Welcome to the 97th installment of the Caixin-Sinica Business Brief, a weekly podcast that brings you the most important business stories of the week from China’s top source for business and financial news. Produced by Kaiser Kuo of our Sinica Podcast, it features a business news roundup, plus conversations with Caixin reporters and editors.
This week:
- We hear that China and the U.S. agreed to hold yet another round of trade talks in Washington in early October, after a phone call with the two sides’ highest-level trade officials.
- We note that the Shanghai government has asked China’s dominant ride-hailing company, Didi Chuxing, to clean up its act.
- We chat about Alibaba’s plan to pay $2 billion to acquire cross-border ecommerce platform Kaola from NetEase.
- We discuss frenzied scenes at the opening of the first Chinese mainland branch of U.S. wholesale giant Costco in Shanghai last week.
- We analyze dating platform Momo’s release of a face-swap, or deepfake, app called Zao, whose popularity soon turned to privacy concerns after it was revealed that the user agreement gave Momo permanent global rights over people’s images they submitted.
- We report that U.S. plant-based meat producer Impossible Foods is seeking to bring its alternative meat product to dining tables in China, but regulatory hurdles will pose the biggest uncertainty of its journey.
- We find out that controversial artificial intelligence specialist and IPO candidate Megvii (pronounced MEG-VEE) is finding itself at the center of yet another debate, this time on how its products may infringe on students’ privacy.
- We dive into Huawei’s new 5G chip, which will power the company’s coming Mate 30 smartphones, the world’s first all-in-one 5G system on a chip, at a trade show in Berlin.
In addition, we talk with Caixin Global reporter Olivia Ryan about dengue fever, a transmissible disease that’s spreading now in China.
