This year’s Chinese New Year holiday period saw both an 8.2% increase in domestic travel, and an 8.6% increase in consumer spending compared to the year before, according to official figures. The holiday for this year was increased from eight to nine days, and a range of stimulus policies were implemented by the Ministry of Commerce to boost spending.

Boosting consumption has been earmarked as a key priority in Beijing’s current Five-Year Plan, and the New Year has started with signs of what may be positive momentum. That said, subsidies are only a short-term solution which runs the risk of front-loading spending. As we have seen in the past, the subsequent removal of subsidies will reduce drastically the amount of purchases made.  

The longer holiday perhaps encouraged more people to travel, but the overall impression is that people traveling for whatever reason are spending much less than they used to. But the holiday period is over now, and China is getting back to work and to reality. It’s going to be a tough year.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s latest AI model, set to be released as soon as next week, was trained on Nvidia’s most advanced AI chip, the Blackwell, reports Reuters, citing a senior Trump administration official. Were this to be the case, it could represent a violation of US export controls.

The official said the US believed DeepSeek would remove the technical indicators that might reveal its use of American AI chips. The official declined to say how the US government obtained the information. The official did not provide information on how DeepSeek obtained the Blackwells but noted that US policy is “we’re not shipping Blackwells to China,” emphasizing that DeepSeek’s possession of the chips could represent an export control violation.

They also said DeepSeek’s Blackwells are likely part of a cluster at its data center in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. The model they helped train likely relied on the “distillation” of models made by leading-edge US AI companies, including Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI, echoing allegations made by OpenAI and Anthropic, the official added.

A senior official in the White House was cited in a Reuters exclusive as saying that China’s DeepSeek has trained AI models on Nvidia’s Blackwell chips—the company’s most advanced. If this were true, Reuters said, it would constitute a violation of current US export controls. It gave no details about how the chips were allegedly obtained. The official said DeepSeek’s Blackwells are likely part of a cluster at a data center in China’s Inner Mongolia. 

The news follows an approval last month by Washington of Nvidia’s second-most powerful chip, the H200 to China—a move that caused contention among policymakers amid calls to limit Chinese access to US tech, citing concerns over both the threat to US dominance in AI and the potential for military applications. It’s unclear what this latest development means for the export of the H200 chips to China, and to DeepSeek in particular. 

The news obviously raises the question of to what extent Nvidia was aware of the sale of Blackwell chips to DeepSeek through whatever channels and whether there may be any consequences for them. All this comes as a backdrop for a planned Trump visit to Beijing in April.

The Trump administration has put a pause on a number of key security measures aimed at Chinese tech ahead of an April meeting between the two countries’ presidents, reports Reuters, citing unnamed sources. The measures include a ban on China Telecom’s US operations and restrictions on sales of Chinese equipment for US data centers, the sources said.

The US has also put on hold proposed bans on domestic sales of routers made by TP-Link and the US internet business of China Unicom and China Mobile along with another measure that would bar sales of Chinese electric trucks and buses in the US, four people told Reuters, declining to be named.

While the administration’s actions are likely aimed at helping to defuse trade tensions related to Trump’s costly trade war, some critics say they also leave US data centers and other technology vulnerable to Chinese threats as data center construction surges to meet exploding demand for AI.

Chinese state-owned companies are buying foreclosed property projects, reports Reuters. The move is a sign that government efforts to reduce massive oversupply in the crisis-hit housing sector are finally getting traction, albeit at a slow pace.

Analysts say the involvement of state firms may cushion the pace of further home price falls and ease the drag that the property slump has had on China’s economic growth since 2021.

But they say it could also prolong the process of the housing market finding a bottom as distressed assets change hands at a deep discount instead of being fully written off. “You’re simply putting your finger in a hole in the dam,” Sam Radwan, chief executive of Enhance International, a Chicago-based real estate consulting firm with Greater China operations, told Reuters.