3. Baidu, China’s leading search engine and AI company, plans to release its own version of ChatGPT in March. (Bloomberg $)
4. The past three months should have been a very busy time for Foxconn’s iPhone assembly plant in China. Instead, it has been hampered by the mass infections of COVID-19 and heavy labor protests. (rest of the world)
5. A new decentralized social media platform called Damus was popular for five minutes (actually two days) before Apple pulled it from the Chinese App Store for violating local cybersecurity laws. (South China Morning Post $)
6. Taiwan It has decided to shut down all nuclear power plants by 2025. But the renewable-energy industry is not ready to fill the gap, and new fossil-fuel plants are now being built to make the energy supply more reliable. (HuffPost)
7. The United States Department of Justice suspects that executives of San Diego-based self-driving company TuSimple improperly transferred technology to China, according to anonymous sources. (Wall Street Journal $)
Lost in translation
According to Chinese publication Shenran Kaijing, renting smartphones is becoming a more popular option than buying in China. In the year With 19 billion RMB ($2.79 billion) in smartphone rental spending by 2021, it’s a niche but growing market in the country. Many people choose to rent a new model to brag about, or as a temporary solution when, for example, their phone breaks and the new iPhone isn’t out for a few months.
But that doesn’t exactly save people cash. While it only costs a buck or two a day to rent a phone, the fees add up over time, and many platforms require a lease to last at least six months. After all, it may not be as cost-effective as buying a phone outright.
The high cost and lack of control have made some individuals use the system. Some people use it as a cash loan: they rent a high-end phone, sell it immediately for cash, and pay off the rent and purchase slowly. There are also cases of scams where people use someone else’s ID to rent a phone and the device disappears when they get it.
One more thing
I was born in Wuhan and grew up eating freshwater fish like Prussian carp. They taste divine, but the popular species often have smaller bones than saltwater fish, which makes the eating experience tiring and frustrating. Last week, a team of Chinese hydrobiologists in Wuhan (duh) announced that they had used CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology to create a Prussian carp mutant devoid of small bones. No lie, this is it is true. Creativity for me.
