The essential social media review to know and understand the world top market. #FrenchinChina is a weekly column from FRED & FARID agency reviewing Chinese social networks to identify big social trends. It is the essential tool to understand and love today’s China.
Thanks to Zhuomin Qin, Feng Huang, Jalila Levesque, Jules Chaffiotte, Radouane Guissi, Ying Zhang, Aliou Maro, Louis Caudevilla, Dushan Karageorgevitch, Mathieu Jolivet, Jing Qian, Antoine Robin, Émilie Ohana, Zhejun Li, Vincent Arassus and Green United Music Asia for their participation to this chronic.
#FrenchinChina website: www.frenchinchina.com
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China's Communist Party has come of age
Last week, China’s top leadership are convene at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing to begin the weeklong 19th National Party Congress of the Communist Party of China. The Congress is the most important political event in China, where the Party’s top representatives meet once every five years to announce changes to top leadership positions and set out the Party’s – and therefore China’s – direction for the next half decade.
This year, around 2,300 delegates will assemble for the Congress. The delegates consist of the Party representatives from China’s national party organs, provinces, leading municipalities, the military, and state-owned enterprises (SOEs), as well as some private sector representatives and other influential figures.
During the Congress, President Xi Jinping gave a 3-hour speech. He declared that China's economy has been transitioning from a phase of rapid growth to a stage of high-quality development. Also that China will support state capital in becoming stronger, doing better, and growing bigger, turn Chinese enterprises into world-class, globally competitive firms.
Jinping added that China will not close its door to the world; it will only become more and more open. And will significantly ease market access and protect the legitimate rights and interests of foreign investors.
Google latest AlphaGo AI program crushes its predecessor
The grandmaster-beating AlphaGo “artificial intelligence,” developed by Google’s DeepMind division, stopped playing Go against mere humans back in May. However, that iteration of the algorithm has now been thoroughly thrashed by DeepMind’s new AlphaGo Zero. The program started off knowing only the basic rules and then played millions of games against itself in just a few days. It updated the neural network that powers it as it went. After almost five million games played against itself, AlphaGo Zero could outplay humans and the original AlphaGo. After 40 days, it was capable of beating AlphaGo Master.
Despite starting with no tactical guidance or information beyond the rules of the game, the newer algorithm managed to beat the older AlphaGo by 100 games to zero. “Even when reliable data sets are available, they may impose a ceiling on the performance of systems trained in this manner,” researchers wrote. “By contrast, reinforcement learning systems are trained from their own experience, in principle allowing them to exceed human capabilities, and to operate in domains where human expertise is lacking.”
Ke Jie, the world’s best human Go player, posted on Weibo when Deepmind announce the news: “It’s the strongest AlphaGo ever — it’s purely learn & develop from itself. Human seems too unnecessary for AlphaGo’s self development.”
Craftsmanship revival in China
Last week, a documentary of Chinese craftsmanship became viral on social media. The documentary contains a series of episodes that introduced several Chinese craftsmen. In the documentary, the production team visited hundreds of craftsman that inherited different traditional craftsmanship of China; most of these craftsmen are unknown to the public that this is the 1st time someone recorded them by video and show to the public.
Different from usual popular documentaries that well-produced by big TV channels, this documentary film was planned & produced by a group of amateurs: there’re only 3 people on the production team, and all of them are the 1st time to do shooting, recording and directing. Therefore, the flames and the tone & manner are presented without carving; However, their lack of experience also brought them their biggest advantage: the documentary presented craftsmanship in the most detailed and accurate way, and faithfully recorded the life and emotions of the craftsmen.
FRED & FARID website: www.fredfarid.com
All #FrenchinChina podcasts on iTunes.