China Digital Digest Weekly: Exploring the Chinese Digital Landscape
- ClickInsights
- 7 hours ago
- 5 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 Plans Spin-Off IPO of T-Head
Alibaba Group is planning an initial public offering for T-Head Semiconductor, its AI chipmaking arm, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sources said Alibaba intends to first restructure T-Head into a standalone company with partial employee ownership, before exploring a public listing. The timing and valuation of the potential IPO have not yet been disclosed. Established in September 2018, T-Head is Alibaba Group’s wholly owned semiconductor subsidiary and serves as the company’s primary vehicle for in-house chip development.
2. Alibaba Unveils Qwen3‑Max‑Thinking
Alibaba has officially released its flagship reasoning model, Qwen3‑Max‑Thinking, setting multiple new global records on authoritative benchmarks.
Qwen3‑Max‑Thinking is currently Alibaba’s largest and most powerful reasoning model, with over 1 trillion parameters and 36 trillion pretraining tokens. Its performance rivals GPT‑5.2 and Gemini 3 Pro, making it the strongest AI large model in China and the closest domestic model to top international counterparts to date.
3. Pony Ma Details Tencent’s AI Strategy at Annual Meeting
At Tencent’s annual company meeting, Pony Ma, Chairman and CEO of Tencent, delivered a speech outlining the company’s strategic thinking and investment priorities in artificial intelligence.
Ma reviewed Tencent’s “cost reduction and efficiency improvement” phase since 2022 and noted that the company’s overall investment began to rebound in 2025 due to increased spending on AI. In a rare public move, he also commented on ByteDance’s Doubao Phone and Alibaba’s Qwen, raising concerns about the security of the Doubao Phone.
4. vivo Halts AI Glasses Project
Smartphone maker vivo has recently suspended its AI glasses project, which had been developed in stealth for around six months and had already entered the demo stage in collaboration with multiple ODM partners, including Goertek and ThunderSoft.
According to a source familiar with the matter, vivo had explored several AI glasses concepts, including audio-video-focused designs and models with single-color display modules. However, before a final direction was set, the project was shelved. The key reason, the source said, was a judgment by senior executives– including Executive Vice President Hu Baishan– that vivo’s AI glasses would be very difficult to differentiate under current conditions.
5. Meituan Launches “Ask Xiaotuan” AI Search
Meituan has introduced a new AI-powered search feature, “Ask Xiaotuan,” as part of a recent app update on iOS and major Android platforms.
The launch is accompanied by a refresh of Meituan’s in-app branding, with the slogan shifting from “A Little Helper for a Better Life” to “Ask Meituan, It’s All Taken Care Of.” The company says “Ask Xiaotuan” moves well beyond traditional keyword search. Powered by Meituan’s self-developed LongCat large language model and integrated with multiple mainstream foundation models, the feature acts as an AI-driven decision assistant.
6. Baidu Unveils ERNIE 5.0 with 2.4 Trillion Parameters
Baidu has officially launched ERNIE 5.0, its latest fully multimodal large language model. With an unprecedented 2.4 trillion parameters, the new model delivers powerful advances in language understanding and generation, marking a major leap forward in AI capabilities.
ERNIE 5.0 is built on a new unified multimodal modeling architecture, enabling it to process and reason across text, images, audio, and video within a single framework. By deeply integrating multiple data modalities, the model achieves more accurate comprehension and generation across complex tasks.
7. ByteDance’s Doubao AI Appointed Official Guide at Shanghai’s Pudong Art Museum
ByteDance’s Doubao AI has partnered with the Shanghai Pudong Art Museum, becoming the official AI guide for two major exhibitions– marking what is widely regarded as the first instance of an AI product serving as an official museum docent.
The collaboration covers “Pattern and Ornament: Islamic Art from the Louvre” and “Extraordinary Picasso.” Powered by Doubao’s Seed 1.8 model, the system was trained on exclusive exhibition data and optimized search capabilities to enable artwork recognition and continuous natural-language dialogue.
8. Kuaishou’s Kling AI Reaches 12 Million MAU
Kuaishou’s video generation model Kling AI has recorded rapid growth, with monthly active users (MAU) surpassing 12 million in January, according to a report by LatePost.
More notably, Kling AI’s commercial performance has significantly outpaced internal expectations. The report estimates that full-year revenue for 2025 will reach USD 140 million, more than double Kuaishou’s original annual target of USD 60 million set at the beginning of the year. The strong user growth and monetization performance underscore Kling AI’s market traction and its potential to become a meaningful revenue driver within Kuaishou’s AI strategy.
9. Moonshot AI Launches New Funding Round as Multimodal Model Update Expected Soon
Large-model unicorn Moonshot AI (known for its Kimi series) has launched a new round of fundraising, according to people familiar with the matter.
The company’s pre-money valuation is said to be close to USD 4.8 billion, up from a post-money valuation of USD 4.3 billion following its USD 500 million Series C round, which was completed less than a month ago. Moonshot AI is also expected to roll out a major model upgrade in the near future, potentially involving the much-anticipated K2-VL multimodal large model.
10. China Fines Ecommerce Firm PDD for Tax Violations Amid Probe
Shanghai’s tax authority has fined an operating entity of PDD Holdings, citing its failure to comply with local tax requirements.
Shanghai Xunmeng Information Technology, a PDD subsidiary which operates Pinduoduo, failed to report necessary information concerning its platform operators and employees for the third quarter of 2025, the city’s tax authority said, adding the company failed to rectify the issue despite notice from the government. The 100,000-yuan (US$14,359) fine follows a reported fistfight between PDD employees and market regulators last month, which garnered wide market and media attention and resulted in the firing of dozens of PDD staff members.
11. China’s Trip.Com Probe Targets Algorithms, Prices After Vendor Anger
China’s market regulator has opened a formal antitrust investigation into Trip.com Group Ltd, alleging the online travel giant may have abused its dominant market position and engaged in monopolistic practices under the country’s Anti-Monopoly Law.
The probe comes amid complaints from travel operators about unfair clauses, high commissions and pricing algorithms that may disadvantage competitors and partners. Trip.com said it is cooperating with regulators, and its business operations continue normally for now. The announcement triggered a fall in its share price as investors weighed potential penalties and regulatory outcomes. The move reflects Beijing’s ongoing scrutiny of major tech and platform companies to curb unfair competition.
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.