About Hello China Tech

Hello China Tech

Hello China Tech is an English-language newsletter analysing China's technology industry, written from Beijing by Poe Zhao. It exists, in its own words, to close a gap: Western tech media, its About page argues, covers China through a familiar lens of geopolitical threat, copycat economy or a state reining in its own companies, while Chinese state media tells a mirror-image story of inevitable triumph, and neither is useful to readers making decisions about investments, partnerships, strategy or policy. Hello China Tech's answer is analysis built on Chinese-language primary sources: IPO prospectuses, government and regulatory filings, state-owned enterprise procurement announcements, earnings calls and Chinese industry reporting, read in the original by a Beijing-based analyst who has watched the industry for twelve years. It published more than 200 deep dives in its first year, with new analysis every week, and says its work has been cited by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Reuters, The Economist, CNN, AFP, WIRED and the South China Morning Post.

The author: Poe Zhao in Beijing

The newsletter is written by Poe Zhao, who states the essentials of his position plainly: "I live in Beijing. I read the Chinese sources in Chinese. And I have watched this industry for 12 years." He has spent those twelve years analysing technology and innovation industries, founded a previous venture called Dailyio, and is based in Beijing because, as he argues, the work does not function from outside: a writer has to be present, reading the filings the day they come out, for long enough to know what came before. Chinese is his first language and English his second, a fact he discloses as part of explaining how each article is made. The operation is small and personal: readers can reply to any newsletter or email him directly, a co-founder, Candice Zhang, handles operations and business development, and Poe Zhao states that every topic, argument and conclusion in Hello China Tech is his own.

Editorial convictions

Hello China Tech is built, its author says, on three editorial convictions. The first is to treat Chinese tech companies as rational actors, whose strategies follow from real constraints, regulation, capital, competition and politics, a logic that he argues explains more than shorthand references to state subsidy or intellectual property theft. The second is to explain the machinery behind the output: a fast initial public offering or a big deployment number is the output, while the newsletter looks for the funding, approval and buying systems that produced it. The third is to be honest about both systems, holding two facts at once: that Chinese innovation under constraint can be impressive, and that it is still a response to constraint. These convictions shape a publication that is analytical rather than reportorial, concerned less with breaking headlines than with the structures that make the headlines predictable.

Four lenses: system, industry, language and history

The About page organises the newsletter's advantage into four elements, each illustrated by a free essay. The system means understanding how the Chinese state works with the market: who funds a company, who approves its IPO and who buys its first product, rules Poe Zhao has written down in six principles and re-scores every July in The China Tech Field Guide. The industry means recognising why Chinese tech companies so often act the same way, where their money comes from, what they need before going public and how a price war ends; his example contrasts big platforms, which can try every way of making money from artificial intelligence at once, with a startup lab that can afford only one bet. The language means reading the original Chinese rather than a translation, as in his account of a four-hour meeting between DeepSeek's founder and investors published only in Chinese. The history means recognising that most of today's China tech news has happened before, a theme of his free Origins series, where the 3Q War of 2010 is presented as the moment platforms won the right to block a rival.

Coverage areas

The newsletter's stated coverage spans the commanding heights of Chinese technology. On artificial intelligence and large language models, it follows DeepSeek, Zhipu, MiniMax, Moonshot and StepFun alongside the platform giants ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu, examining model competition, pricing dynamics, state-directed enterprise deployment, the economics of AI startup survival and the demand layer of tokens, tenders and workflow integration that Western coverage largely ignores. On semiconductors, it sets Nvidia against Huawei's parallel ecosystem and analyses domestic GPU challengers including Moore Threads, Enflame, Kunlunxin and Cambricon through their prospectus filings, alongside CXMT's DRAM challenge, the Hefei Model of the state acting as venture capitalist, export controls and procurement dynamics. Electric vehicles and autonomous driving coverage addresses the tension between domestic price-war survival and global brand-building, CATL's value-chain dominance and robotaxi expansion into the Middle East. Robotics coverage develops a thesis about the overlap between smart cars and humanoid robots, while policy coverage treats AI regulation, content labelling, local government financing vehicle mechanics and untranslatable concepts such as Xinchuang that shape deals in the market.

Formats: deep dives, FlashPoint, recaps and reports

Hello China Tech publishes in several distinct formats. Deep dives are its core: long-form analysis with original frameworks drawn from primary Chinese sources, appearing two to four times a week depending on the news, with paid subscribers reading every piece in full and free subscribers receiving previews plus selected deep dives unlocked in full. FlashPoint is rapid-response analysis of market-moving events, terse and financial-first, taking one event and drawing one structural implication, published the same day or the next morning and restricted to paid subscribers. A Weekly Recap, published on Sundays and also sent by email, ties the week's essays into one narrative thread and flags what to watch next, free to every subscriber. Separately, the newsletter produces long sector reports that rebuild a year of coverage on one sector into a single document with a data appendix and a stated data cutoff date, sold individually, with one longer sector report each quarter promised in its higher tiers, alongside the annual China Tech Field Guide.

Grading its own calls

An unusual feature of the publication is its public self-assessment. Every essay carries a date, Poe Zhao notes, so every call can be checked. The Field Guide re-scores his six principles each July, and an annual letter, "What I Got Wrong About China Tech," grades individual calls: in year one, he reports, two held clean, one broke on its arithmetic and one he missed. Founding members receive a quarterly Founding Letter in which his calls are likewise settled in public, together with a Framework Index keeping the named frameworks behind the archive current. This apparatus of dated predictions and published corrections is presented as part of the product: readers making investment, strategy or policy decisions are offered not only analysis but a checkable record of how the analyst's previous analysis performed.

Transparency about AI and sources

The newsletter publishes a detailed account of how its articles are made. Poe Zhao states that he chooses every topic himself, reads the Chinese sources himself, company filings, policy documents, earnings calls, local media and industry conversations, and that the frameworks and calls are his own. He also discloses his use of artificial intelligence tools in three roles: drafting, when he starts from Chinese notes and an outline and AI produces the first English draft; editing, to make the English clearer and shorter; and challenge, asking AI to find weak points in his argument while he decides what to change. Article illustrations, he notes, are generated with AI image tools from his prompts. Against that, he states what AI does not do: it does not choose topics or form his views, he reads and edits every line before publication and checks every number and quote against the original Chinese source, and if something is wrong, the mistake is his, with errors corrected in public when readers reply to point them out. The About page carrying this disclosure was last updated in September 2026.

Readers and subscription tiers

The newsletter names three audiences. Investment professionals, venture capitalists, hedge fund analysts and institutional investors, are offered filings-based financial analysis grounded in prospectuses and procurement records. Corporate strategists and executives at multinational companies are offered institutional context, how procurement systems, policy incentives and capital structures determine whether a deal or market entry will succeed. Policy analysts and researchers at think tanks and in government are offered the conceptual vocabulary to move beyond headline narratives. Free subscribers receive previews of every deep dive, selected full deep dives, the Sunday Weekly Recap, the Field Guide and annual calibration letter in full, and more than seventy full articles in an open archive. Paid subscribers receive every deep dive, FlashPoint, the complete archive of more than 200 analyses and research reports at a reduced price. An Institutional Access plan for firms offers full access for five named seats, every research report and one written question a month, while explicitly excluding calls, investment advice, securities recommendations, due diligence, deal sourcing, non-public information and sponsored content, and any influence over editorial judgment.

Recognition and positioning

Hello China Tech says its analysis has been cited by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Reuters, The Economist, CNN, AFP, WIRED and the South China Morning Post, a list it presents as evidence that primary-source, Beijing-based analysis is valued by the international financial and general press. Its positioning within English-language China coverage is deliberate: it is neither a news wire nor a commentary magazine, but a subscription research product that happens to be written by one analyst. Its Start Here page introduces new readers through five free essays beginning with The China Tech Field Guide, and its Reading Guide organises the archive into four layers, foundation (AI chips and semiconductors), intelligence (large models and AI applications), physical (robotics and manufacturing) and market reality (electric vehicles and energy). In a field crowded with newsletters, its distinguishing claims remain the ones on its About page: presence in Beijing, fluency in the primary sources, twelve years of watching the same industry, and a published record of its own predictions being graded in public.