China Tech Talk

This week, I welcomed my friend Dan on the show. You can find him on x https://x.com/DanCollins2011. He worked extensively in China’s auto industry and actually lived in Shanghai area until a few years again. I welcomed him on my show to talk about his experience in China and now in America with the semiconductor industry.

Just like episode 16, I feel the conversation about traditional engineering and hard sciences is really important. Mechanical and chemical engineering on traditional pillars of industrialization. Too much focus has been on China’s new tech sector and not enough time has been looking at China’s advancement in traditional engineering sector (outside of the EV sales).

We also talked about the China and US relationship. I welcome his optimistic outlook of the relationship.

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This week, I asked my friend Mr. W to come on the show to talk about China’s progress in traditional industry like chemical and mechanical industry. We also spent a lot of time talking about China’s changes in engineering code and how that has catapulted the quality of their product since 2014.

The traditional engineering and hard science industries have much longer development time cycle than more “sexy” new industries like software and AI. It takes long period of R&D (just incredible amount of test and trials) to develop the right procedures, material science and building standard. The West has decades of R&D head start vs China in these areas. So even though people that work in these industries in North America are generally older (without a lot of young blood), they are still ahead in many areas. China will have to do the grind to catch up across the board. Although, it has already caught up in many areas. We talked about how the enforcement of engineering code has significantly moved China up the value chain. The only way China can get past the news stories of “lead painted toys” and “cheap Chinese crap” is through consistently improving quality.

But the interesting part is just how losing the older generation of traditional engineering talents will have on US industrial competitiveness in the future. You can see this video here where an American tried to make a BBQ brush with all American components only to find it impossible to find machinists to do many of the simple tools needed for the brush. If a “simple” expertise like making basic components on BBQ brush can go away so completely over time, it would be catastrophic to lose machinists from Boeing & chemical engineers from Dow Industry over the next decade or two. After we recorded the podcast, news came out that China had developed 17m super long super high pressure steel pipe after 13 years of R&D. This can used to transport high-temperature, high pressure, flammable/explosive oil, gas and chemicals. The manufacturing of 10m+ pipes in this segment had long been monopolized by foreign countries, so huge step by Norinco to develop this.

And finally, we discussed how the advanced economies will hate China for taking away the fat margins that they get in these traditional higher value added industries.

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This week, I invited Rick Joe onto my podcast to talk about the commissioning of the CV-18 Fujian carrier. Rick talked about the previous carriers and the steps that PLAN took to get to its first catapult equipped super carrier. We also discussed about how PLAN is likely to use CV-18 initially. Be patient guys. It took 9 years for CV-16 to achieve FOC status after joining service in 2012. It will probably be faster for CV-18, but give it sometime to fully develop and operate all the necessary aircraft.

We then talked about all the aircraft that are likely to operate off CV-18. KJ-600 may be the most interesting and important one.

After that, we moved onto our next topic of 9/3 parade and the general PLA development in the past year. The drone discoveries are very interesting and so are all the missiles. Rick offered his thoughts on those platforms also.

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This week, I decided to summarize the thread I have worked on for a while now since the announcement of China’s Rare earth export controls. I spent the first portion of the episode talking about why they did and why it’s effective. I spent the rest of the episode going through the thread I have on twitter/x to talk about the tech breakthroughs that they’ve had in the past year that allowed them to impose these sanctions from a position of strength.

This past month showed that among high tech/modern economies of this world, power comes from technology/scientific prowess. If you can wreck other countries’ economy through tech control, then your threats have bite. They are taken seriously. It gives you geopolitical power. But in order to impose your export control on others, you also need to have backup plans in the event that retaliations happen. China has made a lot of progress in the high tech sector in the past year that gave them extra leverage. And that would include the all important AI sector where Huawei actually created something really great. They are the only player out there that controls the full supply chain for AI. They have invested in many of the supply chain players to ensure that they cannot be cut off in the event of something big. As such, all the other breakthroughs do support AI. However, they also support other modern industries, because a lot of the supply chain is used across many industries.

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This week, I invited Angelica Oung on the show to talk about one of my favorite topics: Nuclear Energy. She is able to give us a very detailed explanation of the nuclear power situation in Taiwan as well as grid situation as a whole. I’m super glad to hear the anti-nuclear stance of the DPP, since I had no idea of its history with that.

Also, I was really glad to talk to her about the craziness around American VC money going into SMRs and the progress around thorium molten salt reactors in China as well as fusion reactor.

We finished up with the evolution in our view toward mainland and on her recent trip to mainland China. You can see Angelica’s most recent substack here on her interview with François Moran as well as her other hot takes on all things Taiwan and China.

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This week, I welcomed Eric Yeung (@KingKong9888) to talk about what’s been happening recently going on with China and gold. I asked Eric to discuss what is currently happening on the Shanghai Gold Exchange and Shanghai Future Exchange with respect to Gold Vault.

What does it mean for SGEi to be opening up vaults around the world? What does it mean for China to be talking to other countries about storing their gold reserves in SGE vault? And what does it mean for China and Russia to be building an alternative securities depository system to Euroclear and ClearStream? How does all of this play out in China’s overarching goals of creating an alternative financial system to the one that has been created by Western countries?

I think Eric did a pretty good job explaining all of that here. And I recommend everyone to follow him on X or Xiaohongshu.

As an update from today:

China is also currently in a spat with BHP where it is refusing to buy any iron ore unless traded in RMB. This is another sign China intends to conduct energy and natural resource purchase in RMB and to use its own domestic exchanges. Even more recently, Russian oil traders are shifting to yuan payment from Indian refiner in another move that is undoubtedly going to fuel Petroyuan move.

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This week, I welcomed back Glenn Luk as well talked about the recent happenings with respect to Alibaba’s Great Leap Forward in its AI ecosystem, cloud platform and the full stack solution. We talked about over how Alibaba has gotten back into the good graces of Chinese government and did all the hard work of becoming a powerhouse in AI. They are basically the only hyperscaler outside of Google who is doing its own models, AI apps, AI servers, chips and cloud solutions. AI is a central part of Alibaba’s strategy in winning the global cloud competition. It is now making great progress in rest of the world as seen by its major data center expansion strategy in 2025 and 2026.

We also talked about how Huawei and Ascend have caught up in the AI chip race by coming up with whole system approach which takes advantage of Huawei’s core competency in networking and software integration with hardware. It seems to us that many people are missing the full picture when only comparing the chips rather than the full system.

Please listen in as we explore global AI race and more.

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On this episode, I spoke with my friend Nelson, who is a Brazilian journalist currently living in and reporting from Beijing. We talked about how China and Brazil’s relationship has grown in the past 15 years. How Brazil and America’s relationship has been declining, especially under Trump. And we talked about what are the things going forward that will likely to continue to pull the 2 countries together.

Did you know that ByteDance CEO just met with Lula to build a $10B data center in Brazil or that Huawei has just restarted selling phones in Brazil? This is after Alibaba and Huawei are both investing in new data centers for their cloud in Brazil.

Did you also know that China is very involved with building infrastructure in Brazil? Recently, it is in discussion with Brazil to build a Bioceanic Corridor from Peru to Brazil’s Atlantic Coast.

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This week, I’m happy to welcome Han Feizi on my show. He is a writer on Asiatimes and has very interesting and high quality view on China’s economy and its changes over time.

Since I recently stayed in Beijing for 3 weeks, it was good to catch up with him just on what I saw and how it matches up with what he sees on the ground.

One thing that Han really emphasizes is that China’s economy is actually a lot larger than US’s economy. In fact, it is not at all dependent on export, because China specifically does not report on activity of certain service sectors as part of economy. As such, trade war doesn’t really do much to most of China’s regions. The chart above would just show how much of China’s production for each industries is actually dependent on US export. You can see that Consumer Electronics is basically the only major one. Of course, a large part of that is just Apple exporting products made in China to America and then making a huge profit on top.

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In this episode, I am joined by Lei and Bora to discuss all the various interesting platforms that we saw in the recent parade. We didn’t talk about the political/geopolitical side of things since that’s really not interesting. We also didn’t talk about nukes, since that’s just a distraction.

So, we really focused on which platforms on game changing and we they are important. I think we spent the most times on YJ-19 and the UUVs (AJX002 & HSU100) + Underwater implications:

We also took a serious look at the various UCAVs on display, especially from just the huge # of highly capable large drones that seem to already be in Western China for tactical and conceptual development of MUMT and unmanned air warfare.

And the last one we really spent a lot of time on were the laser platforms and just the huge implications as they keep getting more capable over time.

Of course, I also talked about the coolness of seeing all the new EV related tech that was showcased in the Type 100 tank and FSV, but that’s not as transformational as the other stuff we saw.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit tphuang.substack.com