China Daily Briefing

BlackRock's QDII license, reported by SCMP, gives the world's largest asset manager direct access to China's $149 billion QDII framework — a significant step in Beijing's selective capital markets opening that had previously been dominated by domestic institutions and smaller foreign players. The license allows BlackRock to create RMB-denominated products accessible to mainland Chinese retail and institutional investors, opening a fee-generating distribution channel into the world's second-largest savings pool. This is a regime signal, not just a company announcement: when BlackRock gets QDII, other major global asset managers will follow within 12-18 months.

SCMP reported that some family offices are revisiting Chinese investment allocations as US-China tensions show signs of easing — a tentative but meaningful signal given the persistent risk-premium embedded in China equities over the past three years. Family office re-entry typically precedes institutional reallocation by 6-12 months, as the wealth management channel is faster to react to sentiment shifts than compliance-heavy sovereign funds. The Tencent +3.62% move today and the KraneShares China Internet ETF +0.60% session are consistent with early positioning rather than broad institutional deployment — watch for Northbound Stock Connect flows to confirm.

Bernstein analysts, cited by SCMP, found that Huawei has meaningfully closed the mobile chip performance gap with Apple by applying the Tau Scaling Law to its Kirin chipset design — a technical result that challenges the prevailing narrative that US export controls have permanently capped Huawei's semiconductor trajectory. The finding carries implications for HBM and advanced node procurement dynamics in China: if Huawei can continue closing the gap with internal chip engineering, the demand signal for SMIC and domestic chipmakers accelerates. For investors in TSMC (which supplies Apple) and ASML (which supplies TSMC), Huawei's progress is a competitive pressure signal that deserves monitoring.