weekly planet
The Weekly Planet #19: The China Shock, Part 3: AI.
When UBTech robots walked onto the factory floor at Zeekr's electric vehicle plant in March 2025, they did something no humanoid robots had done before: they worked as a coordinated team, lifting boxes, assembling car parts, and performing quality checks - all without human supervision. Powered by DeepSeek's reasoning model, these machines represented more than a manufacturing curiosity. They embodied a fundamentally different vision of artificial intelligence, one that may reshape the global technology competition in ways Silicon Valley hasn't fully grasped.
The Weekly Planet #18. China Shock, Part 2: Renewable Energy
When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva arrived at the COP30 climate summit in Belém this November, he stepped out of a Chevrolet - the lone American vehicle in a fleet of Chinese electric and hybrid cars assembled to shuttle world leaders through the Amazonian city. The symbolism was unmistakable. As delegates gathered to negotiate emissions reductions, Chinese EVs from BYD and Great Wall Motor hummed quietly through streets once choked with exhaust, while the United States, for the first time in three decades, sent no senior representative to the talks. The world's clean energy transition is accelerating, but it is increasingly being conducted in Chinese.
The Weekly Planet #17: The China Shock, Part 1
The world is undergoing a transformation whose outlines we are only beginning to discern. For five centuries, the West has imagined itself as both the author and subject of history, as the arbiter of what constitutes progress and modernity. That story has outlived its usefulness. China's rise-or more precisely, China's arrival - represents not merely the emergence of another great power, but a fundamental challenge to assumptions long embedded in Western thought about development, governance, and civilizational achievement itself.