So when I read that Tencent and PayPal announced this Tuesday that TenPay Global is now connected to PayPal World, my first instinct was: finally. In plain terms, a U.S. PayPal user landing in Beijing can open the PayPal app, point it at any WeChat Pay QR code at any merchant, and the transaction goes through. No WeChat download. No Chinese bank account. No mainland ID. The merchant does nothing different on their end.

This is big news because it’s not as if Tencent and Ant Group, which runs Alipay, haven’t tried to make it easier before. TenPay Global has existed for years as Tencent’s cross-border payments arm, a network of licensed financial institutions under Tencent that connects the WeChat ecosystem to overseas wallets and users. Until very recently, TenPay Global’s partner list looked like a tour of secondary Asian payment apps: Vietnam’s MOMO and ZaloPay, Laos’s BCEL, Mongolia’s Hipay, Thailand’s TrueMoney. You get the point. Useful if you were a Vietnamese tourist in Shanghai. Useless if you were an American tourist anywhere in China.

China is, functionally, a cashless society now. Across the board, first-tier metropolis and county-seat alike, Alipay and WeChat Pay together run more than 94% of the mobile payments market. So for anyone visiting, payment is the thing that quietly sits at the top of mind. I can’t count the conversations I’ve had with friends who either haven’t been to China or haven’t been back in five-plus years, and the worry is always the same: how do I actually access my money and pay for things. The setup has historically been glitchy, a process of linking foreign cards to apps that I genuinely cannot explain to them in a way that sounds reassuring.

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It begs the question: why now?

China is the new Japan this year, the place everyone has either just been or is about to go. Tech writers, AI delegations, sovereign-wealth scouts, journalists, VC investors. The SAIL Media delegation spent ten days this spring touring DeepSeek, Moonshot, MiniMax, Unitree, Alibaba, and more. There’s an AI/tech trek in Beijing for youngsters scheduled in a month. Lex Fridman is hitchhiking in China at the moment.

The numbers underneath the vibe are hard to ignore. In 2025, 82 million foreigners entered China, up 26% year on year. Of those, 30 million came in visa-free, up nearly 50%. China has been steadily widening unilateral visa-free access, now covering 50 countries, with the UK and Canada added this February.

It could be that China-maxxing is playing a role in all of this. The FT just ran a piece on “China-maxxing,” the soft-power moment carrying Labubu and bubble tea across the world. There are 13 HeyTea locations in New York now, a Times Square flagship doing 2,000-plus cups a day. Luckin Coffee opened its first two U.S. stores in Manhattan last June and is already up to fourteen. Pop Mart, with more than 50% of its business now coming from outside of China, posted a 204% revenue jump in the first half of 2025.

Why has it been so hard to get done?

The payment friction is that the entire mobile life-stack in China assumes a Chinese mainland national ID. Real-name verification is the invisible gate. Buying a high-speed rail ticket, reserving a slot at a popular attraction, unlocking a shared bike, hailing a cab, checking into a hotel: nearly every “getting around” scenario routes through an app, and many of those apps only recognize a national ID, not a passport. A lot of attractions now require advance in-app booking as opposed to just walk in. I wrote an entire piece about my experience trying to watch the flag-raising at Tiananmen Square last year on this very fact.

A Caixin piece puts it well: the inconveniences foreigners run into in China are not random; they are the shape of a system built around domestic identity.

The PayPal deal doesn’t solve all of the fection. It solves exactly one slice of it: payments at retail merchants, and only for U.S. PayPal users to start, with other markets to follow in phases.

Alipay has taken the opposite approach, and it is worth pausing on because it juxtaposes what Tencent just did. Ant International (which runs Alipay+) has been building the opposite kind of bridge: helping Chinese travelers pay abroad and helping regional Asian wallets pay inside China. Indonesia–China QR connectivity in May. HUMO Pay Uzbekistan last October. iFAST Global Bank in the UK earlier this month.

The plumbing matters more than the deal

The corridor that made the PayPal deal possible has been a year in the making. In July 2025, the People’s Bank of China began trial operations of the Cross-Border Interconnection Payment Gateway, or CPG: a single PBOC-supervised pipe that overseas wallets can plug into to reach China’s QR network. Before this, every foreign wallet had to negotiate access bank by bank, app by app. The CPG replaces all of that with one point of entry.

By September 2025, TenPay Global and Ant International were named the two inaugural foreign-institution partners on the CPG. PayPal is the first major Western consumer wallet on it. This is more than a corporate handshake between Tencent and PayPal; it required the central bank’s blessing. The news is that a Western wallet has finally gotten access to infrastructure the Chinese central bank built.

The timing ahead of the APEC summit Shenzhen hosts in November is not a coincidence.

So everyone is coming. The Labubus are selling out, and we all love our HeyTea. PayPal now works in a Shenzhen noodle shop, and I feel more at ease knowing that. One wall down. Could Instagram be next? I’ll be in China this summer. I’ll let you know.

Calling the Shots is read by the sharpest observers and operators in communications, tech, China strategy, and media. They understand that perception and narrative create enterprise value and confer the power to call the shots.

Whether you are trying to avoid making the comms mistakes others have made or read China news from a different lens, you will enjoy reading Calling the Shots.

Red Note’s US expansion is the culmination of years of organic growth, building a global footprint through the Chinese diaspora, which already uses and loves the app.

The global nature of Red Note is not to be underestimated. Beyond its domestic Chinese user base, millions of Chinese speakers across the US, Canada, Germany1, Australia, and the UK were already living on Red Note — using it to find apartments, review restaurants, compare daycares, and navigate diasporic life in a language their daily environment didn’t provide.

Then came the TikTok refugee wave last January, which served as a proof-of-concept beyond that core base. The wave didn’t lead to a sustained spike in user growth, but what the moment affirmed was the thesis that there’s a demographic well beyond Mandarin speakers: a broader segment hungry for authentic engagement and genuine diversity of thoughts, in a register th…

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In a new Calling the Shots series called The AI Script, I want to track how AI narratives shape the perception of power. From valuation gaps to geopolitical leverage, the story told about AI often matters more than the technology itself. Xiaomi’s venture into AI is the first story.

Xiaomi: An Underestimated AI Narrative in China

By Peiyue Wu

Xiaomi is undeniably China’s closest parallel to Tesla. Both began as consumer tech companies that successfully extended into cars, and now both are pushing into AI.

For three consecutive weeks, Xiaomi’s MiMo-V2-Pro AI model dominated the OpenRouter leaderboards. It was a rare feat of endurance that even high-flying startups like Z.ai and MiniMax d…

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Chinese Open-Source Has Quietly Entered America’s AI Products

By Peiyue Wu

Director Chloé Zhao said in an interview about her new production, an adaptation of Hamlet. When asked why she wasn’t working on something “original,” she pushed back on the premise outright.

“The word original, the root of that word, orīgō, it means old,” she said. “Original doesn’t mean new. We have a sort of misunderstanding of what the word original means.”

She was talking about Hollywood. But she could have been describing the AI industry.

Back in February, OpenAI and Athropic accused DeepSeek, MiniMax, and Moonshot AI of “free riding” their models through distillation. Chinese labs allegedly spun up thousands of accounts to scrape US models, and used the outputs to train their models without paying the full cost of building from scratch. It neatly fits into a well-worn narrative: American innovation versus Chinese imitation.

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Then two weeks ago, the dynamic flipped and Cursor, a leading US AI coding startup, was caught building its newly launched model Composer 2 on top of Kimi K2.5, a Chinese open-source model from Moonshot AI. Cursor initially did not disclose it, and the issue came into light after an X user claimed the model was essentially Kimi K2.5 with reinforcement learning layered on top. The post quickly went viral, amplified by Elon Musk’s blunt reply: “Yeah, it’s Kimi 2.5.”

Moonshot AI’s Head of Pretraining posted a technical breakdown showing Composer 2’s tokenizer was identical to Kimi’s. The now deleted post demanded a response from Cursor on why the company had neither credited the model nor followed its license terms. The terms require any product exceeding $20 million in monthly revenue to display “Kimi K2.5” in its interface. Cursor’s annualized revenue reportedly exceeded $2 billion.

By contrast, DeepSeek and Alibaba’s Qwen do not impose similarly strict requirements on large-scale commercial use. Qwen, which had been releasing open-weight models well before DeepSeek’s V3 launch, has been one of the most widely used base models on Hugging Face

Under pressure, Cursor’s VP of Developer Education, Lee Robinson, acknowledged Kimi K2.5 had been used as a base and admitted the lack of attribution was a mistake, while emphasizing “only ~1/4 of the compute spent on the final model came from the base, the rest is from our training.” He said Kimi was chosen simply because it was “the strongest” among evaluated models.

In a surprising reversal, Moonshot AI responded graciously, reframing the episode as an “authorized commercial partnership.” For the Chinese lab, the episode lands as a near-perfect branding moment.

Both Chinese distillation and Cursor building on Kimi are forms of learning from someone else’s work, which is in the spirit of open source; but the key difference is who gets the upper hand at owning the narrative.

Who Gets to Define “Copying”?

Cursor’s reluctance to disclose its use of Kimi K2.5 reveals competing priorities: investors’ obsession with original ideas and speed to market, and the discomfort of admitting dependency on Chinese technology and the geopolitical risks that come with itwith. Cursor is purportedly targeting a $50 billion valuation in its next round. “Built on Chinese open-source” doesn’t fit neatly into that pitch deck.

But before accepting the idea that building on someone else’s work slashes enterprise value, it’s worth asking what really counts as copying.

When OpenAI trained GPT on the entire internet without compensating the individual authors, was that not also a form of extraction? When every major model ingests the creative output of millions and then monetizes the result, who is truly free riding on whom?

Accusations against Chinese labs rely on defining a model’s outputs as proprietary. Applied consistently, that logic would implicate any large model trained on copyrighted human work without consent. When the things making a model powerful — its architecture, its weights, its training algorithms, the chips running underneath — have been fiercely protected as proprietary intellectual property. But the billions of data points that actually teach the model how to think — every article ever written, every piece of code ever shared, every question a user typed into a chat interface, every creative work fed into a training pipeline — that, apparently, belongs to no one. This kind of framework protects creation only once it becomes corporate infrastructure.

The messages behind China’s open-source

Kimi K2.5 is certainly not the first Chinese model adopted by Silicon Valley. It might just have attracted the most attention. Earlier versions of Cursor had already shown traces of DeepSeek, and just weeks ago, Rakuten’s flagship AI model in Japan was found to be built on DeepSeek V3, despite being presented as domestically developed. DeepSeek, however, did not require the same “credit” in its licensing policy.

Chinese labs open-source their weights for developers to download and self-host. But for smaller companies and individual developers who lack the infrastructure such as computing power to run models locally, the commercial API remains the practical option. Chinese model APIs are priced dramatically below their US closed-source equivalents. Open-source release thus builds familiarity and trust, which ultimately leads to customer acquisition. The results are measurable. On aggregation platforms like OpenRouter, Chinese models have begun to overtake US models in total API call volume. Take Kimi as an example, its overseas revenue has exceeded its domestic revenue.

We may soon see more Chinese models embedding themselves into global products and, in cases like this, becoming the invisible layer inside companies that are still publicly positioned as their rivals.

Unlike goods subject to tariffs, or apps subject to data sovereignty concerns, Chinese models earning dollars through API calls have not yet attracted significant U.S. regulatory attention. That window won’t stay open forever. But for now, it’s open.

The geopolitical reality: the perception of abandonment from China’s perspective is now a deal breaker.

My editor Peter Cowan sharply stated the broader condition:

Shein’s long-running attempt to position itself as a “global company” may have reached its breaking point. As geopolitical tensions rise, firms built on Chinese industrial ecosystems are finding it harder to sustain that strategic ambiguity.

With New York and London off the table, Hong Kong has emerged as Shein’s most viable and likely only IPO option. That path comes with its own logic. If Shein lists in Hong Kong after years of presenting itself as a Singapore-based global company, the listing itself becomes an admission: offshore restructuring has limits as a strategy for escaping political scrutiny…

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Dian Dian was first publicly mentioned in December 2024, when Red Note began a small-scale beta test of an "Ask Dian Dian" feature near the search bar. The company behind Dian Dian, incorporated in August 2024, was effectively an internal incubation from the start and “acquired” by the end of 2025, according to Chinese media. The standalone app, which it launched in November 2025, had accumulated 2.51 million Android downloads as of early December — respectable, but not a breakout consumer AI product by any measure. But the effort to push Dian Dian has ramped up recently in my feed, and that's how I came acros…

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In five livestreamed minutes, he announced a RMB 10 billion investment to build Shein's smart supply-chain system in the province. He closed with a line that, read against the last two years of Shein's global communications strategy, landed like a confession:

“广东是希音的根，也是我们奋斗的起点“

““Guangdong is Shein’s root and where we began.”

It was a remarkable thing to say because Shein has spent years trying very hard to make the world forget it.

The China-Shedding Years

For anyone who has tracked Shein’s trajectory, the Guangdong speech is the end of a story that was always going to end this way.

In 2022, Shein relocated its headquarters to Singapore and hired its Executive Chairman Donald Tang. Shein cultivated a global brand identity built around fashion, youth culture, and…

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Manus is the latest example, and the cleanest break yet. As I explained in this post, most of the conversation around China-shedding focuses on the companies themselves. What structure did they use? Where did they relocate? How did they cut ties? But what Manus did right was understand the power of influence.

What was the communication strategy that made it credible? Because even with the perfect legal structure, if the narrative doesn’t hold across different stakeholder groups, the structure doesn’t matter.

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So I wrote a field guide on how to build global trust. Effective global communication is built on reputation, market trust, and geopolitical context. For this one, I’m focusing on Singapore as the destination for companies with Chinese roots.

This guide is written for investors, financial and operating partners, and legal, compliance, and advisory firms working with companies with China affiliations. The deck is not a thought piece and focuses on how those relationships are communicated, including how due diligence is articulated without sounding defensive and how exposure is credibly explained.

A China affiliation is a variable most stakeholders evaluate upfront. It is not necessarily a dealbreaker, but something that needs to be understood and managed.

You can download the full Field Guide by becoming a supporter of Calling the Shots.

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CNBC reported that the daily average of U.S. users deleting the TikTok app has increased nearly 150% over the past five days compared with the previous three months.

Last week, before the TikTok U.S. joint venture announcement, I made a TikTok about the one-year anniversary of the Red Note refugee moment, and the close to 200 comments became a live focus group of TikTok users who are also on Red Note.

My favorite comment came from someone who said she moved to China because of Red Note.

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Amy and I talked a lot about Red Note feminism, which can be understood as a collective search for meaning in a reality where women express independence by rejecting traditional gender roles and values. One reason I think Red Note is so sticky is that it creates subcultures and a safe space where expression feels natural and authentic. At the same time, in the gaps once filled by real humans, technology increasingly steps in to provide emotional connections.

After a few hours with …

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Nikkei rounded up a set of surprisingly useful AI innovations at CES 2026; Wired reported that VR glasses are suddenly everywhere. Robot vacuum brand Dreame is even rolling EVs onto the floor—while both the EV company and Dreame try very hard not to acknowledge the connection.

Meanwhile, Kuaishou, China’s TikTok Douyin competitor, is pushing into AI video v…

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By China shedding, I mean the deliberate effort to reduce or remove perceived China ties in order to lower political, regulatory, and reputational risk in global markets. Meta’s decision to buy Manus for $2.5 billion is a definitive vote that China shedding is an exit strategy that can clear at scale, at least on the U.S. side of the U.S.–China AI competition.

To understand why, it helps to define “reverse CFIUS” in plain terms. If CFIUS is the U.S. process that worries about foreign buyers taking control of sensitive American companies, reverse CFIUS flips the direction of concern.

Instead of asking, “Is China buying U.S. tech capabilities?” it asks, “Are we helping China build?” That is why a U.S. investment into a China-linked AI startup triggered scrutiny in the first place. Washington was tryi…

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According to my ChatGPT Wrapped, this year, “I built meaning through strategy, owned the narrative, and turned press releases into philosophy.”

But if I’m being honest, the most meaningful moments of my year were the quiet and uneventful ones: reading through A–Z dog names in the index section with my four-year-old; channeling my inner Mel Robbins and giving my tween the pep talk before his archery competition, debating the societal ramifications of AI with my engineer-turned lawyer husband. Long walks in the park. Eating good butter.

1.FAV pasttime 2. Direct 3. Archery 4. I feel seen by my 4 yr old 5. aforementioned good butter 6. hosting fds 7. I know so many dog breeds now 8. don’t be 心不在焉 9. Important words of 2025 according to my Gen Alpha (sans 67, because parents ruined it)

The moments I return to most are the ones I spent alone with myself—journaling, reading books that strengthen my mind with no obvious payoff for work, no immediate utility…

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Politics aside, Red Note has become a governance headache in Taiwan precisely because it functions as a networked public where meaning is produced bottom-up. For Taiwanese authorities, that matters because once content circulates through peer-to-peer ties and platform-native behaviors—reposting, stitching, parody—it becomes harder to attribute intent, enforce boundaries, or contain spillovers.

This is even more true when the platform sits outside local jurisdiction and compliance mechanisms. As content …

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In the recent WSJ Exchange front-page feature, “Arc’teryx Won Over China With a $1,000 Jacket. Now It’s Popping Up Everywhere,” the brand essentially gets a beautifully packaged replay of its own talking points:

• China is the growth engine.

• Arc’teryx can charge 20% more in China than in the U.S., even in a deflationary economy.

• The Cai Guo-Qiang Tibetan Plateau outrage “hasn’t stopped its growth in China,” and “a widespread boycott didn’t materialize.”

• Amer Sports’ stock is up 28% this year.

  

This is exactly the investor thesis from Amer, Arc’Teryx’s parent company: Greater China as the growth engine, Arc’Teryx as the hero asset, differentiated from luxury names like LVMH and Kering that are supposedly struggling to unlock Chinese demand. The WSJ piece doesn’t interrogate that story; it reaffirms it, at length, with some colorful anecdotes layered on top.

If you don’t follow the brand or the crisis closely, you walk away thinking: Arc’teryx is one of t…

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I first came across GIADA’s mini art-history series while scrolling on Red Note. I lived in Florence for a year, so Renaissance art has a permanent claim on my heart. When I mentioned this campaign to — my partner in tracking Red Note signals, and an art history major (she’s endlessly cool) — Peiyue immediately saw it as a fascinating example too.

Below is a deep dive into how GIADA — a Chinese-owned, Italian-positioned brand — courts the minds and hearts of Chinese consumers, and the tensions that come with it. The brand is also waging a second, almost contradictory fight: staying aspirational for China…

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Our inaugural piece focuses on mental health and the wave of people informally “diagnosing” themselves with ADHD on Red Note. It’s not that different from the old habit of cross-checking every rash on WebMD—and now asking ChatGPT about every symptom—but it points to something larger. As the outside world feels stagnant, this becomes an extension of the logic of 躺平 (“lying flat”) by turning inward: if you can’t move the system, you start scanning and reinterpreting yourself, trying to make peace with what you can’t change.

For an older generation in China, anxiety didn’t really have a psychological vocabu…

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The White House would like the TikTok chapter to read as closure. It isn’t. The executive order did something narrower: it set up a U.S. vehicle fronted by Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi’s MGX at roughly half ownership, pushed ByteDance below twenty percent, and kept the app running by licensing a copy of the recommendation engine to be retrained and audited in the United States. Enforcement is paused for 120 days to December 16, even as the Supreme Court has upheld the 2024 sale-or-ban law. This is not a clean break; it is a political workaround. The vector of influence is just rearranged, not removed.

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That conditionality is the headline. On the very day the EO landed, I went on the BBC to make the point that TikTok’s five-year saga shows that in the U.S. market, success can be achieved and then renegotiated.

The licensing workaround ultimately hinges on China…

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