AI Fights Cancer 🎯 DHGate Tops US Charts 📱 China’s BYD Wins in NYC 🏆

2025-04-21 | subscribe | homepage

Welcome back to this week’s edition of the China Insights Weekly Newsletter!

Here are some of the key highlights for this week’s edition:

• Shanghai opens visa-free business zone near Pudong Airport

• Fudan develops world’s fastest flash memory, aiming for consumer rollout

• ASEAN+3 adds yuan to regional currency swap safety net

• Vietnam’s VietJet leases C909 jets as China expands aviation reach

Dive deeper into these stories and more by clicking the headlines below. We value your feedback. Let us know your thoughts or suggestions on LinkedIn, X or Facebook.

🚀 Headlines

Chinese ecommerce app DHGate surges to the top of US app store as tariff anxiety hits (link)

On April 15, DHgate, a B2B cross-border e-commerce platform, unexpectedly soared to third place on the US iOS App Store’s free app rankings. According to Appfigures, DHgate’s iOS downloads surged to 117,500 on April 13, a 732% increase from its 30-day average, with US downloads accounting for 65,100 of those, up roughly 940%. The surge was driven by opportunistic messaging by Chinese sellers and rising anxiety among US consumers over tariff hikes. TikTok videos highlighting Chinese manufacturing and affordable luxury alternatives on DHgate contributed to the platform’s popularity. Founded in 2004, DHgate was China’s first B2B export e-commerce platform. DHgate founder and CEO Diane Wang was among the first employees at Microsoft China. In 2000, she became CEO of Joyo.com, which was later acquired by Amazon. Wang left Joyo.com in 2002 and launched DHgate two years later. As of April 21st, DHGate was the #1 app on iPhone in the Shopping category, as 5 Chinese apps rank in the top 10.

Alibaba’s cancer detector becomes first AI model to receive US FDA’s ‘Breakthrough Device’ status, AI paper by 4 Chinese scientists paved the way for ChatGPT (link, link)

Alibaba's Damo Academy has developed an AI-powered tool for early pancreatic cancer detection, becoming the first AI model to receive the US FDA's "breakthrough device" designation. Named Damo Panda, the tool uses AI to identify subtle lesions in CT images that are difficult for the human eye to detect, achieving a screen sensitivity of 92.9% and a specificity of 99.9%. Since its launch in November 2023, Damo Panda has been used in some Chinese hospitals, including Ningbo University's Affiliated People's Hospital, where it diagnosed six early-stage pancreatic cancer cases out of 40,000 patients, two of which were missed in regular exams. China has been accelerating AI applications in healthcare, with the National Healthcare Security Administration including AI-assisted diagnosis in its medical service price guide for the first time in November.

A research paper authored by four Chinese researchers in 2016 has become the most cited scientific paper of the 21st century and is on track to become the most cited paper of all time. The paper, published at the 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, deals with ResNets, or deep residual learning networks. Its findings have paved the way for artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT and AlphaGo. The leading paper received between 103,756 and 254,074 citations, depending on the database consulted. The authors of the paper—He Kaiming, Ren Shaoqing, Sun Jian, and Zhang Xiangyu—were all members of Microsoft Research Asia at the time. The paper addresses the issue of performance degradation in deep neural networks, where the learning signal weakens as it passes through more layers.

ASEAN + China, Japan, and South Korea add yuan to currency swap network (link)

The ASEAN+3 (China, Japan, and South Korea) currency swap network has approved the addition of the Chinese yuan as a funding currency. This decision was formalized at a recent meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, attended by finance and central bank deputies, including Xuan Changneng, deputy governor of the People’s Bank of China. The move allows all participating countries to contribute yuan to the Chiang Mai Initiative Multilateralization (CMIM), which was established in 2010 to provide a coordinated framework for addressing short-term liquidity needs. Previously, the primary funding currency was the US dollar.