In Depth: The Consumption Conundrum Dividing China’s Economists

Nvidia restarts sales: Nvidia Corp. revealed that it will likely soon restart Chinese sales of its H20 artificial intelligence (AI) chips. The company has applied for a license from Washington to export the chips and has been assured by the authorities that its application will be successful, the company said in a statement. The U.S. government told the company it would require a license to export the chips earlier this year. H20 chips were specifically designed for the Chinese market, to comply with export restrictions imposed by the Biden administration. Chinese companies remain reliant on foreign-made chips, despite efforts to boost domestic production of comparable tech.

Moonshot’s new model: Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI has released its new open-source foundation model Kimi K2, aiming to rival GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V3. The company touts its model as having industry-leading coding and mathematical reasoning abilities. A foundation model is a general-purpose model capable of many tasks on which more specialized models can be built. Moonshot AI was founded in 2023 and in late 2024 it said its products had some 36 million monthly active users.

Shenzhen’s priciest land sale: A subsidiary of state-owned developer China Merchants Shekou Industrial Zone Holdings Co. Ltd. paid a record price for a parcel of residential land in tech hub Shenzhen. It forked out 2.16 billion yuan ($301.4 million) for the land in the city’s Qianhai zone, equivalent to 84,200 yuan per square meter of floor area — a record for the city. As private developers have been battered by China’s property market downturn, cash-rich state-backed firms have grown increasingly prevalent. They’re focusing on prime plots in the best locations, leading to a new wave of land price records.

Rule of law: The Communist Party’s Central Committee on Monday unveiled a set of guidelines on judicial work, urging party committees at all levels to prevent and rectify the use of administrative and criminal measures to interfere in economic disputes, and strengthen mechanisms to prevent, identify and rectify wrongful and erroneous cases involving enterprises. As local government finances have grown increasingly strained in recent years, some have turned to a practice known as “long-distance fishing,” in which companies based outside their jurisdiction are targeted for fines or asset confiscation. Beijing has repeatedly launched measures to curb the practice.

Asset overseer punished: A former vice minister-level official at the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission was handed a suspended death sentence on Monday for taking bribes totaling over 220 million yuan ($30 million). Luo Yulin was also fined 8 million yuan for insider trading. Luo was placed under investigation for corruption in May 2023, when he was the executive vice governor of the northwestern province of Qinghai. The 66-year-old is the 28th ministerial-level official to be sentenced for corruption this year so far, according to Caixin calculations.