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A navy brigade in China’s Eastern Theater Command has refurbished temporary family housing and outdoor play areas ahead of the Lunar New Year, easing earlier shortages that forced families to stagger visits. The upgrades—featured in a SoMi report—aim to boost morale, retention and the everyday well‑being of servicemen posted away from home.

A Guangzhou court sentenced Cedar Holdings founder Zhang Jin to life imprisonment and ordered confiscation of his assets after finding him guilty of large‑scale fundraising fraud. The collapse of Cedar’s trust and wealth products left about 6,800 investors short roughly RMB 20 billion, with retail holders likely to recover only a tiny fraction of their losses.

Chinese developers have used gifts of gold and other in-kind incentives to bridge the gap between asking prices and buyer expectations during a property downturn. A recent rise in bullion prices has made some of these promotions look like profitable hedges in hindsight, but industry practitioners say the effect is coincidental and marketing-driven rather than a durable solution to weak demand.

Beijing has deployed roughly Rmb20.5 billion in vouchers, subsidies and prizes over a nine‑day Lunar New Year period to spur household spending, backed by a larger Rmb625 billion trade‑in fund and a Rmb100 billion prize‑invoice pilot. The package combines fiscal transfers, retail supply measures and financial easing aimed at converting available goods and services into sales, but its long‑term effectiveness depends on household confidence and income growth.

China’s leading tech platforms have launched an extraordinary Lunar New Year promotional battle that blends cash red packets, steep discounts and AI features, with announced spends approaching 10 billion yuan (~$1.4bn). The campaigns aim not only to drive immediate consumption but to train users on AI interactions and lock them into each firm’s ecosystem.

Silver’s dramatic surge and sudden crash in early 2026 exposed a commodity market strained by crowded speculative bets, structural liquidity limits, and a large inflow of retail money into ETFs and physical holdings. A shift in macro expectations—especially around U.S. monetary policy—and programmatic deleveraging triggered a liquidity dry‑up that caused sharp price falls and heavy losses for many investors.

Beijing’s consumer watchdog has ordered Huazhu’s membership-services operator to review and fix a clause that requires disputes to be arbitrated in Shanghai, saying it unlawfully restricts consumers' right to sue. The move highlights growing regulatory scrutiny of standard-form contract terms in China and poses compliance and reputational challenges for the country’s largest hotel group.

Hengchang, the baijiu venture of exhibition magnate Deng Hong, has been hit with 132 million yuan in tax arrears amid collapsing prices, channel breakdowns and excess inventory. The case exposes larger vulnerabilities in China’s premium sauce‑flavour liquor boom, where heavy marketing, property ties and leverage masked weak consumer fundamentals.

Over the last decade gold has transformed from a peripheral hedge into a central asset, rising more than 300% from under $1,100 to peaks above $5,000 per ounce by early 2026. The shift is driven by sustained central-bank buying, weakening dollar share of reserves, low real interest rates and heightened geopolitical risk, but the market now displays greater volatility and complex implications for investors and policymakers.

China Mobile has launched a Lunar New Year–timed promotional campaign featuring actor Wang Yaoqing to highlight network stability and user experience. The ad aims to reassure subscribers that China Mobile can handle seasonal traffic peaks and to translate large-scale network investment into everyday consumer benefits.

Chinese retailers and producers are charging significant premiums for eggs labelled as 'functional'—selenium‑enriched, DHA‑fortified, antibiotic‑free or suitable for raw consumption—by leveraging feed additives, tighter husbandry and marketing. Costs and risk management differ sharply across these claims, and tightening regulation is likely to compress ambiguous premiums, favouring integrated producers who can internalise the investments required.

Meituan has upgraded its AI concierge “问小团” for the Lunar New Year to offer verified, transaction‑ready local recommendations and holiday coupons, aiming to convert queries into on‑platform purchases. The move highlights a broader industry push to make generative AI the primary interface for commerce, raising questions about accuracy, merchant obligations and regulatory oversight.

Apptronik has closed a $520m A‑X round, bringing its Series A total to over $935m and nearly $1bn raised overall. The financing attracted strategic investors from tech, automotive, telecom and agriculture, underscoring renewed appetite for commercialising humanoid robots and signalling a new phase where big corporate money supports the transition from lab prototypes to industrial pilots.

Elon Musk told xAI staff that the company should build a factory on the Moon to manufacture AI satellites, arguing lunar production would provide unmatched compute and deployment advantages. The plan leverages SpaceX’s heavy‑lift ambitions but faces significant technical, economic and regulatory hurdles and could reshape strategic competition over AI infrastructure in space.

Apple has delayed and will stagger the rollout of major Siri AI features after internal tests exposed stability, accuracy and routing problems. Privacy constraints and underperforming in‑house models are slowing development, while some search and image features may still ship on schedule.

Seedance 2.0, a Chinese generative video model, can produce hyper-realistic footage by integrating image, motion, audio and text, lowering the barriers to making sophisticated video. Its realism has sparked copyright backlash and deepfake concerns even as China’s large user base, open-source releases and supportive AI policy accelerate development and adoption.

Mianbi Intelligence has released SALA, a hybrid sparse‑linear attention architecture, and a 9B model called MiniCPM‑SALA that claims large inference speed gains and support for up to one million token contexts. If independently validated, the design could make very long‑context applications feasible on mid‑sized models and a range of inference hardware.

Lantu has secured all pre‑listing regulatory approvals and conditional HKEX consent to list in Hong Kong by way of introduction, following a CSRC filing valid from January 22. The listing is embedded in a two‑stage corporate restructure that will distribute Lantu shares to Dongfeng shareholders and privatize Dongfeng Group, positioning Lantu as a likely first centrally owned EV firm to list overseas.

Meta will build a 1 GW data‑centre campus in Lebanon, Indiana, with more than $10 billion invested in the facility and nearby community, creating roughly 4,000 construction jobs and 300 permanent roles. The scale of the project signals a strategic push for large‑scale AI and content infrastructure but raises questions about power supply, local benefits and long‑term demand for such massive compute sites.

Xi Jinping has instructed China’s National Natural Science Foundation Commission to strengthen and strategically reorient funding for basic research, deepen grant reforms, and support original scientific breakthroughs to advance technological self‑reliance. The move elevates basic science as a national priority while foreshadowing more targeted funding, tougher incentives for originality and cautious expansion of international cooperation.