| This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a seasonal selection of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here. The Rise of Chinese Soft Power | Over the years, I've written columns about Beijing's soft power deficit. But in late 2024, the equation began to change with the video game success of Black Myth: Wukong and the allure of Li Ziqi, China's Martha Stewart. Then this January happened. First, hordes of Americans stampeded into RedNote, AKA Xiaohongshu, on the eve of the threatened ban of TikTok (a China-based but China-banned platform super-popular in the US). Then, DeepSeek surprised the Silicon Valley billionaire boys' broligarchy with its investment-lite AI chatbot that everyone suddenly wanted to have on their smartphones. Now, Chinese tech and culture are beginning to take on the kind of cool that turned Japan and Korea into destinations for young Americans. As Tyler Cowen notes, that's "first and foremost, because China's internet actually is cool." Says Tyler: "There is so much commentary on the financial, geopolitical and national-security implications of DeepSeek that Americans are in danger of overlooking the obvious: China has stolen a march on us — not only in technology, but also in vibes." Oh, and China (by way of movie director Zhang Yimou) also produced this mesmerizing bit of cyborg kitsch to celebrate the arrival of the Year of the Snake this week:
There's still a lot of skepticism out there that the Chinese have made actual AI advances. Microsoft Corp. cast the first stone, saying it was looking into the possibility that DeekSeek built its model on OpenAI's work (which, mind you, was built via the ethically questionable tactic of scraping the internet for the art and writing of countless unremunerated human beings). "There's an entrenched bias that China just copies," says Catherine Thorbecke. The truth is that Silicon Valley recently "has had to pivot to roll out copycats of Chinese tech products." That includes Meta's imitations of TikTok. Back in 2023, when China managed to make advances in chipmaking prowess despite US bans on hi-tech sales, the achievement was pooh-poohed as a one-off. As I noted in a column, that rankled not just the People's Republic but most anyone of Chinese descent who remembers millennia of Westerners usurping Chinese tech: silk, porcelain, gunpowder, printing, tea, stirrups, the ploughshare… The British science historian Joseph Needham wrote the incredibly thorough multi-volume Science and Civilization in China as a reminder of how much technological know-how stems from the country. It's going to take more so-called Sputnik moments to stun Western techies out of knee-jerk belittling of Chinese engineering and culture. Says Catherine: "The DeepSeek shock exposes an uncomfortable truth: American tech exceptionalism, and the xenophobia that underpins it, mean the broligarchy will keep being surprised."  | | | For big cities all over, subways and metros are how they make an impression on visitors. Moscow's underground train system is palatial. Tokyo's system is so immaculate and quiet that a conversation counts as pollution. New York's in-your-face grittiness is reflected in its subways, as Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote for Leonard Bernstein's tune: "New York, New York, a helluva town, The Bronx is up, but the Battery's down, The people ride in a hole in the groun'." India's crop of shiny new urban metro lines, however, is a quandary. There is no question that the trains are alluring. They are air-conditioned, and the atmosphere above ground is often unbreathable, as Mihir Sharma notes. However, he says, a lot of them are being built in cities that don't quite need them. They're just around for show and have become white elephants. Says Mihir: "Even in large towns with millions of residents, like Lucknow and Jaipur, they look more like political prestige projects than genuine attempts to transform urban transit. And in India's megacities, metros are underperforming badly. Mumbai's ridership is about 30% of what its planners promised, and Bengaluru's is just 6%." It is not, he says, a good allocation of resources: "The costs are beginning to add up. More than 40% of India's urban development budget is being spent on metros, according to parliament; that's money that could be spent on new electric bus networks or charging stations for three-wheelers." "On Jan. 26, President Alexander Lukashenko held a transparently sham election, awarding himself 86.8% of the vote and the response was predictable: more sanctions. … These measures are no longer fit for purpose. … A longer game is needed that maximizes contact with the West for ordinary Belarusians, rather than seals them off, while reducing Lukashenko's dependence on Russia… Cross-border passenger train services should resume, frontier crossings reopen and a plan to lift selected sanctions in exchange for specific actions such as prisoner releases should be placed on the table for Lukashenko to pick up." — Marc Champion in "It's Time to Roll Back Sanctions on Putin's Ally in Belarus."  "It's a good thing for Tesla that its chief executive has cozied up to the US president, because the company's latest numbers are awful. Tesla Inc. missed earnings estimates for the fourth quarter. The bigger issue is that the miss would have been even worse if Tesla hadn't pulled a couple of levers. Another big slug of greenhouse gas credit sales combined with an unusually large dollop of 'other income,' due mostly to an accounting change related to Bitcoin holdings, added up to $1.5 billion. Tax-adjusted, that's half of Tesla's entire earnings for the quarter right there. These earnings aren't just weak but low quality, too." — Liam Denning in "Tesla's Awful Numbers Put Musk Back Into Campaign Mode." Sam Altman's worst nightmare. — Parmy Olson Starmer's sturm und drang. — Rosa Prince Defining taxation downwards. — Chaminda Jayanetti Britain's NIMBY wars. — Matthew Brooker The dollar's more kingly than Trump. — Marcus Ashworth Debunking the debanking debacle. — Paul J. Davies Walk of the Town: A Candle for Your Groundhog | If you've still got your Christmas tree up, don't worry; you've got a couple more days to neaten up. Some Christian traditions keep the decorations up till Candlemas, which falls on Feb. 2. (The practice supposedly includes England, but I haven't seen bunting here since Boxing Day. Maybe I haven't looked hard enough.)
The holiday is the feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary, when Jesus' mother went to the temple for the post-partum rites that certified her re-entry into society. It's called Candlemas because the devout bring candles to church to be blessed for use throughout the year. Several scholars like to think that the Catholic Church used Mary's temple visit to replace a popular pagan festival in the Roman Empire, the Lupercalia — a violent and sexually-charged celebration in which the populace was cleansed and sanctified by way of sacrifice as well as instruments called februum. That, of course, is how the month got its name. As some of you may have noticed, though, Feb. 2 is also Groundhog Day. The groundhog is only native to North America but the tradition of seeing whether it would see its shadow (resulting in an extension of winter or not) came by way of European immigrants. In Germany, people badgered the badger for its prognostications; in Hungary, it was bears. I don't know how you checked in on bears without risking never seeing spring ever again, but if the bears were bearish about their shadows, then the cold would linger.  Stop bothering me. Photographer: Tim Boyle/Hulton Archive Feb. 2 falls virtually at the midpoint between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. And for many pre-Christian peoples of Europe, that was a time to check in on what animals — much more intimate with the cycles of the cosmos — would predict. In The Bear: The History of a Fallen King, Michel Pastoureau describes how pagan tribes would observe the title beast emerging from hibernation to prophesy the length of cold weather. For devout Christians, having Candlemas on the same day might usurp the reign of heathen animal gods. Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness and all that. Don't tell Punxsutawney Phil. He'll probably try to convert. Thanks for dropping by. Doesn't February have strange holidays?  "I'm the groundhog's shadow. Why won't you be my Valentine?" Illustration by Howard Chua-Eoan/Bloomberg Notes: Please send sunny days and feedback to Howard Chua-Eoan at hchuaeoan@bloomberg.net. Sign up here and find us on Bluesky, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn and Threads. | 
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