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Most of what I followed in China tech this week was about who gets to say no. Lenders said yes to Tencent while its shares kept sliding. China’s biggest apps sit on ByteDance’s own list of those declining its agent. A robot maker pushed its own prospectus into next year.
Tencent borrowed $5.7bn. Its shares are down 29% this year.
Tencent raised about $5.7 billion in US dollar and offshore yuan bonds on October 13, Reuters reported, with orders more than four times the final size. The shares are down about 29% so far this year. The way I read the two prices, lenders are paying for the business that exists, and shareholders are still discounting a capital expenditure bill that more than doubled in the first half. In August I wrote that analysts confirmed the core business was healthy, then kept charging the AI spending against the group. The bond market just did the first half.
On September 30 I set a test for October 15. It came back a day early.
ByteDance’s Doubao phone assistant said on October 14 that it would gradually open screen automation in third-party apps, The Paper, a Shanghai news site, reported. Its list of apps that, it says, have declared refusal was updated that day. WeChat, Taobao and Alipay are on it, with banks, the three carriers, DeepSeek and Kimi. By my count, more than 150 apps.
In September I wrote that the app, not the phone, owns the agent’s work, and that I expected WeChat, Taobao and Alipay to refuse or be blocked. The list runs far wider than the two super apps I built that piece around.
AgiBot is raising again, and its IPO slips past 2026, an investor says.
AgiBot, the Shanghai humanoid maker, has started a new round of about Rmb 1bn to Rmb 1.5bn at a valuation of about Rmb 50bn, Caijing, a Chinese business magazine, reported on October 13, citing an investor. Hong Kong rules, as Caijing describes them, add a 120-day wait after new pre-listing financing, absent a waiver. The investor told Caijing the round means AgiBot cannot complete its IPO in 2026. AgiBot told Caijing it had no comment for now.
In this month’s Founding Letter I wrote that if the quarter ends without AgiBot’s filing, I will read China’s robot listing queue as slowing. It is heading that way.
In August I wrote that only mandatory disclosure makes a robot company give up the right to pick its numbers. An investor now says the listing that would do that will not finish in 2026. The Folklore Ledger of China’s Robot Boom is open to all readers until Tuesday, October 20, noon Beijing time.
Beijing named the problem my Ulanqab piece is about. It did not define it.
On October 16, China’s State Council, chaired by Premier Li Qiang, heard a progress report on its “AI Plus” campaign. Xinhua’s readout lists “coordinating computing power and electricity” as one step to strengthen AI’s foundation. It does not say what the term covers, and it gives no figures. In my October 15 piece on Ulanqab, the term has an address: a finished campus, and a 500kV substation and line that, as of a September 3 report, were still being built.
“Half of China’s compute makes short dramas.” So went the headline.
The claim went around Chinese social media this week. The source is a June roadshow record from COL Group, a Shenzhen-listed short drama company, reported by Caiwen News at the time. It told investors that AI dramas and video take 55% of China’s token consumption, e-commerce and marketing 24%, software development 15%. The record names no source.
In April I wrote that tokens are not fungible. A video token is not a coding token. A share of tokens is not a share of spending, and it is not a share of compute.
THIS WEEK
China’s Parallel AI Stack: My second report. What training on domestic chips costs, chapter by chapter.
In Ulanqab, Operators Pay for the Wait: A finished campus in Inner Mongolia, and the costs that start before the meter does.
Manus and the Surviving Shape: What survived Beijing’s block of the Meta sale, and who may copy it.
DeepSeek Fills Its Cap Table at July’s Price: The round doubled, the price did not. Who got in, at what fee.
The Second Seat in China’s Consumer AI: Free to read. How China’s chatbot rankings moved in a year, and what Alibaba spent.
Next week I publish my analysis of Beijing’s proposal to put large AI models on its export-restriction list. One test is a top-10 global rank. The draft does not say which ranking counts, and that choice decides which Chinese models it reaches.
The Folklore Ledger closes Tuesday, October 20. Paid readers keep it, along with more than 240 other analyses, and get my reports at $49 instead of $99.
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