Retail sales accelerated and industrial production topped expectations over first two months of the year.
2 min
SINGAPORE—China reported surprisingly robust economic activity to start the year, giving Beijing some wind at its back as it faces the prospect of increased tensions with President Trump’s second administration.
Retail sales, a measure of consumer spending in China, accelerated, and investment and industrial production grew more than expected, though unemployment rose to a two-year high, and the beleaguered property market remained under pressure, according to official data.
The numbers come a day after Beijing released a policy plan to expand domestic consumption, including raising wages, increasing pensions and creating incentives for childbirth . The plan was the latest acknowledgment of the urgency in Beijing to find alternatives to export-led growth, but was light on specifics, such as whether new funding would be allocated to its policies, or how local governments would implement the proposed measures.
China earlier this month set an ambitious growth target of about 5% for 2025 and pledged to step up spending and boost domestic demand to stimulate a sluggish economy that is threatened by an escalating trade war with the U.S. The 5% growth target, unchanged from a year earlier, projected a sense of continuity as the Trump administration upends long-held assumptions about the global economic order .
In the two months since his return to office, Trump has put an additional 20% tariff on all Chinese goods and imposed an extra 25% duty on steel and aluminum imports.
China reported weaker-than-expected growth in the export sector to start 2025, which was a key engine of China’s economy last year—and which stands to take a hit as tariff barriers rise around the world. China also recently reported a drop in consumer prices for the first time in a year, a reflection of a larger disinflationary environment that has prompted Chinese leaders to call for more spending by households and businesses. Loans and credit data for February also came in below expectations.
On Monday, China said retail sales in the first two months of the year increased 4% from the same period a year earlier, up from December’s 3.7% year-over-year growth, according to figures published by China’s National Bureau of Statistics. China combines January and February data each year to iron out distortions brought by the shifting timing of the Lunar New Year holiday.
Chinese leaders have identified boosting domestic consumption as their top policy priority for 2025, a move that economists say has become critical as Trump administration tariffs hinder Beijing’s ability to rely on exports to boost growth.
China said industrial production in January and February rose 5.9% from a year earlier, more than economists’ expectations for a 5.4% increase but down from the 6.2% year-over-year gain in December.
Production of new energy vehicles, which includes electric vehicles, 3-D printing equipment and industrial robots jumped 48%, 30%, and 27% year-over-year, respectively, according to the data. Investment in buildings, equipment and other fixed assets rose 4.1% for the same period compared with a year prior.
The real-estate sector, a sore spot in China’s economy, continued to struggle. Property investment fell 9.8% year over year during the first two months of the year. New construction starts dropped by about 30% from the year prior.
Many economists say a sustained recovery in China’s property market is essential to repairing consumer sentiment and increasing spending, given how important real estate is to household wealth levels in the country.
China’s headline measure of joblessness, the urban unemployment rate, rose to 5.4% in February, its highest level since February 2023, up from 5.2% in January and 5.1% in December, according to the data. The metric isn’t seasonally adjusted.
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
