About - Hello China Tech

The System Underneath

Western tech media covers China through a familiar lens: geopolitical threat, copycat economy, or authoritarian crackdown. Chinese state media tells a mirror-image story of inevitable triumph. Neither is useful if you need to make actual decisions about investments, partnerships, strategy, or policy.

Hello China Tech exists to close that gap.

I read China’s technology ecosystem in its native language every day: IPO prospectuses, government filings, state-owned enterprise procurement announcements, earnings calls, policy documents, and industry reporting from sources like 36Kr, Sohu, and Jiemian. I translate the system underneath the words: the institutional mechanics, competitive dynamics, and strategic constraints that explain why Chinese tech companies behave the way they do.

What Makes This Different

I read what you can’t.

Most English-language China tech analysis works from translated wire reports and English-language press releases. I work from Chinese-language primary sources: regulatory filings that reveal how Beijing’s AI approval system actually functions, IPO prospectuses that expose a GPU startup’s real customer concentration, SOE deployment reports that show where AI models are actually running in production. When I reported that DeepSeek had been deployed across 113 state-owned enterprises, the source was original Chinese-language reporting that Western media had not covered.

I build frameworks that outlast the news cycle.

Every deep analysis produces a reusable analytical tool, a way of understanding that applies beyond the single story. Three examples:

The Sanctions Paradox. US export controls were supposed to slow China’s AI. Instead, they forced architectural innovations (DeepSeek’s sparse attention, mixture-of-experts) that cut inference costs 25-30x. The framework helps you assess the actual effectiveness of technology containment and the real competitive position of companies operating under restriction.
The Golden Cage. Zhipu AI carries a $5.5 billion valuation, but its government backer is simultaneously lead investor, primary regulator, and largest customer. Privileged access and constrained strategic freedom come in equal measure. The framework helps you evaluate any state-backed Chinese tech company’s true degree of strategic freedom and where its valuation assumptions break.
The Air Pocket. Xiaomi Auto’s 25.5% gross margin looked like it rivaled BMW. I showed it was a structurally temporary peak: depleting order backlogs, expiring subsidies, and tightening safety regulations all converging in mid-2026. The framework helps you identify the hidden expiration dates inside impressive quarterly numbers.

These are analytical instruments built from primary data that readers apply to their own research and decision-making.

I challenge both sides.

I am pro-clarity. That means scrutinizing Western narratives and Chinese triumphalism with equal rigor.

When Western media framed idle Chinese-made chips as procurement failures, I explained why they represent the calculated transition costs of building sovereign compute infrastructure. When Chinese robotics companies secured Spring Festival Gala placements, I documented that leading robots operate at 30-50% of human efficiency and that marketing spend inversely correlates with product maturity. When a Chinese AI toy market shipped millions of units, I tracked the 30-40% return rates and the “two-week wall” that no company has solved.

The world is more interesting than either side’s narrative allows. My job is to show you the structural reality underneath.

Start Here: Three Articles That Define the Perspective

If you’re new to Hello China Tech, these three pieces demonstrate what this publication does and how it thinks:

1. China Shipped Millions of AI Toys While the West Was Still Debating
A little girl sobbing over her broken AI companion. A $3.5 billion market that barely exists in English-language coverage. This piece weaves together Guangdong supply chain economics, DeepSeek’s cost revolution, the “Double Reduction” education policy, and the ethics of children forming emotional bonds with machines, all in one narrative. What it shows: how I connect policy, supply chains, technology, and culture into analysis you won’t find anywhere else.

2. China’s Practical AI Play: The Case for Right-Sized Intelligence
Silicon Valley pours $300 billion into the race toward AGI. Meanwhile, 70 AI employees in a Shenzhen government district process paperwork with 95%+ accuracy using models a fraction of the size. This piece makes the case that China’s “right-sized intelligence,” smaller models optimized for specific tasks, may represent a more sustainable path to AI commercialization than the “bigger is always better” paradigm. What it shows: how I use Chinese enterprise data and policy documents to challenge prevailing narratives and build a framework for understanding where each ecosystem’s real advantages lie.

3. Running Out of Runway
Two of China’s most prominent AI startups, Zhipu and MiniMax, filed for IPO in the same week. Both have healthy gross margins. Both are burning cash at five times the size of the entire Chinese LLM market. I read both prospectuses and found that different strategies led to the same destination: an emergency search for the next fuel tank. What it shows: how I extract original financial analysis from Chinese-language filings that Western coverage doesn’t touch.

What I Cover

AI & Large Language Models. DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiniMax, Moonshot, StepFun, and the platform giants (ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu). Model competition, pricing dynamics, state-directed enterprise deployment, the structural economics of AI startup survival, and the demand layer (tokens, tenders, and workflow integration) that Western coverage largely ignores.

Semiconductors & the Chip War. Nvidia vs. Huawei’s parallel ecosystem. Domestic GPU challengers (Moore Threads, Enflame, Kunlunxin, Cambricon) analyzed through their actual prospectus filings. CXMT’s DRAM challenge and the Hefei Model of state-as-VC. Export control dynamics, analog chip retaliation, and the credential economy governing procurement.

Electric Vehicles & Autonomous Driving. The structural tension between domestic price-war survival and global brand-building. CATL’s value-chain dominance. Robotaxi expansion into the Middle East. Why component suppliers with technological moats historically outperform manufacturers during consolidation phases.

Robotics & Embodied AI. The 70% overlap thesis between smart cars and humanoid robots, and why the remaining 30% is where difficulty concentrates. Unitree’s Xiaomi model vs. Zhiyuan’s Huawei model. The gap between visibility and viability.

Policy & Industrial Structure. AI regulation as developmental infrastructure. Content labeling as accountability engineering. The LGFV mechanics behind state-backed tech champions. How both sides weaponize market access. The concepts, Xinchuang, siyouhua bushu, Ya Shi Pingtai Zeren, that have no English equivalent but shape every deal in this market.

Content Formats

Weekly Deep Dives. Long-form analysis with original frameworks, drawn from primary Chinese sources. Free subscribers receive these every week.

FlashPoint. Rapid-response analysis of market-moving events. Terse, financial-first, actionable. Typically published within hours of a development, while others are still translating the headline. Premium only.

Premium Deep Dives. Extended analysis with bull/bear/base case scenarios, specific financial triggers, and due diligence frameworks for investment professionals. Premium only.

Who I Am

I’m Poe Zhao. I’ve spent 13+ years analyzing technology and innovation ecosystems, founded Dailyio, and am based in Beijing.

What that means in practice: I read Chinese IPO prospectuses, government AI filing databases, SOE procurement announcements, provincial policy documents, WeChat industry groups, and brokerage research reports every day, in their original language. Then I write for a global audience that needs the system decoded and the concepts translated.

I built Hello China Tech on three editorial convictions:

Treat Chinese tech companies as rational actors. Their strategies have internal logic shaped by specific constraints: regulatory environments, capital structures, competitive dynamics, political economy. Understanding that logic is more useful than defaulting to “state subsidy” or “IP theft” explanations.

Explain the machinery behind the output. When a Chinese AI chip startup IPOs in 88 days, look past the speed: the STAR Market’s political mandate, the Xinchuang procurement system, and the LGFV funding cycle made it possible. When 113 SOEs deploy DeepSeek, the real story is siyouhua bushu (private on-premise deployment) as a structural barrier to foreign AI companies. The institutional machinery is the analysis.

Maintain intellectual honesty about both ecosystems. Chinese innovations under constraint are genuinely impressive, and they are responses to constraints rather than fundamental breakthroughs. The Hefei Model produced world-class display manufacturing, and its funding mechanism is collapsing as land sale revenues dry up. Holding both truths simultaneously is the only honest position.

Who This Is For

Investment professionals. VCs, hedge fund analysts, and institutional investors who need primary-source analysis of Chinese tech companies. You get financial triggers, due diligence frameworks, and bull/bear scenarios grounded in actual filings.

Corporate strategists and executives. Leaders at multinational companies navigating Chinese competition, partnership, and supply chain decisions. You get the institutional context, how procurement systems, policy incentives, and capital structures actually work, that determines whether a deal or market entry will succeed.

Policy analysts and researchers. Think tank researchers and government analysts tracking technology competition. You get the conceptual vocabulary and structural analysis needed to move beyond headline narratives.

Free. Weekly deep-dive analysis with original frameworks. Chinese-language primary sources translated into global strategic context.

Premium. Everything free subscribers get, plus FlashPoint rapid-response analysis, extended deep dives with investment-grade scenarios, and early access to emerging coverage areas.

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