The unexpected success of AI start-up DeepSeek shook the Chinese tech world as much as the Western one. Few had the Hangzhou-based company on their radar as a disruptive player. Hopes were placed on others: Stepfun, for example, founded in April 2023 by a former Senior Vice President of Microsoft. Or Zhipu, which is rumored to have ties to the Chinese military.
What is clear is that China’s AI companies – also known as “AI tigers” – now have to step up their game even more than they already have. However, the fundamental prerequisites for further breakthroughs are there, AI expert Jimmy Goodrich tells Table.Briefings. However, he also sees the developments as a relay race: Those who lead the pack today may fall far behind tomorrow.
China is trying hard to present the province of Xinjiang with an image of normality – but for the Uyghurs living there, everyday life remains characterized by repression. A new investigation by Human Rights Watch shows that the repression extends beyond Xinjiang’s borders. The most bizarre highlight is guided tours for Uyghurs living abroad to their own homeland under strict supervision. Marcel Grzanna has taken a closer look at the situation.
Celebrating birthdays in public was long frowned upon in China. Under Mao, this was the prerogative of the Communist Party alone. Those times have changed, writes Johnny Erling. Today, Generation Z goes to McDonald’s to relive simpler times with junk food. But the paper crown on their heads is ultimately just an expression of weariness with the present. The “little emperors” of yesteryear, who grew up as only children, feel increasingly left behind and alone.
The shocks caused by the Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek in the tech and business world are still being felt. Warnings are particularly loud in the US. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demands that global AI model standards must come from the US. Dario Amodei, CEO of US AI start-up Anthropic, explains that China’s progress in the AI sector, coupled with its industrial strength, could catapult the country into a global leadership role – “not just in AI, but in everything.”
However, DeepSeek’s success sent shockwaves through China’s tech sector, just as it did in the US. The company was not an established player in the Chinese AI scene. “DeepSeek was not in the five-year plan. It’s not a state-owned enterprise, not a national champion,” explains Jimmy Goodrich, a technology analyst specializing in China at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, in an interview with Table.Briefings. He believes precisely this relative shadowy existence in the domestic competition has given the company a decisive advantage. “DeepSeek is not bound to the country’s big internet companies and, unlike them, is not out to make a quick buck – they just wanted to innovate first.”
Nevertheless, Goodrich also sees DeepSeek’s rapid progress as a result of focused government investment in education and research: “China’s universities are increasingly influential on the global stage and produce first-class AI research. That is why DeepSeek is not the only company that can draw from a large talent pool and thus also benefit from government and private investment programs.”
A group of companies known as the “Six AI Tigers” – Stepfun, Zhipu, Minimax, Moonshot, 01.AI and Baichuan – push ahead with developing new AI models. The pressure is enormous: OpenAI is about to release its latest model, “o3”, and its Chinese competitors need to make their models even more efficient and cheaper in light of DeepSeek.
“The race for AI leadership is no longer just about who has access to the best chips, but about who puts them to best use,” said DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in an interview a year ago. However, even after the success of Liang’s model, chips remain a big limiting factor, says Goodrich: “DeepSeek itself admits that the biggest development bottleneck is the lack of chips. More processing power could make their model and that of other Chinese providers even stronger.” All AI companies, whether in China or elsewhere, must therefore continue to focus on mass and large-scale scaling to increase efficiency and growth.
China’s tech giants are also heavily participating. In late January, ByteDance presented its Doubao-1.5-pro language model, which took OpenAI’s “o1” as a benchmark and is reportedly superior in several respects, including cost and energy consumption. Tencent, a company known for gaming and social media applications, focuses on its Hunyuan model, a powerful text-to-video generator that is said to compete with Meta’s Llama 3.1 – and with only a tenth of the computing power that Meta needed for training.
Alibaba Cloud, in turn, followed up with an updated version of its AI model Qwen 2.5. It unveiled Qwen 2.5-Max on January 29, right in the middle of the Spring Festival holidays, which suggests that DeepSeek’s success has also hit the tech giant in the stomach. The company reported that DeepSeek V3 immediately outperformed eleven important benchmarks. Both companies are based in Hangzhou in eastern China, which probably makes the competition even fiercer.
Another promising newcomer is Moonshot AI from Beijing. Like DeepSeek, the company, backed by Alibaba, was founded in 2023 and presented its latest language model around the same time as DeepSeek on January 20 – with far less global attention, but certainly with presentable results. Named Kimi k1.5, the model is said to have surpassed OpenAI’s o1 model in areas such as mathematics and programming. The previous Kimi model had already attracted attention because it could process millions of Chinese characters in one input.
Equally new is Stepfun, founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft Senior Vice President Jiang Daxin. With the support of investors such as Tencent and financial backing from the Shanghai government, the company launched as many as eleven basic AI models, including voice, image, video, audio and multimodal systems.
In addition to powerful AI models, infrastructure and efficiency also play a crucial role in China’s domestic AI race. The start-up ModelBest, founded by researchers at Tsinghua University, focuses on smaller, resource-efficient models. Its MiniCPM series is optimized for smartphones, PCs, smart home devices and robots.
Infinigence AI takes a different approach: The company does not develop its own AI models, but an infrastructure that efficiently combines chips from various manufacturers. This is particularly important for Chinese companies that are struggling with US sanctions.
Zhipu, with a valuation of over two billion US dollars, is one of the largest Chinese AI start-ups and reportedly plans to go public soon. Investors include fund-related institutions of the city of Beijing as well as renowned venture capital firms.
Like Moonshot AI, Zhipu is based in Beijing and is also supported by Alibaba. The company gained worldwide attention after the US government blacklisted it along with other Chinese companies on January 15. Zhipu allegedly maintains ties to the Chinese military and helps the People’s Liberation Army optimize weapons with AI. The company distanced itself from the allegations. “One thing is certain: Zhipu is somewhat more state-oriented than the other AI companies in China,” says Goodrich.
China’s AI push shows that the US lead is not set in stone. “While there was talk of an 18-month gap six months ago, China has already reduced this to just a few months,” says Goodrich. The race is far from over. “I see it as a long relay race – there are many runners, but perhaps no finish line. Whoever started the fastest will not necessarily be the winner in the end,” says the AI expert.
The decisive factor will be who builds the best structures in the long term – in software, hardware and infrastructure. “DeepSeek has proven that China can catch up technologically, but the US could soon counter with new models.”
The life of a Uyghur is still far from normal. China may try to convince the world that the restrictions of its “Strike Hard Campaign” against the ethnic minority in Xinjiang have vanished into thin air. However, a recent investigation by Human Rights Watch once again backs the assumption that the oppression of the population group continues.
The repression targets both Uyghurs living in Xinjiang and those who have left China. Uyghurs with a Chinese passport are just as affected as those with a foreign citizenship. The authorities’ suspicion is so high that the Communist Party’s United Front now offers supervised visits for Uyghurs living abroad who want to visit their families.
Supervised travel at least offers a faster option for obtaining a visa and reduces the risk of possible detention and interrogation by the police. However, official escort comes at a price. Participants told HRW they were closely monitored and had to ask permission to visit their families. Participants were only allowed to speak Mandarin – even among themselves. Participation in propaganda activities praising the Communist Party for its policies in Xinjiang was also mandatory.
“The Chinese government continues to deny Uyghurs their right to leave the country, restrict their freedom of speech and association abroad, and punish them for their ties abroad,” says Yalkun Uluyol, an author of the HRW report. She says the travel restrictions are used to repress Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the diaspora. The human rights organization conducted almost two dozen interviews with those affected in recent months.
Meanwhile, Uyghurs wishing to leave Xinjiang must submit applications, explain the purpose of their trip, provide personal information from family members living abroad and guarantee that they will not contact activists outside the country and will return to China on a specified date.
According to Turghunjan Alawudun, President of the Uyghur lobby organization World Uyghur Congress (WUC), travel documents and passports have long since become an instrument of repression. Many Uyghurs are refused a passport or have an existing document taken away. “This deliberately robs them of the opportunity to leave China or to move around freely,” Alawudun told Table.Briefings.
The WUC complains that the Chinese government uses these measures as a mechanism of transnational repression. Uyghurs living abroad are practically rendered stateless by having their travel documents confiscated or outright denied or pressured to return – with the risk of arrest on arrival.
According to HRW, travel to “sensitive countries” with a large Muslim population, such as Turkey, is not permitted. For business trips, Uyghurs are only allowed to visit certain countries such as Kazakhstan. Chinese citizens of Kazakh origin are also affected by the restrictions.
In principle, border crossings between the two countries are possible without a visa, but there are indications that Kazakhs with Chinese passports have recently been refused re-entry if they have already entered Kazakhstan twice from Xinjiang. This is what Xinjiang researcher Rune Steenberg told Table.Briefings. The anthropologist, who is fluent in Uyghur and also speaks basic Kazakh, refers to several sources who have talked to him about these experiences.
Uyghurs with foreign citizenship already find it very difficult to enter China. Some Uyghurs living abroad were only allowed to visit Xinjiang after “thorough background checks,” which can take up to six months, HRW notes. Some had first to obtain permission from local “neighborhood committees” and local police at their families’ homes and undergo police questioning upon arrival.
“The authorities want to largely dry up the flow of information between Uyghurs at home and abroad,” says Uyghur documentary filmmaker Abduweli Ayup (known for films like “All Static and Noise”). Ayup recently used his X account to spread the news that around 20 Uyghurs had been arrested in Xinjiang in January. Their crime was allegedly responding to a post by a mutual acquaintance who lives in Turkey on the Chinese TikTok variant Douyin. Ayup deleted the post because he was told it would get those arrested even more trouble. He says he is not sure whether they have since been released.
China consistently explains repression against the Uyghurs by referring to its fight against terrorism. The US government and numerous parliaments of Western democracies, on the other hand, describe Beijing’s actions as genocide.
In his old age, Confucius (551 BC-479 BC) called on his disciples to learn from him: “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.” The disciples included his words in their anthology “Sayings of Confucius (Lun Yu).” In 1909, the German sinologist Richard Wilhelm translated them and explained the meaning: At the age of 30, a person must be able to find their way in life and stand firmly on their own two feet.
Confucius’ two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old wisdom has also been popular in the People’s Republic since the Communist Party leadership under party leader Xi Jinping discovered it as a precursor to the politically correct characteristics of Chinese socialism. For the Spring Festival 2025, China’s media wrote: “Celebrate the New Year with Confucius” and praised his homeland as the birthplace of the “First Family under Heaven.”
Party leader Xi combined all of this. At the start of February, he published his 2016 internal speech on the role of the family for the first time. He calls for a return to the harmony of the family and its Confucian values as a guide to mastering the socialist future. However, there is hardly any mention of the Communist Party’s function as a role model. Xi’s tribute begins with the confession, “The root of everything under heaven lies in the family” – “天下之本在家.” Honor your elders, love your young and siblings, ensure harmonious relationships and social problem-solving.
The Party would do well to adopt such virtues for the masses of single children seeking direction. Their slogan for this year’s Spring Festival: “Let’s go home to the family,” has never sounded so loud and so wrong. Since 2023 and after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, social scientists have registered new trends of estrangement between Generation Z and their parents. Family researchers call it the “phenomenon of separation among relatives” – 断亲现象. The Beijing journal “Studies on Contemporary Youth” (当代青年研究) discussed this in 2025 with social researcher Yan Yunxiang, who teaches at Renmin University in Beijing.
When Xi gave the recently published speech in 2016, Beijing had just ended its 35-year one-child dictatorship. The fallout caused China’s society to age unexpectedly quickly and broke down the structures of extended families even faster. Between 1982 and 2020 alone, they shrank from 4.41 to 2.62 members per average household.
The new Generation Z (225 million only children were born between 1980 and 2015) is now – unlike Confucius once hoped – on unsteady footing at the age of 30 instead of firmly established in life. Frustrated and plagued by job anxiety, their longing to quit coined the phrase “wanting to lie flat” (躺平), also an expression of their protest against a life in the hamster wheel of learning, exams and work stress.
These existential crises manifest themselves in other bizarre reactions. A popular new trend among young people is to celebrate their 30th birthday with a fast food party at McDonald’s (麦当劳 过生日). The WeChat page of the cultural magazine “Sanlian Life Weekly” looked into the phenomenon of why groups of young Chinese people meet there: it received answers such as: “I usually work from morning to night. On the weekend, I just want to stay in bed and chill in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips. But on my birthday, I get dressed up. However, I no longer go to a fancy restaurant or luxury hotel to celebrate like I used to and send selfies to friends from there. Since I turned 30, I’ve preferred to party with junk food.”
The reason has to do with their socialization as only children. When McDonald’s spectacularly opened its first Chinese flagship restaurant in Beijing’s main shopping street Wang Fujin in April 1992, the multinational company incorporated one of its successful foreign concepts into its Chinese program. It created Happy Meal children’s corners for special Chinese birthday parties, complete with balloons, birthday paper crowns, and cakes. Other foreign franchising chains and Chinese fast-food giants soon jumped on the bandwagon.
McDonalds alone advertises on its Chinese website with 1800 branches nationwide that offer special deals for kids’ birthdays. The fast food company has introduced and popularized such parties in China. More than 30 years later, it now offers nostalgic birthday parties for today’s adults to “celebrate like a child again.”
It was soon discovered that such parties are part of the collective memory of Generation Z and thus for legions of the former ‘Little Emperors’ who grew up as only children in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and into the 2010s. Celebrating their 30th birthday with fast food has become a ‘fashion item’ on internet platforms such as Bilibili.
Beijing’s first McDonald’s opened in 1992 and became a “symbol of engagement” with the West, writes China expert James Carter in his essay for “The China Project.” Even CP officials booked kids’ birthday parties there. This was also a break with CP traditions. Before 1980, birthdays were only allowed to be publicly celebrated if they had a propaganda purpose related to the founding day of the Communist Party, its organizations or the proclamation day of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949. Youth magazines used to encourage their readers to congratulate themselves on the Communist Party’s birthday, preferably by joining the Youth Federation or the Young Pioneers.
Communist Party officials were not supposed to celebrate personal birthdays. Mao Zedong had already demanded this in guerrilla times in Xibaibo (西柏坡), the last station before his invasion of Beijing in 1949. Mao’s recently revised biography (volume 5, p. 150) states that in Xibaibo, as a measure against corruption, he internally instructed the highest party offices: “We do not celebrate our birthdays. We wouldn’t be able to grow older that way either,” 一曰不做寿，做寿不会使人长寿. “And we don’t give each other presents.”
Mao’s political grandson Xi Jinping also forbade party members from celebrating birthdays in public. In a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party on June 1, 2021, he reminded people of the behavioral bans that Mao had once issued in Xibaibo. “Do not celebrate birthdays, do not give gifts, make a few toasts at banquets, applaud little, do not name public places after living people and do not put Chinese people on the same level as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.” Xi admitted that the only thing that was implemented was not celebrating birthdays.
However, Mao and his “grandson” Xi enjoyed it when others celebrated their birthdays as their cult of personality grew. This was particularly true of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. He celebrated his birthdays privately with his closest associates, where peaches and particularly long “Changshou noodles” (长寿面) were served. His birthdays and guests are well documented.
Xi’s birthday on June 15 was not celebrated publicly. Outside China, however, he had no problem when bosom buddy Vladimir Putin celebrated him. When Xi attended the CICA summit in Tajikistan in 2019, Putin marked his 66th birthday with presents, Russian ice cream specialties and a cream cake with the words “Happy 66th” – 六六大顺.
Traditionally, the Chinese once only celebrated their newborns’ first birthday and their elders’ birthdays over the age of 60. Historical annals mention birthday customs in early ruling dynasties, whenever dynastic successors were born. Tang Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗, for example, had his birthday declared a national holiday. Detailed descriptions of birthday ceremonies lasting up to eight days can be found in the classic feudal-era family novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” 红楼梦.
Ancient Chinese birthday celebration culture, which is making a comeback today (mainly as a family game), also featured a ceremony called 抓周, once considered superstitious. The one-year-old baby is placed in the middle of a circle with ritual objects, from tools, jewelry and money to paintbrushes and ink. The first thing it reaches for indicates its future.
Since the rehabilitation of Confucius after being politically ostracized under Mao, the People’s Republic has been celebrating his birthday on September 28 ever more magnificently. In 2024, his homeland Shandong celebrated Confucius’ 2575th birthday. Beijing’s political efforts are underway to merge China’s Teacher’s Day on September 10 with Confucius’ birthday on September 28 to celebrate the birthday of the great educator.
This fits in with Xi’s latest appeal to his youth, who are in danger of losing direction. He wants them to return to the family, its virtues and values. Earlier this week, Xi received praise from state television CCTV: “Under his leadership, the socialist family civilization of loving country and family, loving each other, being positive and kind, building and sharing everything together has become the new trend in China.”
This little rascal goes to great lengths to appear menacing. But he is still popular everywhere in China: “Nezha 2” has become the biggest Chinese box office hit of all time. Within nine days, the animated film grossed more than 5.8 billion yuan (768 million euros). The film about a mythical boy with magical powers set the box office buzzing, especially during the New Year celebrations. The first film in the series was already a box office hit in 2019. The character Nezha (哪吒) is based on a protective deity in Buddhism, Taoism and other religious movements. As so often in China’s pop culture, the film also borrows from classical literature, in this case from Fengshen Yanyi (封神演义), an epic from the Ming Dynasty about the lives of gods and demons.
The unexpected success of AI start-up DeepSeek shook the Chinese tech world as much as the Western one. Few had the Hangzhou-based company on their radar as a disruptive player. Hopes were placed on others: Stepfun, for example, founded in April 2023 by a former Senior Vice President of Microsoft. Or Zhipu, which is rumored to have ties to the Chinese military.
What is clear is that China’s AI companies – also known as “AI tigers” – now have to step up their game even more than they already have. However, the fundamental prerequisites for further breakthroughs are there, AI expert Jimmy Goodrich tells Table.Briefings. However, he also sees the developments as a relay race: Those who lead the pack today may fall far behind tomorrow.
China is trying hard to present the province of Xinjiang with an image of normality – but for the Uyghurs living there, everyday life remains characterized by repression. A new investigation by Human Rights Watch shows that the repression extends beyond Xinjiang’s borders. The most bizarre highlight is guided tours for Uyghurs living abroad to their own homeland under strict supervision. Marcel Grzanna has taken a closer look at the situation.
Celebrating birthdays in public was long frowned upon in China. Under Mao, this was the prerogative of the Communist Party alone. Those times have changed, writes Johnny Erling. Today, Generation Z goes to McDonald’s to relive simpler times with junk food. But the paper crown on their heads is ultimately just an expression of weariness with the present. The “little emperors” of yesteryear, who grew up as only children, feel increasingly left behind and alone.
The shocks caused by the Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek in the tech and business world are still being felt. Warnings are particularly loud in the US. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg demands that global AI model standards must come from the US. Dario Amodei, CEO of US AI start-up Anthropic, explains that China’s progress in the AI sector, coupled with its industrial strength, could catapult the country into a global leadership role – “not just in AI, but in everything.”
However, DeepSeek’s success sent shockwaves through China’s tech sector, just as it did in the US. The company was not an established player in the Chinese AI scene. “DeepSeek was not in the five-year plan. It’s not a state-owned enterprise, not a national champion,” explains Jimmy Goodrich, a technology analyst specializing in China at the UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, in an interview with Table.Briefings. He believes precisely this relative shadowy existence in the domestic competition has given the company a decisive advantage. “DeepSeek is not bound to the country’s big internet companies and, unlike them, is not out to make a quick buck – they just wanted to innovate first.”
Nevertheless, Goodrich also sees DeepSeek’s rapid progress as a result of focused government investment in education and research: “China’s universities are increasingly influential on the global stage and produce first-class AI research. That is why DeepSeek is not the only company that can draw from a large talent pool and thus also benefit from government and private investment programs.”
A group of companies known as the “Six AI Tigers” – Stepfun, Zhipu, Minimax, Moonshot, 01.AI and Baichuan – push ahead with developing new AI models. The pressure is enormous: OpenAI is about to release its latest model, “o3”, and its Chinese competitors need to make their models even more efficient and cheaper in light of DeepSeek.
“The race for AI leadership is no longer just about who has access to the best chips, but about who puts them to best use,” said DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng in an interview a year ago. However, even after the success of Liang’s model, chips remain a big limiting factor, says Goodrich: “DeepSeek itself admits that the biggest development bottleneck is the lack of chips. More processing power could make their model and that of other Chinese providers even stronger.” All AI companies, whether in China or elsewhere, must therefore continue to focus on mass and large-scale scaling to increase efficiency and growth.
China’s tech giants are also heavily participating. In late January, ByteDance presented its Doubao-1.5-pro language model, which took OpenAI’s “o1” as a benchmark and is reportedly superior in several respects, including cost and energy consumption. Tencent, a company known for gaming and social media applications, focuses on its Hunyuan model, a powerful text-to-video generator that is said to compete with Meta’s Llama 3.1 – and with only a tenth of the computing power that Meta needed for training.
Alibaba Cloud, in turn, followed up with an updated version of its AI model Qwen 2.5. It unveiled Qwen 2.5-Max on January 29, right in the middle of the Spring Festival holidays, which suggests that DeepSeek’s success has also hit the tech giant in the stomach. The company reported that DeepSeek V3 immediately outperformed eleven important benchmarks. Both companies are based in Hangzhou in eastern China, which probably makes the competition even fiercer.
Another promising newcomer is Moonshot AI from Beijing. Like DeepSeek, the company, backed by Alibaba, was founded in 2023 and presented its latest language model around the same time as DeepSeek on January 20 – with far less global attention, but certainly with presentable results. Named Kimi k1.5, the model is said to have surpassed OpenAI’s o1 model in areas such as mathematics and programming. The previous Kimi model had already attracted attention because it could process millions of Chinese characters in one input.
Equally new is Stepfun, founded in April 2023 by former Microsoft Senior Vice President Jiang Daxin. With the support of investors such as Tencent and financial backing from the Shanghai government, the company launched as many as eleven basic AI models, including voice, image, video, audio and multimodal systems.
In addition to powerful AI models, infrastructure and efficiency also play a crucial role in China’s domestic AI race. The start-up ModelBest, founded by researchers at Tsinghua University, focuses on smaller, resource-efficient models. Its MiniCPM series is optimized for smartphones, PCs, smart home devices and robots.
Infinigence AI takes a different approach: The company does not develop its own AI models, but an infrastructure that efficiently combines chips from various manufacturers. This is particularly important for Chinese companies that are struggling with US sanctions.
Zhipu, with a valuation of over two billion US dollars, is one of the largest Chinese AI start-ups and reportedly plans to go public soon. Investors include fund-related institutions of the city of Beijing as well as renowned venture capital firms.
Like Moonshot AI, Zhipu is based in Beijing and is also supported by Alibaba. The company gained worldwide attention after the US government blacklisted it along with other Chinese companies on January 15. Zhipu allegedly maintains ties to the Chinese military and helps the People’s Liberation Army optimize weapons with AI. The company distanced itself from the allegations. “One thing is certain: Zhipu is somewhat more state-oriented than the other AI companies in China,” says Goodrich.
China’s AI push shows that the US lead is not set in stone. “While there was talk of an 18-month gap six months ago, China has already reduced this to just a few months,” says Goodrich. The race is far from over. “I see it as a long relay race – there are many runners, but perhaps no finish line. Whoever started the fastest will not necessarily be the winner in the end,” says the AI expert.
The decisive factor will be who builds the best structures in the long term – in software, hardware and infrastructure. “DeepSeek has proven that China can catch up technologically, but the US could soon counter with new models.”
The life of a Uyghur is still far from normal. China may try to convince the world that the restrictions of its “Strike Hard Campaign” against the ethnic minority in Xinjiang have vanished into thin air. However, a recent investigation by Human Rights Watch once again backs the assumption that the oppression of the population group continues.
The repression targets both Uyghurs living in Xinjiang and those who have left China. Uyghurs with a Chinese passport are just as affected as those with a foreign citizenship. The authorities’ suspicion is so high that the Communist Party’s United Front now offers supervised visits for Uyghurs living abroad who want to visit their families.
Supervised travel at least offers a faster option for obtaining a visa and reduces the risk of possible detention and interrogation by the police. However, official escort comes at a price. Participants told HRW they were closely monitored and had to ask permission to visit their families. Participants were only allowed to speak Mandarin – even among themselves. Participation in propaganda activities praising the Communist Party for its policies in Xinjiang was also mandatory.
“The Chinese government continues to deny Uyghurs their right to leave the country, restrict their freedom of speech and association abroad, and punish them for their ties abroad,” says Yalkun Uluyol, an author of the HRW report. She says the travel restrictions are used to repress Uyghurs in Xinjiang and the diaspora. The human rights organization conducted almost two dozen interviews with those affected in recent months.
Meanwhile, Uyghurs wishing to leave Xinjiang must submit applications, explain the purpose of their trip, provide personal information from family members living abroad and guarantee that they will not contact activists outside the country and will return to China on a specified date.
According to Turghunjan Alawudun, President of the Uyghur lobby organization World Uyghur Congress (WUC), travel documents and passports have long since become an instrument of repression. Many Uyghurs are refused a passport or have an existing document taken away. “This deliberately robs them of the opportunity to leave China or to move around freely,” Alawudun told Table.Briefings.
The WUC complains that the Chinese government uses these measures as a mechanism of transnational repression. Uyghurs living abroad are practically rendered stateless by having their travel documents confiscated or outright denied or pressured to return – with the risk of arrest on arrival.
According to HRW, travel to “sensitive countries” with a large Muslim population, such as Turkey, is not permitted. For business trips, Uyghurs are only allowed to visit certain countries such as Kazakhstan. Chinese citizens of Kazakh origin are also affected by the restrictions.
In principle, border crossings between the two countries are possible without a visa, but there are indications that Kazakhs with Chinese passports have recently been refused re-entry if they have already entered Kazakhstan twice from Xinjiang. This is what Xinjiang researcher Rune Steenberg told Table.Briefings. The anthropologist, who is fluent in Uyghur and also speaks basic Kazakh, refers to several sources who have talked to him about these experiences.
Uyghurs with foreign citizenship already find it very difficult to enter China. Some Uyghurs living abroad were only allowed to visit Xinjiang after “thorough background checks,” which can take up to six months, HRW notes. Some had first to obtain permission from local “neighborhood committees” and local police at their families’ homes and undergo police questioning upon arrival.
“The authorities want to largely dry up the flow of information between Uyghurs at home and abroad,” says Uyghur documentary filmmaker Abduweli Ayup (known for films like “All Static and Noise”). Ayup recently used his X account to spread the news that around 20 Uyghurs had been arrested in Xinjiang in January. Their crime was allegedly responding to a post by a mutual acquaintance who lives in Turkey on the Chinese TikTok variant Douyin. Ayup deleted the post because he was told it would get those arrested even more trouble. He says he is not sure whether they have since been released.
China consistently explains repression against the Uyghurs by referring to its fight against terrorism. The US government and numerous parliaments of Western democracies, on the other hand, describe Beijing’s actions as genocide.
In his old age, Confucius (551 BC-479 BC) called on his disciples to learn from him: “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning. At thirty, I stood firm. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth. At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.” The disciples included his words in their anthology “Sayings of Confucius (Lun Yu).” In 1909, the German sinologist Richard Wilhelm translated them and explained the meaning: At the age of 30, a person must be able to find their way in life and stand firmly on their own two feet.
Confucius’ two-and-a-half-thousand-year-old wisdom has also been popular in the People’s Republic since the Communist Party leadership under party leader Xi Jinping discovered it as a precursor to the politically correct characteristics of Chinese socialism. For the Spring Festival 2025, China’s media wrote: “Celebrate the New Year with Confucius” and praised his homeland as the birthplace of the “First Family under Heaven.”
Party leader Xi combined all of this. At the start of February, he published his 2016 internal speech on the role of the family for the first time. He calls for a return to the harmony of the family and its Confucian values as a guide to mastering the socialist future. However, there is hardly any mention of the Communist Party’s function as a role model. Xi’s tribute begins with the confession, “The root of everything under heaven lies in the family” – “天下之本在家.” Honor your elders, love your young and siblings, ensure harmonious relationships and social problem-solving.
The Party would do well to adopt such virtues for the masses of single children seeking direction. Their slogan for this year’s Spring Festival: “Let’s go home to the family,” has never sounded so loud and so wrong. Since 2023 and after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, social scientists have registered new trends of estrangement between Generation Z and their parents. Family researchers call it the “phenomenon of separation among relatives” – 断亲现象. The Beijing journal “Studies on Contemporary Youth” (当代青年研究) discussed this in 2025 with social researcher Yan Yunxiang, who teaches at Renmin University in Beijing.
When Xi gave the recently published speech in 2016, Beijing had just ended its 35-year one-child dictatorship. The fallout caused China’s society to age unexpectedly quickly and broke down the structures of extended families even faster. Between 1982 and 2020 alone, they shrank from 4.41 to 2.62 members per average household.
The new Generation Z (225 million only children were born between 1980 and 2015) is now – unlike Confucius once hoped – on unsteady footing at the age of 30 instead of firmly established in life. Frustrated and plagued by job anxiety, their longing to quit coined the phrase “wanting to lie flat” (躺平), also an expression of their protest against a life in the hamster wheel of learning, exams and work stress.
These existential crises manifest themselves in other bizarre reactions. A popular new trend among young people is to celebrate their 30th birthday with a fast food party at McDonald’s (麦当劳 过生日). The WeChat page of the cultural magazine “Sanlian Life Weekly” looked into the phenomenon of why groups of young Chinese people meet there: it received answers such as: “I usually work from morning to night. On the weekend, I just want to stay in bed and chill in front of the TV with a bag of potato chips. But on my birthday, I get dressed up. However, I no longer go to a fancy restaurant or luxury hotel to celebrate like I used to and send selfies to friends from there. Since I turned 30, I’ve preferred to party with junk food.”
The reason has to do with their socialization as only children. When McDonald’s spectacularly opened its first Chinese flagship restaurant in Beijing’s main shopping street Wang Fujin in April 1992, the multinational company incorporated one of its successful foreign concepts into its Chinese program. It created Happy Meal children’s corners for special Chinese birthday parties, complete with balloons, birthday paper crowns, and cakes. Other foreign franchising chains and Chinese fast-food giants soon jumped on the bandwagon.
McDonalds alone advertises on its Chinese website with 1800 branches nationwide that offer special deals for kids’ birthdays. The fast food company has introduced and popularized such parties in China. More than 30 years later, it now offers nostalgic birthday parties for today’s adults to “celebrate like a child again.”
It was soon discovered that such parties are part of the collective memory of Generation Z and thus for legions of the former ‘Little Emperors’ who grew up as only children in the 80s, 90s, 2000s and into the 2010s. Celebrating their 30th birthday with fast food has become a ‘fashion item’ on internet platforms such as Bilibili.
Beijing’s first McDonald’s opened in 1992 and became a “symbol of engagement” with the West, writes China expert James Carter in his essay for “The China Project.” Even CP officials booked kids’ birthday parties there. This was also a break with CP traditions. Before 1980, birthdays were only allowed to be publicly celebrated if they had a propaganda purpose related to the founding day of the Communist Party, its organizations or the proclamation day of the People’s Republic on October 1, 1949. Youth magazines used to encourage their readers to congratulate themselves on the Communist Party’s birthday, preferably by joining the Youth Federation or the Young Pioneers.
Communist Party officials were not supposed to celebrate personal birthdays. Mao Zedong had already demanded this in guerrilla times in Xibaibo (西柏坡), the last station before his invasion of Beijing in 1949. Mao’s recently revised biography (volume 5, p. 150) states that in Xibaibo, as a measure against corruption, he internally instructed the highest party offices: “We do not celebrate our birthdays. We wouldn’t be able to grow older that way either,” 一曰不做寿，做寿不会使人长寿. “And we don’t give each other presents.”
Mao’s political grandson Xi Jinping also forbade party members from celebrating birthdays in public. In a speech marking the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party on June 1, 2021, he reminded people of the behavioral bans that Mao had once issued in Xibaibo. “Do not celebrate birthdays, do not give gifts, make a few toasts at banquets, applaud little, do not name public places after living people and do not put Chinese people on the same level as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.” Xi admitted that the only thing that was implemented was not celebrating birthdays.
However, Mao and his “grandson” Xi enjoyed it when others celebrated their birthdays as their cult of personality grew. This was particularly true of Mao during the Cultural Revolution. He celebrated his birthdays privately with his closest associates, where peaches and particularly long “Changshou noodles” (长寿面) were served. His birthdays and guests are well documented.
Xi’s birthday on June 15 was not celebrated publicly. Outside China, however, he had no problem when bosom buddy Vladimir Putin celebrated him. When Xi attended the CICA summit in Tajikistan in 2019, Putin marked his 66th birthday with presents, Russian ice cream specialties and a cream cake with the words “Happy 66th” – 六六大顺.
Traditionally, the Chinese once only celebrated their newborns’ first birthday and their elders’ birthdays over the age of 60. Historical annals mention birthday customs in early ruling dynasties, whenever dynastic successors were born. Tang Emperor Xuanzong 玄宗, for example, had his birthday declared a national holiday. Detailed descriptions of birthday ceremonies lasting up to eight days can be found in the classic feudal-era family novel “Dream of the Red Chamber” 红楼梦.
Ancient Chinese birthday celebration culture, which is making a comeback today (mainly as a family game), also featured a ceremony called 抓周, once considered superstitious. The one-year-old baby is placed in the middle of a circle with ritual objects, from tools, jewelry and money to paintbrushes and ink. The first thing it reaches for indicates its future.
Since the rehabilitation of Confucius after being politically ostracized under Mao, the People’s Republic has been celebrating his birthday on September 28 ever more magnificently. In 2024, his homeland Shandong celebrated Confucius’ 2575th birthday. Beijing’s political efforts are underway to merge China’s Teacher’s Day on September 10 with Confucius’ birthday on September 28 to celebrate the birthday of the great educator.
This fits in with Xi’s latest appeal to his youth, who are in danger of losing direction. He wants them to return to the family, its virtues and values. Earlier this week, Xi received praise from state television CCTV: “Under his leadership, the socialist family civilization of loving country and family, loving each other, being positive and kind, building and sharing everything together has become the new trend in China.”
This little rascal goes to great lengths to appear menacing. But he is still popular everywhere in China: “Nezha 2” has become the biggest Chinese box office hit of all time. Within nine days, the animated film grossed more than 5.8 billion yuan (768 million euros). The film about a mythical boy with magical powers set the box office buzzing, especially during the New Year celebrations. The first film in the series was already a box office hit in 2019. The character Nezha (哪吒) is based on a protective deity in Buddhism, Taoism and other religious movements. As so often in China’s pop culture, the film also borrows from classical literature, in this case from Fengshen Yanyi (封神演义), an epic from the Ming Dynasty about the lives of gods and demons.
