MiniMax has released H3-Image, an open-weight image model that turns text into a 4K picture in about ten seconds. The Shanghai company is betting that fast, downloadable generators can win developers who want control over where their images are made.
Tencent has opened an internal beta for E-Ciyuan, its first AI game-companion agent, which reads the screen in real time and talks to players. It arrives as AI companionship shifts from novelty chatbots toward context-aware, multimodal products.
Tang Jia San Shao, one of China's most famous web novelists, has stopped publishing new books but still earns tens of millions of yuan a year. He kept the game and film rights to his Douluo series and built a company around them, turning old stories into lasting assets.
Honor of Kings' farm mini-game now lets players stack land into nesting plots, and the first tier-three plot reportedly needs 6.7 billion in savings. Most players sit in their 80s and 90s, with top accounts past level 101.
A new Tencent comedy series overseen by Zhao Benshan and directed by his son Zhao Yinan has drawn unusually blunt criticism, much of it aimed at its wall-to-wall Northeast dialect. The show, 'Zou Ma Shang Ren,' leans on a familiar troupe of comic actors and a family pairing in front of and behind the camera.
Apple has struck a deal with Alibaba to embed the Qwen model inside Apple Intelligence in China, letting Siri, writing tools and visual search call on Chinese text and image understanding. Testing opens on 4 November with the latest iOS developer beta, ahead of a full release in December.
Short and medium-length series are becoming a serious business in China, with one show's first season reportedly earning over 33 million yuan in revenue sharing. New titles like 'Bionic Maze' and 'The Appraisal' are testing whether compact storytelling can sustain a profitable model.
Chinese game studios are reading thousands of job listings for clues about their next hit, and the signals point away from anime-style gacha titles and toward social play. A new essay argues the industry's five-to-six-year cycle is turning again.
Tencent's Hunyuan team released Hy-SimulMT, an open-source speech-to-speech translation model that turns Chinese into English and back in about three seconds, faster than the four to five seconds human interpreters typically need. It also clones the speaker's voice in real time.
Delta Force's security team helped Guangdong police dismantle a major DMA cheat operation, arresting 16 people and seizing more than 20 million yuan in value. The case highlights how hardware-based cheats are becoming gaming's toughest anti-cheat problem.
As Chinese tech firms moved from counting tokens burned to measuring AI returns, employees started performing efficiency rather than achieving it. Researchers and workers describe a year of AI FOMO in which looking productive became safer than being honest about what the tools actually do.
WeChat has put ten serialized public-account novels in front of short-drama producers, letting them negotiate adaptation rights directly and publish the results inside its own video ecosystem. It is a quiet bid to feed China's insatiable micro-drama machine from WeChat's own archive rather than from outside platforms.
China's biggest shopping festival has become an AI proving ground, with Alibaba's Qwen Go assistant handling price checks and refunds while ByteDance's Doubao phone helper hits roadblocks. The contest shows how agents are moving from chat into checkout.
Moonshot AI has unveiled Kimi K3.1 Pro, the first model in its K3.1 line and its most capable yet, built on a 3-trillion-parameter architecture. A 24-second teaser and a mystery Arena contender codenamed Kibitz had already tipped off Chinese developers before the official release.
Alipay has become the latest Chinese internet giant to plug its services into Tesla's in-car system, following WeChat and ByteDance's Doubao AI model. Elon Musk's carmaker is turning its dashboard into a platform for China's biggest apps.
Chinese startup Today AI has raised more than $200 million just months after launching its personal AI assistant, with backing from Tencent, Ant Group and Sequoia China. The company is betting that always-on agents will manage schedules, tasks and daily life.
Tencent's stock closed at HK$393.8 on October 21, a one-year low, as its market value fell nearly 40 percent from January's peak. Weak Hong Kong liquidity and a reassessment of tech valuations are weighing on the internet giant.
Popular Chinese Hearthstone streamer 'Dog Thief' disappeared from the internet for nearly two years, reportedly entangled in a gambling investigation. Now rumors say he has been released from prison, but whether he will ever stream again remains unclear.
Tencent has introduced a method that lets large language models generate and solve their own training tasks, improving without new human data. The approach could reshape how Chinese AI labs compete with DeepSeek and others.
As the 2026 World Championship kicks off in Texas, Chinese League of Legends stars are weighing life after the record salaries of the LPL boom years — and some are simply walking away.
Kuaishou's AI video arm Kling released version 4.0, and analysts are now asking whether the AI unit could be valued above the short-video parent that built it. The question is whether AI can lift Kuaishou past the limits of its core business.
A Chinese science writer asks why younger internet users have never heard of classic PC viruses like Panda Burning Incense, and explains what changed in how computers and software are built.
Tencent and Ubisoft will close The Division 2's Chinese server on December 14, 2026, after what the operator calls a change in business strategy. Top-ups and new registrations stopped on October 12.
A fan poll tied to Honor of Kings' tenth anniversary has drawn hundreds of thousands of votes, and the hero Li Xin has surged to a commanding lead while Sun Wukong sits outside the top three.
China's biggest tech companies are racing to make AI assistants the default gateway on smartphones, each with a different strategy. The winner may decide how billions of people search, shop and pay.
Tencent is considering its first major offshore bond in years, a dual-currency deal worth up to $5 billion, as China's tech giants race to bankroll AI computing. The cash-rich gaming and cloud group is stockpiling long-term capital before the spending peaks.
The latest update to Kuro Games' open-world action RPG wraps a three-version storyline about the city of Xuafang and the legendary fox, Xin Yuehu. Players are praising how the patch pays off threads planted months earlier.
Chinese AI video tools like Kuaishou's Kling are moving from viral demo clips into real production pipelines. As global rivals including Claude and GPT add video, the winners will be the tools creators cannot work without.
Chinese AI models burn most of the tokens on global routing platform OpenRouter but capture only a small slice of its revenue, raising questions about who owns the metrics that define success.
From shopping carts to ride-hailing, Chinese apps keep pushing instant loans at checkout. The offer is engineered, not generous — and the real product is your repayment behavior.
The Demacia Cup international group stage delivered a lopsided sweep as LGD crushed JDG, while AG steadied its season in the KPL. Both storylines point to one prize: a trip to Beijing.
Changsha TES.A edged Chongqing Wolves 3-2 in a back-and-forth 2026 KPL Grand Final series, winning the deciding fifth game. The underdog run headlines a busy week for Chinese esports as the Demacia Cup international event also opened.
The second RED LAND festival opened on Fuxing Island in Shanghai on October 2, doubling its footprint to 150,000 square meters and hosting more than 160 game and anime brands through October 6. Organizers say five ticket rounds sold out in an average of 20.6 seconds each.
China filed a record 224 micro-drama titles in September, the third straight monthly high. Among them is an AI-assisted fantasy series, while urban stories overtook costume legends for the first time.
Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index closed up 0.37% on Wednesday at 24,613.27, though it fell 3.7% over September. AI model developers Zhipu and MINIMAX led gains, while internet names like Kuaishou and Meituan also rose.
Inside Alibaba, a small AI-native team built Qoder, a coding assistant that writes and reviews software. The project hints at how Chinese tech giants are reorganizing around AI agents.
China's national Honor of Kings squad beat Malaysia 4-0 to defend its Asian Games title in Nagoya, sparking celebrations from Tokyo's Shibuya Crossing to four Chinese cities. The win, backed by Xinhua and top clubs, cements mobile esports' place on the podium.
China's Honor of Kings team beat Malaysia 4-0 to defend its Asian Games title, with captain Xu Bicheng becoming the first esports athlete to win two Asian Games golds. The Olympic Council of Asia also denied rumors that esports will leave the Asian Games after 2026.
The Olympic Council of Asia denied reports that esports will leave the Asian Games after 2026, confirming a new Asian Esports and Mind Sports Games in Kuwait instead. The clarification came as China celebrated a dominant gold in Honor of Kings at Nagoya.
Chinese securities firms are rushing to connect their services to AI agent platforms from Kimi, Tencent, Alibaba and ByteDance, as 2026 is dubbed the year of the financial AI agent. The shift moves brokerage AI from in-house tools toward open ecosystems.
