2. Conservative US politicians want to crack down on the deluge of duty-free packages shipped from China. (Associated Press)

3. The unusually heavy rainfall in central China this year has ravaged wheat farms and threatened China’s goals for food self-reliance. (New York Times $)

4. The cutthroat electric-vehicle price war in China is making life hard for all automakers. Nio, the Chinese company once seen as the “Tesla killer,” is having an especially bad time. (Wall Street Journal $)

5. The US Department of Justice is pursuing its first-ever prosecution of China’s fentanyl supply chain. Four Chinese chemical companies and eight Chinese individuals have been charged for trafficking fentanyl ingredients. Two defendants have been arrested overseas. (NBC News)

6. Though there is no formal ban, many Chinese graphite exporters have stopped exporting to Sweden, where the mineral is used to produce lithium batteries. The reasons are both political and commercial. (The Economist $)

7. As China tightens its control of online speech, many disgruntled users found a new home in the Reddit group “China_irl.” (Rest of World)

Lost in translation

The era of fanatic online shopping festivals in China is coming to an end. Traditionally, all e-commerce websites in China participate in at least two shopping festivals every year, one in mid-June and the other in mid-November, when they compete to offer the lowest prices and achieve higher-than-ever total sales (It’s like Cyber Monday in the US, only bigger and more frequent). This June, even though some platforms were supposed to have made their “largest investment” ever in promoting the event, the festival felt much quieter than before. And none of the platforms released their total sales results.

Chinese publication Shenran Caijing talked to several young shoppers about why they quit the shopping bonanza this year. Some of them had started working in the advertising industry and saw with their own eyes how brands use these festivals to clear their excess stock; others were exhausted by the gamified promotion mechanisms that they needed to navigate for a meager discount. They feel that by shopping only when the need arises and going back to brick-and-mortar stores, they are regaining control of their consumption habits.

One more thing

We’ve all seen Twitter fights between people who spend too much time online, but what if it happens between two chatbots? This weekend, Truth GPT and LMAO GPT—set up by the same creator using ChatGPT to generate automatic snarky replies—got into a 42-tweet-long quarrel that’s awkward and extremely petty (like arguing about whose metaphor is more outdated). I don’t know if they enjoyed it, but the hundreds of human users watching it surely did.