A Shein advertisement on a bus stop in London on July 11. Photo: VCG

In the sprawling industrial districts of Guangzhou, thousands of garment factories operate around the clock, churning out polyester dresses, denim jeans and other viral fashion items destined for consumers around the globe.

For years, this hyper-efficient manufacturing engine propelled Shein Global Holdings Ltd. from an obscure cross-border vendor into the world’s leading online fast-fashion platform.

Now, after years of regulatory headwinds and shifting market sentiment, Shein is finally closing in on an IPO. Having secured approval from China’s securities regulator and cleared its listing hearing with Hong Kong’s stock exchange, the company is preparing to go public in the city as early as late August.

Yet, any celebration is likely to be muted. The planned debut comes not at the height of Shein’s meteoric rise, when private investors valued it at more than $98 billion, but at a relatively humbled projected value of around $30 billion to $40 billion.

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Competitors take part in Hyrox Shenzhen on Aug. 16, 2026. Photo: VCG

Hyrox, a grueling indoor race that combines running with strength exercises, is surging in popularity in China, drawing thousands of participants and a growing roster of corporate sponsors while giving the country’s battered gym industry a new way to attract customers.

The German-born competition entered China less than two years ago. Fewer than 1,700 people competed at its Beijing event in 2024, while more than 10,000 took part in a Shenzhen race that ended Aug. 16. Events scheduled for Beijing and Sanya later this year have sold out.

The appeal is spreading from serious athletes to corporate executives, social-media influencers and recreational gymgoers. Xu Xiaodong, a 55-year-old vice president at detergent maker Guangzhou Liby Enterprise Group Co. Ltd., added two weekly conditioning and outdoor-running sessions to his regular workout regimen after watching his first Hyrox event in March.

“The atmosphere was incredible,” Xu told Caixin. After five months of training, he completed the Chengdu event in early August. “For me, just finishing was a victory,” he said.

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Hitachi Energy’s power transformer factory in Hefei on Oct. 7, 2025. Photo: VCG

Hitachi Energy is investing about $300 million to expand its transformer manufacturing capacity in China as a global boom in artificial intelligence and renewable energy strains power grid supply chains.

The power equipment maker signed an agreement on Aug. 17 to enlarge its manufacturing base in Hefei. Established in 1996 as a global components operations center, the site produces tap changers and specialized condenser bushings used across power grids, data centers, renewable energy, hydrogen production, and rail transit. The new investment will nearly triple the facility’s tap-changer capacity.

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The expansion underscores how surging electricity demand from data centers and the broader energy transition is forcing major industry players to aggressively scale up output to clear a severe global bottleneck.

Surging infrastructure needs have stretched delivery cycles for top-tier transformer manufacturers well beyond 2027. Bruno Melles, CEO of Hitachi Energy’s transformer business, said the global supply squeeze could persist for up to a decade.

The rapid buildout of AI data centers by tech giants like Meta Platforms Inc., Amazon, and Google is a major catalyst. To secure scarce power equipment, data center developers have shifted from single-project purchasing to locking in multi-year procurement plans, allowing manufacturers to better arrange their supply chains.

While AI data centers are driving the rapid acceleration, Melles noted that industrial decarbonization and broader electrical grid upgrades account for an even larger share of the baseline demand.

The Hefei plant will supply Hitachi Energy’s internal network as well as Chinese manufacturers, who are increasingly exporting their products to international markets. China’s transformer exports surged by more than 45% year-on-year to roughly $7.7 billion in 2025.

Domestically, China’s push to build ultra-high-voltage transmission networks to move renewable power from its western regions to eastern demand centers is also driving orders. Hitachi Energy executives said the Hefei facility will localize research and production for these advanced grid components, while the company works to manage ongoing raw material cost pressures from copper and steel.

Unitree Robotics made a spectacular debut on Shanghai’s STAR Market on Wednesday, soaring 629% and raising 6.1 billion yuan ($905 million), making the Chinese robot-maker the best-performing new listing at the open on China’s A-share market this year.

The opening price gave the Hangzhou-based company, officially known as Yushu Technology Co. Ltd., a market capitalization of about 445 billion yuan. It also crystallized investor enthusiasm for humanoid robots, a technology that has become one of China’s hottest investment themes as companies race to integrate AI with machines.

Yet the valuation comes with a sizable bet attached. Unitree itself said embodied intelligence remains at an early stage, while large-scale use of humanoid robots in factories and homes still faces substantial technical hurdles. On Thursday morning, Unitree’s shares fell 16%.

Here are five things to know about the company.

How did Unitree go from robot dogs to humanoids?

Unitree was founded in 2016 by Wang Xingxing, an engineer who had been building robots since his student days. The company spent most of its first years focused on quadruped robots designed for research, inspection and other industrial or consumer applications.

Wang, 36, had experimented with humanoid robots earlier, but initially judged the technology too immature. Traditional control systems struggled with the large number of joints and the balance and stability required to make two-legged machines move reliably, Wang told Caixin in an early 2024 interview.

Unitree instead concentrated on robot dogs, gradually building expertise in motors, joints, control systems and locomotion algorithms. By 2021 and 2022, Wang previously said, the company’s AI algorithms for quadruped robots were becoming more mature.

Then a couple of developments changed the focus of the industry. Tesla Inc. unveiled its Optimus humanoid robot in 2022, and ChatGPT and the broader large-language-model boom reignited expectations that AI could eventually give robots more-general capabilities.

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But behind these impressive customs figures lies a formidable bottleneck — one that has nothing to do with software features or manufacturing capabilities. Instead, Chinese brands are facing a trial by residual value.

In Europe, outright vehicle purchases are the exception. The market is instead driven by car rental companies, corporate fleets and auto financing firms. For these critical stakeholders, a vehicle’s future resale value is what matters most. Unless Chinese new-energy vehicle (NEV) companies can crack the code on preserving the value of used cars, their rapid expansion in Europe could hit a wall.

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Hu Xiaowei constructed a global network of businesses suspected of being used to launder of Prince Group’s profits.

For months after the arrest of alleged cybercrime kingpin Chen Zhi, his closest associate was darting around the world in an apparent attempt to stay ahead of the law.

Hu Xiaowei, described by people familiar with Prince Holding Group as the conglomerate’s No. 2 figure, moved between Cambodia and Japan, at times aboard a Falcon 8X private jet. He also surfaced in Britain, sources told Caixin, where he previously purchased a mansion near London’s Holland Park for about 30 million pounds ($40.5 million).

His time on the run ended June 14, when Japanese police arrested Hu at a luxury hotel in Osaka on suspicion of falsifying electronic notarized records in an effort to obtain permanent residency.

Authorities alleged he used Japan’s highly skilled professional visa program and falsified a change of address to make it appear he lived at the Tokyo office of one of his companies. Police issued another arrest warrant in July over the alleged improper use of his Japanese residence card.

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Photo: Generated with AI assistance

China Everbright Group’s move to sell its only listed healthcare and eldercare unit, Cachet Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., marks the culmination of years of weakening earnings, unresolved tax issues and growing exposure to China’s sweeping anti-corruption campaign in the medical sector.

In February, the state-owned financial conglomerate agreed to sell its entire 28.48% stake in Cachet to Beijing Tongrentang (Group) Co. Ltd. for about 1.5 billion yuan ($222 million). After the transaction closes, Tongrentang, which is backed by the Beijing municipal government, will become the controlling shareholder of the Shenzhen-listed medical distributor.

The sale effectively sidelines Everbright’s broader healthcare and eldercare platform, which one insider said had already lagged peers.

Everbright has framed the sale as part of a broader shift toward its core financial and industrial businesses. But people familiar with the matter told Caixin the divestment also reflects deep-seated management and compliance problems at Cachet.

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A view of Asia’s largest open-pit copper mine, located in Shangrao, Jiangxi province, on Nov. 13. Photo: VCG

Artificial intelligence is sparking a fierce new scramble for global commodities.

Driven by the colossal energy demands of data centers, copper prices have surged more than 60% since April 2025, nearing all-time highs of $11,705 a ton earlier this year. Uranium and battery metals like lithium and cobalt are following suit. But this boom masks a deeper crisis for global supply chains: the world’s richest mineral deposits are increasingly held hostage by resource nationalism.

From the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which controls roughly 70% of the world’s proven cobalt reserves, to Guinea, the top exporter of bauxite, geology and political stability have become inversely correlated. For mining companies, venturing into these high-risk jurisdictions is no longer optional — it is a necessity dictated by the AI revolution.

Yet the playbook for operating in these regions is obsolete. Over the past five years, a wave of resource nationalism has swept across the globe. Governments are unilaterally rewriting the rules to extract greater rents. Whether through export restrictions in Zimbabwe, aggressive tax hikes in Mali or outright nationalization in Niger, host nations are weaponizing national sovereignty to seize existing mining assets.

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But just as the technology is accelerating production and profits, Washington is moving to tighten regulation of AI-generated content, creating new uncertainty for the overseas success story.

Once constrained by the high cost and slow pace of filming in the U.S., Chinese platforms are increasingly relying on AI to automate scriptwriting, video generation and distribution, allowing them to produce thousands of short dramas each month.

Meanwhile, U.S. audiences accustomed to paying for digital subscription services are bingeing the mobile-first stories serialized for quick consumption, turning American handsets into the industry’s most lucrative overseas battleground.

Industry analysts predict that the global micro-drama market will grow to more than $6 billion in 2026, up 60% from a year earlier. Global downloads of short-drama apps topped 850 million in the first quarter of this year, a 140% jump from the same period of 2025, Sensor Tower said in a report.

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Italian rider Federico Caricasulo races the No. 64 ZXMOTO 820RR at Portimão, Portugal on March 27, 2026. Photo: VCG

Ten years after motorcycle enthusiast Li Xiaoli (not his real name) spent nearly 200,000 yuan ($29,614) to import a Triumph Scrambler 900, the British-built retro road bike had already been condemned to the scrapheap. At least according to Chinese law.

Li felt otherwise. Because of his busy job, he didn’t often ride the motorcycle — a 2013 model — so it had less than 11,000 kilometers (6,835 miles) on the odometer when the law mandated its retirement. That’s not even enough to meet the manufacturer’s recommended mileage for its first major maintenance service.

Li said he does not intend to comply. “I won’t scrap it,” he told Caixin. “I want to keep it as a memento.”

Under a national standard in force since 2013, motorcycles in China must be scrapped after 13 years on the road, regardless of their condition. But according to some, the rule was written for a different machine and a different rider.

“Twenty or 30 years ago, motorcycles were cargo haulers in rural areas. When used in that way, a bike naturally wouldn’t last beyond 13 years,” said Zhang Xue, the founder of ZXMoto, the Chongqing-based company whose motorcycle won two middleweight races at the Portuguese round of the Superbike World Championship in March.

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In July, He Miao, an employee at a large IT outsourcing company in Shandong province, received an ultimatum: pay thousands of yuan in backdated social security contributions — including the money his employer should have contributed — or transfer to another subsidiary. Refusal would mean he would be put on a basic monthly salary of 4,000 yuan ($593).

“To keep our jobs, very few people can fight back,” He said. Choosing to stay meant paying out 4,500 yuan to cover his company’s shortfall and another 2,000 yuan for his own share.

His case reflects the growing strain imposed by a nationwide enforcement drive with tax authorities tightening collection of social security contributions. The campaign is central to Beijing’s effort to shore up a pension system under mounting pressure from rapid aging and years of weak compliance. At the same time, it is driving up payroll costs for companies and, in some cases, cutting into workers’ pay.

Under China’s rules, social-security contribution bases are determined with reference to the previous year’s average local wage, with a floor at 60% of that benchmark and a ceiling at 300%. If a worker’s income falls within that band, contributions are required to be paid on actual wages.

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Guizhou province’s Shuisi Building, an enormous faux-traditional tower, stands idle in July 2020. Photo: VCG

China’s booming tourism industry broke more records last year.

Domestic travelers took 6.52 billion trips and spent 6.3 trillion yuan ($930 billion), according to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism. Holiday crowds packed the country’s scenic areas, and “viral” destinations capitalized on social media fame.

Yet many of the state-owned companies behind this industry are losing money. Across China, local governments own tourism-focused investment vehicles akin to the local government financing vehicles (LGFVs) that borrowed heavily to build the country’s infrastructure. These tourism LGFVs developed the scenic areas, replica ancient towns, and resort complexes during the construction spree of the last decade.

Like many LGFVs, they were never quite the businesses they appeared to be. Many functioned less as tourism operators than as land-finance vehicles, borrowing against government-granted land and counting on property sales to repay the debt.

That model died with the real estate slump. Since the downturn began in 2021, these vehicles have lost the quick cash their borrowing depended on, leaving behind idle assets, mounting losses, and — in some cases — exposed credit risks.

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Manus is set to return to operating as an independent company. Photo: VCG

Manus is set to return to operating as an independent company as some of its former investors bought the AI-agent startup back from Meta Platforms Inc. for $2 billion, following Chinese regulators’ order to unwind the acquisition.

Tencent Holdings Ltd., ZhenFund and HSG are among the investors who bought back the company, according to a person close to Manus. U.S. venture capital firm Benchmark, which had been Manus’s largest shareholder before the Meta deal, did not participate. Tencent acquired Benchmark’s former stake and has become Manus’s largest shareholder, the person said.

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Manus announced Tuesday that it will resume independent operations. As part of the transition, some user data created on or after Dec. 29, 2025 — the day Meta acquired the startup — will be deleted. Affected users can begin backing up their data immediately, the company said.

The $2 billion repurchase price aligns with the lower end of the $2 billion to $3 billion range Meta paid for the acquisition. Meta said at the time that the deal would give it a general-purpose AI-agent product and help fill a gap in its AI application lineup.

But in April, China’s National Development and Reform Commission said its foreign-investment security review mechanism had prohibited the transaction and ordered the parties to unwind it.

The ruling comes as Beijing tightens scrutiny of overseas transactions involving Chinese technology, data and talent. New rules governing outbound investment that took effect July 1 require security reviews of transactions that could affect national security and restrict the overseas transfer or use of controlled goods, technologies, services and related data without approval.

The rules are aimed in part at closing loopholes that allow companies to move sensitive technology abroad through offshore entities or by relocating personnel rather than through a conventional cross-border investment, said Dai Menghao, a partner at King & Wood Mallesons.

He said the framework could apply to structures such as the Manus deal, as well as so-called “Singapore washing” arrangements in which Chinese companies shift technology, assets or talent to entities registered in Singapore or other overseas jurisdictions.

Manus was founded in China in 2022 by serial entrepreneur Xiao Hong and launched its general-purpose AI agent internationally in March 2025. A month later, it raised $75 million in a round led by Benchmark at a valuation of about $500 million.

The company later shifted its core team to Singapore and shut down its Chinese mainland operating entity amid a U.S. Treasury review of Benchmark’s investment.

By the time China ordered Meta to unwind the acquisition, the transaction had already closed and Manus’s investors had received their proceeds, according to a financial adviser familiar with the deal. Manus’s founders had also exited their equity and joined Meta.

Despite the ownership dispute, Manus has continued operating and announcing partnerships with companies including Canva, Zoom, Similarweb, Notion and Shopify.

Its business has also expanded rapidly. A person close to Manus said in June that annual recurring revenue had climbed to about $400 million from $100 million in December. At a $2 billion repurchase price, that implies a valuation of roughly five times ARR, far below the multiple implied by Meta’s original acquisition.

China’s exchange-traded fund (ETF) market is at a critical inflection point. After peaking at over 6 trillion yuan ($840 billion) in late 2025, the industry is expanding beyond passive index tracking into active management.

Flagged by China Securities Regulatory Commission Chairman Wu Qing in June, the impending pilot of active ETFs represents a structural evolution for the major Asian ETF market.

However, the success of this innovation partly hinges on resolving a fundamental transparency paradox: balancing the secrecy required for market-beating returns with the transparency demanded by China’s market structure.

Trend-chasing trap

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File photo: Buddhist amulets for sale at a market in Bangkok, Thailand. Photo: VCG

Young Chinese facing a bruising job market, income anxiety, romantic setbacks and difficult odds of starting a business are looking for quick ways to improve their fortunes.

That search has helped turn Thai Buddhist amulets — once largely folk religious tokens in Thailand’s Theravada Buddhist tradition — into a growing obsession among young people in China.

But Thailand’s Immigration Bureau recently warned that the booming cross-border trade in amulets is being exploited by Chinese gray-market capital networks as a money-laundering channel.

Proceeds from online gambling, telecom fraud and drug trafficking are being disguised as legitimate business revenue through amulet sales, sham auctions, temple-space leases and peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transfers.

Choengron Rimpadee, deputy commissioner and spokesman for Thailand’s Immigration Bureau, told the Bangkok Post that legitimate dealers and believers should remain vigilant, verify customers’ identities and use formal bank channels for transactions. They should not hold assets for others or act as business agents on their behalf, he said.

Thailand’s Anti-Money Laundering Office, Central Investigation Bureau, cyberpolice, Department of Business Development, Revenue Department and customs authorities have launched a joint crackdown.

2494 and “thang samor”

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China’s long-running efforts to transform electricity from a state-managed input into a market-priced commodity is entering a more disruptive stage. As spot trading expands, price swings are becoming more immediate, more visible and more consequential — exposing industrial users, power retailers and renewable developers to risks that administrative pricing has long concealed.

The shift is not simply a technical upgrade to how electricity is traded. It is becoming a broader re-ordering of incentives across the power system. Real-time pricing is beginning to determine not only the cost of electricity, but also the value of flexibility, the viability of renewable investment, the survival of retail intermediaries and the economics of moving power across provincial borders.

The result is a market that is more responsive to supply and demand, but also more sensitive to weather, fuel costs and policy design.

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Xiaohongshu headquarters in Shanghai. Photo: IC Photo

The public airing of a legal dispute between Xiaohongshu and a former employee over his dismissal and stock options has cast a shadow over any future Hong Kong listing by the Chinese social platform creator.

Chen Hao, a former employee of Xiaohongshu Technology Co. Ltd., said in a June 29 social media post that he had filed complaints with Hong Kong’s stock exchange and securities regulator, arguing that Xiaohongshu’s position in their litigation could raise disclosure and compliance concerns in any future listing.

While both parties had settled the employment and stock-option cases, Chen said in his post that Xiaohongshu had denied in court that its domestic operating entities were affiliated with Xingin International Holding Ltd., the offshore company that issued employee stock options.

That position conflicted with the common-control and consolidated reporting arrangements typically required under the variable-interest-entity structure used by Chinese technology companies seeking offshore listings, Chen said.

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Photo: Geng Tongxue Jiang Gushi

An academic fraud-busting campaign launched by a prominent Chinese science blogger has yielded severe repercussions, resulting in the retraction of two research papers by scholars in top-tier Nature journals on July 30.

The retractions followed an earlier correction issued by Nature Cell Biology for another paper flagged by the same blogger. Out of the studies publicly questioned by the online sleuth — who posts under the handle “Geng Tongxue Jiang Gushi” — two have now been retracted and one corrected.

The two retracted papers originated from research teams at Tongji University and Nankai University. Both studies faced allegations of abnormally similar raw data shortly after their publication. During subsequent investigations, journal editors discovered further data discrepancies and ultimately concluded that the experimental data could no longer be trusted.

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Takashi Fujiwara, vice president of Lawson’s China operations, is set to take the helm as president.

At the end of 2025, Lawson Inc. had about 7,000 stores in China — more than its rivals 7-Eleven or FamilyMart, and enough to keep the Japanese chain at the head of the country’s foreign-invested convenience-store sector.

Holding that lead is about to become someone else’s job. Takashi Fujiwara, currently vice president of Lawson’s China operations, is preparing to take the baton as president from Motonobu Miyake, who is retiring after 14 years at the helm. Miyake scores his tenure at 70 out of 100, the missing 30 points owed mainly to a target he did not hit — the 10,000 stores Lawson had promised itself by 2025.

Fujiwara arrives at the front of the company from its hardest battleground. For the past four years he has run South China, a market where domestic brands had long since locked up the neighborhoods and the lower-tier towns, where 7-Eleven was already dug in, and where discount snack shops and on-demand delivery apps were draining customers from both ends. There was little room left for a latecomer.

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Photo: VCG

The U.S. has added 43 more Chinese companies to an import blacklist over alleged rights abuses of Uyghur and other ethnic minority groups in Xinjiang, marking the single largest-ever expansion of the roster.

The addition brings the total number of listed entities to 187, underscoring Washington’s continued efforts to enforce the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) that created the blacklist.

The UFLPA was passed by Congress in 2021 to target imports from the Xinjiang Uyghur autonomous region in western China and to prevent goods alleged to have been produced through forced labor from entering the U.S. market. To escape from the list, exporters must provide supply chain traceability records to prove their materials are not made with forced labor.

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Effective August 3, U.S. Customs and Border Protection will apply a rebuttable presumption that goods produced by the 43 entities are prohibited from entering the U.S. as a result of the companies’ activities, either sourcing materials from Xinjiang or working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor or receive Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz or members of other persecuted groups out of Xinjiang, according to a statement from the U.S. Department of Home Security on Friday.

The 43 new entities include companies in high-priority sectors for enforcement, including aluminum, apparel, copper, cotton, as well as tomatoes and downstream products.

A spokesperson from China’s Ministry of Commerce condemned the U.S. move on Saturday, calling it “typical economic coercion” that lacks a factual basis and disrupts global supply chains.

The unilateral sanctions, imposed under the pretext of human rights, severely violate the consensus reached over stabilizing the bilateral economic and trade relations by the leaders of both countries, the spokesperson said, adding that China would take “necessary measures” to protect the legitimate interest of its companies.

China’s embassy in Washington called the U.S. accusations “a lie” on Friday, reiterating that Chinese law prohibits forced labor and that workers in Xinjiang are free to choose their occupations.