Skip to content

Information/Technology - 3. page

UDN: Amazon E-Book Store Officially Withdraws from China

United Daily News (UDN), one of the primary Taiwanese news groups, recently reported that, Amazon China announced on its official website on June 30 that the Kindle China e-book store has ceased operations on June 30, 2023, and will stop cloud download services on June 30, 2024. After that, undownloaded e-books will not be available for download. Already downloaded e-books will remain readable on the local Kindle device. Kindle customer service will also remain only until June 30, 2024. After the news of Kindle’s complete withdrawal from the Chinese market came out, many Mainland China netizens expressed regrets on “yet another foreign investor leaves China.”

Amazon initially launched Kindle in 2007, setting off a global e-book reading craze. Kindle officially entered the Mainland Chinese market in June 2013. In 2018, the sales of Kindle Readers in China exceeded one million. Amazon announced in 2022 that its e-book business will withdraw from the Chinese Mainland market in three phases.

Source: UDN, July 1, 2024
https://money.udn.com/money/story/5603/8065269

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology US-China Relations

CNA: Chinese AI Companies Restricting Services Due to Chip Shortage

Primary Taiwanese news agency Central News Agency (CNA) recently reported that, affected by the U.S. chip export ban, Chinese technology companies have reported chip shortages leading to insufficient computing power. These companies are restricting artificial intelligence (AI) related services. This reliance on chip imports may put China’s technology industry at a disadvantage in the AI competition. China’s semiconductor industry may have found a way to produce advanced chips for 5G smartphones, but it has yet to make chips powerful enough to run AI applications. For example, in order to avoid insufficient computing power, China’s short video and live broadcast platform Kwai had to limit the number of users to test its text-generated video model Kling. Kwai uses Nvidia’s A800 chips to train it AI models. AI startup Moonshot that was recently valued at US$3 billion, also warned its users of their popular chatbot that their computing power may be insufficient during peak hours. Companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and ByteDance that offer large-scale language model applications are telling their enterprise customers who need heavy use to wait in line. All above-mentioned companies declined to comment on this matter.

Source: CNA, June 28, 2024
https://www.cna.com.tw/news/aopl/202406280418.aspx

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology US-China Relations

Guangming Daily: The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Security Governance

Guangming Daily published an article on Artificial intelligence (AI)’s impact on governance over national culture and security. It stated that AI exhibits a series of prominent characteristics, such as deep learning, cross-domain integration, human-machine collaboration, open collective intelligence, and autonomous control. These features are having a profound impact on national cultural security and governance systems.

The data-driven intelligent analysis capability makes AI an effective tool for in-depth analysis and mining of massive amounts of data, providing extensive data support for security governance. The latest generation of AI technology, by integrating diverse types of information and relying on big data models and powerful computing capabilities, can process and analyze data in real-time and quickly produce and publish results. This efficient and timely information processing greatly facilitates the convenience of cultural dissemination and the timeliness of security governance.

AI can also be used for real-time monitoring and risk identification of cultural security, effectively enhancing the foresight and precision of governance. By deploying advanced algorithms and machine learning models, AI systems can continuously collect information from the internet, social media, and other data sources, analyzing the trends and patterns of cultural dissemination. Statistics show that by the end of 2023, AI systems in China were able to monitor and analyze about 100,000 pieces of sensitive information related to cultural security every day, with approximately 80% of the information being processed in a timely manner.

Source: Guangming Daily, June 23, 2024
https://theory.gmw.cn/2024-06/23/content_37394566.htm

Briefings | | |   Government/Politics Information/Technology

Huawei Hires TSMC Talents to Build Out Chinese Semiconductor Capabilities

Financial journalist Emmy Hu recently revealed on her Facebook account “Emmy’s Drama Watch Time” (“Emmy追劇時間”) that Huawei is poaching talents from Taiwan’s chipmaker TSMC so that Huawei can expand beyond the telecommunications business into chip manufacturing. Huawei establishes new legal entities for such poaching operations, making it hard for outsiders to connect the dots back to Huawei.

As early as 2022, a TSMC employee informed Emmy Hu that Huawei had been conducting a lot of interviews with TSMC staff. Huawei poached a star TSMC plant manager using a legal entity “Sheng Wei Xu (昇维旭)” which claimed to be manufacturing memory chips. The interview questions posed were all about integrated logic circuits (logic ICs), however, and all the interviewees were Huawei personnel. “Peng Xin Wei (鹏芯微)” is another company established by Huawei. This company moved even faster in purchasing equipment than “Sheng Wei Xu.” Emmy Hu was told that Huawei aimed to poach 300 mid-to-senior level employees at once because Beijing realized that poaching a single person, like Liang Mong Song (currently the CEO of SMIC), would result in slower progress (in terms of setting up manufacturing capabilities) than poaching a larger number of people. According to Emmy, Huawei’s goal is to bring in an entire factory management team to ramp up operations quickly.

Emmy Hu mentioned that two years ago SMIC (a Chinese chipmaker) attempted to produce 7nm chips supporting Huawei’s new Mate60 smartphone, but SMIC could not handle the task by itself. Huawei masterminded the effort, putting to work its resources recruited from Taiwan. Fujian Jinhua Integrated Circuits, an independent Chinese company, now follows Huawei’s direction; it used to produce memory chips but now has switched to producing logic ICs. There are now a total of seven such logic IC chip companies working with Huawei; they are refer to the “Seven Little Dragons.”

Source: Facebook, account “Emmy追劇時間,” June 5, 2024
https://www.facebook.com/story.php/?story_fbid=1005948894485371&id=100052108087251&_rdr

Briefings | | |   Economy/Resources Geo-Strategic Trend Information/Technology

People’s Daily: “Technological Weapons” to Prevent Cheating in the College Entrance Exam

China holds national college entrance exams once a year. Over 13 million people took the exam in 2024.  People’s Daily published an article introducing the idea of using “technological weapons” to prevent cheating on the exam.

  • Beijing has developed an Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform to monitor the exam rooms to identify student cheating and mass incidents (incidents involving many people, e.g. protests).
  • Shanxi Province created a system to ensure that mobile devices cannot “be brought in, used, or send signals out.”
  • Harbin City in Heilongjiang Province set up an AI check gate to prevent students from bringing any electronic equipment into the exam.
  • Henan Province “cleaned out” those local markets that sell cheating equipment. It also set up electromagnetic systems to inspect vehicles, houses, and people for radio transmission equipment and to check radio signals in the relevant frequency bands.

Source: People’s Daily, June 7, 2024
http://edu.people.com.cn/BIG5/n1/2024/0607/c1006-40252243.html

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology

TikTok Possibly Planning Layoffs

Well-known Chinese news site Sohu (NASDAQ: SOHU) recently published an article saying that “informed sources” have said TikTok is planning large-scale layoffs. Specifically, TikTok’s global user operations department is facing dissolution. “A large part” of the department’s 1,000 employees will be affected by the layoffs, and the remaining employees will be reallocated to content, products, marketing, and security departments. The reasons for these potential layoffs, as well as the specific number of employees to be let go, are currently unclear. TikTok has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Some employees already received termination notices as early as the evening of May 21. TikTok has rarely conducted large-scale layoffs in the past. The move is indicative of the company’s strategy in the face of huge pressures — it intends to cut operating costs and seek long-term strategic changes.

On April 23, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill requiring the TikTok platform to divest from its Chinese parent company ByteDance before a nine-month deadline. Failure to comply with this requirement will result in TikTok being banned from operating in the United States. The bill has been signed into law by President Biden. TikTok responded by calling the new law unconstitutional and filing a lawsuit in early May.

TikTok’s performance in the field of non-game applications was outstanding in 2023, with its in-app purchase revenue reaching US$4 billion, ranking first among non-game applications. TikTok’s lifetime cumulative revenue has exceeded the US$10 billion mark, with 80 percent of its revenue coming from the U.S. market.

Source: Sohu, May 23, 2024
https://m.sohu.com/a/780971157_656058

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology US-China Relations

China Reports Technology Breakthrough on Communication Within Drone Swarms

People’s Daily recently reported on a technological advancement in using light (rather than wireless communication) to convey information among drones within a drone swarm.

To achieve efficient collaborative work, drones in a cluster (or swarm) need to be able to “communicate” closely. However, current drone swarms rely mainly on wireless communication, which has obvious electromagnetic characteristics. This makes drone swarms easy to identify and susceptible to electromagnetic interference.

A research team at the Northwestern Polytechnical University reported a technological breakthrough by imitating the communication method of fireflies. They utilized lighting equipment on one drone to emit light signals and employed photodetectors on another drone to capture these signals and perform intelligent analysis. This enables collaborative flight among drones. The transmission of light signals is not affected by electromagnetic interference. Additionally, the energy requirement to emit light is low and generates almost no heat, making it suitable for small drones that have limited amounts of energy.

Source: People’s Daily, May 15, 2024
http://finance.people.com.cn/n1/2024/0515/c1004-40236280.html

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology

SMIC May Have Developed 5nm DUV Process

CNBeta, one of China’s largest technology news sites and a member of Microsoft Chinese Technology Cooperation Network, recently republished an article by Hankyung (The Korea Economic Daily, South Korea’s largest business newspaper by revenue), suggesting that China’s largest semiconductor manufacturer, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), has achieved a new milestone in the use of Deep Ultraviolet Lithography (DUV) technology to manufacture computer chips without the use of more advanced Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography (EUV) equipment. The news claimed that the new 5nm process, which uses legacy DUV equipment, has been completed and SMIC is ready to mass produce a first batch of wafers.

In the meantime, Huawei has also announced that its next-generation Kirin SoC chip will appear in the upcoming Mate 70 series mobile phone this October. There is no word yet on production volumes, but SMIC’s 5nm process has previously been considered expensive to produce due to the lack of next-generation equipment. A current U.S. trade ban prohibits companies like the Netherlands’ ASML from supplying cutting-edge EUV equipment to any Chinese company.

It is estimated that the cost of SMIC’s 5nm chips will be 50 percent higher than Taiwanese TSMC’s chips. Also, Huawei’s HarmonyOS Next operating system will be unveiled with the new Mate 70 mobile phone, aiming to compete head-to-head against Google’s Android platform.

Source: CNBeta, May 15, 2024
https://www.cnbeta.com.tw/articles/tech/1431027.htm
https://www.hankyung.com/amp/2024051366751

Briefings | | |   Information/Technology