Once upon a time, there was a Japanese monk by the name of Saicho. As the story goes, he was studying at Tiantai Mountain, in China’s Zhejiang province, in the early ninth century, when he encountered a drink that was said to be a meditation aid: tea. The monk became so enamoured by the drink … Read more
Alibaba Group Holding is scaling down its metaverse operations, according to a source familiar with the matter, making it the latest Big Tech company to pull back resources from the once-popular sector. Dozens of employees at Yuanjing, the metaverse unit of e-commerce giant Alibaba, have been laid off, as part of a restructuring that aims … Read more
The next-day delivery for European Union countries includes a €2 (US$2.20) service for parcel deliveries to Spain and Portugal, the company announced on Tuesday during its 2024 Smart Global Logistics Summit in Hangzhou, capital of eastern Zhejiang province. A three-day delivery option, which costs from €3 to €5, is also available in other countries in … Read more
The Chinese legal community’s latest discussion about standards for the death penalty come after a court in Inner Mongolia autonomous region upheld the death sentence of a local official who pleaded guilty to pocketing more than 3 billion yuan (US$422 million) in total. On August 27, Inner Mongolia’s regional high court dismissed an appeal by … Read more
“[We have] severely punished spies who carried out intelligence theft, infiltration and sabotage activities, in accordance with the law, effectively safeguarding the security of our country’s core secrets,” the ministry said in the post. It made specific mention of the arrest of Taiwanese political activist Yang Chih-yuan, which it called “an innovation in the law … Read more
Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, the Instagram-style app where young consumers to share lifestyle tips, is seeking to become a new force in the country’s crowded e-commerce market by grabbing attention and revenue from established players such as Alibaba Group Holding and ByteDance’s short-video app Douyin. Xiaohongshu, the platform also known as Red with 300 … Read more
Alibaba.com, a business-to-business (B2B) cross-border e-commerce platform owned by Alibaba Group Holding, is projecting US$60 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) for 2024, which would be a 20 per cent increase over the US$50 billion last year, the platform’s president Zhang Kuo said. The sourcing platform’s turnover growth slowed after a sevenfold increase in GMV … Read more
Last month, at a forum in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, academics, industry observers and AI developers discussed gender bias in AI models and AI-generated content (AIGC), calling for more balanced data and better design, as well as for more equal rights in the real world. In recent years, China has been pushing its AI development along … Read more
While it was not uncommon a decade ago for Matthew and other Chinese officials like him to travel abroad for leisure, their counterparts in 2024 are under much tighter travel restrictions, where Hawaiian honeymoons are out of the question. Matthew’s promotions over the past few years have not helped to satisfy his wanderlust, because in … Read more
China’s Politburo – a high-level decision-making body of the country’s Communist Party – reviewed a pilot accountability mechanism for financial de-risking on Monday, the latest offensive in Beijing’s campaign to address deep-rooted hazards in the financial system and the crisis-plagued property sector. The blueprint for how to keep financial actors like watchdogs, state-owned financial institutions … Read more
