Round Table China

Deep in the Italian Alps lies a course so punishing that it has broken some of the world's best athletes. This year, it was conquered by Zhao Jiaju, a Chinese runner who once delivered takeout for a living. A year earlier, the same mountains handed him his worst defeat. This time, he did not simply finish the race. He rewrote the record book and became the first non-European ever to win. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

China is pushing harder to remove phones from classrooms, and a new Chongqing regulation marks a notable escalation. Schools there can now ban smartphones, tablets, and smartwatches, but this measure sits inside a juvenile crime prevention law rather than an education policy. That raises difficult questions about the link between screen habits and criminal behavior, and whether real evidence justifies the connection. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

Every text you send, every search you run, every question you ask an AI passes through the same quiet piece of software beneath your fingertips, and it is watching all of it. In 2026, China's biggest tech companies are fighting to control that software, and the stakes go far beyond convenience. The battle to reinvent the keyboard may be the fiercest front in the AI competition, hiding in the one place nobody thinks to look. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

China has now approved the world's first national standard for BCI medical devices that use AI to interpret brainwaves, setting rules for how brain data is collected and accessed. The question now is whether that standard makes the technology safer for patients, and whether BCIs are finally entering everyday medicine. On the show: Steve, Yushan & Yushun

Bringing someone into your home to clean or care for your family feels like a private arrangement. In China, it is also a thirty-million-person industry, one that has long run on informal deals, unclear hours, and unanswered questions about who is responsible when something goes wrong. Now nineteen new measures aim to change how that work is done, covering everything from training and insurance to background checks and pricing. On the show: Steve, Fei Fei & Yushan