The WeChat AI Field Guide
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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WeChat
1 min read
The entire article is a guide to navigating WeChat for AI news. Understanding WeChat's history, technical architecture, censorship mechanisms, and its role as a 'super-app' in Chinese digital life provides essential context for why this platform matters for following China's AI landscape.
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Zhongguancun
10 min read
The article references Haidian as 'the Silicon Valley of Beijing' and mentions Zhongguancun-affiliated organizations. Zhongguancun is China's most important technology hub, and understanding its history and ecosystem illuminates why so much AI media and development is concentrated there.
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Great Firewall
15 min read
The article discusses how a translator changed 'inside the Great Firewall' to 'inside the Great Wall' to navigate censorship, and the broader context of Chinese internet censorship shapes why WeChat-based media operates differently from Western platforms. Understanding the technical and political aspects of China's internet censorship is crucial context.
Much of the coverage we do at ChinaTalk relies on WeChat, the Tencent super-app where most Chinese people send messages, consume content, and share updates with friends and family. WeChat is a huge information ecosystem and an arguably essential resource for following the latest news in China’s AI landscape.
Where should you go on WeChat (and on the broader Chinese internet) to learn about what’s happening in AI? The ChinaTalk Cinematic Universe brings you a comprehensive guide to following AI on WeChat, featuring:
How to make your WeChat work like Substack;
Various types of AI media outlets;
And how to read beyond WeChat.
We’re also looking to run a weekly roundup of the most interesting Chinese developments around AI in the newsletter. If interested, submit a sample here. We pay!
How WeChat Works
Specifically relevant for our purposes is the “Official Accounts” tab. It’s a little like a Substack ecosystem inside WeChat: anyone can open an Official Account on WeChat and publish articles to their subscribers’ feeds — and reading and sharing Official Account articles is a daily occurrence for WeChat users. Government organs, public service authorities, news media (both state-run and independent), and corporations alike use Official Accounts to communicate with citizens.
Subscribing to relevant Official Accounts is the most streamlined way to read Chinese tech news directly from the source. WeChat makes it very easy for non-Chinese speakers to navigate by putting a “Translate Full Text” option at the top of every article, although the quality of translation remains mediocre relative to what ChatGPT can deliver.
Our Favorites
For headlines:
新智元 AI Era
Founded in 2015 by Yang Jing 杨静, then a researcher at the Ministry of Civil Affairs-affiliated Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence, AI Era is one of the earliest and most successful media-entrepreneurship ventures to focus on AI in China. AI Era hosted the inaugural World AI Conference (WAIC) back in 2016. Its feed is a blend of repackaged stories from Western tech media, accessible explanations of new ML/AI research, and content for aficionados. While AI Era doesn’t produce a lot of original reporting, it is a solid one-stop shop for keeping up
...This excerpt is provided for preview purposes. Full article content is available on the original publication.