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A major geomagnetic storm caused auroras to appear across large swathes of China, delighting onlookers but also raising concerns about impacts to satellites, communications and power systems. The event highlights ongoing solar activity and the need for robust space-weather monitoring and infrastructure resilience.

An explosion outside a Chinese restaurant in Kabul on 19 January killed one Chinese national and wounded five. Beijing has lodged an emergency representation with Afghan authorities, condemned the attack, urged stronger protections for Chinese citizens and advised against travel to Afghanistan.

Professor Wang Jiangzhou urged that 6G should be built around integrated communication and sensing, arguing 5G cannot meet the latency, reliability and situational awareness needs of industrial and safety‑critical applications. He stressed multi‑station cooperative sensing, shared hardware and unified waveforms as central technical directions, and positioned China’s policy moves alongside global efforts to capture leadership in 6G.

TCL Electronics and Sony have agreed a memorandum of understanding to form a joint venture in which TCL would hold 51% and Sony 49% to run Sony’s home entertainment business, including BRAVIA-branded TVs. The deal, subject to a final agreement by March 2026 and operations beginning April 2027, would give TCL operational control of Sony’s TV unit and could accelerate consolidation in the global television market. The transaction pairs TCL’s rising manufacturing and panel capacity with Sony’s premium brand, promising scale and market-share gains but raising questions about brand stewardship, regulatory approval and competitive responses from other global players.

Fu Sheng, founder of Cheetah Mobile and OrionStar, argues the AI era will flip human–machine roles and calls for rebuilding apps as AI‑native products. He stresses a scenario‑first approach for robots and devices to secure commercial returns, while warning that foundational models still need improvement for decision‑critical tasks.

China Merchants Bank and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank have launched satellites into the Tianqi low‑Earth orbit constellation to bolster loan monitoring, improve disaster resilience and develop new data services. The launches underscore a trend of Chinese banks adopting commercial space assets to enhance risk controls, though regulatory, privacy and technical limits will shape adoption.

Gold hit record highs above $4,700 on January 20, driven by geopolitical concerns and strong ETF inflows, with Chinese retail jewellery prices following suit. Strategists see a plausible longer-term bull case for gold but warn of short-term overbought readings and the potential for sharp corrections, especially in silver.

Xibei’s closure of 102 stores has become a high‑profile symbol of wider distress in China’s restaurant sector. Structural pressures—rising food and labour costs, falling per‑capita dining spend and tougher social‑insurance rules—are squeezing margins, prompting widespread closures, weak IPOs and a wave of industry consolidation.

China has introduced a mandatory energy‑consumption standard that ties electric‑vehicle electricity use to curb weight, forcing manufacturers to curb the recent trend of heavier battery‑bulked models. The rule will accelerate lightweighting, higher‑density batteries and systems integration while reducing resource pressure from oversized pack production.

A candid video by Li Yapeng triggered a rapid wave of public donations that raised nearly RMB20 million for Yanran Angel’s cleft‑care work, but legal and structural limits mean those funds cannot easily cover the hospital’s rent arrears. The episode highlights the strength of mass micro‑giving in China and the fragility of non‑profit healthcare providers that depend on commercial leases and fragmented funding channels.

China’s NDRC is preparing a package of measures to boost urban and rural household incomes and shore up consumption, pairing immediate demand support—such as trade‑in subsidies and job stabilisation—with investment, service‑sector expansion, and reforms to spur private participation. The moves respond to data showing consumption is now a leading driver of growth even as officials warn of a supply‑demand imbalance.

GAC has denied online claims that half of its automotive chips will be supplied by Gree, while confirming that a January meeting took place to discuss smart ecosystem cooperation. The clarification underscores the strategic interest of appliance makers in automotive power semiconductors and the risks posed by unverified market rumours.

Zhongke Yuhang has completed acceptance tests of its Liqing‑1 30‑ton LOX‑kerosene engine, demonstrating deep throttle (100%–50%) and 1% thrust precision, using a needle‑and‑pin injector and stainless‑steel 3D‑printed components. The company plans to use three Liqing‑1 engines on its LiHong‑2 reusable vehicle and is preparing larger Liqing‑2 tests, marking a material advance for China’s commercial reusable‑rocket ambitions.

Beijing has opened the Rocket Street complex in E‑Town, a 145,000 sqm commercial space hub that consolidates R&D, testing, manufacturing and operations under one roof. The project underpins Beijing’s strategic push to scale China’s commercial space industry, accelerate reusable‑rocket capability and foster hundreds of high‑tech firms and unicorns by 2028.

JD Health unveiled Zhuoyi 2.0, a hospital‑oriented large‑model product designed for full‑scene clinical deployment. The launch highlights Chinese tech firms’ drive to embed generative AI into hospital workflows while raising questions about clinical validation, regulation and data governance.

Chinese start‑up Jieyue Xingchen open‑sourced Step3‑VL‑10B, a 10‑billion‑parameter multimodal model that the team says matches same‑scale state‑of‑the‑art performance on vision, reasoning, math and dialogue. The release highlights a push for efficient, deployable multimodal models and will prompt independent verification and community adoption.

SK Hynix and Samsung are reallocating memory capacity to serve AI data centres, driving a surge in HBM and SSD demand that has pushed memory prices sharply higher. The result is higher costs and stealth downgrades for consumer devices, with ordinary buyers effectively shouldering the bill for large‑scale AI infrastructure build‑outs.

AI is transforming drug discovery from an expensive exercise in trial-and-error into a data- and compute-driven engineering problem. The result is a pragmatic partnership between American algorithmic and compute strength and China’s unrivalled clinical scale, producing record licensing deals even as regulatory and scientific bottlenecks persist.

China has unveiled a two‑year, 5,000‑billion‑yuan guarantee programme to boost private and SME investment by expanding government risk sharing, cutting guarantee fees and encouraging longer‑term lending. The targeted scheme aims to support equipment, digital and consumption‑related upgrades while limiting direct fiscal exposure through eligibility rules and performance incentives for local guarantee bodies.

CES 2026 moved the narrative from flashy demos to physical, embodied AI and underscored China’s shift from exporter to global supplier of AI hardware. Investors returned with cautious optimism: the technology is making measurable progress, but crowded categories and deployment challenges demand clearer paths to revenue and regulatory compliance.