China

Intelligence for Better Decision Making

Shanghai Robotics Summit Showcases Breakthroughs in Humanoid Automation and Industry Investment
Dec. 11, 2025 | Technology & Innovation

The 2025 Global Developers Pioneers Summit and International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition will gather industry leaders in Shanghai from December 12 to 14 to showcase and evaluate cutting-edge robotics in simulated real-world scenarios.

**The summit features six major tracks and 17 distinct events centered on embodied intelligence, with challenges spanning industrial production and life skills.**
Industrial tasks include moving goods and tightening screws, while life skill scenarios require robots to arrange flowers, fold clothes, and make coffee. These activities unfold in homes, hospitals, and disaster-relief environments, with judges assessing both technical performance and humanistic care.

**Aoyi Technology will supply 30 high-performance dexterous robot hands—critical for humanoid robots operating in complex urban and industrial settings.**
Aoyi’s technical team will provide on-site support as the hands undergo intensive testing, feeding operational lessons directly into future product iterations.

**Humanoid Robot (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. will enter its full-size general-purpose humanoid robot, Qinglong, in the home service track.**
Built on open-source hardware and software platforms, Qinglong will tackle tasks such as folding clothes and tidying tableware to reveal challenges in model generalization and robustness across varied domestic environments.

Shanghai Zhuoyide Robot Co., Ltd. will challenge its precision motion-control systems in the flower-arranging event, using performance data from the competition to advance research and development in high-precision robotic manipulation.

**In the industrial sector, Shanghai Kepler Robot Co., Ltd. will deploy its “blue-collar humanoid robot” team to demonstrate autonomous, flexible logistics handling.**
Key capabilities include dynamic environment adaptation, heavy-load management, dual-arm coordination, and extended operation hours supported by proprietary components and algorithms. Kepler views the competition as a stress test for its technology’s commercial viability.

**Qinglang Intelligent will present its XMAN-R1 service robot, backed by extensive deployment experience.**
In 2024, Qinglang holds a 22.7% share of the global commercial service-robot market, with over 100,000 units operating in more than 600 cities. The firm will use the competition to validate its robots’ reliability and practicality in complex, realistic scenarios.

**Rongtai Electric Material announced a USD 77 million investment to build a factory in Thailand producing insulation components for new energy vehicles and robotic parts by end of 2026.**
The facility will manufacture 14,000 tons of mica paper, 4,500 tons of mica products, and seven million sets of robotic components annually. After the announcement, Rongtai’s shares rose over 7% in early trading before closing up 1.1%, outperforming the Shanghai Composite Index. Rongtai already supplies mica insulation to Tesla, Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz, and in June acquired a 51% stake in Shanghai-based Dizi Precision Machinery—specialists in planetary roller screw products used in humanoid robots—positioning itself to enter the precision transmission component market for robotics.
China’s Chip Export Surge Drives Foreign Trade Rebound amid US Tariffs
Dec. 11, 2025 | Technology & Innovation

China’s chip industry is fueling export growth as broader foreign trade rebounds amid tensions with the United States.

**In November 2025, China recorded a 5.9 percent year-on-year increase in exports to USD 330.3 billion, reversing October’s 1.1 percent decline.**
Strong shipments of integrated circuits and automobiles, alongside a lower comparative base from the previous year, drove this export rebound. Imports rose 1.9 percent to USD 218.7 billion, bringing total foreign trade to USD 549 billion, a 4.3 percent year-on-year gain.

**Integrated circuits led sectoral growth with a 34 percent jump in export value, while car exports surged 53 percent compared with November 2024.**
Analysts attribute these gains to China’s ongoing manufacturing transformation and a global upswing in investment linked to artificial intelligence technologies.

**Exports to the United States plunged 28.6 percent to USD 33.8 billion, widening from October’s 25.2 percent drop, as US tariffs averaging 31 percent continued to curb shipments.**
By contrast, China expanded exports to other major markets: the European Union bought 14.8 percent more, Japan 4.3 percent more, and South Korea 1.9 percent more.

**Exports to ASEAN countries rose 8.2 percent to USD 58.1 billion, though growth slowed from October’s 11 percent increase.**
Observers link this deceleration to reduced re-exports following US tariff hikes on certain ASEAN member exports.

**In the first eleven months of 2025, China’s total foreign trade grew 2.9 percent to USD 5.7 trillion.**
Over the same period, exports climbed 5.4 percent to USD 3.4 trillion, while imports edged down 0.6 percent to USD 2.3 trillion.

Monitored Intelligence for China - Dec. 12, 2025


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Erudite Risk takes an all risks approach to intelligence reporting. We categorize key intelligence into one of 40 different risk intelligence categories.

The goal is to provide intelligence that allows decision makers to avoid being blindsided by what they may have missed, while informing them to make better decisions as well.

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We categorize key intelligence into one of 30 different operations intelligence categories.

Different roles and functions within the organization can monitor different key issue areas. HR may monitor employment, wages, regulations, labor and management relations, etc., while P&L leaders may monitor overall developing trends.

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CCUS seen as smoother path to CO2 goals

China Daily | English | News | Dec. 12, 2025 | Climate Change

China is advancing its carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS) technology to reconcile sustained economic growth with its goal of carbon neutrality by 2060. Facing an energy system heavily reliant on coal and heavy industry, the government and state-owned energy companies are shifting from pilot projects to large-scale industrial CCUS clusters. Beijing has incorporated CCUS into its national 14th Five-Year Plan (2021-25) and updated its technology roadmap, stressing CCUS as essential for the low-carbon use of fossil fuels and overall carbon neutrality efforts.

The National Energy Administration (NEA) has promoted CCUS to transition from experimental stages to industrial demonstration and scaled production through enhanced policy support and technological innovation. The oil and gas sector is operating over 90 CCUS projects, including more than 10 enhanced oil recovery (EOR) initiatives, with annual CO2 injection reaching 4 million tons. As of the end of 2024, China had 126 planned or operational CCUS projects, capable of capturing 6 million tons of CO2 annually, led by energy conglomerates.

Sinopec operates the first million-ton scale CCUS project at its Qilu petrochemical plant, capturing 1 million tons of CO2 per year and injecting it for EOR at the Shengli oilfield. This project provides key engineering experience to support nationwide CCUS expansion. Sinopec views CCUS as critical to upgrading traditional industries and fostering new productive forces, and it aims to collaborate internationally on technology breakthroughs and cluster development. Meanwhile, China National Petroleum Corporation is developing major CCUS hubs in Heilongjiang, Gansu, and Tianjin, integrating emissions from nearby industrial sources.

Globally, CCUS is gaining momentum as an important tool in the energy transition. Although much captured CO2 is currently used for EOR, Chinese state firms are increasingly exploring geological storage in deep saline aquifers, especially near coastal regions, to secure long-term carbon sequestration.

开源模式重构产业竞争格局

Open Source Model Reshaping Industry Competition Landscape

Guangming Daily | Local Language | News | Dec. 12, 2025 | UndeterminedTech Development/Adoption

As of the end of 2024, China's active open source projects have surpassed 3 million with 2.27 million active developers, creating a large and diverse talent pool. The openEuler community, nurtured by the OpenAtom Open Source Foundation, boasts over 2,100 member organizations, 23,000 global contributors, and over 5.5 million users. By the end of 2025, openEuler OS installations are expected to exceed 16 million, making it a leading digital intelligence platform across key Chinese industries such as telecommunications, government, finance, and energy.

Open source technology is recognized as a key driver of technological innovation and high-quality development, particularly in the AI era with large models. China leads in open source large AI models, including Qwen and DeepSeek, while open hardware architectures like RISC-V are rapidly advancing and expected to enable next-generation AI computing power, fueling China’s independent innovation beyond Moore's Law.

Inspur General Software highlights the maturity of the open source ecosystem, with projects like HarmonyOS and openEuler achieving significant scale and wide industry adoption in areas such as finance and aerospace. The recent open sourcing of 360 Group’s FG-CLIP2 model, which outperformed global tech giants in public AI benchmarks, exemplifies China’s competitive progress in AI foundational models.

The UBML open source project under Inspur supports low-code development by lowering barriers for SMEs to create customized applications, promoting efficient innovation circulation across the industry. Beijing Yizhuang has established a national-level open source ecosystem with strong government support through policies and initiatives like the AI open source root community “Moli Ark,” which hosts thousands of models and datasets to enhance innovation impact globally.

The OpenAtom Foundation advances open source through project incubation, talent development, cultural promotion, and community standardization. Experts project open source will continue to fuel China’s collaborative innovation in AI, chip design, and industrial ecosystems, contributing to global digital transformation. The future evolution of open source communities will hinge on integrating large model capabilities to create intelligent development ecosystems emphasizing collaboration, value feedback, and monetization through commercial applications.

老油田书写能源新答卷

Old Oil Fields Write a New Chapter in Energy

Guangming Daily | Local Language | News | Dec. 12, 2025 | UndeterminedEnergy Prices

On December 3, 2025, the Gulong continental shale oil demonstration area in Daqing surpassed an annual production of one million tons, marking a significant milestone in the large-scale, efficient exploitation of shale oil. The development started in 2021 with a production of 15,000 tons, steadily increasing each year through technical breakthroughs and independent innovation, positioning Gulong shale oil as a strategic resource to enhance China's national energy security.

Daqing Oilfield overcame major challenges unique to Gulong shale oil, such as high clay content and complex geological characteristics that made conventional fracturing methods ineffective. Initial attempts to apply North American fracturing technology failed, leading the team to develop their own exclusive fracturing process tailored to local conditions. This indigenous process, which includes using higher-quality desert quartz sand, has enabled stable production and improved efficiency while controlling costs.

The development of Gulong shale oil embodies the enduring "Daqing spirit" of perseverance and innovation, with drilling teams setting regional records despite difficult strata. Single wells have achieved notable stable outputs, and year-one production declines have been more favorable than those in North America. The project plans to expand beyond the current Q9 oil layer to deeper reserves with three-dimensional multi-layer fracturing, addressing complex engineering challenges for coordinated fracture network development.

Looking forward, Daqing Oilfield aims to increase annual shale oil production to 3 million tons by the end of the 15th Five-Year Plan and 5 million tons by the end of the 16th Five-Year Plan. Continued technological breakthroughs and resource development will support the goal of building a century-old oilfield and contributing to China's energy security. The company emphasizes unwavering dedication to overcoming technical bottlenecks and maximizing resource potential as part of its national mission.

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