Summary

Spring Festival data support only a stable start for consumption, not a structural reversal in domestic demand. The 8-day holiday box office reached about RMB9.5B, up nearly 20% year on year; domestic, inbound and outbound travel also rose, while total tourism spending grew faster than traveler numbers. But Li Feng’s sequence for a true reversal remains: property stabilizes first, household balance sheets and expectations improve, confidence recovers, and policies such as trade-in subsidies add support. Li Xiang used a car analogy: “First you have to slow down, then stop there, and only then can you start turning in the opposite direction.”
The investment significance of Ne Zha 2 goes beyond being a blockbuster: China’s high-investment services sector has shown it can organize complex industrial projects. The film took more than 5 years to complete, including more than 2 years of scriptwriting and more than 3 years of production, mobilizing over 100 companies and accounting for more than half of Spring Festival box office. Even with the rest of the slate underperforming, attendance still increased. The program compared it with Avatar: “One exceptionally good thing brings everyone back,” giving cinemas and the film industry a much-needed shot in the arm.
What DeepSeek truly rewrote was the AI industry’s economics, not just the U.S.-China technology narrative. Its professional impact reached virtually every major AI company worldwide, while its consumer app reportedly reached 30M daily active users in a very short time. Full open-sourcing, lower training and inference costs, and rapid adaptation across cloud, chip and telecom ecosystems made “technology parity” more deployable in practice, while forcing Chinese general-purpose model companies to prove their differentiation—5 or 6, or even 3 or 4, models of the same scale and use case cannot coexist indefinitely.
The next phase of AI investment is shifting from “bigger” to convergence, verticalization and edge deployment. Li Xiang’s framework is that the core model first converges on software and hardware costs, then vertically converges around specific capabilities, and finally shrinks onto phones, earbuds, glasses and robots. DeepSeek has not completed all 3 steps, but it “got off to a good start.” The cloud optimizes for broader capability at better cost-performance, while the edge optimizes for extreme cost-performance, usability and fit with specific scenarios.
Ne Zha 2, DeepSeek and China’s innovative-drug pipeline all point to the major variable of the next decade: high-value-added services can expand domestic demand and are beginning to be exported. The program’s figures are that 2024 goods trade was about RMB43T, with a surplus of more than RMB7T, while services trade was more than RMB7T with a deficit of over RMB1T. Relative to the scale of goods consumption, China’s services consumption is clearly insufficient. Services businesses have a higher wage share of sales; as the sector expands, wages could account for a larger share of GDP. That is the income-side mechanism for “letting people consume.”
China’s combined advantage in the next services-and-technology contest is the simultaneous presence of a large market, supply chains, an engineer dividend and favorable data conditions. The program condensed it to: “People have to be capable, numerous, smart and relatively cheap,” alongside data scale, liquidity, accessibility and pricing conditions. TikTok, animation, AI and robotics all benefit from this mechanism. The globalization of cultural products remains contested: technology is more universal, while cultural acceptance is more constrained by national power, market size and underlying cultural distance.
The re-rating of Chinese assets cannot be attributed to DeepSeek alone; U.S. policy uncertainty may also be driving capital reallocation. In China, the policy direction, resolve and toolkit have gradually been confirmed since Sept. 24, with DeepSeek acting as the event that crystallized the market’s perception. In the U.S., tariffs, immigration and foreign policy could simultaneously push up goods and services inflation over the next 1–2 years. If deportations leave “enough jobs but nobody to do them, while there are still enough unemployed people,” and Tesla’s FSD continues to be delayed in China, the resulting policies and industrial arrangements could face both macro and sector-level tests.

Deep dive

1. Spring Festival Box Office Hit a Record Total, but Supply Concentration Reached an Extreme

On an 8-day year-on-year basis, Spring Festival box office reached about RMB9.5B, roughly RMB1.4B more than last year and up nearly 20%, exceeding even the high base created under the exceptional conditions of 2021. Li Xiang believes attendance is more informative about demand than box office, and attendance also increased.
The program preserved one important counterexample: Ne Zha 2 alone accounted for more than 50% of total box office. During previous high-performing Spring Festival periods, the top 3 films often each exceeded RMB1B, whereas this year was a case of “one strong film and many weak ones.” Without this phenomenon-level hit, the total could have looked entirely different.
Both conclusions can therefore be true at once: cinemas can still be reactivated by good content, but RMB9.5B cannot be extrapolated directly into a broad-based recovery in household consumption. The program did not smooth over the weakness of extreme blockbuster concentration; it treated it as a signal that demand and supply must be assessed separately.

2. Ne Zha 2 Shows How Animated Blockbusters Can Bypass Live-Action Production Constraints

The program cited a prominent director’s distinction between 2 schools of thought. One believes the core of film is story and artistic expression, which should move audiences even on a small phone screen. The other, represented by James Cameron and the later Ang Lee, keeps adding new technology and visual forms to make audiences feel that cinemas are irreplaceable.
The director’s view is that whenever television or phones make people worry that cinemas will disappear, the industry brings audiences back through a leap in presentation. Avatar is the classic example: “One exceptionally good thing brings everyone back.” For the film industry itself, that is more like a shot in the arm than a low-budget critical success.
Ne Zha 2 took more than 5 years from start to finish, including more than 2 years of script development and more than 3 years of production, and involved over 100 animation companies. Li Xiang’s portfolio company Two Point Ten also participated. Animation does not depend on a centralized location or live-action crew, allowing it to sustain long-term investment through the pandemic cycle—something much harder for live-action blockbusters to organize at the time.
Li Xiang consequently revised his interpretation of the 2024 film market. The issue was not that audiences inherently did not want to watch films; rather, the live-action movies that could enter production after the pandemic had too little preparation time, leaving a shortage of visually ambitious industrial-scale productions. Ne Zha 2 avoided that constraint and, at the time of recording, had already entered the global top 3 animated films by box office.

3. Ne Zha 2’s Overseas Ceiling Depends First on Distribution, Not Story Translation

The film was scheduled for a U.S. theatrical release on Feb. 14. At the time, it had almost no European distribution, while theaters had booked it in North America, Oceania, Southeast Asia and parts of Africa. Australia and New Zealand would also have to compete with an American superhero release. The program therefore treated distribution as a more immediate constraint than word of mouth.
Li Xiang worries that the Fengshen mythology may be harder for Western audiences to understand than Black Myth: Wukong. The strongest counterargument was that Chinese audiences did not systematically read Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings as children, yet could still enter those stories. Background knowledge is not an absolute barrier.
Estimates for global box office were deliberately restrained: “One-tenth would already be good,” referring to the film’s box office relative to Wolf Warrior 2. The domestic market itself could push total box office to RMB10B. Another risk is that social media may deliberately package the film as “anti-American.” That repackaging could damage global acceptance even if it did not originate with the filmmakers.

4. Spring Festival Travel Showed Improvement in Both Traffic and Ticket Size

Domestic, inbound and outbound travel all increased year on year. More importantly, total tourism spending grew faster than traveler numbers, meaning average spending per traveler was higher than during previous holidays. Li Xiang grouped this with box office as the second large sample showing that consumption capacity remained fairly solid under holiday stimulus.
Self-driving and rental-car travel rose significantly, reflecting the combined impact of 4 years of new-energy vehicle adoption, rural car-ownership campaigns, broader vehicle penetration, and the latest auto subsidies and trade-in programs on household travel habits.
Demand is also coming from lower-tier cities. Residents of cities below tier 3 contributed visibly more to travel volume and activity. Li Xiang cited wealthy rural areas in Zhejiang, where families have developed a stable habit of traveling together after reuniting for Spring Festival. This pattern showed up relatively clearly in the national data this time.
“Silver-haired tourism” is another thread. Retirees in their 50s and 60s have pensions, housing, savings and time, while their children are less likely to need care. “Their balance sheets and cash-flow statements are both in pretty good shape.” After visa-free stays were extended to 30 days, visa-free arrivals exceeded 20M in 2024, and the average age of inbound tourists also fell significantly.

5. A Strong Spring Festival Start Still Has to Translate into Wage Income

Li Xiang’s bottom line is that box office and tourism at least show that consumption had “a pretty good start,” but its ability to continue remains far from confirmed. Policies over the past 6 months—including trade-ins for appliances, phones and cars—have almost all targeted consumption, because even the brightest productivity innovation and technology showcase cannot replace the “big-picture problem” of aggregate demand.
A meeting related to the premier called for higher wage income, naturally turning the discussion toward services. Rather than continuing to expand the production of physical goods, China’s larger incremental opportunity may lie in tourism, dining, healthcare, education, finance, culture and technology services, where wages account for a higher share of sales.
The program therefore did not treat Ne Zha 2 and DeepSeek as isolated nationalist-emotion events. It asked whether they could represent a shift in employment, wages and the export mix. If the feeling that “China is back” is to show up in the economy, it must transmit from individual blockbusters into industry scale and household cash flow.

6. DeepSeek Hit the Professional Circle, Consumers and Domestic Competitors at Once

Li Feng had already viewed DeepSeek as an excellent startup story: a team from a quantitative background, without external financing, building models out of technical idealism and a view of AI’s future. A friend had even asked whether he wanted to meet Liang Wenfeng, but he missed the opportunity because he was busy and underestimated its importance. “We really didn’t expect” a model and app to generate global influence so quickly.
At the professional level, nearly every important AI company and related business issued commentary. On the consumer side, it reportedly reached 30M daily active users in a very short period. Li Feng believes this gave DeepSeek a broader impact than Ne Zha 2: the latter is primarily a Chinese cultural phenomenon, while the former directly disrupted the global technology industry.
The impact on China’s large-model companies was especially direct. They had previously been asked how far they were from OpenAI and whether compute was becoming a bottleneck. After DeepSeek appeared, those questions suddenly became “awkward.” Some teams have explicitly shifted toward non-general-purpose models, while the rest must prove their value through better performance or a new path.
Li Xiang points out that “5 or 6, or 3 or 4” general-purpose models with the same scale, type and applicable scope “cannot exist.” That will compress the room for undifferentiated companies and turn differentiation from a marketing slogan into a condition for survival.

7. Full Open Source Turned DeepSeek from a Model into an Infrastructure Event

DeepSeek completed adaptations across cloud providers, chips, Ascend and the 3 major telecom operators in an extremely short period. Li Feng believes “there should be some policy force pushing this,” while Li Xiang stressed that the team received such resource support first because “they were worthy of it or deserved it.”
Full open-sourcing and lower costs reduced the barriers to local deployment, modification and ecosystem integration. Whether participants were motivated by patriotism, cost, convenience, business necessity or the desire to “prove I can do it,” joining became easier. The program’s “technology parity” refers concretely to the possibility that deployment rights could shift from a small number of closed platforms to a broader set of institutions.
This could also create financing and valuation pressure for other large-model companies, forcing them to differentiate on performance, industry capability or monetization. The market rumor that Alibaba’s large model may cooperate with Apple was mentioned as an early sign that the industry could be beginning to recombine, not as an established fact.

8. Hangzhou’s “6 Little Dragons” May Be Seeds Left by the Previous Industrial Shift

Li Xiang traced Huanfang’s presence in Hangzhou to the fund-town boom around 2018. Zhejiang and Jiangsu were early to develop specialized towns, while Hangzhou concentrated on recruiting secondary funds, especially quantitative funds, and offered policy convenience. Quantitative institutions naturally emphasize computing and engineering; U.S. precedents such as D.E. Shaw and Renaissance Technologies show the same technological affinity.
Huanfang did not suddenly jump into AI. Li Xiang recalled that from late 2023 through 2024, 2 portfolio companies in AI applications and the robotics supply chain had already been actively approached and studied by Huanfang, indicating that the parent company had begun laying out the AI ecosystem beyond models.
From 2017 to 2019, Hangzhou was going through a transition as Alibaba e-commerce and internet finance came under pressure and office vacancy rates rose. The fund town, biotech recruitment and openness to new-technology companies were the “causes” planted by that round of replacement policies. Li Xiang noted that an internet-finance angel company he invested in ultimately avoided being “fished out to a distant ocean,” perhaps because of Hangzhou’s local environment.
In 2018, Zhipu was still in a relatively small, dated office and had limited industry attention. Today’s robotics, gaming and AI companies are simply a more visible group among the many seeds planted at the time. Li Xiang compared this with Shenzhen’s shift from finance and property to cross-border e-commerce, and Shanghai’s “vacate the cage and replace the bird” industrial transition: industrial replacement often begins with years of invisible groundwork.

9. DeepSeek’s Global Ceiling Remains Constrained by Geopolitics

The intense discussion DeepSeek triggered in the U.S. and Silicon Valley amplified its profile in China. But the U.S., Japan, South Korea and some European countries subsequently introduced usage restrictions. Li Xiang asked whether this was an ideological conflict or an unavoidable boundary for product internationalization.
Li Xiang believes geopolitics will determine a large share of the outcome. If Huawei’s globalization is used as a reference, its peak may represent DeepSeek’s phased ceiling if development proceeds smoothly. The longer-term result will still depend on how politics and the technology ecosystem evolve.
Viewed alongside Ne Zha 2, the contrast is clear. Technology products are more universal but face restrictions in different countries; cultural products are constrained by distribution channels and cultural distance. Both are going overseas, but the sources of friction are different.

10. The 3 “DeepSeek Moments” Exposed the Huge Gap in China’s Services Trade

Li Xiang put Ne Zha 2, DeepSeek and China’s innovative-drug pipeline into the same import-export category: none is delivered as a physical good; all are, in essence, high-value-added services exports. Investment-bank materials show that China’s share of global investment buying rights to new-drug R&D pipelines has risen from persistently below 10% to about one-third today.
In 2024, China’s goods imports and exports totaled more than RMB43T, or roughly $6T, generating a surplus of more than RMB7T. Services trade was only about RMB7T, roughly one-seventh the scale of goods trade, and still ran a deficit of more than RMB1T.
High-value-added services are already growing rapidly. Gaming generates about RMB300B domestically and more than RMB100B overseas; film, cultural IP, technology and pharmaceutical R&D are also beginning to export. But compared with the U.S.’s sustained exports of education, finance, healthcare, entertainment and technology services, China’s structure remains heavily tilted toward physical goods.
The services deficit is driven mainly by tourism and service imports after opening. Chinese travelers still spend more abroad than foreign visitors spend in China. Around 2019–2020, financial, medical and other services also opened further to foreign capital, increasing imports. Both statements must remain true: China is opening its services market to imports while accelerating the formation of its own high-value-added exports.

11. Services Expansion Could Address Growth, Employment and the Wage Share at the Same Time

The program had previously compared China’s physical-goods consumption with the U.S. and found them in a similar order of magnitude, while China’s services consumption was lower; the U.S. figure is more than 2x China’s. Li Xiang therefore believes the fastest-growing and largest industries over the next decade could be services, with the total at least moving closer to U.S. levels.
The advantage of services is not limited to adding consumption categories. Whether finance, law, chip design and new-drug R&D, or film, animation, dining and tourism, wages generally account for a higher share of sales than in physical-goods chains. As these industries expand, the wage share of GDP can rise even if other conditions remain unchanged.
Wages can account for more than 50% of GDP in Europe and the U.S.; Li Xiang attributes an important part of this to their high services share. If China expands both everyday and high-value-added services, while enabling strong companies to export, it could create a dual engine: the domestic market pulls once, and the international market pulls again.

12. The Dispute over Cultural Exports Is About How Universality Is Created, Not Quality

Li Feng’s reservation is that technology is naturally more universal. TikTok can globalize smoothly, but it is hard to get the entire world to eat hot pot. Ne Zha 2 carries Fengshen culture, much as Wolf Warrior succeeded mainly in regional markets, while a similar theme made in the U.S., such as Top Gun, can sell globally.
The capital threshold of the cultural industry further magnifies market-size advantages. With the same $100M investment, a U.S. film company can spread risk across the global market, while a company from a mid-sized country may find the bet difficult to make. China’s domestic market is large enough to support high-cost content, but that does not automatically confer cultural universality.
Li Xiang’s response was that “culture is basically correlated with national influence.” At the beginning of the 20th century, the U.S. already led in GDP and manufacturing, yet Europe still regarded it as a “cultureless, history-less nouveau riche.” Its financial, monetary and cultural influence only caught up with its hard power after 2 world wars reshaped the global order. The program left open whether China will repeat that process.

13. A Large Market, Engineers and Data Form the Next Comparative Advantage

TikTok is Li Xiang’s standard causal chain. China first became the world’s largest smartphone market, with the most users and a complete manufacturing chain. Its large, diverse user base and intense competition forced companies to develop short-video products that made fuller use of cameras and phone performance, after which they took that domestic advantage global.
Ne Zha 2 needed more than 100 animation companies and several thousand workers; DeepSeek relied on domestic engineers. The underlying condition is the same: “People have to be capable, numerous, smart and relatively cheap.” Technological breakthroughs and supply chains, as well as labor density, must coexist. A single genius is not enough to industrialize a product.
Li Xiang believes future industries will be driven in parallel by data, technology and R&D personnel. China may have a distinct advantage in “the scale, liquidity, accessibility and pricing of data.” These conditions are shaped by population and infrastructure, as well as by policy and the way data circulates.
The Luckin Coffee–Starbucks comparison shows how this advantage can be realized. Starbucks achieved standardization through industrial coffee machines, but did not build the same closed-loop digital adaptation to China’s B2B and B2C markets. Chinese coffee chains developed a different competitive model through the digital chain.

14. AI Investment Has Shifted from Super-Models to 3 Rounds of Convergence

Li Xiang says this is not hindsight after DeepSeek. Since late 2022, his team has used 3 directions to assess AI investment: “convergence, verticalization and edge deployment.” If model and hardware costs do not fall, the industry cannot afford to use them; if models do not become vertical around specific scenarios, they cannot create sufficiently clear economic value.
The industry had previously been racing in the opposite direction. Parameters, data and clusters moved from thousands of GPUs to tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands, with the goal of using 1 model to solve every problem. Application companies had tried putting AI into specific hardware, but most first built the product and then called cloud APIs, while investors focused on whose model was larger.
DeepSeek put the 3 rounds of convergence back at the center of the debate: the core model first cuts costs through algorithms and hardware, then vertically converges around inference or industry capabilities, and finally compresses onto phones, watches, earbuds, glasses and robots. Robots in particular cannot rely entirely on the cloud; latency, network outages or abnormal feedback could create risks.
The program used a mixture-of-experts system to explain the efficiency gains. If a model has 150 expert systems but calls only 10 each time, it can save compute and storage. The human brain consumes about 20% of the body’s energy, yet it also activates different regions by task before deciding what to store long term, cache or discard. The analogy emphasizes “calling on demand,” not that the technology has reached its limit.

15. Private Companies Are Increasingly Participating in Research and Education

Li Xiang cited structural data showing that companies contribute more than 70% of China’s total technological innovation when measured by invention patents. Several portfolio technology companies have independently or jointly applied with research institutes for national science and technology projects, with funding ranging from several million yuan to several hundred million yuan; some projects have already been completed.
He expects the private-economy promotion law and subsequent policies to further raise the status of private companies in national research programs, with supporting funding and policy. DeepSeek’s symbolic significance is that it turned “private companies are also research institutions” from an institutional trend into a case visible to the general public.
Fuyao University of Science and Technology was described by Li Xiang as a “small milestone” after appearing in the Ministry of Education’s public notice on newly established universities. It was founded by a private entrepreneur under the name of his own company. During Spring Festival, there was also news that Zhong Shanshan planned to establish a university, but the program explicitly said it had seen no official information and could treat it only as a rumor pending a public notice.
Finance, healthcare and education are all important parts of the services economy. The program used a private company establishing a university as an example of both education and services-sector development, while drawing no conclusion about its longer-term impact.

16. The Re-Rating of Chinese Assets Is Being Driven by Forces at Home and Abroad

Li Xiang rejects attributing the entire rise in A-shares, Hong Kong stocks and technology stocks after Spring Festival to DeepSeek. The domestic logic unfolded gradually after Sept. 24: the market first saw the policy direction, then saw resolve, tools and support for private business through trade-ins, appliance and phone subsidies, new-energy vehicle replacement and high-level meetings. DeepSeek merely caused that judgment of state capacity to erupt into market recognition.
Externally, tariffs, trade, diplomacy and economic policy under Trump’s presidency have increased uncertainty around the paths of the U.S. economy and dollar over the next 1–2 years. Some capital may therefore reconsider emerging markets outside the U.S. and selected European markets to reduce the volatility associated with concentrated positioning.
Foreign inflows and a re-rating of Chinese technology assets were already visible at the time of recording, but consumer-related stocks remained broadly weak. Banks and other dividend stocks were among the earlier winners. Asset prices show a change in expectations, but cannot substitute for confirmation in household consumption and corporate revenue fundamentals.

17. Musk’s Governance Experiment Is Amplifying Both His Capabilities and His Limits

The efficiency department led by Musk laid off many people during Spring Festival and attracted widespread attention. The program “for convenience called it America’s anti-corruption campaign.” Musk himself moved into the center of the storm and reportedly revised the 17th version of his will, specifying how different affairs should be handled if he could not be contacted for 72 hours.
After rereading Isaacson’s biography of Musk, Li Feng’s strongest impression was how deeply Musk understands mass attention. Faced with Tesla’s giant factory, he first asked how to announce to the world that “this is the largest factory in the world.” For a Neuralink demonstration, he wanted a result everyone could understand at a glance, such as “making a paralyzed person walk again,” rather than simply discussing a breakthrough in a paper.
The biography also shows his thinking gradually taking on stronger conspiratorial overtones. When faced with a Washington Post reporter friendly to SpaceX, he replied only, “Say hello to your puppet master for me,” convinced that Bezos was controlling him from behind the scenes. He also repeatedly swings between declaring that “human civilization has hope again” and that “human civilization is in grave danger.”
Li Xiang worries that Musk may be crossing the boundary of his capabilities—or at least that his “ego is too big”—as he moves from changing industries and becoming the richest person in the world to using politics to “shape the world.” The U.S. has corruption and the media are not neutral, but if the targets exposed are all Democrats such as Pelosi, Clinton and Obama, then “the cabbages and radishes are rotten only on the left half,” which is plainly implausible. Partisan conflict and personal grievances cannot be packaged as pure governance.

18. Musk’s Political Engagement and Trump’s Immigration Policy Will Both Face Economic Tests

Tesla filed matters related to bringing FSD to China in August last year, but at the time of recording there was still no approval. During the same period, its Shanghai Megafactory had been completed. Li Feng worries that as Musk devotes too much energy to U.S. politics, Tesla’s share-price decline, weak new-model pipeline and delayed FSD rollout could begin reinforcing one another.
Beyond price competition, China’s intelligent-driving market has converged on software, hardware and data. Huawei’s intelligent-driving capabilities have helped propel several “jie” brands, especially Seres. BYD has brought intelligent driving down to models priced around RMB100K, while Yu Chengdong emphasizes that “good and safe intelligent driving” is not the same thing as merely installing equipment.
China is the world’s largest EV market, and the intelligent-driving flywheel depends on vehicle scale, algorithms and data continuously training one another. Li Xiang’s conditional judgment is that if FSD is delayed another 1–2 years before entering China, Tesla “may have no advantage at all” in the world’s largest market. That deserves more investor attention than a single model launch.
Another test comes from employment. Li Xiang previously broke down U.S. data and concluded that most of the new jobs created over the past 1.5 years were filled by undocumented immigrants with work authorization, concentrated in construction, healthcare and education/caregiving, restaurants, hotels and other physical or service jobs. After mass deportations, February or March data could show “enough jobs but nobody to do them, while there are still enough unemployed people.”
Li Feng added the logic of those who support deportations: undocumented immigrants increase the supply of low-end labor, potentially depressing the income of native workers. But if that supply suddenly contracts, employers will have to raise wages to attract workers, pushing up services wage inflation. Combined with tariff-driven goods inflation, the result could be the “puzzling” combination of strong job demand, low employment, rising unemployment and higher inflation.

19. A Domestic-Demand Reversal Must First Stop the Slide in Property and Household Expectations

Li Xiang’s final question was whether Ne Zha 2, DeepSeek and Spring Festival consumption represent structural change or merely the fact that “they are exceptionally good.” If the structure has changed, the economy should improve slowly even without the 2 phenomenon-level projects. If not, blockbusters prove only that individual teams are excellent.
Li Feng’s answer remained cautious. Spring Festival box office and tourism suggest that consumption fundamentals may be beginning to stabilize, but the full chain must occur in sequence: property stabilizes, household balance sheets or expectations improve, policy, capital markets and the broader environment restore some confidence, and subsidies and trade-ins then help the consumption flywheel turn.
This does not require property prices to rise quickly; they first need to stop falling. Li Xiang’s analogy is a car moving by inertia in one direction: “First you have to slow down, then stop there, and only then can you start turning in the opposite direction.” Phenomenal supply can ignite the engine, but it cannot substitute for stopping the old trend.
The most important calibration from this episode is therefore neither “China is back” nor “China is still not back,” but which underlying variables have slowed and which are merely Spring Festival pulses. Services, technological innovation and high-value-added exports point to a new direction. Whether domestic demand has truly reversed still requires consecutive confirmation from property, income and consumption data.

February 18, 2025 92. Academician Zhang Yaqin on Consciousness, Longevity, and Robots