• Halloween costumes in Shanghai poke fun at Chinese authorities
• UK, US, EU and China sign declaration of AI’s ‘catastrophic’ danger
• Apple“s holiday-quarter forecast faces threat from Huawei, weak China market

Halloween costumes in Shanghai poke fun at Chinese authorities

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/01/halloween-costumes-in-shanghai-poke-fun-at-chinese-authorities

Halloween revellers in Shanghai have poked fun at the Chinese authorities with their costumes, with people dressing up as Covid prevention workers, surveillance cameras and China’s falling stock market.

Videos posted on social media showed police shepherding away people with particularly subversive costumes on Tuesday night, including one person dressed as Lu Xun, a Chinese writer from the early 20th century whose fable about a useless scholar has become a meme for China’s unemployed youth.

The Lu Xun impersonator carried a sign that said: “Studying medicine cannot save the Chinese” – a Lu Xun quote – and recited one of the author’s famous sayings: “Those who can do things, do things. Those who can speak out, speak out.” Police appear to move him off the street shortly afterwards. The Guardian was unable to verify the date of the video but the impersonator is standing in front of a car with a Shanghai licence plate.

This year’s Halloween festivities were the largest gathering of people on the streets of Shanghai since thousands of people in cities across China demonstrated against China’s harsh zero-Covid regime in November last year. Those protests are seen as one of the reasons that Beijing decided to abandon the restrictions shortly afterwards.

Shanghai had suffered a particularly severe lockdown, with millions of residents largely confined to their homes for three months in 2022. Many vented their frustrations on social media before taking to the streets in November, in a show of dissent the likes of which have not been seen in China for several decades.

Other tongue-in-cheek costumes posted to social media include a person dressed as Winnie the Pooh – a mocking reference to Xi Jinping, China’s leader, often censored on social media – and several people dressed as Covid protection workers, who wore white hazmat suits during the pandemic.

上海万圣节 pic.twitter.com/kDVvu6kCJe

— 李老师不是你老师 (@whyyoutouzhele) October 31, 2023

Another photograph, which was described as coming from Shanghai, showed a person holding a sign with the slogan: “It is forbidden to flow backwards.” The sign depicts a graphic of a man surfing a wave on a yellow background.

The costume appeared to be an oblique reference to Li Keqiang, China’s former premier who died on Friday. Li was seen as an economic liberaliser who pledged that China’s reform and opening-up would never stop, saying: “The Yellow River and Yangtze River will not flow backwards.” Public mourning of Li has been strictly controlled, as authorities fear an outpouring of grief for the man seen to represent an alternative vision for China that that has failed to materialise as Xi has tightened the Communist party’s grip on the country.

UK, US, EU and China sign declaration of AI’s ‘catastrophic’ danger

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/01/uk-us-eu-and-china-sign-declaration-of-ais-catastrophic-danger

The UK, US, EU and China have all agreed that artificial intelligence poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity, in the first international declaration to deal with the fast-emerging technology.

Twenty-eight governments signed up to the so-called Bletchley declaration on the first day of the AI safety summit hosted by the British government.

The declaration does not agree to set up an international testing hub in the UK, as some in the British government had hoped. But it does provide a template for international collaboration in the future, with future safety summits now planned in South Korea in six months’ time and in France in a year.

The declaration says: “There is potential for serious, even catastrophic, harm, either deliberate or unintentional, stemming from the most significant capabilities of these AI models.

“Given the rapid and uncertain rate of change of AI, and in the context of the acceleration of investment in technology, we affirm that deepening our understanding of these potential risks and of actions to address them is especially urgent.”

Rishi Sunak welcomed the declaration, the prime minister calling it “a landmark achievement that sees the world’s greatest AI powers agree on the urgency behind understanding the risks of AI”.

Apple“s holiday-quarter forecast faces threat from Huawei, weak China market

https://reuters.com/article/apple-results/apples-holiday-quarter-forecast-faces-threat-from-huawei-weak-china-market-idUSKBN31W2OA

Apple investors will have one big question when the world's most valuable company reports earnings on Thursday - will Huawei's resurgence in China dampen its holiday-quarter expectations?

The company, which will post results for the July-September period, is grappling with an uneven recovery in the world's second-largest economy and tougher competition from Huawei after the Chinese firm's new Mate 60 Pro series phones saw strong early sales.

Apple's (AAPL.O) own iPhone 15 line-up has gotten off to a slow start in the crucial international market. Counterpoint estimates China sales of the latest series were nearly 5% lower compared with the iPhone 14 in the first 17 days after launch.

"Strength of the iPhone 15 cycle is the key question heading into the December quarter," Bernstein analysts said, adding that they expected "muted" sales of the device due to a lack of new features, strained consumer spending and competition from Huawei.

Huawei sold 1.6 million units of its Mate 60 Pro in six weeks, and brokerages such as Jefferies have said the firm could take back much of the market share in the coming years it lost to Apple after U.S. sanctions in 2019 hammered its business.

Those fears, as well as a wider pullback in tech stocks due to high interest rates, knocked Apple shares down nearly 14% in the three months to October-end, compared with the tech-heavy Nasdaq's (.IXIC) 11% decline in the same period.

But there are signs of an economic pick up in China. Data released last month showed the economy grew at a faster-than-expected clip of 4.9% in the third quarter - though less than the 6.3% expansion in the second quarter - while consumption and industrial activity also surprised on the upside in September.

The July-September period marks Apple's fiscal fourth quarter, and the company is expected to lay down a percentage target for sales growth for the October-December period - its fiscal first quarter that covers holiday-season shopping.

Wall Street analysts expect iPhone sales to rise about 6% in the October-December period, according to LSEG data. That is well below historical levels - barring 2022's holiday season quarter when Chinese COVID-19 curbs curtailed production of high-end iPhones, the average holiday quarter sales growth for the device has been 9.2% in the past four years.

However, the fiscal first-quarter projections suggest an improvement from an estimated increase of 2.8% for the three months ended September, marking the largest rise in iPhone sales since the start of this year.

Overall revenue is still expected to tick down nearly 1%, dragged by continued weakness in sales of the iPad and Mac, which are expected to fall 15% and 25%, respectively.

Apple earlier this week unveiled new MacBook Pro and iMac computers and three new chips to power them. The machines aimed at professional users, come at a time when the PC market is showing signs of a pick up after its over two-years-long slump.

The decline in global PC shipments slowed for a third straight quarter in the July-September period, a sign that the market has bottomed out, according to research firm IDC.

The global smartphone market contracted 8% in this period, according to Counterpoint.

The company's services business will likely be a bright spot, with estimated growth of 11.3%. The segment has often outpaced growth in Apple's hardware business in recent years and now accounts for nearly a quarter of its total revenue.