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2025-03-31 | 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:

• AstraZeneca invests $2.5B to expand biotech in Beijing

• VanEck rejoins China, signaling renewed foreign fund confidence

• Walker robots at Audi take humanoids into car factories

• China mass-produces 31-inch color e-paper, a global first

🎂 This month also marks the 1-year anniversary of China Insights. Thanks for reading, growing, and staying curious with us. We would appreciate your help and share China Insights with your friends!

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

UK’s AstraZeneca to invest USD 2.5 billion in new global strategic R&D center, biotech agreements, and manufacturing in Beijing (link)

AstraZeneca has announced a USD 2.5 billion investment in Beijing to establish its sixth global strategic R&D center, alongside major research and manufacturing agreements aimed at advancing life sciences in China. This five-year investment includes partnerships with three local biotech firms — Harbour BioMed, Syneron Bio, and BioKangtai—and follows the recent Fibrogen announcement. The new R&D center, AstraZeneca's second in China after Shanghai, will focus on early-stage research and clinical development, supported by an AI and data science laboratory. It will be located in the Beijing International Pharmaceutical Innovation Park, near leading biotechs and research hospitals. Additionally, AstraZeneca is launching a joint venture with BioKangtai to develop and manufacture innovative vaccines, marking its first and only vaccine manufacturing facility in China. The company expects its Beijing workforce to grow to 1,700 employees.

China's Kunlun Tech releases the world's first music reasoning model, DeepSeek releases upgrade to its v3 model (link, link)

Chinese tech company Kunlun Tech has launched the world's first music reasoning model, Mureka O1, which introduces chain-of-thought technology to enhance music quality, creation efficiency, and flexibility. The model uses the MusiCoT method to pre-generate music structures before finalizing auto tokens for decoding, improving structural coherence and instrumental arrangement. Kunlun also released Mureka V6, which supports pure music generation and AI music creation in 10 languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, and French. Both models support various music styles such as jazz, electronic, pop, and rock, and offer features like music reference and vocal functions.

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has released DeepSeek-V3-0324, a 685-billion-parameter large language model with a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, allowing it to activate only 37 billion parameters for specific tasks, drastically reducing computational demands. The model can run on consumer-grade hardware like Apple’s Mac Studio with an M3 Ultra chip, achieving 20 tokens per second. This represents a significant shift from the data center requirements typically associated with state-of-the-art AI. While early testers report it outperforms other leading commercial AI systems, the model is freely available under an MIT license, contrasting with Western AI companies’ closed approaches.