Tag: china

Something Sparked a Technological Revolution in China 146,000 Years Ago—Archaeologists Have Now Linked It to a Mysterious Extinct Human Species

During the harsh conditions that prevailed in ice age China 146,000 years ago, a remarkable survival strategy was being developed by early humans—something that led to one of the region’s earliest technological revolutions.

In a series of recent discoveries at the Lingjing site in Northern China, archaeologists have unearthed evidence of sophisticated stone tools associated with Homo juluensis, an extinct human relative that inhabited parts of East Asia long ago, and which may even have interacted with ancestors of modern humans.

The findings, reported in the Journal of Human Evolution, have now revealed that stone crafting at the site began nearly 20,000 years earlier than previous estimates, placing these ancient toolmakers amid some of the harshest glacial period conditions, rather than the later warmer climate associated with past evaluations of the site.

The findings add to recent discoveries that have revealed surprising features about ancient archaic humans that thrived during this period, which include not only their unexpected size, but also their understanding of complex stone crafting techniques.

Creativity Driven by Cold

“People often imagine creativity as something that flourishes in good times,” said lead author Yuchao Zhao, the assistant curator of East Asian archaeology at Chicago’s Field Museum, in a statement. “Finding out that these stone tools were made during a harsh ice age tells a different story.

“Hard times can force us to adapt,” Zhao adds.

For more than a decade, archaeologists have undertaken excavations at Lingjing, where everything from animal remains to ancient tools has been uncovered.

Something else that the ancient human presence at this site has revealed is a surprisingly sophisticated ice age lithic industry, where the ancient humans who once thrived here employed a technologically complex manufacturing process for their time.

Evidence of this comes in the form of disc-shaped stone cores, which are deceptively simple in appearance. To craft them, their ancient makers had to carefully work them in ways that produced useful cutting flakes. Some of them were shaped evenly on both sides, while other examples reveal asymmetrical designs where one side served as a striking platform, and the other appears to have been prepared for controlled flake removal.

Keep reading

Apple Trains Custom AI Model For China With Alibaba’s Help

Apple has trained a custom large language model specifically for the Chinese market, utilizing technical support from Alibaba Group, according to Reuters. 

This arrangement would make Apple the first foreign company cleared by Beijing to offer a proprietary AI model in China.

The custom model is expected to power portions of Apple Intelligence when the AI suite rolls out to mainland China via an upcoming iOS update.

This marks a strategic shift from Apple’s earlier plan to rely solely on third-party Chinese models for its regional generative AI features. According to the report, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude – which Apple pairs with its own technology in Western markets – are unavailable in China.

In July, China’s Cyberspace Administration officially registered Apple’s generative AI service, clearing the primary regulatory hurdle that had kept Apple Intelligence off local devices.

Under this approved framework, Alibaba’s Qwen model will integrate into Apple Intelligence across compatible iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Vision Pro headsets sold in China, while Baidu’s technology will separately support search-related features.

It remains unclear exactly how Apple’s proprietary model will divide tasks with Qwen and Baidu, as the technical breakdown between the systems has not yet been disclosed.

China remains one of Apple’s most crucial markets. Until now, the lack of native AI capabilities on Chinese iPhones has put Apple at a distinct competitive disadvantage against domestic rivals like Huawei, which have aggressively marketed AI-equipped handsets.

Apple Intelligence began rolling out globally in October 2024, but Apple said at the iPhone 16 launch that September that mainland China availability was “subject to regulatory approval.” The CAC’s July 15 registration came roughly 22 months later, clearing Apple alongside six other on-device generative AI services from Huawei, Samsung, OPPO, vivo, Xiaomi and ZTE.

The wait proved costly in a market Apple has been winning back. IDC put Apple’s China smartphone share at 18.1 percent in the second quarter, up from 13.9 percent a year earlier on 24.4 percent shipment growth – the strongest gain of any major brand, and enough to move Apple from fifth place to second. Huawei held the lead at 22.6 percent. They were the only two vendors to grow at all as overall shipments fell 4.3 percent to roughly 66 million units, a fifth straight quarterly decline driven by rising memory costs and fading government subsidies.

Apple’s gains came from holding iPhone 17 pricing steady while Android rivals raised theirs, and from signaling second-half price increases that pulled demand forward – mechanics that flatter one quarter rather than establishing a trend. Domestic rivals shipped on-device generative AI features throughout the wait.

Reporting has indicated Apple evaluated Baidu, ByteDance’s Doubao and DeepSeek before settling on Alibaba as its primary model provider. Apple has said nothing publicly about the arrangement – every confirmation to date has come from Alibaba and Baidu, or from the regulator’s own filing. No mainland launch date has been announced.

Keep reading

Are China’s Surveillance Exports Turning Nations Into Digital Dictatorships?

Is Beijing hoping to turn other authoritarian societies into digital Chinas?

China’s rise as the world’s leading exporter of surveillance technology is yielding some disturbing results. Beijing’s surveillance export packages comprise an entire technological architecture that can give governments an unprecedented ability to see, identify, and track their populations.

Those technologies include cameras, artificial intelligence, telecommunications networks, cloud computing, facial recognition, license-plate recognition, and centralized command systems. Many mid-sized countries are becoming or are already customers.

Turning Other Nations Into ‘Little Chinas’

Turkey is an important case study.

To be clear, Turkey has not yet become a Chinese-style surveillance state. Its political system and institutions remain different from China’s. That said, Chinese technology companies have established a significant presence in Turkey’s digital infrastructure, and they’re not shy about it. In fact, Huawei has explicitly marketed its AI-powered CCTV and “Safe City,” i.e. surveillance technologies, in the Turkish market.

It’s no mystery that China wants to sell as much merchandise to as many trading partners as possible. But is it also possible that China wants as many partners as possible to use and become dependent upon its surveillance technology so that their societies turn into “little Chinas” by deploying Smart City tech?

AI Camera Surveillance

The first building block is the camera.

Chinese companies such as Hikvision and Dahua have become global leaders in video-surveillance equipment. Meanwhile, Huawei has developed AI-powered cameras capable of performing sophisticated image recognition and analysis. CSIS notes that Chinese firms can provide technologies ranging from cameras to AI analytics and centralized deployment.

Huawei’s AI-enabled technology is in Turkey, using cameras with embedded AI chips and deep learning capabilities to perform recognition and identification while feeding information into cloud-based big-data systems. Such systems could operate across enormous numbers of cameras.

That represents a fundamental shift in surveillance capability for nations such as Turkey. A conventional camera records what happened. An AI camera can begin answering who, when, where, and what.

Keep reading

House Committees Detail Harvard Ties With Chinese Entities In New Report

A report released by House committees on Aug. 13 alleged that Harvard University prioritized financial ties over American national security and received more than $600 million from China, the most of any U.S. university.

The report, released by the House Select Committee on China and the House Education and Workforce Committee, alleged that Harvard created a nonprofit called Harvard Global to circumvent federal requirements for disclosing foreign donations to higher education.

According to the report, Harvard Global initially stated on its website that it could serve as a “proposal applicant and awardee” for awards the university was unable to accept for legal or financial reasons. The nonprofit later removed the language after the committees sent Harvard a draft of the report.

“Harvard created an entity in a blatant attempt to get around federal foreign funding disclosure laws. That’s unacceptable, especially given Harvard’s history of failing to comply with these requirements,” Education and Workforce Committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement.

The committees identified 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and researchers affiliated with Chinese universities, including a “Seven Sons” university, the report stated.

The “Seven Sons of National Defense” is a group of elite Chinese universities directly subordinate to the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, which regulates China’s defense sector.

The House committees alleged that Harvard-affiliated researchers have worked with “Chinese universities that, as a matter of policy, conduct extensive weapons research and development and hold top-secret security clearances with the PLA [People’s Liberation Army].”

The report cited a 2023 research paper on magnetic materials co-authored by a Harvard-affiliated researcher and a researcher at China’s National University of Defense Technology – which the U.S. government has placed on its entity list as a threat to American national security.

Keep reading

CCP Agent Buys a Listening Post Next to the White House

Location, location, location.

According to the Daily Caller, on July 21, a group called the Philip Qiu and Family Foundation paid $8.4 million for a hundred-year-old office building in DC.

What’s the big deal? It’s about 650 feet from the White House. That’s prime real estate… if your business is spying on the White House.

The buyer, Qiu Feili, is a former Shanghai police detective who later enrolled in an executive MBA program complete with a “team-building” wargame. Photos show him in camo, holding a rifle. University materials brag that he personally took out a third of the opposing side and posted the best individual marksmanship score in the group. Cool cool cool.

Since then, Qiu has climbed the ranks of the United Front Work Department, the CCP’s intelligence recruitment machine, eventually chairing the Shanghai Overseas Chinese Foundation. His circle connects straight into China’s actual spy services, the MPS and the MSS.

Qiu’s own assessment of the Party he serves, from 2021: it’s “like a kind, but firm parent.” Sure. The kind of parent who buys the building next door and points a listening device at your bedroom window. If Shelley were writing this newsletter, I’m sure she’d have something to say about that.

Keep reading

China Sends Science Team to Iran for ‘Exploration and Processing’ of Rare Earths

The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) on Monday announced a collaboration with Iran on the “exploration and processing of rare earth elements,” presented as a series of workshops that will be mostly funded by China.

The NSFC said that it will provide about $4,200 in funding for each workshop, while Iran’s National Science Foundation will help with travel arrangements and accommodations for Chinese researchers visiting Iran, and vice versa.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted that Beijing chose a “particularly sensitive time” to announce a new collaboration with Iran, given ongoing hostilities between the United States and Iran.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping is scheduled to visit the United States in September to discuss trade issues with President Donald Trump, although the meeting could already be imperiled by volleys of “tit-for-tat” sanctions between the U.S. and China. Trump is unlikely to be pleased by the announcement of a new Chinese collaboration with Iran at this uneasy juncture.

The SCMP pointed out that China seems to be taking a significant diplomatic risk for a very modest collaboration in an industry that China already dominates. China has the world’s largest known rare earth reserves and is the leading producer and refiner of the metals.

Iran might have significant rare earth deposits in its central region, but it has not developed the technology to confirm those deposits exist, or exploit them. All that is certain for now is that central Iran boasts the sort of iron and phosphate formations that could harbor rare earth deposits.

Keep reading

US territory turned tropical maternity ward has produced thousands of ‘American’ babies for parents living in China

Pregnant Chinese women have turned a tropical paradise into a maternity ward — pumping out babies who automatically become US citizens daily.

The Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a US territory northeast of Guam in the Pacific Ocean, has been flooded with so-called “birth tourists” since 2009 when then-president Barack Obama introduced a visa-waiver program for Chinese nationals.

China-watchers estimate about 1,000 companies offer birth tourism to the Northern Mariana Islands, other US overseas territories and even the US mainland. They claim a gob-smacking 1.5 million American babies are being raised in China by Chinese parents who’ve participated in birth tourism.

In a March 9 letter to three Trump Cabinet secretaries, Republican lawmakers demanded an accounting on Chinese birth tourism.

“The concern is about these children born to Chinese parents — do the parents have connections to the Chinese Communist Party, which is an adversarial government to the US?” Chris Chmielenski, president of the nonprofit Immigration Accountability Project, told The Post regarding the letter.

Keep reading

British Royal Navy’s Spy Drones Have Cameras Suspected of Sending Back Data to China

Who are these drones spying for, in the end?

The Royal Navy is fighting a war with Britain, to have resources to modernize and expand the much-diminished forced, said to be the smallest-ever.

But even when modernization efforts do come, they are not without issues, as we’ve learned this week.

It’s been widely reported that the Royal Navy spy drones used by Britain’s elite special forces had cameras suspected to be secretly sending sent data to China, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Telegraph reported:

“The cameras on the K3 Scout surveillance drones had components made in China which were transmitting information to a device in the country.

The Royal Marines have been using the £12m fleet since March and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) was forced to remove all internet connectivity from the cameras after discovering the breach.

The revelation raises fears that Beijing has been attempting to spy on Britain’s military after years of security warnings about the threat from the country.”

Keep reading

Iran Demands China’s Anti-American BRICS Coalition Provide More Support During War

Iran’s representative at a meeting of the anti-American BRICS coalition on Wednesday used the opportunity to demand that member countries invest more of their time, money, and energy into “practical initiatives” to help Iran, a call that follows months of minimal support from the bloc during the ongoing war with America.

BRICS — named after core countries Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — is an economic, security, and diplomatic coalition largely led by communist China that seeks to overthrow the current, Western-led global order. It presents itself as a vehicle to aid the development and prosperity of the “global south” despite the presence of Russia and China, promoting interdependency among its members at the expense of ties with America. In addition to its core members, the group consists of Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Iran, and Indonesia. Another 13 countries, mostly rogue states such as Cuba and Belarus, received BRICS “partner” status in 2024, a second tier of cooperation inferior to full membership.

The BRICS coalition has persistently been challenged by the fact that the member countries do not fundamentally share national interests. Since the founding of the bloc, India and China have engaged in territorial warfare, South Africa has had to protect its economy from China’s malignant goods dumping schemes, and the UAE has supported Ukraine against Russia’s ongoing invasion. Iran has been the most overtly problematic member of the group, however, actively bombing the UAE then diverting the agenda of BRICS meetings to demand other countries support its terrorist activity.

Wednesday’s BRICS finance minister and central bank governor meeting continued the trend of Iran hijacking the coalition to prioritize its own interests. Iranian Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati lamented in his remarks, according to Iranian state media, that BRICS was not doing all it could to offer concrete support to Tehran.

“BRICS will have the greatest impact when it can turn policy dialogues into practical initiatives and operational mechanisms,” Hemmati stated, according to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency.

“Referring to the difficult and complex regional and international circumstances, as well as the U.S.-Israeli military aggression against Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity,” Tasnim added, “Hemmati said economic and financial stability cannot be achieved without peace, respect for international law, and adherence to the principles of the U.N. Charter.”

Keep reading

Federal Grand Jury indicts 11 in massive $100K-per-couple marriage fraud scheme

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) unsealed a two-count indictment charging 11 individuals for orchestrating a massive, decade-long marriage fraud network that arranged over 1,000 sham marriages.

Federal prosecutors described the operation as one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in U.S. history, spanning “from 2016 through July 2026 and generating tens of millions of dollars in illegal revenue.”

The criminal scheme primarily aimed to secure fraudulent green cards and lawful permanent residency for foreign nationals, predominantly citizens of the People’s Republic of China, the DOJ noted.

According to the 21-page indictment unsealed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the defendants marketed their services through social media, word of mouth and targeted advertising.

Foreigners reportedly paid the enterprise up to $100,000 each to facilitate a fake marriage and process green card applications. In turn, the network recruited U.S. citizens to act as spouses, paying them up to $30,000 per arrangement, while recruiters pocketed commissions of around $5,000 for every participant enrolled.

Federal officials explained further how the syndicate functioned as a “full-service” operation designed to systematically evade federal immigration checks. Facilitators hired officiants and photographers, staged wedding ceremonies — sometimes at local restaurants where participants wore traditional attire to fabricate authenticity — and generated fake documentation.

Keep reading