China Science And Technology News

[Beijingwalker]

 

[Beijingwalker]

Pocket-sized AI-powered phones take center stage at China show​

Chinese smartphone makers showcase compact devices with advanced AI features as the race for smarter mobile technology accelerates

By Hafsa Naeem Baig
Published July 19, 2026

Pocket-sized AI-powered phones take center stage at China show

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC in Shanghai, Chinese tech firms took center stage by showcasing a new generation of "agentic" AI smartphones.

This marks a massive shift from standard digital assistants to true "pocket-size AI"—handsets capable of executing complex, multi-step real-world tasks directly on the device.

Unlike current AI smartphones that primarily focus on isolated tricks like photo editing or voice dictation, these new models use built-in AI agents integrated directly into the operating system.

Through simple voice or text commands, a user can instruct the phone to execute complex workflows across different software platforms. Prominent examples showcased at the event include.

Nubia's NaviX Ultra: Powered by ByteDance’s massively popular Doubao AI chatbot tool, this device is built to natively collaborate across a multitude of applications.

On-Device Autonomy, prototypes on display demonstrated the ability to seamlessly compare e-commerce prices across different retailers, plan travel itineraries, and order food entirely on their own.

Processing AI models locally on the phone's hardware rather than relying on the cloud offers massive benefits to consumers.

This comes as tech firms are racing to roll out advanced smartphones that use artificial intelligence to do everything from ordering food to composing messages upon a simple voice command.

Processing AI models locally on the phone's hardware rather than relying on the cloud offers massive benefits to consumers.

Speed tasks like live audio translation, document summarization, and file searching happen with zero latency.

These devices also cater privacy issues. because data doesn't leave the handset, users have vastly superior data security.

Wide adoption of phones running on so-called AI agents would be a revolution, but would also take control away from major apps, which aren’t always happy about it.

Days after it was released, tech giants including Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com restricted the built-in assistant’s access to their platforms.

App developers are hesitant to let an AI agent act as a middleman, fearing they will lose direct engagement, data control, and user tracking to the hardware maker.

Associate research director at US market intelligence firm IDC said, gaining broad access to apps owned by other companies is a sticking point for AI agent devices.

“Platforms want to keep direct contact with their users, otherwise "they lose control to another party", she added.

While the technology is incredibly promising, a major geopolitical and corporate roadblock has emerged as “app access control.”

Pocket-sized AI-powered phones take center stage at China show

At the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference WAIC in Shanghai, Chinese tech firms took center stage by showcasing a new generation of agentic AI smartphones.This marks a massive shift from...

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[Beijingwalker]

China lures away 105 top American minds in bid to dominate med, tech fields​

By Gabrielle Fahmy
Published July 25, 2026, 7:57 a.m. ET

China is aggressively poaching America’s top scientists in its rabid quest for global dominance in fields like medicine, space and tech, with at least 105 of the best and brightest defecting to the communist nation since 2024, The Post has learned.

Nearly half of the recent wave of defectors over the last year is in biotechnology and medicine, according to a Post analysis, suggesting China is investing heavily to surpass the United States in medical innovation.

Other deserters specialize in critical fields like space science, climate change, computers and semiconductors.

They’ve all left US universities — or major corporations — to join what are in most cases Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions — lured by cash, with some like turncoat Harvard professor Charles Lieber promised a salary of $750,000 plus $150,000 in living expenses — and often their own sprawling research laboratories.

They’ve all left US universities — or major corporations — to join what are in most cases Chinese Communist Party-funded institutions — lured by cash, with some like turncoat Harvard professor Charles Lieber promised a salary of $750,000 plus $150,000 in living expenses — and often their own sprawling research laboratories.

• Charles Lieber, the former chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, who resurfaced last year as the founding director of a research institute in Shenzhen, where he will lead the race to develop the world’s first AI super-soldier. His new lab, based on his three decades of work at Harvard where he received at least $8 million in funding from the Department of Defense, is entirely bankrolled by the communist government. The Ivy League scientist was convicted in 2021 of lying to the feds about his ties to China.
• Zhonghua Gao, a leading brain development researcher who left Pennsylvania State University’s College of Medicine in January to join the newly established Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, where he will recruit others. During his more than two decades in the US, Gao led multimillion-dollar research on autism and cancer development, funded by the National Institutes of Health.
• Renowned biologist Xianzhong Xu, who returned to China in May, a few months after four researchers in his lab at the University of Michigan were arrested for conspiring to smuggle biological material. Xu was not arrested with the others and there’s no evidence he was involved in that scheme.
• Virologist Haitao Hu, who left the University of Texas last December for the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology, where he will lead a team developing vaccines for major viral infections including HIV — mirroring the work he did for more than four years at Water Reed for the US Military.
• Omar Yaghi, who won last year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating sponge-like materials that can trap water and gas and could be used to produce drinking water from desert air or capture carbon dioxide. Yaghi, 65, left the University of California Berkeley earlier this month for Tsinghua University in Beijing, where he is leading an institute that uses artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of new materials.
• Astrophysicist Liang Dai, who left Johns Hopkins University for Fudan University this spring. Dai, 38, who works hunting black holes, was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship for the “brightest young scientists” in 2021. Since the prize was established in 1995, 60 fellows have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

Harvard’s Lieber was promised $900,000, plus his own sprawling research facility, to defect to China.REUTERS

“Both China and the United States recognize that the battlelines being drawn in the global war for scientific talent are critical for national security,” said Jack Burnham, senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ China Program.

“Beijing is increasingly betting that paralyzed federal science funding, concerns over immigration status for foreign workers and students at US universities, and its own pool of increasingly cutting-edge researchers will give it an advantage over Washington to lure away the next generation of top researchers.”

China was second only to the US as the world’s largest pharmaceutical market last year. It has long tried to figure out how to replicate American ingenuity, desperate to close the gap on drug research and development. Since 2024, it leapfrogged the US in clinical trial volume.


Berkeley’s Omar Yaghi won the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry, before defecting to China.Getty Images


Zhonghua Gao led autism and cancer research in the US before moving to China.University of Macau

“There’s more and more interest in what China has been developing. They’re doing heavy recruiting in the US, and there’s an interest among scientists in the US because they have so much more freedom to advance treatments in China as opposed to what we’ve been mired down in regulatory restrictions in this country,” Dr. Roberta Shapiro, professor at Columbia University Medical Center and chief medical officer at Crescel, told The Post.

The FBI has repeatedly warned Chinese talent programs are part of a broader push to obtain foreign technology and expertise to bolster China’s strategic and military ambitions.

“Time and time again, the Communist government of China has proven that it will use any means necessary to advance its interests at the expense of others,” FBI counterintelligence assistant director John Brown had told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

“Beijing aims to acquire our technology — often in the early stages of development — as well as our expertise, to erode our competitive advantage and supplant the United States as a global superpower.”

Exclusive | China lures away 105 top American minds in bid to dominate med, tech fields

Nearly half of the recent wave of defectors over the last year is in biotechnology and medicine, suggesting China is investing heavily to surpass the United States in medical innovation.

nypost.com