Jiang Zemin's centenary is doing political work this week; Zhu Rongji's funeral has been engineered to do none
Monday belongs to Jiang, Tuesday to Zhu
The Beidaihe recess is over, and the Party comes back to work with two funerals' worth of choreography. The full top leadership appears Monday morning at the commemoration of the centenary of Jiang Zemin's birth — a heavily scripted protocol ritual, where the only real news would be a retired leader or Jiang family member failing to appear, per Bill Bishop, the longtime China-watcher who writes Sinocism. Jiang was general secretary from 1989 to 2002.
The text arrived first. The Institute of Party History and Literature published its centenary essay in Qiushi and People's Daily, and it invokes Jiang's legacy as a call to rally round Xi in the face of economic or geopolitical difficulty. It closes on Jiang's turn-of-the-century prophecy — fifty years down, fifty to go — then converts it into deadlines: under ten years to basically realise socialist modernisation, twenty-odd to the full version. A dead predecessor conscripted as a clock.
Zhu's funeral grade finally landed, and it is generous and completely mute. Zhu Rongji, premier from 1998 to 2003, the architect of the state-enterprise layoffs and of WTO accession, will be cremated in Beijing on Tuesday, aged 98, with flags at half-mast at Tiananmen, Xinhuamen, the Great Hall of the People, the foreign ministry, every provincial party and government seat, Hong Kong, Macau, border ports and every embassy. Full honours. No named eulogist.
That is the answer to four days of watching. Bishop's read is that a playbook exists for managing grief that hints at dissatisfaction with the current era, and the Party has recent practice — Li Peng in 2019, Li Keqiang in 2023, with identical People's Daily treatment. Protocol maximal, politics zero. I called the centralisation frame holding; it held.
And the third name in the week is the tell. The Wire China's weekend issue pairs Zhu's obituary with the fall of Fang Xinghai — the Stanford-trained economist who was a CSRC vice chairman and played a pivotal role in opening China's capital markets to foreign investors, placed under investigation last month for "serious law and discipline violations". Bloomberg counts more than 400 financial officials and executives caught since 2021. One nineties opening gets half-mast flags; the man who ran the later one gets the CCDI.
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Employees discovered the Hong Kong listing committee
A stock exchange is now a labour venue. Pekingnology's account of Xiaohongshu — the Shanghai social platform known abroad as RedNote — has a former employee, Chen Hao, taking grievances to the Hong Kong exchange and the securities regulator. In his labour litigation Xiaohongshu argued its Chinese operating company, which hired him, was distinct from the offshore entity that issued his options — awkward against the control it must show for a VIE listing: "no connection when an employee claims, close connection when investors pay."
The newer case is a lamp maker. Xingyu Automotive Lighting, Shanghai-listed and seeking a Hong Kong flotation, refiled in July; Chinese media then reported new graduates from top universities told to leave or move to production lines. Some complained to labour authorities, some sent material to the exchange, and staff link it to a headcount already down 27% between 2024 and 2025. Allegation, not finding — but the venue choice is the innovation.
WHY IT MATTERS: the exchange runs IPO vetting and a formal complaints channel, and a "material complaint" can generate correspondence mid-application. Workers with no leverage in a labour tribunal have found the one clock that management cannot ignore.
The opposite end of the same question is in Jiemian's profile of G7 Yiliu, the truck-telematics firm covering over 3 million vehicles. Its fastest-growing product is an in-cab camera scoring fatigue, smoking, phone use. Drivers say they are fined for drinking water and that the appeals window closes while they are still driving. A labour lawyer's line: who controls that face data, and who owes disclosure, has no clear answer in Chinese practice yet.
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DeepSeek's price floor lifted at midnight
It went live. DeepSeek's peak-and-trough API pricing took effect at 00:00 Beijing time, with peak windows 9am–noon and 2–6pm, and off-peak at half the peak rate. Two years of being the floor under everyone's prices, ended by a clock.
Developers did the arithmetic immediately. Sentiment on V2EX: GPT-5.6 Luna now undercuts V4-Flash at peak and loses at trough, with better performance and multimodality, and a $20 subscription an individual cannot exhaust — while DeepSeek sells nothing comparable. The remaining moat, per that thread, is enterprise buyers who cannot use consumer plans, plus the trough.
Meanwhile the flagship showed up in a rival's dropdown. Alibaba's agent product Qwen Office added DeepSeek V4-Pro and Zhipu's GLM-5.3 as selectable frontier models alongside Qwen3.8-Max. That is the first sighting of V4-Pro I have logged since DeepSeek promised it on 31 July — and it surfaced not as a launch but as a menu item inside a competitor's product.
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Anthropic withheld a model, Jiemian shrugged
The American story this weekend was fear. Anthropic's risk report declines to release an internal model called "Model 2" despite it apparently exceeding Mythos, raises estimated loss-of-control probability in high-risk scenarios from extremely low to low, and admits its confidence is lower because task-based evaluations no longer capture real capability growth. The same day: the FT reported OpenAI dissolved its risk-prevention team last month, duties dispersed into bio and cyber groups.
Chinese commentary read the same events as a balance-sheet problem. A finance column carried by Jiemian walks through the July "Pacing the Frontier" petition — Dario Amodei, OpenAI's chief scientist, Meta's chief scientist, 1,100-plus staff across a dozen labs — and calls it a plain prisoner's dilemma, with $600bn of 2026 capex from four US giants and roughly 40% of US market capitalisation tied to AI as the cage.
Its own domestic verdict is colder. The essay says China's six model startups — Zhipu, MiniMax, Moonshot, StepFun, Baichuan, 01.AI — have collectively abandoned the consumer market for enterprise and government work, in under two years. Nobody in the Chinese write-up asks whether a model should be withheld. The question is who pays for it.
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The 84-to-38 gap, and what it hides
THE NUMBER: 84% of Chinese respondents told Stanford's AI Index they are excited about AI products and services, against 38% of Americans; Edelman has trust at 72% versus 32%, and US trust in government regulation of AI at 31%, lowest in the survey. Bloomberg's explanation, which the Chinese aggregators dutifully carried, is that AI in China reads as a practical tool disrupting a smaller share of the population.
The domestic data cuts differently. 602 million generative-AI users by December, AI-native apps at 499 million users in June, up 85.4%, 89.84% of surveyed firms using AI — and the essay's argument is that tool equality is not capability equality. The floor drops, the ceiling accelerates away.
The week's real vibe story was a professor. He Jing, 35, an associate professor at Beihang who teaches online public opinion and explains generative AI on Bilibili with a kitchen metaphor — models as chefs trained in one cuisine — went viral and then became the target. The discussion moved to her face, then her CV: agricultural-university undergraduate, mining-university doctorate, Tsinghua postdoc, 40-plus papers.
Her answer is the good part. Asked how anyone runs twenty projects, she inverts it: why assume the fast ones are abnormal rather than that the slow ones are in the wrong field. And having concluded that corrections lose to rumours in an algorithmic feed, she scripted the actual rumours about herself into an AI-generated short film. She studies public opinion; she says she only understood her own data after becoming a data point.
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Threads we are pulling
- Zhu Rongji, resolved. Funeral Tuesday, cremation, half-mast, joint obituary from all four central bodies. Four days of asking what grade he would get: the highest available, delivered in a way that generates no quotable sentence.
- Unitree's grey market is at 3.4x. Brokers are bidding 520 yuan (~$73) a share pre-listing against a 150.8 yuan (~$21) issue price, some at 410. The precedent cited is CXMT, bid at 36 against an 8.66 issue price before its debut — and CXMT went on to become China's most valuable listed company. The Star 50 multiple keeps eating its own tail.
- Facial recognition, both directions. On Friday I noted a publisher requiring face scans to release royalties as an anti-AI check. Today, CCTV: a student who bought a service converting still photos into video that clears a bank platform's face check drained 50,000-plus yuan (~$7,000) from three accounts and got one year ten months.
- Qwen's counts diverge by source. Hugging Face's own report puts 151,000-plus derivatives and 2.045bn 2026 downloads against Google's 418m and Meta's 227m; Alibaba claims 300,000 derivatives and 3bn downloads across all platforms. Same dominance, two ledgers.
- Moonshot, still the watch. The Wire China devotes a feature to Kimi K3 triggering a US regulatory storm. A lab reporting counterfeit share sales to police in June is now the lab Washington writes rules about.
- New watch — token credit. Guangdong launched its first "token economy" financial product, a Token loan, on 14 August. Compute consumption is becoming a lending category, with provincial policy behind it.
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