Houze Song

to reduce reliance on both U.S.

as well as Western technologies.

So I think while the current U.S.-China relationship is expected to be probably stable this year, but probably most people as well as Beijing believe that it's more likely to be transitory, meaning that Beijing still needs to aggressively

push for its attack independence initiative to prepare the longer-term potential conflict and confrontation with the United States.

A good question.

I would say that first, that in terms of interplay between real estate and household expenditure, there has been some shift.

Being that initially, say, during the like 22 to 23 period, that you can say basically that real estate decline was a trigger or was a cause of weak household sentiment as well as expenditure.

But more recently, I would say that the ongoing real estate property weakness is probably more a reflection and outcome of the broad growth weakness rather than a cause.

The being that I think that currently that really the root cause of a weak household consumption is really the weak job market.

Both the unemployment rate being elevated and also the fact that the job security, that, for example, close to a third of Chinese urban workforce are essentially gig workers.

So basically, they're really not very sure that they will still have a job, say, in two months or three months from now.

So I would say that right now, the labor market weakness, especially this feeling of insecurity, probably has a bigger role in terms of limiting Chinese household expenditure.

I would say comparatively speaking, the balance is much more in favor of technology and capital compared to labor when it compares to, for example, debate and also the public opinion in U.S.

and other Western countries.

the Chinese government doesn't seem to really take into the job effect of AI and automation into consideration when they draft those AI and robotics-related policies.

And I would say that actually they are much more encouraging

about the AI and the robotic and its economic impact.

So that's kind of like understandable because it seemed to me that really that the technology advancement, especially how it helped to China to boost its international standing, also its national security position, probably at this moment matters more for the Chinese government than really grows our job.

I think the Chinese government has clearly doubled down on its advanced manufacturing and technology initiatives.

I think that's fine, I mean, as long as they're also taking care of the broad weakness of the Chinese economy.