TikTok saga: final episode?
Welcome back to What’s Happening in China, your weekly China brief.
This is probably our last issue of 2025, so I’d like to wish you a wonderful holiday season if you celebrate!
Let’s jump into it.
— PC
Through the Lens
In Focus
I. U.S.-China AI chip race
In a high-security Shenzhen laboratory, Chinese scientists have built what Washington has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing the cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones and weapons central to Western military dominance, Reuters has learned.
Completed in early 2025 and now undergoing testing, the prototype fills nearly an entire factory floor. It was built by a team of former engineers from Dutch semiconductor giant ASML who reverse-engineered the company’s extreme ultraviolet lithography machines or EUVs, according to two people with knowledge of the project.
EUV machines sit at the heart of a technological Cold War. They use beams of extreme ultraviolet light to etch circuits thousands of times thinner than a human hair onto silicon wafers, currently a capability monopolized by the West. The smaller the circuits, the more powerful the chips.
China’s machine is operational and successfully generating extreme ultraviolet light, but has not yet produced working chips, the people said.
In April, ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet said that China would need “many, many years” to develop such technology. But the existence of this prototype, reported by Reuters for the first time, suggests China may be years closer to achieving semiconductor independence than analysts anticipated.
Read: How China built its ‘Manhattan Project’ to rival the West in AI chips (Reuters)
Related:
China boosts AI chip output by upgrading older ASML machines (Financial Times)
China’s AI Chip Deficit: Why Huawei Can’t Catch Nvidia and U.S. Export Controls Should Remain (Council on Foreign Relations)
Can the West recover from China’s hi-tech knockout blow? (Chatham House)
II. TikTok saga: final episode?
TikTok has signed the deal backed by President Donald Trump to spin off its US assets to create a new entity with a group of mostly American investors, CEO Shou Chew told employees in a memo Thursday.
Although the transaction is not yet complete, the move brings TikTok one step closer to securing its long-term future in the United States. It comes after a law passed last year required that the US version of the app be spun off from its parent company, ByteDance, or be banned in the United States. Trump repeatedly delayed enforcement of the law as he pursued a deal to transfer control of the popular app to American ownership.
“We have signed agreements with investors regarding a new TikTok U.S. joint venture, enabling over 170 million Americans to continue discovering a world of endless possibilities as part of a vital global community,” Chew said in his memo, which was obtained by CNN. A person familiar with the company confirmed the memo’s accuracy.
Read: TikTok has signed the deal to spin off its US entity with American investor group (CNN)
III. “Best China Books of 2025”
As armchair travelers at China Books Review (though both editors did visit China this year), we can observe a few trends in the shifting landscape of what’s being published about, and in, China and the Sinophone world. First: more books are coming out than ever; we counted 655 English-language books on or from greater China this year, up from 567 last year (though we may just be getting better at finding them). Second: fewer of those books are reported works and memoirs from on the ground, and more are academic or policy titles (with a steady sprinkle of translated fiction, up on last year). Third: there’s been a shift in what China books sell the best. The top spots in our bestseller list used to be occupied by conspiracy theories and Cold War Redux warnings; now there are more tech profiles and mixed portrayals of China proving sticky in the top five.
Does this show a change of analysis or perspective? Ultimately, any trendlines are buried in the diversity of the field. The range of genres and topics, and sheer weight of the shelf, can be overwhelming — which is where we come in. We canvassed a roster of writers and scholars on China to tell us their favorite books from this year, as well as adding some of our own and taking nominations for our book prize into account. All to come up with the below lists of 10 nonfiction titles and 10 works of literature (in no particular) that we think you should read, with recommendations written by experts in the field.
Read: Best China Books of 2025 (China Books Review)
Related: Dissecting the Douban Best Books of 2025 lists (Andrew)
