I Took a Driverless Taxi in China Joshua in China
In this video, I order a robotaxi in Shenzhen, watch it arrive with nobody in the driver’s seat, get inside, check out the interior, take the ride and even wave goodbye when it drives off on its own. Self-driving taxis are already operating in parts of China, and experiencing one in real life definitely makes the future feel a lot closer. Come along for the full ride and see what taking a driverless taxi in Shenzhen is really like.
Joshua Johnson coordinates ABCF activities in China and he is also Youth Coordinator for FALCARPC (the Federation of Latin American and Caribbean Associations for Friendship with the People’s Republic of China). He is a Ph D student at Tsinghua University’s Shenzhen International Graduate School (SIGS). Also watch Joshua’s My FIRST Friend in China.
Gan Yang 1980s Interview 3 - Reading the China Dream
This part of the interview discusses Gan Yang’s life as a university student in Heilongjiang and then as an M.A. student in Beijing. If you missed Part One and my general introduction, you can take a look here. Part Two, on Gan Yang’s life as a sent-down youth, is available here.
A useful time to complain - by Zichen Wang - Pekingnology
A stock exchange is an unlikely venue for a labour dispute. Yet employees of Chinese companies seeking Hong Kong listings have begun taking grievances to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange (HKEX). They are not asking it to adjudicate dismissals, unpaid benefits or share options. They are trying to turn such disputes into questions of disclosure, compliance and fitness to list.
Li Xunlei on China’s Transport Overcapacity
China’s infrastructure boom has been one of the defining features of its economic transformation. But does its transport infrastructure now exceed what actual demand can support?
We have previously discussed related questions, including whether China has massively overbuilt high-speed rail in our sister newsletter, Pekingnology. In today’s article, Li Xunlei, Chief Economist at Zhongtai Financial International Limited, a leading Chinese investment bank, takes a data-driven look at the broader issue of China’s transport overcapacity.
Li argues that China’s transport infrastructure, including expressways, railways, and urban public transport, has already developed structural overcapacity: in less-developed regions, infrastructure expansion has often exceeded what local populations and economies can support, while the continued expansion of transport networks has been accompanied by lower utilisation, weaker investment returns, and heavier debt burdens. Demographic changes, declining population mobility, and greater population concentration in major cities are only going to widen these mismatches.
Just the FAQs: A Deep Dive on China’s Most Secretive Hydropower Project
It bugs me when journalists refer to things in China as “secretive”. Most of the time, “secretive” just means “not covered in English-language media. Typically, it’s a trick to gin up mystery around something that isn’t actually that mysterious at all, and if the journalist had taken the time - or had the ability - to research the topic with Chinese sources, they would have found that it wasn’t that secretive at all.
I preface my essay with this commentary to establish a shared understanding: when I say something in China is secretive, I really mean it. A secretive Chinese project in my eyes means it’s hard for anyone to find credible information about it, even in Chinese.
That is the case for the now under-construction hydropower mega-project on the Yarlung Tsangpo River in eastern Tibet/Xizang, also called the Medog Hydropower Station. Formally under construction since the middle of 2025, this behemoth is budgeted at ~1.2 trillion CNY ($160-170 billion USD) and expected to eventually boast 60GW of electricity generation capacity. That’s more than the current installed power generation capacity of Sweden or Argentina, and roughly 3x the generation capacity of the Three Gorges Dam, which is already the largest hydropower facility in the world. Yet for all the fanfare about the project’s ambitious scale, the public knows very little about what kind of facility it even is, never mind details like the construction milestones, power export destinations, effects on the surrounding environment, or expected impact on human populations….
Officially, the Medog Hydropower Plant is a “run-of-river water diversion” facility. The project will bore a long underground tunnel as a headrace between the upper section of the Great Bend, near Mainling City’s Pai Town (派镇) at 2950 meters, and the lower section of the Great Bend, with Medog County’s Xirang Village (西让村) at ~600 meters.
Water from the river at the top of the great bend will be diverted into the ~40km tunnel, where it will flow downhill at a continuous grade of ~5-6%. This will produce an enormous hydraulic head, sufficient to drive five separate powerhouses along the way, each one at ~12GW, for a total of 60GW. At the bottom of the tunnel, the water will rejoin the original course of the river. Chinese planners have described this approach as “zero net consumption of water”, with all water diverted at Pai Town returned to the river’s course at Xirang Village before it flows into India.
What the mudslide along China-Nepal border tells us about Himalayan Risk
…I found their discussion particularly useful because it addresses, from another angle, many of the questions raised since the disaster: why an event like this is so difficult to predict, the practical obstacles to building a cross-border disaster warning system, and the efforts China and Nepal have already begun to make toward more regular cooperation.
After Prison, Finding a Place in Society - by Jiang Jiang
Today’s story comes from an August 22 report by Southern Weekly. It follows several people trying to find work and rebuild their lives after leaving prison in China.
At the center of the story is Pangdonglai (胖东来), an influential Chinese retail chain that operates supermarkets, shopping malls and cinemas. The company has created a dedicated recruitment channel for people who have served prison sentences, a move that has prompted debate in China over employment, public safety, fairness and what a second chance should look like after someone has completed their punishment.
Ming dynasty work shows how Chinese understood the world in the 1600s | South China Morning Post
Long before the digital age, a Ming dynasty scholar made it his mission to map human knowledge from a Chinese perspective.
The result was an encyclopaedia spanning 127 volumes known as the Tushu Bian, or Compendium of Illustrations and Texts.
The work – published in 1613 – was compiled by Neo-Confucian scholar Zhang Huang and drew on more than 200 printed sources across several decades to document the concepts of heaven, Earth and humanity…
This weekly newsletter is put together by DeLisle Worrell, President of the ABCF. Visit us at Association for Barbados China Friendship | (abcf-bb.com).
Thanks to everyone who sent contributions for this week’s Update. Please send items of interest to me via the contact page at ABCF-BB.com or to info@DeLisleWorrell.com
The ABCF mission is to build a deeper understanding between the Chinese people and Barbadians and Caribbean people from all walks of life. The association’s focus is on personal experiences, people-to-people contact, cultural exchanges and exchanges of ideas, and the facilitation of travel, business and study. From the outset we aim to learn from and build on the experiences of the Caribbean and China, and to develop mutual understandings and support that will be to the benefit of both sides.
