It’s been more than three years, and Shein has shaved off ¾ of its peak valuation of close to $100B in 2022. Shein filed confidentially in New York in November 2023. It got FCA approval in London in April 2025 and walked away a month later without Beijing’s sign-off. It then filed in Hong Kong in July 2025 and waited until July 10 of this year for China’s securities regulator to clear it. To list at home, it needed permission from home.

So the significant thing about September 1 is that it happened at all. Shein is finally out of geopolitical limbo, but it is listed at a heavy geopolitical discount.

The reality is that it couldn't list at the optimal time frame, and an investor base more wary of potential risk and momentum for future growth impacted by tariffs is the geopolitical discount. And it is not going away because a bell rang.

But to be fair, 2022 is a bad yardstick to evaluate Shein in 2026. That number came from a zero-interest-rate environment, an available de minimis exemption, tariff conditions Shein could route around, and a market that had not yet decided online retailers were a political question. None of those conditions exist now. Shein is not a company that lost three-quarters of its value. It is a company priced by a different world. (If I were advising Shein, this is the point I’d go all in and repeat in every single briefing and interview).

It is also competing for attention in a market that has something shinier. Greater China listings have raised over $54 billion this year, up from $46 billion all of last year, and the AI cycle is absorbing the risk appetite that would otherwise have found its way to a fashion retailer. Set Shein next to a chip company and what investors see is a business with a luxury gross margin, 67.9 percent, and a supermarket net margin, 4.9 percent.

Fulfillment and marketing costs are also rising for Shein. The US de minimis exemption ended in May 2025, and duties now run from 10 to 87.5 percent. The EU added a parcel levy of about three euros in July, and Shein says the hit could match or exceed the American one. Every order is now a parcel that costs money to move, and Temu and Amazon are bidding for the same shopper.

Which is why Shein is trying to make its money earlier in the value chain. It is turning its supply chain into infrastructure other brands can rent, and it is buying brands that already have goodwill, like Everlane, an environmentally concious millennial brand. But becoming part of the supply chain is a harder businesses with thinner margins than selling a dress and building a brand. But there's logic underneath the pivot: 7,500-plus contracted manufacturers, about 4,700 new styles a day, and inventory that turns in 36 days against Zara’s 88 and H&M’s 138. That network only works if it stays busy. Keeping suppliers fed is what keeps them willing to run small batches on Shein’s terms. The day those factories decide Shein is no longer the bread and butter, they jump to Temu or whoever is filling their lines next, and Shein’s edge goes with them.

There is a second reason the timing, and whether to abort the IPO at all, was not really Shein’s to choose. If the company had not sold shares by December 31, it owed nearly $4.4 billion in cash to holders of its convertible redeemable preferred shares. Going public triggered a different bill: roughly $3.5 billion to early investors, including $1.3 billion in guaranteed returns at 8 to 12 percent and up to $2.2 billion in compensation for the valuation drop. The IPO raised $1.77 billion. For most companies, a listing is the culmination of years of growth, a public validation of the business and its ambitions. For Shein, it was also a payment deadline.

The prospectus also lacks a clear vision for the future. Shein says 40 percent of the proceeds will go toward technology: more cloud and server capacity, AI-assisted demand forecasting, warehouse automation, digital inventory management and as many as 2,000 new technology hires. Another 40 percent will fund global expansion through performance advertising, brand campaigns and larger local marketing teams in the United States, Europe and other growth markets.

Its broader growth plan follows the same practical logic: attract more customers, add new product categories, bring more third-party merchants onto the marketplace and offer Shein’s supply-chain, manufacturing, fulfillment and marketing infrastructure to outside designers and brands.

These are credible ways to spend capital. They could make Shein’s existing system faster, widen its customer base and allow acquired or partner brands to grow through the company’s vast manufacturing and distribution network. They still leave the central question unanswered: what kind of company does Shein intend to become? Bloomberg reports that founder Sky Xu told investors the Shein brand could no longer sustain its previous pace of growth, making acquisitions and brand partnerships the next engine.

The purchase of Everlane offers the clearest path forward: Shein can buy an established label, plug it into its supply chain and improve its reach and margins. Buying growth is a strategy. Buying goodwill instead of earning the brand trust may also soften Shein’s reputation. But investors with a longer time horizon may question whether there is a next act for a company whose original growth machine has reached its limit.

In February, I wrote that Sky Xu’s appearance at a Guangdong provincial conference was the end of Shein’s China-shedding.

The title next to his name at the Guangdong Provincial Party Committee conference read: Founder of Guangzhou Shein International Import and Export Co., Ltd. Guangzhou. He told the room that “Guangdong is Shein’s root and where we began,” and pledged 10 billion RMB to build a smart supply chain in the province. After four years as a Singapore company and distancing itself from its China roots, it was a homecoming at last, and more importantly, an expression of loyalty that paved the way to the Hong Kong IPO.

Six months later, Xu stood on a stage at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange with a flower pinned to a white Shein T-shirt, in front of a screen that read SHEIN Global Holdings. Shein has changed what it says it is at every stage that required it, and those changes have worked well enough to get the company here.

The Goldilocks story did not end when she found the bowl that is just right. It ended when the bears came home. Shein found its exchange on the third try, at a quarter of its peak valuation and just before the bill came due. Now the bears are home.

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

The dark horse of the summer blockbuster season is Niu Lai, a film made on a budget of a few thousand dollars by a two-person team, which got onto China’s big screen with almost no market interest until it became a cult favorite for how bad it is.

My theory

Niu Lai‘s success is the anti-AI-slop version of the “little guy who made it” overnight success story. It’s bad and juvenile but it is “manual crafted” (手搓). It’s a story of the little guy making it — a mother-and-son team driven by a deep conviction to bring a story they cared about to the big screen. Or at least that is the story we want to believe. Niu Lai’s film aesthetic is anachronistic, with a hint of nostalgia, and the nostalgia economy is having its moment.

I wrote about AI and the film industry for Fast Company China this summer. What generative AI actually disrupts is the organizational logic the film industry has run on for as long as Hollywood existed: who is qualified to make a film, the industry’s power dynamics, and what confers legitimacy and the right to call the shots. But the shock of a visual medium being overturned by technology was predicted a century ago.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin wrote “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” an essay that has had a long reach in modern media theory. He described aura — the irreplaceable tie between a work and its specific time, space, and context. Benjamin saw that reproduction technology would change art. He also saw that media technology would reshape the way people perceive the world.

Benjamin was prescient in predicting how media technology changes content and attention structures. A painting asks for contemplation: a viewer stands in front of a still work, and the attention goes to a static form of beauty. Film demands a different relationship with the viewer because the medium requires a different kind of attention. Cuts, close-ups, camera movement, and editing choices chop up reality. The audience conjures meaning from a montage, intimacy from the close-up, emotion from the rhythm. Film trains the viewer’s eye and taste toward new ways of looking, and art is received while we are distracted by the art itself. That is what Benjamin called reception in a state of distraction.

When AI promises to drive the marginal cost of generating an image to near zero, the industry will (eventually) get used to AI living permanently on set. What compute can’t replace is the creator’s read on human experience, the judgment of emotional rhythm, and the ability to give the moving image meaning beyond the effort it took to make it.

Benjamin defined aura as what gives art its meaning, and argued that mechanical reproduction destroys it. In the case of Niu Lai, reproduction and recreation deepen meaning.

Taboo behaviors and theater etiquette were thrown out the window, and screen recordings of Niu Lai became a force for distribution. The film’s perceived flaws give moviegoers tacit permission to break the rules. It’s not a deliberate attempt to disrespect the creator’s intent — the thing etiquette exists to protect: the integrity of the storyline, the element of surprise. Recording it is a form of paying homage to the meme and to be part of the recreation. All of this creative labor sparks curiosity. Thousands of social media posts are the proof points, and collectively they deepen the meaning beyond the original expression of Niu Lai.

Reproduction doesn’t kill the aura anymore. Here is what the aura of Niu Lai means in 2026: in a society going through seismic change and uncertainty, creating with Neolithic methods—and subcultures of Niu Lai moviegoers dissecting the film’s frames, meaning, and aesthetics—is the new aura.

How I ended up in the theater watching Niu Lai with two teenagers

SCMP reached out before I saw the film. From just reading about Niu Lai and the enormous ripple effect of how much people were talking about it on Red Note and in mainstream media, I knew I wanted to see it. In Shanghai, I bought tickets on the day of, and they were double the price I paid for IMAX Odyssey the weekend before.

I asked two Gen Zs if they were down to see the film, and to my surprise, they were super excited and already knew the online chatter about the film.

Gen Z #1, Ayden: lives in New York and well-versed in meme culture; spent the summer in China hanging out with local kids at a Chinese archery school.

Gen Z #2, George: almost 16, lives in Shanghai, learned about the film from his classmates at a summer cram school, and had watched five minutes of the movie on YouTube.

I interviewed them over hotpot after the movie and recorded their responses.

I found their answers to be exactly why Niu Lai struck a chord in China. Here’s the recap from Ayden and George with minimal polishing for clarity (and connecting the sentences because there were many pauses for chewing), followed by my own observations.

Over hotpot

Why is everyone in China suddenly watching this? It got famous for being bad. What are people actually watching?

Ayden: The movie is supposed to be aimed at kids, but now kids don’t really like watching things with morals. Instead of watching slow-paced movies, they all watch the creepy AI videos on Douyin because they need the dopamine to stimulate themselves. So I think it’s probably aimed at a more mature audience who could, instead of looking at it as a story of morality and growth, just look at it as some funny meme.

George: This is the first time such an absurd (抽象) thing has appeared in a movie that made it into theaters. The picture quality is very poor — is this really a movie made in 2026? Then there are only two directors, and the production team has only two people. And all the stuff going around online. I think everyone may have a sense of novelty about watching a movie like this.

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Ayden: The credit list, unlike The Odyssey and other movies, is so short. It’s like two people. (laughs in unison)

How did you first hear about it?

George: My classmates told me. They saw it scrolling on WeChat. They told me how bad it was, and that when Niu Lai came out, the box office was tiny. And then it was, like, people wanted to go see it. Once that news broke, the next day the box office started going up. Everyone just wanted to see how bad it actually is.

Do you think we’re in a new zeitgeist where people want to root for the little guy?

Ayden: I noticed that— (chewing pause; the hotpot is ready) People tend to like— (never finishes the thought, too busy eating)

George: It just makes you laugh. I think this movie is very pure (纯粹).

Ayden: I don’t think it was for that purpose.

George: I know, but it’s viral because it is.

Ivy: It doesn’t try to be pure. Because the moment you try to be pure, the vibe is just wrong.

George + Ayden: *nod in agreement*

Ivy: What’s the translation of 纯粹? I think the most direct translation is probably unadulterated. Something that has not been tainted and is natural.

George: It’s also just that there’s a real gap between this and what a 2026 film is supposed to look like.

Ayden: It also feels low-effort. The setting keeps changing, and the size of the bird went from as big as the mommy cow’s head to the size of her fingernail.

Ivy: But did you like that? Because AI makes everything so perfect, so the imperfection becomes very authentic? (is this a leading question :D oh well.)

Ayden: Yeah. It’s funnier now that it’s 2026. We are used to everything being well done and perfect, everything perfectly shot with great graphics. When something bad like this comes along, it’s funny because it’s like an outlier.

Ivy: How do we feel about outliers?

Ayden: I feel like this movie wasn’t meant to be an outlier, just a mother and son with a small budget trying to make a movie to teach kids a lesson. But this movie would have attracted more kids a decade ago, because at that time kids watched more movies with a constant pace instead of swiping short videos. (Ivy: it’s hilarious this is coming from a 13 year old)

What stood out to you in the plot? What do you think the plot is about? (spoilers ahead)

George: The jumping off the cliff. In the beginning, [Niu Lai] was scared to even jump over the small river. But to protect the herd, he jumped. It’s a form of growth.

Ayden: But did he really, because it was all just a dream?

Ivy: What’s Baola’s role — the leopard cub? Is he real?

Ayden: We don’t know.

George: Baola is loyalty.

Ayden: All the characters represent something, and the journey to grow up. When the dogs come, Baola shows up and [it shows] friends are important and we defend each other. Can I have the meatballs?

Ivy: I like how Ayden called the dogs Temu Cerberus when we were watching. Why were there three dogs?

George: They represent three different personalities.

Ayden: I’m not sure.

Ivy: What about the “monster” at the end that looks like something out of Minecraft?

Ayden: Maybe the message is that technology destroys nature… It’s a car running over the cows.

George: But also that Niu Lai overcame his fear.

Ivy: What was his fear in the first place though?

Ayden: Making jumps.

Ivy: What does making jumps symbolize? (I was either getting into my Freudian mode or really getting into my inner middle school teacher persona)

Ayden: He’s fearful and stays by his mom’s side, but he also can’t help wandering off.

Why did you want to see it?

Ivy: I think the recreations give the movie a deeper meaning.

George: Yeah, but no one went to the movie to see a good movie. If they want to see a good film, they can see Spider-Man. It’s driven by curiosity (猎奇), more than anything.

Ayden: Because it seems unique. Spider-Man is well done, I saw it. With Niu Lai you just want something different, to see something bad.

Ivy: What does bad mean to you in 2026?

Ayden: Graphics are bad.

Ivy: Would you recommend this to your friends?

George: Yes, of course I would recommend this movie to my friends, since in today’s fast-paced, high-pressure society, people really need movies like this to receive “pure” happiness. One of my friends told me that Niu Lai was great. He went into the theater with his father, and his father couldn’t stop laughing at the movie, even though normally his father is a very strict and boring person. Watching movies like The Odyssey makes you think about what the story is conveying, which deviates from what movies were meant to be. From my perspective, movies are created to entertain people, and Niu Lai — even if it was maybe never meant to make people laugh — is a movie that entertains people.

(Can I call it that the kids are alright?)

My observations

We got to the theater close to 25 minutes after the movie began. We watched the screen-recorded movie on YouTube in the back of our Didi.

We settled into a theater that was about half full on a Wednesday. About half an hour in, a child in a family a few rows to the right of us yelled out that the film is so bad, in a Henan accent, followed by one of her parents’ loud ringtones and picking up to have a conversation about the movie.

The two people sitting behind me, who had been chitchatting and trading punchlines at audible volume, immediately jumped to judgment — was it the Henan accent, I thought to myself, that gave them a sense of superiority? It was clear that the folks behind me had done their research and knew about the hype, which is why we were all there. The Henan family of three left shortly after, probably unwilling to endure a slow-paced, dopamine-lacking film that only made sense if judged by avant-garde cinematic standards.

The closest thing I can compare the sound effects of Niu Lai to is a rough brush scraped against a concrete floor, standing in for hooves clopping.

I can’t help comparing it to The Odyssey’s music score, which to me never stops being climactic, directing the viewers to feel exactly how we should feel — surging and anxious. Niu Lai barely has a music score; the songs were written by the mother, an amateur composer who learned to do it for the movie, and one I swear was the intro to Vivaldi’s La Primavera for at least two seconds. The pauses that come from the lack of sound direction are at times uncanny; I couldn’t tell whether the emptiness was there to linger unintentionally or to give the viewer a respite to think. The empty shots of the landscape, a moment to just sit with the void. Voices that take their time, a tad too slow to match the imagery on the screen. The tempo is insanely slow.

The two teenagers who are natives in the attention economy sat through all of it and preferred it to Christopher Nolan’s take on a hero’s journey.

When we saw Odyssey the weekend before, coming out of the theater after three hours absorbing Nolan’s ideologies, Gen Z Ayden’s biggest complaint was that the film cut Nobody out of the Cyclops episode — in the original, Odysseus told the Cyclops his name is Nobody, so when the blinded giant howled for help, the other Cyclopes hear that nobody is hurting him and went back to sleep. It is the oldest trick in the hero’s journey.

Niu Lai is a nobody: no budget, no poster, no crew, no grand vision to redefine film as a genre, and none of the hubris to rewrite Greek history to reinforce an ideology. It got out of the cave, and that makes it a hero. One of the best lines in the movie is what Niu Lai’s mother tells him when he is too scared to jump: today is the future of yesterday. We don’t know what tomorrow holds, but maybe today we just want a simple laugh and a reason to stop scrolling and go to the theater to root to be part of the journey.

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

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 pa…

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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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