Made in China

I don’t want to admit it, but I did spend a lot of money online this holiday shopping season. And unsurprisingly, some of those purchases didn’t meet my expectations. A photobook I bought was damaged in transit, so I snapped a few pictures,…

At a 7-Eleven convenience store in Taiwan, you can pick up a 4-inch plushie of Miffy, the bunny character from the Netherlands, a mini bento box charm complete with a realistic chicken drumstick, or a tiny plastic rotary phone. Produced by…

Go high or go wide? DeepSeek and ByteDance, the two leaders of China’s AI industry, are adopting vastly different strategies.On Monday, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V3.2, another open-weight model that anyone can tinker with. The startup says…

At what age should a kid ideally get a smartwatch? In China, parents are buying them for children as young as five. Adults want to be able to call their kids and track their location down to a specific building floor. But that’s not why…

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…

Despite the never-ending drama over whether to ban the app, President Donald Trump’s volatile tariff regime, and executive shake-ups, TikTok’s ecommerce division is still seeing massive growth.TikTok doesn’t disclose aggregate sales…