as the kitchen. Hong Kong’s median per-capita living space is just 172 square feet..

I have visited such residences while reporting on the realities of marginalised groups in the city — ventilation is poor, privacy is lacking and clutter abounds.

• EXCERPT FROM JOANNA’S PIECE IN GLOBE AND MAIL

On a brief layover last month – my first visit since more than 10,000 people were arrested in connection with 2019’s mass protests – bamboo was everywhere, as usual. I might not have even noticed it if the café where I met friends hadn’t been wrapped in scaffolding, filtering the sunlight. We discussed the city’s mood: quiet, careful, adapting to a drastically changed political environment. In this hypermodern city, the bamboo is a symbol: it is, as my friend told me, a comforting reminder that Hong Kong hasn’t lost itself completely.

Two days later, a devastating fire swept through Wang Fuk Court, a public-housing estate in Tai Po. Almost immediately, early police reports, prominent media outlets and online commentary blamed the bamboo scaffolding, framing the tragedy as an indication that the city clung to tradition despite the safety risks of using a combustible material. But many of the facts did not support the narrative that bamboo was the main culprit. Authorities have since pointed to flammable netting and the foam panels in many of the windows, the building’s aging insulation and faulty fire alarms, and a year-long record of residents’ safety complaints. Police arrested three staff members from the construction company on suspicion of manslaughter and gross negligence, after officials warned contractors multiple times to meet fire safety requirements.

The rush to fault bamboo reflects not engineering concerns, but Hong Kong’s shaken sense of identity after years of turmoil. In a city that has been through so much, even honoured traditions – maybe especially honoured traditions – can become lightning rods for collective unease.

Certainly, not every part of Hong Kong’s identity is worthy of pride. Extreme income inequality, for instance, is enmeshed in the city’s social fabric. When I lived there, I covered stories about migrant Southeast Asian domestic workers being abused by employers and commonly sleeping on floors and in closets, even when working for wealthy families. According to an Oxfam study, the richest 10 per cent of households earn a median of HK$131,100 a month (about $23,000), while the poorest 10 per cent make just HK$1,600 (about $280) a month. Nearly a quarter of the city’s households live in poverty.

So if there is a part of Hong Kong’s culture to blame, it appears that it’s inequality – not bamboo – that made the fire so deadly.

Thank you for reading and supporting Nüora Global Advisors — and for being part of a community that cares about these conversations. Reach me at crystal@nuoraglobal.com

Crystal Tai

RECOMMENDED READS

• “Near-record low election turnout in Hong Kong amid discontent over apartment fire” — The Guardian

• “China’s National Security Office in Hong Kong Summons Foreign Journalists” — New York Times

• “Hong Kong fire: Echoes of loss beneath burnt towers” — Reuters

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Jing Zhang is a journalist, editor, and consultant specializing in the luxury, fashion, and retail industries across Asia and China.

This Nov. 11, I flew to Hangzhou, where Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is headquartered — not to celebrate the Singles’ Day shopping festival but to indulge in 24 hours of local fine dining for a documentary (it’s a hard life, I know). While we were driving around in a friend’s automated Xiaomi car — my gob was truly smacked by this experience alone — and talking about sales, scale and hype from the center of China’s ecommerce universe, the shift in the country’s consumption story became clear.

China’s 2025 Singles’ Day results underlined a structural truth the industry has quietly accepted: the country’s biggest shopping festival has matured into a long, disciplined retail season rather than a midnight adrenaline hit. The period has even been extended to five weeks to stimulate buying, amid continued weak consumption indicators and tariff disputes dominating 2025.

The headline numbers tell the story. Third-party tracker Syntun put total gross merchandise volume (GMV) during the Single’s Day period at 1.695 trillion yuan (about US$240 billion) across e-commerce, instant retail and community group-buying. That’s a 14% year-over-year increase — respectable, but far from the breakneck surges of earlier years. The boom is steady, not explosive; the consumer, pragmatic, not euphoric.

Major platforms such as Alibaba’s Tmall and JD.com again declined to release headline GMV — something unthinkable a decade ago. The official line is sustainable, “quality growth.” The subtext is caution.

Still, momentum was there. Double-digit growth would give Western markets fever dreams. JD.com reported a 40% surge in active shoppers and 60% growth in fulfilled orders, signaling that Chinese consumers haven’t lost their appetite — they’ve simply recalibrated how and where they spend.

Alibaba doubled down on ecosystem stickiness: 198% growth in its “buy-now-get-now” Taobao Instant Commerce orders; more than 30% GMV growth on its online travel platform Fliggy; and a sharp 31% year-over-year jump in daily active 88VIP loyalty program members. Singles’ Day is now less about fireworks and more about deepening repeat behavior — loyalty disguised as spectacle.

Here are some key dynamics that show how the future of Chinese e-commerce is taking shape:

1. Instant retail goes mainstream. Consultancy Daxue reports that “buy now, get now” has become the most visible structural shift, with instant delivery now a “tens of billions of yuan” GMV layer on top of traditional e-commerce.’’

2. Clean, “rational” consumption. Tmall Global saw a meaningful uptick in natural and organic cosmetics, in line with a broader clean-beauty and value-for-money mindset.

3. From AI to feel-good beauty. Artificial intelligence–powered recommendation engines improved conversions across categories. In lifestyle, outerwear and “science-backed” skincare — particularly China-beauty brands — saw strong growth.

For brands, the takeaway is blunt: Singles’ Day is no longer a GMV trophy hunt. It’s a stress test of pricing discipline, logistics speed and customer relationship management (CRM) sophistication. The winners treated the festival as a year-long engine powered by tight data loops, omnichannel immediacy and loyalty programs that actually matter. Clearance culture isn’t entirely dead, but credibility, localization and precision are what convert in China now.

And for those who think this means China is “slowing down,” it’s all relative. Having just spent five months in Europe, it certainly didn’t feel slow cruising through Hangzhou at night in my friend’s hyper-autonomous Xiaomi SUV. It navigated intersections, drove me to my hotel via GPS, and parked itself — with my friend chatting away in the driver’s seat — while I enjoyed a back massage in the passenger seat. Go figure.

Until next time,

Jing

***

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This article was originally written by Nüora Global Managing Partner Joanna Chiu for Rest of World.

In my role as China editor, I’m excited to work with colleagues around the world to tell nuanced stories about Chinese people’s experiences with technology — and the migration of Chinese manufacturing and tech companies abroad. Anyone who has lived in China can attest to the unique ability of swathes of the population to quickly adopt new technologies and use platforms in remarkably creative and profitable ways.

Amid the ongoing U.S.-China tech rivalry, high-stakes stories are happening beyond either country’s borders. I’m particularly interested in how a decoupling of U.S. and Chinese technology partnerships and supply chains would affect private companies and other nations — in unexpected ways.

For example, take Microsoft’s $1.4 billion investment in G42, the leading AI firm of the United Arab Emirates. The deal is important to Microsoft because it involves plans to build a massive geothermal-powered data center in Kenya for high-speed cloud and AI services, among other regional projects. The computing power needed to train AI requires an astonishing amount of natural resources. With space constraints and limited public support for large-scale projects in the U.S, the future of American companies’ AI prowess relies on partners abroad.

But even this deal — between an American company and an Emirati company — is being caught in the crossfire between the U.S. and China.

G42’s CEO, Peng Xiao, is very connected to China’s business community. And American spy agencies have warned U.S. officials that G42’s connections with large Chinese companies like Huawei could make it a conduit for the Chinese government to access sensitive information, according to a recent investigation by The New York Times.

Microsoft couldn’t get support for the deal from the Biden administration until G42 agreed to sever its Chinese business links. But doubts persist among Pentagon officials about G42’s compliance, Bloomberg reported last week, citing unnamed sources familiar with the matter. It could put the deal in jeopardy.

This wouldn’t be the only time the U.S.-China tech war has derailed lucrative deals in other countries. Europe’s most valuable tech company, Dutch chipmaking tool supplier ASML, has seen profits slump amid restrictions on the sale of its lithography equipment to China. I was the first to report that top Canadian universities were severing multimillion-dollar research deals with Huawei. The problem, disgruntled scientists tell me, is that governments haven’t stepped in to make up for the lost funding.

Matthew Pines, a director at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, says the appeal of setting up American AI hubs in the Middle East is that several countries there have “basically blank cheques with no environmental restrictions or NIMBYism to contend with.”

“But at the end of day, if next-generation AI models are born in the Emirates, the ability for the U.S. to constrain or protect that knowledge from leaking to China is much harder to do than if it took place in Arizona or Illinois,” Pines told me.

That’s the dilemma U.S. officials seem to be tussling over. The end result could determine whether tech giants like Microsoft need to think twice about partnering with any company connected to China.

This post was originally written by Nüora Global Managing Partner Joanna Chiu for Monocle.

Earlier this year, I attended Web Summit Vancouver, a global tech conference that offered the usual 2025 mix of utopian hype and doomsday predictions. After a morning of panels declaring that artificial intelligence (AI) will both cure global ills and eliminate millions of jobs, I slipped into a side event: a meet-up of Chinese entrepreneurs. Here the mood was different. In a room buzzing with Mandarin, which was interspersed with English words such as “seed funding”, young founders pitched apps and demo reels. Also present were several immigration lawyers who were surrounded by Chinese nationals seeking advice on stalled residency applications. It was another snapshot of our times: talent weighed down by uncertainty.

America’s fears of industrial espionage are spreading to other global tech hubs, including Vancouver. In Silicon Valley, companies are tightening vetting of Chinese employees and recruiting ex-FBI officers as “insider risk investigators”, signalling that firms suspect potential spies among their staff. Some concern is valid: this month, a US judge ordered Chinese firm Hytera to pay Motorola more than $70m (€59m) for stealing trade secrets in order to build its radios. But suspicion also reveals insecurity. Many in the West still struggle to accept the pace of Chinese innovation and that much of it is down to its openness to foreign ideas. When Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek unveiled a large language model that rivalled American ones, the dominant reaction was disbelief. To figures such as David Sacks, Trump’s AI and crypto tsar, theft, not ingenuity, was the only explanation.

Beijing has long invested in talent programmes that blur the line between overseas recruitment and intellectual property theft. For years, Western governments looked the other way, motivated by access to China’s huge market and labour force. Now the pendulum has swung sharply the other way. Western universities are severing partnerships with Chinese tech giants, visa applications are immediately denied and the country’s overseas students are interrogated for hours before being sent home. But what began as a legitimate concern is slipping into xenophobia. As Tatyana Mamut, CEO of Wayfound AI and a Ukrainian refugee, told me at the summit, “It’s true that many cyberattacks come out of China. But it’s politically harder to accept that there are also many good Chinese ideas and that we should at least try to work together.” That balance between protecting against espionage and welcoming talent is what’s missing in some policy approaches. It might be easier to implement sweeping security measures but the potential costs are high. The future of geopolitical power will rest less on armies than on technological prowess. AI is reshaping economies and societies – to harness its potential responsibly and avoid its worst repercussions, countries need to stop treating its development as a zero-sum arms race.

Big tech firms used to understand this. In the 1990s and 2000s, Microsoft and Google established research labs and incubators in China and India that have contributed to today’s breakthroughs in machine learning. They recognised that innovation thrives on global connections. Safeguarding intellectual property is vital but a climate of fear drives away the very people whose work strengthens economies and, ultimately, national security. Many of today’s most groundbreaking tech teams are dominated by people of Chinese heritage. Yet the US still cancels visas for Chinese students who could help achieve future breakthroughs.

Not every Western government is mirroring Washington’s approach. Across Europe, universities are stepping up efforts to recruit Chinese students in the wake of US visa restrictions. But as Yale research scholar Yangyang Cheng, once a physics PhD student in Chicago, told me, “When a state deems groups undesirable, no amount of degrees or professional titles can protect them.” Her words are a reminder that this debate is about more than visas or background checks. National security isn’t strengthened by the paranoid shutting of doors – America’s openness to talented foreigners helped the country triumph in the Cold War. Governments and companies should adopt nuanced security processes and work with international partners to set clear best practices, otherwise the technology of the future will be weaponised by governments and populations scared of the other.

Joanna Chiu is a Vancouver-based journalist, author of ‘China Unbound: A New World Disorder’ and managing partner of Nüora Global Advisors.

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