My first paid piece for New China Literacy is out.

It is a contextual investigation into how a Chinese international-relations think tank briefly became an AI company during the 2023 AIGC boom.

The story begins with Haitu AIGC, a generative-AI product launched by Intellisia in Shenzhen in April 2023. Within seven months, it had financing, offices, industry-association memberships, public demonstrations, provincial recognition, and a place in the institute’s year-end achievements. Then it largely disappeared from public view.

This is about a wider mechanism: how policy credibility, academic authority, open-source models, thin product wrappers, and the language of “self-developed” and “secure and controllable” could be assembled into something that looked like a domestic AI company.

I wrote this as the first paid piece because it represents the kind of work I want New China Literacy to make possible: granular, evidence-based, institutionally informed, and difficult to write from inside the Chinese-language public sphere.

For seven months in 2023, that was enough.