🔥 HOT TOPICS
🔶A strong signal to heed – Xi meets global business leaders
Chinese President Xi Jinping urged global business leaders to invest directly in China at a closed-door roundtable in Beijing last Friday (Mar 28). More than 40 top executives from leading international corporations such as Bridgewater Associates and Blackstone Group and British firms including HSBC, Standard Chartered, GSK, and AstraZeneca attended the meeting.
“To invest in China is to invest in tomorrow,” and that multinational corporations had a duty to “uphold global order”, Xi gave it straight to the business leaders, amid rising trade tension with the US. He also assured the movers and shakers that Beijing is committed to ensuring foreign companies get fair treatment in government procurement bids. A similar roundtable was organised last year but attended by mostly American bosses.
Earlier in March China held its Two Sessions, the annual meetings of the country’s top legislature and the top political advisory body, where growth targets are set, legislation ratified, budgets announced, among other agenda. This year’s two sessions took place when the UK-China relations improved under the Labour government, which had announced the UK’s priority growth sectors weeks earlier.
The UK-China Economic and Financial Dialogue (EDF) was resumed in January, with agreements and understandings on cooperation and collaborations at multiple fronts, including trade, business, finance and technology, particularly cleantech-related spaces.
Here’s more on the potential alignments of China’s goals and the UK business needs:
Further reading:
China’s Xi urges global CEOs to protect trade as Trump tariffs loom | Reuters
China, EU discuss ‘level playing field’ on trade, EU’s Sefcovic says | Reuters
China’s Xi calls on top executives to help ‘uphold global order’ as trade tensions with U.S. rise
🔶AI leadership – the legal and financial sides of the unfolding story
AI remains a hot topic but the focus has slightly moved from tech innovation to some other aspects, such as diffusion, patents, legal framework, and impact on digital assets. As the UK gears up to embrace the global GenAI revolution and explore collaboration opportunities with China in this field, these non-technology aspects of GenAI are to attract more attention.
The latest WIPO report on GenAI confirmed China’s global leadership in GenAI patents: between 2014-2023, it invented the largest number of GenAI technologies, securing over 38,000 patent families, far more than any other nation. It follows that the nation needs to make sure the momentum keeps growing, and the “new quality productive forces” will keep driving long-term national development.
This, according to SINOTALKS® In Brief, translates partly to a call for developing robust legal solutions to the challenges. It suggests that China’s overall strategy prioritises fostering innovation while balancing robust legal protections and ethical considerations, further solidifying its global leadership in AI development.
Further reading:
A Web3 First: China Leverages Cross-Border AI Data For Industrial Use
Reprogramming IP: Story Builds A Blockchain For The AI Era
China’s AI Patents and Compensation for Patent Infringement
🔍 Insights
🔷 Taking history as a mirror – a conversation with Professor Kerry Brown on the UK-China relations past present and future
We love history. Because one benefits in multiple ways by taking history as a mirror. We certainly hope audiences of our podcast, Talking China Business, agree on this point.
In the latest episode of our podcast, Professor Kerry Brown, Director at Lau China Institute at King’s College London, shared his view on the UK-China relationship with host Ting Zhang FRSA, founder & CEO at Crayfish.io. Read the article for more insights into the complex relationship’s historical underpinnings, present challenges, and future opportunities.
🔷 A closer look at the cleantech sector, where energy synergies can be identified and leveraged
Now let’s zoom in, on one of the sectors identified as key in both countries, cleantech. It’s a big picture, a landscape dotted with cross-border collaboration opportunities. Where would you place your business on the map?
More on the key areas of UK-China cleantech collaboration, and what’s happening on the ground, here:
✅ Before you go…
💚 Culture…what about Chinese business culture?
Culture is arguably one of the hardest subjects to narrate, a most diverse, nuance-rich one. It matters a lot in cross-border business. This is a point made and received well in a China Culture and Business workshop Crayfish.io did with Xaar plc, a Cambridge-based innovative inkjet print technology company. More on this here:
? Our Founder and CEO Ting Zhang FRSA recently led a half day China Culture and Business Workshop at Xaar’s global…💚 Centenary celebration!
Someone or something that has reached the 100th year of existence on earth deserves a celebration that fits the moment. That’s what one of our clients, the Company of Biologists, is doing. A not-for-profit scientific publishing house founded in 1925 with a mission to support biologists around the world, CoB’s centenary celebration will span the whole year, including the expansion of its open-access initiative in China:
