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Young Chinese office workers are trading the milk-tea run for 1.5-to-2-litre bottles of plain water, armed with a slogan that turns hydration into a status system. Supermarkets have re-shelved their aisles around the habit — even as the bottled-water business overall shrinks.
Hongguo, the free short-drama platform that out-drew China's four big streamers combined, will retire the coin rewards that kept viewers grinding for credits — a rare case of a platform deliberately switching off its own growth engine.
In a single week the Chinese AI lab open-sourced a search engine, an inference framework and the tools that run its models on Huawei chips — and published how much money each GPU-hour earns it. The giveaway is also a bet on surviving Washington's next move.
The week's biggest stories from Chinese social media.
Terence Tao and Deng Yu — Fields Medalists a generation apart — devoted a podcast episode to the question shaking their field after an AI company published 700 machine-generated proofs: mathematics is entering an age of proof abundance, and the bottleneck is no longer proving but understanding.
The 90th anniversary of the Long March has filled China's screens and trend lists: a CCTV documentary series airing nightly, state essays topping both Weibo and Baidu, a new film about Edgar Snow, and a metaphor that still frames how the country asks to be understood.
New data show petrol cars have fallen below a third of China's new-car sales for the first time, and the ten-year cost arithmetic has tipped decisively toward electric. On the same evening, Li Auto promised to replace any car destroyed by a battery fire — reassurance is now the product.
20 Oct 2026
20 Oct 2026
20 Oct 2026
20 Oct 2026
20 Oct 2026