China Digital Digest Weekly: Exploring the Chinese Digital Landscape
- ClickInsights
- 22 hours ago
- 4 min read
Hi folks, we are back with our weekly edition of China’s Digital Digest, wherein we bring you weekly updates on China’s digital space. The report takes a quick glance at China’s complex and rapidly evolving social media landscape by providing updates on the latest happenings across the social media industry. Here are the major highlights of the report.
1. Alibaba Health Launches “Hydrogen Ion
Alibaba Health has officially launched its AI product “Hydrogen Ion,” (H⁺) which has completed internal testing and is now available for download.
The product has entered real-world deployment and is primarily targeted at clinicians and medical researchers, positioning itself as a GPT for doctors. According to Alibaba Health, Hydrogen Ion is the first commercial application built on the company’s in-house medical large language model, with a core focus on low hallucination and high evidence-based reliability.
2. Alibaba Upgrades Qwen App to Order Food, Book Travel
Alibaba has rolled out a major upgrade to its flagship consumer AI application, Qwen App, marking a decisive shift from conversational AI toward what the company calls “AI that acts”- systems capable of completing real-world tasks end to end.
The new version integrates deeply with Alibaba’s core consumer services, including Taobao, Taobao Instant Commerce, Alipay, Fliggy, and Amap, allowing users to order food, book travel, make payments, and coordinate multi-step tasks directly inside a single AI interface. The features are now open for public testing in China.
3. Alibaba’s Qwen AI App Hits 100 Million Users
Alibaba’s Qwen app has reportedly surpassed 100 million monthly active users just two months after launch, though the company has not confirmed the figure.
Framed as an AI assistant that can both converse and complete tasks, Qwen marks Alibaba’s strategic shift toward the consumer AI market after years of focusing on enterprise solutions. Qwen became the world’s fastest-growing AI app in November after recording the highest increase in MAU among AI products globally at 149 per cent during that period, according to data compiled by AI product popularity tracker Aicpb.com.
4. Kuaishou Plans “QuanQuan” App as Didi Enters Home Services
Kuaishou Technology has announced fresh commercialization milestones for Kling AI, its large-scale video generation model. The company revealed that Kling AI crossed $20 million in monthly revenue in December 2025, translating to an estimated annual recurring revenue (ARR) of around $240 million.
The milestone was reached just 19 months after launch. Kling AI hit $100 million in ARR by its 10th month in March 2025 and went on to double that figure within the next nine months. Today, the platform is widely used across professional creative industries such as marketing, e-commerce, film and television, short-form dramas, animation, and gaming. By the end of 2025, Kling AI had onboarded more than 60 million creators globally, powered over 600 million videos, and established partnerships with upwards of 30,000 enterprise customers.
5. Baidu’s AI Assistant Reaches Milestone of 200 Million Monthly Active Users
Baidu’s AI assistant Ernie Bot has reached 200 million monthly active users. Ernie Bot is integrated into the Baidu search engine on PCs and in the Baidu search engine application.
Like many other AI assistants, Ernie can answer questions, find flights, or order food. It can also generate images, write summaries, and more. Users can also switch between different AI models, including DeepSeek and Ernie. The AI assistant is also linked to the company’s platforms, such as Baidu Maps and Baidu Health, which provide users with information tailored to their healthcare needs.
6. Siemens and Tencent YouTu Lab Achieve Breakthrough with AdaptCLIP
A joint research effort between Siemens and Tencent YouTu Lab has produced a significant advance in visual anomaly detection.
Their proposed framework, AdaptCLIP, delivers strong zero-shot and few-shot performance across multiple industrial and medical datasets– without requiring fine-tuning on target-domain data. The paper has been accepted by AAAI 2026. The research addresses a core challenge in industrial inspection and medical imaging: accurately identifying and localizing subtle anomalies when data distributions shift and defect samples are extremely scarce.
7. H&M Appoints Neo Hou as Brand Ambassador
H&M has announced Chinese actor and singer Neo Hou as its Greater China brand ambassador, positioning him as the face of the brand’s push around individuality and self-expression.
The company has said Hou’s ability to move fluidly between acting and music – and his free exploration of different creative identities – reflects H&M’s broader message of encouraging consumers to define their own style rather than follow a single template. The announcement comes as the Lunar New Year shopping season ramps up, a period when fashion brands typically launch limited collections and high-visibility campaigns to capture a slice of gift-giving demand and festive wardrobe purchases.
8. Temu Catches up with Amazon in Global Cross-Border Ecommerce
In a seismic shift for the global retail landscape, Temu, the budget shopping platform owned by PDD Holdings, has caught up with Amazon.com in cross-border market share globally.
The platform, which launched in 2022, saw its share surge from less than 1 percent then to 24 percent last year, on par with American giant Amazon, according to a survey published by International Post Corporation (IPC), an association of 26 national postal services in Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America. Amazon’s share, on the other hand, has slightly slipped over the past few years. Its market share for the cross-border sector, where consumers purchase goods shipped from elsewhere, was 25 percent in 2024 and 26 percent in the two prior years.
Wrapping Up
The vast and diverse nature of the Chinese Social Media space makes it incredibly challenging to keep a tab on the rapid developments taking place. However, China’s Digital Digest brings you all the latest updates from there to keep you abreast of all the evolving trends.
To delve deeper into the findings of our latest report, click here.