Analysis of Chinese digital law and policy by Rogier Creemers. Assistant professor @UniLeiden, project director @AsiaLeiden, Co-founder @DigiChn.
Leiden, Nederland
Joined April 2012
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China Digital retweeted
How many people are on China’s public payroll? 🧵
For decades, the size of China’s public payroll was hidden from the public. But a Fudan University research team reverse-engineered the numbers through a statistical reconstruction using indirect data points.
Main findings
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China Digital retweeted
Friendly reminder amidst all the scandal that the politics of export controls may be shifting, but the policy issues have barely budged.
Beijing remains deeply suspicious of its labs' demand for US chips and continues to block them at the border. They did not allow CN firms to take advantage of loosened controls on H200 because they worry Lutnick was right, that buying US chips keeps them addicted to US tech and hurts indigenization.
Export control enforcement of existing rules needs a serious boost in expertise, resources and empowerment, something I have argued for many years. We need to be entity listing the shell companies that enable smuggling, plugging loopholes, and tracking where powerful compute is going. The case for remote access restrictions has been getting stronger for the past year.
What is causing me to update/reconsider past views is separate from the scandal. The argument for tuned down chip sales to China is that the boost to their AI capacity today (compared to full blockade, full reliance on limited production of worse CN chips) preserves leverage by keeping China's best AI engineers and companies on Nvidia's CUDA ecosystem, slowing China's indigenization and delaying when their chips plus hardware are good enough to compete with the US. This might in turn reduce China's AI competitiveness in the medium term by diverting AI labs' most scarce resource away from Huawei's CANN ecosystem.
But we need to think hard about the news around DeepSeek/TileLang but also OpenAI Jalapeno, in which better AI capacity today (esp in coding) is accelerating the ability to improve AI chip hardware and software. That strengthens the case for tighter restrictions today by weakening the intertemporal trade-off of export controls.
But we still need to be careful and targeted with controls. China has shown itself trigger happy with its own countermeasures. If we pass MATCH in its current form, my base case is that a) China retaliates by cutting off critical components needed for the equipment that makes chips, as it can't access that equipment anymore, why should they let others? b) US/NL/JP firm production slows, and who can still get those materials? Chinese competitors who are strengthened, and c) attempts for a mutual climb down if US deems necessary will be hampered compared to affiliates rule which commerce could just pause. Trump did that with TikTok, but this Congress will be less forgiving.
Let's make some good policy, with more effective export controls, without going overboard.
Generally, if you assume Beijing is risk-averse, acting incrementally, and pursuing predictability, you'll be correct more often than if your mental model is of a rabid lunatic jonesing at the bit to take over the world.
Alternate view - neither side is looking for breakthroughs, concessions, or major deliverables in Shenzhen. Beijing's incentive isn't to one-up or embarrass Trump, it is to prolong fragile calm w/US, viewing it as important for its broader goal of stabilizing external environment in run-up to Party Congress and amidst domestic challenges.
wsj.com/world/china/beijing-… via @WSJ
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What I would like, though, is a bit more integration of effort. China specialists from across Europe, by and large, get along very well. But the fragmentation of the European landscape means a lot of duplicate efforts, and it is difficult to build specialised expertise.
Is there a more interesting place in the world to be a China watcher outside of China today than Europe?
So much going on... I am obviously biased though
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Intrigue always becomes better with sumptuous architecture. The production values of the prestige TV drama that's going to come out of this are going to be amazing.
The FT went on the ground to unpack how a financier couple operating out of a 1920s Shanghai villa morphed into AI cloud titans, touting wife’s connection to Nvidia. The story gets stranger the deeper you look.
Alice Huang’s tangled web of connections: as.ft.com/r/ebbe04ee-b655-48…
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One question we might also ask is to what extent China also opens up alternative development paths. What might reliable access to cheap solar energy, for instance, enable?
100% this. This framing also lets DMs avoid confronting their own lack of imagination, much of which stems from policymaking that starts from constraints, real or invented (mostly the latter).
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China Digital retweeted
This stuff makes it less likely Alice Huang was a professional govt asset imo, unless she is a really bad one-- or a galaxy brain best-place-to-hide-is-in-the-open good one
China Digital retweeted
It’s neither a science nor is it ‘value free’ (which is a red herring anyway) and there’s an ocean between this delusional proposition (that nobody serious believes) and the notion that it’s entirely what we make it to be, that everything is just political and that there are no constraints on political ambition that can adequately described by economics/political economy.
China Digital retweeted
Nope. The correct take is that Chinese green industrial policy, and energy policy more generally, saved the world from an energy crisis, while helping most places go greener. The lesson is that planning and green investment work.
I think environmentalists should try to take seriously the fact that Donald Trump has implemented the most aggressive "supply-side" climate policy in a generation and everyone agrees it's economically destructive and politically unsustainable.
nytimes.com/2026/11/09/clima…
So rather than saying "Harvard can pay more because it can afford it", unions need to be able to demonstrate that harm or damage will come to Harvard's reputation, prestige, ability to position itself as a central networking venue, or acquire funding and donations.
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