About us

Something is happening in China’s tech world that most English-language readers ever get to see.

Not because the information doesn’t exist — it does, in abundance. But it lives in Mandarin, inside institutions that don’t hold press conferences, among engineers and researchers who have no particular reason to talk to outside observers. The filtering that happens between there and here is real, and the gap between what is actually happening and what gets reported has a way of compounding quietly.

We’ve been working on that gap for a decade.

Since 2015, our team has been building relationships inside China’s technology ecosystem — with research institutions, engineering teams, the developers and product managers inside the country’s largest tech companies, and the executives whose decisions shape where the industry moves. That work has given us a kind of access that doesn’t come from press credentials or conference invitations: the access that comes from being present, consistently, over years.

X.PIN is what we’re doing with it.

What we are

X.PIN is not a translation service. It is not a geopolitical newsletter with tech bolted on. It is not written for a general audience curious about China from a distance.

It is written for people who follow China’s technology development seriously — who want to understand not just what is being built, but where, by whom, and under what constraints.

We cover China’s technology sector broadly: AI, semiconductors, manufacturing and supply chains, new energy vehicles, consumer internet, and the wider ecosystem China’s tech industry is actively shaping. What these stories share is not a theme but a method — primary reporting, direct sourcing, and a commitment to saying clearly what we’ve seen and what we haven’t.

Why now

China’s technology sector is moving faster than most outside observers have frameworks to process — not just in AI, but in medical diagnostics, industrial automation, electric vehicles, and semiconductor development. These are not adjacent stories. They are happening simultaneously, inside the same institutions, shaped by the same policy environment. The received wisdom in English-language coverage tends to lag the reality by months, sometimes more.

We think that lag is a problem. We’re starting this newsletter because we believe it’s a solvable one.

What to expect

We’re doing this deliberately. We’d rather earn your trust before we ask for your subscription dollars. We’d rather you share this with a colleague because it was genuinely useful, not because you got a referral credit.

Our first piece — publishing today alongside this letter — is an investigation into one of the largest medical AI deployments in the world: three models developed at Alibaba’s DAMO Academy that are quietly redefining what early cancer detection looks like at national scale. It contains data points and observations we have not seen reported in English anywhere else.

That’s what we’re here to do.

If you found your way to this letter, someone trusted you enough to share it, or you were curious enough to find it yourself. Either way — welcome.

The X.PIN Team