Alice Han

and seem to defend the WTO liberal trade order and multilateral institutions like the WTO and IMF.

This is coming at a time where we're seeing record Chinese trade surplus, around $1.2 trillion last year, and it seems like China will not be escaping this manufacturing-led growth.

So how did you interpret that speech and China's trade and economic policy going into 2026?

And do you think going into 2026, we've got the March NPC, the Lianghui, as well as the new 15th five-year plan, that that strategy of, as you were alluding to, using trade and manufacturing to drive growth will shift?

Or is China still wedded to this strategy in the midst of, I would say, still pretty weak consumption growth?

And if you could also describe to us, why has it been so difficult for the Chinese government to try to boost consumption, even though it does...

identify it as a key economic problem?

Yeah, I want to touch on that aspect, the tech self-sufficiency, in just a bit because there is an argument that that drives some of the anti-involution campaign because it's created an oversupply in certain goods that has led to price deflation.

But before I go into that, I wanted to touch on the property sector, which you alluded to.

We're probably five years into this slump in the property sector.

Now, there's a debate as to whether it's a hard landing or a soft landing.

But what is clear, and I think you've mentioned this in multiple instances in the past when we've spoken,

is that there is a macro knock-on effect of the property sector on consumers, on household spending.

How do you think about it now that we're five years in, the impact of the property sector on households and their spending patterns?

And number two, do you expect there will be some kind of policy support going into the March NPC in response to continued double-digit negative contraction in the property sector?

And is it the case that we're going to see maybe more slackness in the labor market moving forward if you expect that AI will continue to decrease the demand for some of these gig workers or even graduate students entering the job market?

There's a lot, I think, of apprehension amongst new grads.

We had a record 11 million last year going into the workforce.

There's apprehension that they might not be able to find jobs in an economy that is slowing down and where jobs are increasingly getting automated or replaced by AI.

How do you see that debate play out in China as being distinct from what we're seeing in the U.S.?