Bing’s translation and search engine services in China censor more extensively than Chinese competitors’ services do, according to new research.

Microsoft has maintained its heavy censorship of China-based services despite growing scrutiny from U.S. lawmakers.

Chinese tech firms are motivated to censor less severely, experts say.

On July 9, developers in China will lose API access to all OpenAI platforms, the final step in a slow process of cutting off the country’s access to U.S.-based machine learning tools. 

Consumer-facing applications like ChatGPT have been unavailable in China more or less from the beginning. But the API is more important than the consumer-facing applications, powering apps to fill out forms, flag problems in internal data, or manage other kinds of automation at scale. Right now, Chinese developers still have access to those tools, and they’re using them — but they’ve got only a week and a half left.

Amazon Plans to Launch Discount Online Store that Ships Directly From China to Overseas Customers

According to reports, Amazon (AMZN.US) plans to create a shopping zone that connects buyers directly with cheaper goods in Chinese warehouses to compete in the market.

The report states that the new online zone’s product catalog will include unbranded fashion items, household goods, and other products that can be delivered directly from Chinese sellers to Western buyers within 9 to 11 days.

Amazon reportedly presented this idea to a group of Chinese sellers at a recent closed-door meeting. The new discount shopping area is expected to start accepting inventory as early as this fall.

An Amazon spokesperson said, “We have been exploring new ways to collaborate with selling partners to delight our customers with more choices, lower prices, and greater convenience.”

Key Takeaways:

Dao Insights recently conducted a survey on Chinese travellers’ experience of ordering food abroad.

The survey found that WeChat Mini Programs is the go-to ordering method for most, as well as the preferred method, followed by ordering at the counter/with staff and on HTML5 (H5) websites.

Many cite the ability to overcome language barriers as a key reason for using Mini Programs to order, while preferring it to H5 because it can store order history and is convenient.

This year’s 618 shopping festival has been challenging. Vipshop kicked off its 618 promotions early on 17 May, followed by Pinduoduo and Tmall, who launched their 618 activities on 20 May. E-commerce platforms such as JD.com, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu (RED) subsequently joined the fray. In terms of duration, this year’s 618 promotion can be called “the longest in history.” Another notable change is that the major e-commerce platforms have announced the removal of the pre-sale mechanism used for more than a decade, focusing instead on “spot goods sales.”

Developers of APIs from various countries and regions, including mainland China, have successively expressed on social platforms that they have received a ‘warning letter’ from OpenAI, stating that additional measures will be taken to stop the use of their API in unsupported regions.

The letter stated: ‘Our data shows that your organization has API traffic from a region that OpenAI does not currently support. We will be taking additional measures to block API traffic from regions that are not on our supported countries and territories list starting on July 9.’