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Tag: made in china

  • Chinese Beverage Chains Spread Across the US, Challenging Starbucks’ Dominance

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    Starbucks opened its first store in China in 1999, when drinking coffee in a Western-style café was still a novel idea to many locals. But in the years since, homegrown coffee and bubble tea brands like Luckin Coffee, Heytea, Chagee, and Mixue have gradually chipped away at Starbucks’ share of the Chinese market. Now, they are crossing the Pacific, hoping to compete with the Seattle-based coffee giant and other American beverage chains on their home turf.

    We wanted to experience—and taste—what these Chinese brands are offering American consumers. Over the past week, we visited two Luckin coffee shops and one HeyTea store in New York City, as well as one Chagee location in Los Angeles. What we found was a new and different beverage culture taking shape, built around speed, smartphone apps, and premium flavors.

    The arrival of these Chinese chains comes at a difficult moment for Starbucks. The company closed more than 600 stores worldwide this year and laid off roughly 900 corporate staffers. New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani urged people on Thursday to boycott Starbucks as unionized baristas at dozens of its US locations went on strike. And earlier this month, Starbucks announced it had agreed to sell up to 60 percent of its China business to a private equity firm.

    Luckin’s App-First Model

    The Chinese beverage brand that appears to be expanding fastest in the US is Luckin, which has opened five locations in Manhattan this year alone. Luckin is China’s largest coffee shop chain, with more than than 26,000 stores globally. In China, there are about three Luckin coffee shops for every one Starbucks. The company was started by a former tech executive less than a decade ago and is known for its slick, app-oriented cafés.

    Zeyi visited one of Luckin’s outposts in the Financial District in New York City, where he got a regular-sized iced coconut latte that cost $7.02 after tax. He says he was struck by how quiet it was—at 4 pm on a Tuesday, there were about four customers in the store. But the eerie silence had more to do with how the staff were behaving. Luckin requires customers to place their orders online, so there’s no need to speak to a human.

    A computer screen alerted the baristas when orders came in and printed stickers for them to put on each cup. The only customer interaction happened when Zeyi and another person appeared confused at the counter. “Is it your first time here?” an employee asked. “We do everything online here. You can scan the code and order.” When Zeyi’s drink was done, he says the baristas just left it on the counter, and he had to figure out which one was his by himself.

    The next day, Zeyi visited another Luckin location in Midtown that he says was busier than the first store. This time, he decided to download the Luckin app—new customers who use it can get their first drink for $1.99, a very good deal in New York City. Zeyi ordered a cold brew, and the baristas once again said nothing when it was ready.

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    Louise Matsakis, Zeyi Yang

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  • “I Sweated So Much I Never Needed to Pee”: Life in China’s Relentless Gig Economy

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    “Often, sweat was dripping down my back within the first two hours of a shift and would not stop dripping until the next morning,” writes Hu Anyan in the new English translation of his bestselling book I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. “I sweated so much I never once needed to pee.” This passage was on my mind as I read his book in Tianjin during one hot, Labubu brainrot summer, during which yet another unprecedented annual heat wave had forced almost everyone inside—except for the tireless couriers and delivery workers, whose services are in higher demand when temperatures soar.

    Courtesy of Astra House

    Hu’s writing first went viral in China five years ago, and he’s now a prolific, established author in the country. While his other books, like Living in Low Places, are more about his internal life, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is a focused, refreshing, on-the-ground account of nearly a decade of work, set against the slow simmering background of China’s economic rise. In addition to his stint as a courier in Beijing, Hu also recounts his adventures opening a small snack shop, his time working as a bicycle store clerk, and his brief stint as a Taobao seller. Hu’s minimal, hypnotic prose reveals the perverse beauty of tireless endurance in an increasingly precarious economy.

    When people outside China read about it, it can be easy to imbue the place with a foreign otherness, as if only Chinese people are capable of working around the clock in mind-numbing conditions. Some of Hu’s earlier jobs, such as running an ecommerce shop during the “golden age of Taobao,” or the frantic energy of parcel sorting do speak to the particularly Chinese context of a rapidly developing economy. Yet other elements, like the punishing precarity, the ways profit pressures twist work relationships, or the mundane angst of labor, will all be quite familiar to an American reader these days. Hu’s direct writing style lays bare how toiling in a logistics warehouse, whether in Luoheng or Emeryville, are similar: the night shifts, a drink after work, petty arguments and factions, stuffing items into polypropylene bags.

    Hu recently spoke to WIRED about his journey to becoming an internationally acclaimed writer, Gen-Z and tangping (lying flat) culture, and his vision of work and freedom.

    Did working as a courier offer you flexibility to earn money while being a writer?

    Hu Anyan: My writing and logistics work didn’t happen simultaneously. For example, when I was delivering packages in Beijing or doing the night shift sorting parcels in Guangdong, I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t even reading, and after work I had to decompress. In my book, when I talked about the period when I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, that was actually a special circumstance. At that time, our company was already in the final preparations for ceasing operations, so every day, by one or two in the afternoon, we’d already finished delivering all the goods.

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    Xiaowei R. Wang

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  • How ByteDance Made China’s Most Popular AI Chatbot

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    When Chinese AI startup DeepSeek became a global sensation in January, it not only shocked Silicon Valley but also startled ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. The Chinese tech giant had already launched Doubao, its own flagship AI assistant app with tens of millions of users. But when DeepSeek became the best-known Chinese AI company overnight, no one was talking about Doubao anymore.

    Now, ByteDance has gotten its revenge. By August, Doubao regained the throne as the most popular AI app in China with over 157 million monthly active users, according to QuestMobile, a Chinese data intelligence provider. DeepSeek, with 143 million monthly active users, slipped to second place. The same month, venture capital firm a16z also ranked Doubao as the fourth-most-popular generative AI app globally, just behind the likes of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

    Doubao, which launched in 2023, was deliberately designed to be personable. Unlike most popular AI chatbots, Doubao’s app icon features a human-looking avatar—a female cartoon character with a short bob that greets people when they open the app for the first time. The name Doubao literally translates to “steamed bun with bean paste,” mimicking “the nickname a user would give to an intimate friend,” ByteDance vice president Alex Zhu said in a public speech in 2024.

    Compared to Western AI apps, “there’s a warmer, more welcoming feel,” says Dermot McGrath, a Shanghai-based investor and technologist. “ChatGPT, for example, feels like a tool you open to complete a task and then close again. Doubao has more features and a more colorful user interface that keeps you interested longer.”

    The Everything App

    Doubao offers users a little bit of everything—it’s like ChatGPT, Midjourney, Sora, Character.ai, TikTok, Perplexity, Copilot, and more in a single app. It can chat via text, audio, and video; it can generate images, spreadsheets, decks, podcasts, and five-second videos; it allows anyone to customize an AI agent for specific scenarios and host it on Doubao’s platform for others to use. One of the most important things about the app, however, is that it’s deeply integrated with Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, allowing it to both attract users from the video platform and send traffic back to it.

    Somehow, ByteDance’s ambitiously sprawling strategy for Doubao has turned out to be exactly what Chinese users wanted. A little over two years since its launch, Doubao has quietly become the AI app that Chinese people—particularly those who aren’t very AI savvy—are actually using. But it has almost no name recognition in the West.

    “It’s marketed at people who are not the most technologically informed, people who may prefer voice chat and video interaction over text,” says Irene Zhang, a researcher at ChinaTalk, a newsletter about Chinese tech. “Some of the earliest Doubao users I heard of were my friends’ grandmothers and aunties.”

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    Zeyi Yang

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  • China Rolls Out Its First Talent Visa as the US Retreats on H-1Bs

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    The bottom line is that, unlike the US, China is not a country of immigrants. In 2020, only about .1 percent of the mainland population was made up of foreigners, according to one estimate by researchers from the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. That’s roughly 1.4 million people in a country of more than 1.4 billion. In the United States, by contrast, 15 percent of the population is made up of immigrants. Even other East Asian nations, like Japan and South Korea, are home to far more foreigners than China in terms of their relative population size.

    Because the US already has a large immigrant population from all over the world, it can be easier for new arrivals to adjust. Local companies operate in English, the language of global business. Colleagues and friends communicate through platforms like Gmail and Instagram, which are available in most parts of the world. And when it comes to creature comforts, H-1B recipients from India or China who land in San Francisco or New York will have no trouble finding restaurants (even good ones!) that serve food that tastes like home.

    In China, however, newcomers must navigate a corporate landscape that operates largely in Chinese, a language few foreigners study in grade school or while pursuing a STEM degree. The country’s tech ecosystem is also totally unique. New arrivals face not only an unfamiliar language and culture, but also a suite of unfamiliar programs and apps, most notably WeChat.

    Better Reputation

    There are signs that more people might be willing to overcome these barriers to experience the benefits of living in China, a place now increasingly associated with high-speed trains, electric cars, and futuristic cities. In places like Greece, Spain, and Germany, the majority of people now view China as the world’s top economic power, according to the Pew Research Center. Africa, the continent with the world’s youngest and fastest-growing population, already sends more students to study in China each year than to the US or UK.

    I’ve personally noticed that my American friends and family seem to have much more positive impressions of China than they did a few years ago. That might be in part due to the popularity of Chinese exports like TikTok, Temu, and Labubu. Several friends have even told me they specifically want to visit Chongqing, a Chinese megacity that didn’t attract many foreign tourists until videos of its skyline and hot pot restaurants went viral on Instagram and TikTok.

    Whether this growing curiosity translates into people actually moving to China will depend in part on how the government handles programs like the new K visa. The policy lowers barriers for people who want to study or work there, but it has also stirred anxieties at home. For now, it’s unclear whether it will become a genuine gateway for new waves of international talent, or falter in the face of the same rising nationalist sentiments reshaping politics around the world.

    This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

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    Louise Matsakis

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  • How China’s Propaganda and Surveillance Systems Really Operate

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    A trove of internal documents leaked from a little-known Chinese company has pulled back the curtain on how digital censorship tools are being marketed and exported globally. Geedge Networks sells what amounts to a commercialized “Great Firewall” to at least four countries, including Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Ethiopia, and Myanmar. The groundbreaking leak shows in granular detail the capabilities this company has to monitor, intercept, and hack internet traffic. Researchers who examined the files described it as “digital authoritarianism as a service.”

    But I want to focus on another thing the documents demonstrate: While people often look at China’s Great Firewall as a single, all-powerful government system unique to China, the actual process of developing and maintaining it works the same way as surveillance technology in the West. Geedge collaborates with academic institutions on research and development, adapts its business strategy to fit different clients’ needs, and even repurposes leftover infrastructure from its competitors. In Pakistan, for example, Geedge landed a contract to work with and later replace gear made by the Canadian company Sandvine, the leaked files show.

    Coincidentally, another leak from a different Chinese company published this week reinforces the same point. On Monday, researchers at Vanderbilt University made public a 399-page document from GoLaxy, a Chinese company that uses AI to analyze social media and generate propaganda materials. The leaked documents, which include internal pitch decks, business goals, and meeting notes, may have come from a disgruntled former employee—the last two pages accuse GoLaxy of mistreating workers by underpaying them and mandating long hours. The document had been sitting on the open internet for months before another researcher flagged it to Brett Goldstein, a research professor in the School of Engineering at Vanderbilt.

    GoLaxy’s main business is different from Geedge’s: It collects open source information from social media, maps relationships among political figures and news organizations, and pushes targeted narratives online through synthetic social media profiles. In the leaked document, GoLaxy claims to be the “number one brand in intelligence big data analysis” in China, servicing three main customers: the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government, and the Chinese military. The included technology demos focus heavily on geopolitical issues like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and US elections. And unlike Geedge, GoLaxy seems to be targeting only domestic government entities as clients.

    But there are also quite a few things that make the two companies comparable, particularly in terms of how their businesses function. Both Geedge and GoLaxy maintain close relationships with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the top government-affiliated research institution in the world, according to the Nature Index. And they both market their services to Chinese provincial-level government agencies, who have localized issues they want to monitor and budgets to spend on surveillance and propaganda tools.

    GoLaxy didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. In a previous response to The New York Times, the company denied collecting data targeting US officials and called the outlet’s reporting misinformation. Vanderbilt researchers say they witnessed the company remove pages from its website after the initial reporting.

    Closer Than They Seem

    In the West, when academic scholars see opportunities to commercialize their cutting-edge research, they often become startup founders or start side businesses. GoLaxy seems to be no exception. Many key researchers at the company, according to the leaked document, still occupy spots at CAS.

    But there’s no guarantee that CAS researchers will get government grants—just like a public university professor in the US can’t bet on their startup winning federal contracts. Instead, they need to go after government agencies like any private company would go after clients. One document in the leak shows that GoLaxy assigned sales targets to five employees and was aiming to secure 42 million RMB (about $5.9 million) in contracts with Chinese government agencies in 2020. Another spreadsheet from around 2021 lists the company’s current clients, which include branches of the Chinese military, state security, and provincial police departments, as well as other potential customers it was targeting.

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    Zeyi Yang, Louise Matsakis

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