The man who did the hard thing died on the day Beijing was explaining why it won't
Zhu Rongji died in Beijing on Wednesday morning at 97. He died at around 11am, the official news agency Xinhua reported, with the cause given as illness, citing an obituary issued by the Party. He was premier from 1998 to 2003, the man who broke the state-owned sector, tamed inflation, and dragged China into the WTO over the objections of colleagues who accused him of selling out the country.
The timing is almost unkind. Zhu is being mourned on the same day the South China Morning Post ran a commentary arguing that Beijing understands the diagnosis of its economy perfectly well and simply doesn't trust the doctor — and the same day the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, back from a week in Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou in July, described a country projecting outward confidence with anxiety about growth sitting just under the surface. Zhu's whole method was the opposite: name the rot, absorb the political cost, do the thing anyway.
THE NUMBER: his push to streamline inefficient state enterprises led to the layoff of an estimated 40 million workers. He said at the outset of his premiership that whatever lay ahead — "be it a minefield or a deep abyss" — he would push on, and that line has defined him ever since. No premier since has spent that kind of capital on a domestic restructuring.
The obituary to watch is the one Beijing writes next. Funeral grade, who eulogises, whether the word reform appears as a live verb or a historical noun. When the four-volume selection of his speeches appeared in 2011, reformist ex-officials and intellectuals held up its 2,042 pages as an unflattering mirror to the conservatism of the leadership then taking shape — Xi's. That book is why his death is a political event and not a ceremonial one.
What Beijing is signalling
Manus is coming back to life as an independent company, and the way it happened is the most instructive regulatory story of the week. This was the first time a consummated deal was ordered unwound under China's Foreign Investment Security Review Measures, and the National Development and Reform Commission's decision was a single sentence ordering the transaction undone, with no explanation. Manus — the general AI agent that briefly owned the internet in March 2025 — now has to delete some user data created on or after 29 December 2025, the day Meta announced the roughly $2bn purchase. Backup window closes 07:59 Singapore time on 23 August; restore opens 08:00 on the 25th.
THE TELL: the order named the acquisition of the Manus "project", not a legal entity — looking past corporate formalities to the Chinese business behind them. Manus had moved its headquarters and key staff to Singapore. Any founder who thinks a Cayman-Singapore stack is an exit door now has a one-sentence answer. Manus says data will live in the US and Singapore, and is offering a returning-user bonus to whoever is left.
Rare earths with Iran, of all partners. The National Natural Science Foundation of China listed "exploration and processing of rare earth elements" among five areas in a new joint workshop programme with its Iranian counterpart. Processing is precisely the know-how Beijing has spent two years fencing in with export controls. Sharing it with Tehran while withholding it from everyone else is a choice, not an oversight.
Meanwhile the last soft channel to Washington is closing from the other end. New security restrictions on federally funded collaborations with Chinese institutions are shutting down scientific research as a bilateral link — Singapore and South Korea are already circling the talent. And the US-China Board of Investment, the headline deliverable from May's summit, is not going to be a deliverable next month either, per Sean Stein of the US-China Business Council. Xi goes to Washington in September with the atmospherics and none of the plumbing.
Quantum is being willed into existence. Elias Huber's deep dive for ChinaTalk — he researches quantum cryptography assurance at Fraunhofer Singapore and Singapore's Centre for Quantum Technologies — counts more than 40 investment rounds in the first half of 2026 and approaching 30 quantum computing hardware companies, with neutral atoms the hot architecture. The 15th Five-Year Plan lists quantum first among the future industries. His honest note is the useful one: the top-level mandates contradict themselves, demanding self-reliance and international collaboration, unified national planning and differentiated local development, at the same time. The flywheel spins anyway.
The AI race
Alibaba finally opened the weights on a Max-class model. Late Tuesday night Beijing time, the Qwen team released Qwen3.8-2.4T-A95B: 2.4 trillion total parameters, 95 billion activated per token, 512 experts per MoE layer with 10 routed plus one shared, native 262,144-token context extensible to 1,010,000, trained with multi-step multi-token prediction. Alibaba had never open-weighted a Max-tier model before — Qwen3-Max, 3.6-Max and 3.7-Max all stayed hosted-only. The hosted API launched on 3 August at $2 per million input and $6 per million output tokens, price parity with GPT-5.6. Now the same intelligence is a download.
The post-training write-up is the part worth your time. Rather than hand-integrating environments one by one, they decoupled three axes — task (single, multi, multi-day), workspace (multi-file to messy heterogeneous directory trees), and harness (categories, versions, skills) — so environment count grows combinatorially. Then one unified reward system swallows execution-based checks, rubric grading of text and rendered visual output, and agentic inspection, killing the inconsistency of per-task verifiers. Then an online data balancer rebuilds each batch to be balanced across task, difficulty, workspace and harness, cutting gradient variance between batches. That last one is a training-stability claim dressed as a data claim, and it is the least glamorous and most load-bearing thing in the announcement.
DeepSeek shipped the same night, and undercut everyone. V4-Pro went GA with Responses API and Codex support, benchmarks the company says approach Fable 5, and pricing that reads like an act of aggression: 0.025 yuan per million cached input tokens (about $0.0035), 3 yuan uncached (~$0.42), 6 yuan output (~$0.85). Against Qwen-Max's $6 output, that is a seventh of the price at the top of the market.
WORTH NOTING: the Hacker News thread on DeepSeek V4-Pro pulled 649 points to Qwen's 428, for a model with no open weights and a smaller number attached. Western developer attention still tracks the DeepSeek brand more than the artifact.
Electricity is now the constraint and the state is saying so out loud. CCTV Finance put the numbers on the table: a ten-thousand-card cluster eats at least 200,000 kWh a day, national compute electricity demand hits 800 billion kWh by 2030, and nearly 6 trillion kWh of green power is meant to be on the grid by then. Non-fossil generating capacity reached 2,520 GW at end-June, 62.4% of total, with new data centres in Horinger, Inner Mongolia and Qingyang, Gansu already above 80% green power. The framing — the future of AI is a contest in electricity, not just arithmetic — is not something a US utility regulator would say in public.
Two things for the systems-minded. The Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a training-free visual token pruning method that keeps 97.78% of average capability on Qwen2.5-VL-7B while cutting visual tokens 80.2%, and on a 15,876-token document task claims a 1.258x end-to-end speedup with 73.94% less prompt KV cache. And Leiphone's dissection of AMD buying Taalas, the Canadian startup that etches model weights into metal, is the sharpest chip piece of the day: one anonymous rival exec compares Nvidia adding a "Ferrari" while AMD bought itself a tractor, and admits he doesn't understand the purchase unless there are ten acres of corn to plough. The question the piece lands on — which models are stable enough and called often enough to deserve their own silicon — is the right one.
The vibe
A stray dog burned alive in Guangdong is still the most censored subject in China, six weeks on. Initium's reporting follows campaigners fighting Xiaohongshu and Douyin filters with code: posts about "joining Want Want Group, day three" — the Taiwanese snack brand whose name sounds like the dog's — plus corn-snack photos standing in for her ears, dog-shaped clouds, AI cartoons. One woman, Jiang Hong, paid for a memorial video on a shopping-mall screen; police came to her door that night. Human Rights Watch counted paid billboards in more than 100 cities and over 70,000 signatures on a petition demanding accountability and a national animal protection law. The local government said the boys involved were all under 14 and had been sent to a specialised school, and asked netizens to stop spreading information about the case.
That last clause is the whole story. There is no national animal cruelty statute to charge anyone under, so the state's only available lever is the volume knob. What is trending is not a dog; it is the discovery that a mass sentiment with no political content and no organisation still gets treated as a security problem.
A 67-year-old farmer in Chuzhou, Anhui lost 150 mu — about 25 acres — of sesame overnight because he followed an AI's spray plan. He'd been asking a chatbot about planting times, fertiliser and pesticides for a year and had come to trust it. It generated a full aerial herbicide-and-insecticide programme including fomesafen, which local agricultural technicians say is for broadleaf weeds in soybean fields and is not for sesame. He asked the AI afterwards what went wrong; it named its own recommendation. The vendor's customer service said the system has no independent knowledge base and assembles answers from public web material. The disclaimer about verifying AI output was at the top of the screen the whole time. He had never noticed it.
On the other end of the distribution, a V2EX poster rescued an ancient Surface Pro 5 by having free DeepSeek V4-Flash fix pen recognition, screen rotation and sleep-on-power-button, then patched the Okular PDF reader to handle stylus annotation in about an hour. Frontier-adjacent coding intelligence is now free enough to burn on a driver bug and a hobby feature — and to destroy a sesame crop.
And the summer's actual consumer hit is a camera. 445,000 handheld imaging devices sold online between 13 July and 9 August for 1.33bn yuan (~$187m), per RUNTO, with gimbal cameras jumping from 40% of the mix at the start of the year to 61%, action cams at 27%, and DJI holding 80.5% of the market. Note what is not selling: 360-degree cameras, under 3%. Which is the category Insta360 just launched its tenth-anniversary flagship into — the X6 at 3,999 yuan (~$563), 8K50 video, dual custom 1/1.1-inch Sony sensors, an in-house panoramic model that auto-edits and a 3D scene reconstruction mode. The company grew revenue 74.76% in 2025 and 83.11% in the first quarter of 2026 by escaping its own niche.
Read differently
Every Western obituary of Zhu Rongji leads with what he opened; the Chinese-language ones lead with what he centralised. CNN calls him the "economic czar" who led China to embrace market liberalization and globalization; Reuters opens on his tongue, and the 2011 speeches in which he called flood dykes "tofu dregs". Initium's obituary is titled around the economic czar and his centralising reform legacy — the fiscal and administrative machinery that pulled revenue and authority up to the centre. Both readings are true, and only one of them explains why the current administration finds his toolkit so usable. The liberaliser and the state-builder were the same man; the West remembers the first half.
On the dog, the divergence is subject matter. Foreign coverage is about a legal gap — no anti-cruelty statute, no criminal liability under 14, police dispersing protesters in Chongqing. Chinese-language coverage is about the arms race between grief and a keyword filter. Same event, two entirely different arguments.
Threads we are pulling
- DeepSeek said on 31 July that V4-Pro would follow "as soon as possible." Twelve days. Separately it is hiring electrical, HVAC and civil engineers for data centre teams in Hangzhou, Beijing and Ulanqab, and has registered a "DeepSeek Harness" account. A model lab going vertical into concrete and switchgear.
- Alibaba promised Max-class open weights "next week" on 3 August and delivered on the 12th. The announcement also promised a 27B dense companion; the release write-up covers only the 2.4T checkpoint. Worth checking before anyone plans around it.
- Lin Junyang, until March the technical lead of Qwen, announced Pragmatik Labs in Shanghai — a name he takes from the linguistics term pragmatics, meaning meaning-in-context — co-led by Gaorong and Sequoia China with Tencent and a Shanghai future-industries fund, reported at a $2bn pre-money valuation and chasing agents that cross from the digital world into the physical one. Qwen shipped its largest model ever the same week, without him.
- AI as a paid toll booth, not a free front door: Doubao now charges 12% on hotel bookings it sends to Douyin's merchant platform, while Alibaba's Qianwen opened its platform to third-party agents instead. Both are betting the entrance is worth money; a cited industry survey found 66.2% of users still bounce to a traditional travel site to verify before buying. The habit hasn't moved yet.