China ties traffic hijack to U.S. network | Response to DeepSeek ban | China's AI compute up 146%

Your morning brief on Chinese technology.

Bottom Line Up Front

Chinese investigation traces gambling site redirects to a network registered by U.S. company QOREXA LABS and asks internet registries to revoke its routing number. China's foreign ministry pledged to defend companies after a Department of Homeland Security order barred DeepSeek's AI tools, including third-party products built on them, from 102 federal civilian agencies. China's AI computing capacity rose 146% from a year earlier to 2,592 EFLOPS at the end of September, the industry ministry said. Hefei-based instrument maker CIQTEK launched the TEM-F200, a 200-kilovolt transmission electron microscope, on Sunday and says it can support high-resolution imaging analysis for semiconductors and advanced materials.

An investigation report carried by state broadcaster CCTV blames gambling site redirects hitting users in several Chinese provinces on AS 402425, a routing number registered by U.S. company QOREXA LABS. The report asks internet registries to revoke the number and network operators to filter routes carrying it. The attackers registered false address prefixes in internet routing registries, then announced short paths from the network they controlled, pulling part of China's domestic traffic through it. Routers accept such announcements largely on trust and prefer the shortest path, so a false short path wins until operators filter it out. They then rewrote DNS answers in the hijacked traffic, the lookups that turn a website name into a numeric address, pointing them at gambling sites or at malicious DNS servers that returned those addresses. QOREXA LABS, whose website shows a bitcoin-related business, registered the number with ARIN, North America's internet number registry, on April 9.

Read at CnBeta ↗

China vows to defend its companies after U.S. bars federal agencies from DeepSeek AI

China's foreign ministry pledged today to safeguard Chinese companies' legitimate rights, answering a U.S. order that bars federal civilian agencies from DeepSeek's AI tools. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) order also covers third-party products built on DeepSeek, so it reaches vendors selling such tools to 102 civilian agencies. Caixin reports no public information showing that those agencies use DeepSeek's models or related products. Spokesperson Mao Ning said China opposes overstretching the concept of national security and politicizing technology and trade issues.

Read at Yicaistate media ↗·Read at Caixin ↗·Read at AFP ↗·Read at Federal Registergovt ↗

China's AI computing capacity rose 146% in a year, industry ministry says

China's AI computing capacity reached 2,592 EFLOPS at the end of September, up 146% from a year earlier, said Xie Cun, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT). Computing capacity sets how much AI training and serving a country can do, so the figure gives a current official baseline for China's capacity for that work. One EFLOPS is a quintillion (a billion billion) calculations per second. MIIT has also approved two private companies to run commercial trials of satellite internet-of-things services, which link remote sensors and devices through satellites.

Read at ITHome ↗

Instrument maker CIQTEK launches atomic-resolution electron microscope it says is ready for mass production

Hefei-based instrument maker CIQTEK launched the TEM-F200, a 200-kilovolt transmission electron microscope, on Sunday and says it can already deliver the instrument in mass production. Science and Technology Daily says Chinese users have relied on a few foreign makers to buy and service these instruments, so a domestic unit delivered in volume would give them a home-built source. The microscope fires electrons through a thin sample to image its internal structure, and CIQTEK reports an information resolution of 0.1 nanometers, roughly the width of one atom. Chairman He Yu said the instrument can support high-resolution imaging, defect analysis and nanoscale composition analysis in semiconductors and advanced materials.

Read at Science and Technology Dailystate media ↗·Read at NetEase ↗

POLICY & REGULATION

China's industry ministry proposes barring driver-assistance cars from automated-driving indicator lamps

China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) released a draft mandatory standard that would reserve automated-driving marker lamps for cars with Level 3 or higher systems, which drive themselves under set conditions. The lamp would light only while the automated system drives, so other road users would no longer see an automation signal on Level 2 driver-assistance cars, whose drivers must stay in control. Most Level 2 indicator lamps so far have been blue, the so-called "little blue light," and the draft gives automated-driving lamps a dedicated turquoise color. Comments close Dec. 19, and MIIT recommends the standard take effect Jan. 1, 2028.

Read at ITHome ↗·Read at CnEVPost ↗

III

CHIPS & SEMICONDUCTORS

Chipmaker SpacemiT unveils what it calls the first fully RISC-V-compliant server chip

Chinese chipmaker SpacemiT released its V100 computing chip at the sixth RISC-V Summit China in Shenzhen yesterday, calling it the first chip fully compliant with RISC-V's server-class specification. RISC-V is an open instruction set, the basic command language a processor understands, which any company can use without paying license fees. A chip built to its server specification lets Chinese designers build for servers without licensing x86 or Arm designs. Founder and CEO Chen Zhijian said SpacemiT plans to release a new generation of chips every year.

Read at InfoQ China ↗

QUANTUM & FRONTIER SCIENCE

AI developer MiniMax releases coding agent model priced at half DeepSeek's peak rate

Chinese AI developer MiniMax released M3.1 Flash, a model for coding and for multistep tasks it carries out on its own, at half the peak-hour price of DeepSeek's newest fast model. Coding agents consume tokens, the word fragments AI services bill by, in large volumes on every task, so per-token price largely sets what developers pay to automate software work. MiniMax charges 1 yuan (about 15 cents) per million input tokens and 4 yuan (about 60 cents) per million output tokens, level with DeepSeek's off-peak rates. Its own benchmarks put M3.1 Flash at 62.2 on Automation-Bench, a business automation test, against 60.5 for DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash-1017, though DeepSeek's model ranked first on the DeepSWE coding test.

Read at 36Kr ↗

China rolls out what state media call its first domestic propulsion pod for polar icebreakers

China's first high-power podded propulsor built for polar icebreaking ships, as state media describe it, rolled off a production line on Shanghai's Changxing Island. State media say no domestic unit had been ready for installation on a real ship, so Chinese shipyards building polar vessels gain a home-built source for the component state media call those ships' "heart." The unit houses an electric motor and propeller in a pod beneath the hull that rotates to steer the ship as well as drive it. It must withstand constant ice impact and cold. Before leaving the line, it completed full-load testing on a 40-megawatt bench that simulated extreme operating conditions.

Read at Global Timesstate media ↗

MILITARY WATCH

Chinese navy says it tracked U.S. warship near disputed Spratly shoal

The People's Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command Navy, which covers the South China Sea, said it tracked the USS Charleston after the U.S. warship entered waters near Sabina Shoal without Beijing's approval. The statement puts on record a Chinese naval tracking operation against a named U.S. ship in the Spratly Islands, which the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan also claim in whole or in part. Spokesperson Yin Gang said the transit infringed China's sovereignty and threatened maritime security, and demanded that the United States immediately stop such activities. The Charleston is a littoral combat ship, a small warship built for operations close to shore.

Read at China Military Onlinegovt ↗·Read at Ecns.cnstate media ↗·Read at Anadolu Agency ↗