Chinese AI, Automotive Tech Poised to Sweep Across Global South
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Hello and welcome to another edition of the China Global South podcast, a proud member of the Seneca Podcast Network. I'm Eric Olander, and today we're going to take a little break from the hardcore geopolitics that we've been doing for the past decade.

Thank you.

also looking at Chinese automotive tech. Now, DeepSeat came out on January 20th of this year. It's hard to believe that it hasn't been that long.

And it has been on a tear. Now, if you're sitting in the United States listening to this, DeepSeek was a point of real concern. It forced about a trillion dollars off of the market cap of the stock markets there. But at the same time in China, we've seen the reverse happen. The top five IAI companies in China have been on a tear recently.

since January 20th. Alibaba up 51%, Tencent up 30%, Pinduoduo 24%, Meituan, if you're not familiar, is the food delivery, e-commerce delivery, logistics company up 15%, and the Chinese online travel company up

5% all since January 20th. DeepSeek really lifting the markets there and the share values of those companies. And at the same time, Alibaba has been making some very big moves in the global south just this past two weeks or so. Big announcements out of Alibaba coming in Thailand, where they've expanded their cloud presence there with a second data center. And then they've

launched their first data center in Latin America with a new facility in Mexico. So that is also something to keep an eye on. And that's all going to power e-commerce in these different markets. And I can tell you as somebody who lives in Southeast Asia, who now increasingly relies on Lazada, Lazada is Alibaba's e-commerce platform here in Southeast Asia. The stuff is coming faster and faster. 12, 13 years ago when I first moved here,

It would take two weeks, sometimes three weeks to get a product from China. Now we're getting products in 24 to 36 hours. And in part, that's because of...

the logistics that Alibaba has. And if you're not familiar with their logistics arm, it is absolutely important to put that on your watch list as well. So here in Southeast Asia, you're seeing jets flying all over the region, bringing in e-commerce goods and narrowing those delivery times. Also, we're going to focus today on the auto sector, but

not only on the auto sector, because we're seeing some news coming out of Saudi Arabia that is very, very interesting. BYD earned the contract and signed the deal for the world's largest grid scale battery storage project.

And again, this is something we talked about a couple of weeks ago on the show as to why Chinese mining companies are producing so much nickel and cobalt when the demand on the vehicle side isn't there. But remember, if China is going to be carbon neutral in the 2050, 2060 timeframe, it's going to need an enormous amount of battery storage. So a lot of that cobalt, nickel, and those other battery metals are going to be used not for transportation, but for energy storage.

And this deal in Saudi Arabia is an indication of that as well. And kind of bundling up the news from the past couple of weeks, both from the AI and the automotive sector, BYD, Geely, and Great Wall Motors, three of China's largest auto companies, all said that they're going to add DeepSeek AI to their EVs. So there's the integration process.

of what we're seeing just happening in the AI and the automotive space. So a lot of ground to cover, and this is why I'm thrilled to have back on the show John Lee, who is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Switzerland and a director of EastWest Futures. He's out in this part of the world quite a bit. I had a chance to see him a few weeks ago, and we had a tea in Ho Chi Minh City, and today he joins us on the line from Berlin, probably a very cloudy, cold Berlin, but

But welcome back to the show, John. Great to have you there. Thanks, Eric. Great to be here. So you heard the wind-up, which is a lot of news coming very, very fast on the AI front and the automotive front. Let's talk about DeepSeek and really get into whether or not there's relevance for this technology for the global south. And I think this is particularly important because one of the things that makes DeepSeek special

So different than, say, from OpenAI or any of the other large language models that we're seeing come out of the U.S. or other parts of the world, particularly in the G7 countries, is the fact that it's open source. That means anybody can download DeepSeek, put it onto their local server, and run it without paying a license fee. That is issue number one. Issue number two is that it doesn't take a lot of hardware in order to run DeepSeek.

And so that too could be very important for countries in, say, Africa or Asia, where the infrastructure for that kind of computing power to run an open AI isn't there, but something that could run DeepSeq is there. Talk to us a little bit about the application and the potential application of a technology like DeepSeq in developing countries. Sure, Eric. Well...

The first thing to remember is that when we talk about running DeepSync on your laptop, that's not the full model. That's the distilled version or one of them, which has been basically distilled from other open source models, such as, let's say, Alibaba's Quinn or Meta's Llama and DeepSync.

DeepSeek itself is one of a number of open source models which have emerged both in the Chinese ecosystem and overseas. Even if we talk about the American ecosystem, for example, over the last few weeks, there's been another announcement from OpenThinker, I believe, of an open source model which allegedly has performance benchmarks that are comparable, at least, to those of DeepSeek. So we are seeing a trend towards, as you put it, open sourcing, or perhaps you could say open access, so license-free use of these very...

advanced capabilities, which obviously creates a lot of potential for smaller organizations or countries which don't have the resources. I think it's important also to maybe distinguish between what we traditionally call open source, where all of, in the AI context, even the data sets that are used for training are available, and open access, which is really the key here, I think. So as you mentioned, the ability to use it without paying insorbent licensing fees.

even to use the full DeepSeek R1 model and as everyone knows the price is significantly lower than for using the OpenAI equivalents so in that sense I

I think that it's representative of a trend towards democratizing the use of LLM capabilities. And obviously, that raises a lot of possibilities for the less well-resourced actors in the world. Well, let's talk about that a little bit. You talked about putting DeepSeq onto a laptop. That's one use of it, but you could also put it into one of these new Alibaba cloud centers and run a more robust version of it.

There's now data centers all over the world. They're coming here in Asia, fast and furious. We've seen announcements in Africa as well. So you could run a more robust version of DeepSeek that could give you more power and more flexibility out of a cloud center. Is that correct?

Well, you could run the full model via API or over the cloud, yes. But that said, you can basically on a consumer-grade laptop with, let's say, 32 gigs RAM, run one of the distilled models, as I said. So the potential is, and this is still largely theoretical, I think, which is often the case with AI, to increase the

functions that you can run at the edge of the network, so to call it. So on the one hand, you do have potentially more access to extremely powerful computing functions that are provided over by cloud providers like Alibaba and run through large scale data centers. But on the other hand, you can also potentially run more functions at edge devices, whether that be a consumer laptop or let's say at terminals, which are part of self-driving infrastructure.

So there's many possibilities across, if you like, the range of use cases. The question is whether those use cases have materialized and been commercialized. Well, I think one of the key concerns that a lot of people have about DeepSeek is the fact that it's Chinese. And so if you go into right now into DeepSeek and you type in, tell me all about what happened on June 4th, 1989 in Tiananmen Square,

They're going to come back and say, I don't want to talk about that. Now, that is obviously because DeepSeek hosted in China is behaving in accordance with Chinese regulations, which limit that type of discussion. Outside of China, if I host it on my laptop as a distilled version, or if we install it on a cloud server, say in Egypt, it will not have those restrictions. Is that correct?

Well, there is actually a project to develop, if you like, even more open version of DeepSeq because the model has been, let's say, open source to a large degree with the parameters and so on made available. Not all of the training data, but under the open access license, there already is a foreign project to develop a version of DeepSeq, which, for instance, would not necessarily be subject to

to the censorship restrictions in China. Okay, but I guess my key question is, if we're talking about putting DeepSeek out into the developing world, into other countries, they're not going to use a version of that that's hosted in China, correct? They're going to put it on their own servers, on their own laptops, in their own cloud data centers.

Yeah, that's certainly possible, yes. Okay. Now, if they do that, are they going to be subject to the censorship regime that is currently restricting the types of discussions that it can have on the China-hosted server? None of the models have been tweaked locally, no. Okay. It would not appear to be the case. Certainly, the data privacy concerns in terms of the data and the answers that come back being mediated through Chinese data centers and the, if you like, information management system around that would definitely be

of less concern if we're talking about locally hosted models. Okay, you say less concern, but not entirely free of concern. And this is a problem that's come up in South Korea, where they have banned the use of DeepSeq in the automotive sector, and because they're concerned about the data privacy questions. And this is one of the problems in dealing with Chinese tech, is that we don't have a lot of visibility into what happens to the data,

how much data is going to different servers and if the data is going to China or somewhere else. As far as you know, if a deep seek server cluster is hosted in, again, I'm using Egypt as an example, it could be anywhere, does data from that server cluster, from user data that people are using locally in Egypt, does that go back to China or do we not know?

I think it also depends on the implementation. So if, for example, DeepCity is integrated, as you mentioned, with one of the, let's say, car makers, intelligent driving services, then it also depends on how their service is set up. So, for instance, here in Europe, at least what BYD and other companies say in public is that all of the user data is stored in Europe for compliance with the GDPR, with European regulations.

Now, there have been studies done which show that there is some data transmission in the case of, let's say, the subject particular car model, which occurs to servers in China. In some cases, that's explicable for, you might say, non-nefarious purposes such as navigation, where it's the mapping service, which is basically querying servers in China. But there are other instances where, at least in that case, it wasn't possible for the researchers to say what the

purpose of the file that was being transmitted back to China was. So the same concerns would apply where we're talking about integration of LLM capabilities provided by a third service provider like DeepSeek. Is this a point of concern for countries

that do not have very robust AI capabilities. They put DeepSeek into their systems and onto their servers, but they don't necessarily have a full understanding as to what happens to the user data. Wired Magazine is blaring headlines that say DeepSeek AI is sending your data to China. You see this all over the BBC saying something very similar as well. Is this a point of concern or is the Western media making a mountain out of a molehill here?

I think if you're running the model locally on your own servers, then I would certainly not put that in the same box as accessing DeepSeq, the full model directly from servers in China. I mean, another way that many people outside or entities outside China are likely to use it is via APIs and through foreign cloud service providers like AWS. So in those circumstances, it's difficult.

to say without access to the inside information as to exactly how the data is being managed. But that's not in the same category of risk, I would say. But when it comes to government concerns, I think that there's often a zero risk approach. And certainly when it comes to automotive, as I said, you've got the issue that it's not simply DeepSeek as a Chinese entity that's involved. You have to look at who the cloud service provider is, who the

Autonomous OEM is and what their declared data storage policies are. And when it comes to the risk of Chinese technology companies and data, again, many foreign governments suddenly are just taking a zero risk approach.

So when we think about DeepSeek, it feels to me like it's a revolutionary breakthrough. Yes, it was based on or what you call distilled on ChatGPT data. That's what we think it is. And that's what ChatGPT is alleging and even some of Meta's data sets as well. Okay, that's fine in one sense, but it does open up the opportunity for countries that could not afford to license OpenAI and to access it. I mean, even just for me as a user,

I have to spend 20 bucks a month to pay for OpenAI, for ChatGPT to get the pro version. You don't have to pay anything for DeepSeek. So this does open up opportunities for both users and also businesses that are trying to build new industries based on and empowered by AI. When you travel to places like here in Asia and then other parts of the world, and they're starting to think about how to use AI, what are the conversations that you're having and how does DeepSeek actually change that?

Well, in Southeast Asia, obviously, there's been a lot of attention on the data centers. I think here it's worth highlighting that the capacity of global South countries to use many of these technologies does depend on their existing endowment.

So do you already have businesses which have established products, business models, supply chains, which can put the technology to use? It's possible in the Chinese context to give many examples. And you mentioned at the start, I think it's actually up to about 20 Chinese automakers, which have now said that they're going to integrate DeepSea with various types of intelligent driving technology. If you're a Southeast Asian automaker, and there aren't many of them, are you in a position to do the same thing?

Now, on the other hand, if you talk about data centers, then a lot of that capacity is being used by extra-regional countries. So in Malaysia, for example, and this is one of the reasons why it's a political issue via the US, the data centers that's financed by the Chinese actors are being used by those actors to deliver their own services, ByteDance being the most obvious example. So a

Again, the question is who is using the infrastructure? Has the endowment come to take advantage of it? And ultimately, what benefit does the host economy gain from that? Can you give us some examples of what some of the benefits that, again, you talked about Malaysia. Malaysia is not really a good example in part because they are quite advanced now.

down this road. There are tons of data centers coming into Malaysia. There's a critical mass of talent in Malaysia. So in some respects, they're an outlier in the global south for this. But let's pick another country that maybe isn't as advanced. Vietnam is one. We can pick any number of African countries too, and South America, where they're just ramping up

their AI infrastructure, both on the policy side and also on the tech side as well. Can you give us some applications of how this might be used in those countries? Sure. Well, I suppose that service delivery would be an obvious example. Again, if we were to take a case study from the Chinese context, one of the important

The implementations we're already seeing is the use of integrated elements like DTICM to improve delivery of medical services over the internet. So, for example, personalized patient care and medical advice for developing countries. And I agree with you that Malaysia, let alone Singapore, would probably be outliers.

in terms of the level of domestic resources that they have to apply here compared to, let's say, the sub-Saharan African countries or typical Latin American country. If you like, infrastructure deficit or capability deficit for government service delivery or many other types of services in the developing world is something where...

AI-enabled infrastructure could help close the gap a bit. And even in the developed countries, we've seen that perhaps the single biggest use case for ILM's has been in call centers and customer service functions, for example. So although it may

not be the sexy end of the spectrum in terms of basic service delivery, data analytics, and many other areas where, if you like, a particularly state capacity is limited in the developing world, I think that there's a lot of potential. What does DeepSeek do on the downside of things? So we always talk about the potential upside. You've mentioned some really intriguing business ideas and some ways that in the healthcare sector this can be used. And again, because of the cost efficiency, you can do things with DeepSeek that you could not do with B2B.

pretty much any other AI platform. But at the same time, human beings are prone to take advantage of these technologies, but also to find the most sinister ways

awful ways to use it as well. And I'm thinking, for example, how deep seek localized in certain countries could be used for surveillance. They could be used for disinformation. You can be creating all sorts of narratives out of it that are just not true. What are the concerns on the downside about the fears of how AI hosted locally in countries that generally have weaker state capacity than, say, any of the G7 countries? And I'm starting to exclude the United States from that, given the fact that the United States regulatory structure appears to be collapsing in front of us.

But other than maybe the G6, if you will, minus the United States, they have pretty strong regulatory measures in place. But countries like Mozambique do not. And if a deep-seek server is hosted in Mozambique spewing out all sorts of awful things, what are the risks? Or is it no different than deep-seek than using ChatGPT or any of the other LLMs?

Well, I guess that when it comes to LLMs and risk, you can always distinguish between the political level and, if you like, the nature of the technology itself. So at the political level, obviously, the concerns in many countries around the nature of the political system in China is the issue. And then you can mirror that in terms of how another government would manage data. In Vietnam, where you are, Eric, obviously, Vietnam has its own data regulatory regime. It is also a

one-party system where the government controls information flow fairly carefully. So the same political concerns would apply, at least from the viewpoint of, let's say, a free speech fundamentalist, as Musk likes to call himself, when it comes to the

data that you give to the model and the answers that it provides back. And you have to remember that when you are querying an LLM, you are giving it information. That's the basis on which it can generate an answer for you. That information has to be stored somewhere. So it's a question, again, of the level of trust that you place in the entities involved, whether that be the governments or the companies that are providing the service. But that takes us to the nature of the technology. And I think

Again, anyone listening to this podcast is probably familiar with the discussions around the nature of large language models, the potential for them to provide potentially misleading answers or to facilitate the spread of, let's say, misinformation, if not actually disinformation, the black box nature of security.

some of the processing that occurs. So all of those still apply in the case of Chinese models, obviously. And when we talk about the capabilities of developing countries, I think it's fair to say that the governance of AI, whether it's on the regulatory side or in terms of the technical capability and the human capital that's available for monitoring supervision or fine-tuning of the models themselves to avoid such outcomes is much less important.

Yeah, no doubt. Just very quickly before we wrap up, I also want to touch on automotive as well. This is an area that you've been following quite closely, especially here in Southeast Asia. You brought up Vietnam, where I am. And one of the things that I've noticed over the past, just say four months,

Okay, it's really new. Our BYD is starting to show up on the street. We're also seeing Wuling, the Wuling Bingo, which is about a $10,000 car. I've seen four or five of those. Great Wall Motors is here now. Haval is starting to show up. I mean, out of nowhere, here they come. And they were, again, not in Vietnam for a very long time. Vietnam is home to one of Southeast Asia's only rivals to the Chinese, VinFast.

which for the most part has been selling cars to itself and its own taxi service and not having as much success outside of Vietnam as I think it may have hoped. Also, there's Proton in Malaysia, which again has been sputtering along for probably 20, 25 years. Nothing like what the Chinese are doing right now. And the Chinese are setting up factories in Thailand,

also here in Vietnam as well, which means that they can start shipping cars pretty low tariff, I think barely any tariff or zero tariff in the ASEAN market. And so we're going to see an explosion of Chinese EVs and Chinese internal combustion engine cars in this part of the world, as we are starting to see in other parts of the world. And by the way, I want to give a shout out to my colleague,

in Jenga Hakina, who over on our YouTube channel has been tracking Chinese EV growth in Africa. And it is remarkable, John. I think you would really like what we're doing over there. And in fact, we're going to be launching very soon in the next week or two. In fact, we're at the final stages of this.

the first Africa-focused EV show. So it's called the Africa EV Show with Njenga Hakina. He is going to be looking at Chinese mobility tech, not just in cars, but also in motorbikes, buses, tractors, scooters, you name it. He's going to be looking at it. And Africa, in many ways, is a leader in this.

But let's talk about what the work you've been doing here in Southeast Asia and the trends in the automotive sector is what I'm seeing here in Vietnam playing out across the region where we're starting to see the first kind of rise of Chinese EVs that will eventually probably put enormous pressure on Japanese, Korean and European and even American brands.

Well, I'd say that they already are, Eric. And as you pointed out, Vietnam is actually the only ASEAN country which has its own homegrown OEM whose prospects are actually relatively limited. The thing about VinFast... But Proton's in Malaysia though, right? Well, that's true. Yes. I don't know if I would put Proton in the same box because they're also in a partnership with Geely. And although they have launched their own EV models, the architecture and many...

much of the other technology is provided by Geely. But the same would be true of VinFast. I mean, it's been described to me, I'm at one level as basically a trojan horse for Chinese technology, which I think is probably referring to the batteries more than anything else.

But if we talk about the two ends of the market, on the consumer level, as you said, I think that like the rest of the world and the prospects of local companies to compete with the Chinese EV makers, and here we have to talk about intelligent driving as well as electrification, are evidently

if anything, falling even further behind. And if we just look at this week's news from BYD, for example, making intelligent driving functions, which are integrated with DeepSeek, by the way, free across a wide range of their models, including very competitively priced ones compared to, let's say, paying $8,000 a year to Tesla.

for their FSD equivalent. It's difficult to see how the foreign competition is going to keep up. And we mentioned batteries. That's another area, obviously, in which the Chinese companies are well ahead. And maybe we can have a segue at the end back to the issue of storage, because that's also very important from many developing countries.

perspectives. But on the supply side, I did write a long report for Singaporean institution on the rising role of Chinese firms in the supply chain on the production side in Southeast Asia. And that's where, at least for this part of the developing world, I think that the story is very interesting because it's a test case, if you like, for whether this so-called second China shock, so the rise of China, not merely as cheap assembly hub for inputs from elsewhere in the world,

But as an advanced manufacturing power in its own right, that is still a net exporter that has huge trade surpluses rather than deficits with its partner countries, is going to create more opportunities for firms in developing countries or is going to squeeze them out.

Let me just see if I understand what you're saying. We've been focusing on finished cars, and that's what I was talking about. But you're talking about how Chinese companies in the automotive production supply chain are just as important, you know, in places like Southeast Asia. So in the assembly of cars, maybe not even for Chinese cars, but in other brands as well. So Mercedes has operations here. Porsche sells cars here, but those are made in Germany. But Ford has operations in Thailand. And you're saying the parts feeding into all of those manufacturers is what's critical.

Well, not into all of them, but increasingly for certain technologies, yes, Chinese supplies are becoming important to the foreign MNCs too. I mean, you mentioned Malaysia, for example, that's the location for what is going to be the largest production plant in the world for silicon carbide wafers. And that's the base material for power management chips, especially in higher grade, higher voltage EVs. Now that one is run by a German company, but if you like

end purchase commitments that are making the expansion viable, at least some of them are from Chinese automotive OEMs. So Geely and SAIC, for example. And the wafers that go into those chip plants are also very likely supplied by Chinese companies. It's a segment of the market which has been completely disrupted on a global scale by Chinese vendors over the last few years. So yes, even when you talk about the non-Chinese MNCs, you are seeing an increasing presence of Chinese technology, though there will be some limits.

placed on that by, again, the regulation and the political side. So the connected vehicles rule, for instance, that was finalized in January by the Biden administration on its way out, basically prohibits any kind of data transmitting Chinese-made technology, or for that matter, technology from entities which are owned by or controlled by Chinese interests being sold in the US market. But

Obviously, for much of the developing world, that's not an issue because they don't sell into the U.S. market. Yeah, I don't think they're going to be too concerned about that. I think it was the chairman or the CEO, I'm not sure, of BYD said this week that the Chinese are three to five years ahead of everybody else.

it feels like in many respects in EVs that it's more than three to five years, but nonetheless, they think three to five years is what they have. And when you take that into the context that it wasn't that long ago that Chinese brands were far behind their Western and Japanese and Korean competitors. So the fact that now three to five years is just shows you how far they've leapfrogged in this process.

What's the forecast for the global south in developing regions, particularly here in Southeast Asia that you see for Chinese cars? Is it going to be like phones? There was a time when Nokia used to make phones, right? Remember that? The Finns used to make phones, but they don't anymore. The Chinese now dominate the phone sector. I mean, with the South Koreans and a little bit of Apple, but when we look at the top five brands, they're dominated by the Chinese. And you look out five, six, seven, eight years from now, are we going to see basically all of

the top brands of cars in developing countries to be predominantly from China? Well, again, it's an outlier, but if you were to use Singapore as you like the canary in the coal mine, then BYD is the top selling brand there now. And they offer a range of products across their whole price range.

spectrum. The other thing to remember is that in many developing countries, of course, two-wheelers, so basically electric motorbikes are really the growing market because of the traffic conditions and other limitations. And there are some Southeast Asian players which are trying to get a foot on the ladder. But if you had to generalize, and for the developing world, I think we're really talking about Southeast Asia here. I mean, there is some...

activity by Chinese OEMs in South America. But if you're talking about, I guess, the leading case study for how local automotive sectors are integrating with the Chinese ecosystem, I'd say it would be Southeast Asia.

There really is a transformation going on. So in the ICS report that I mentioned, I list the collaborations between Chinese and local firms or public research agencies, other actors across five different segments of the supply chain of the production process. And everywhere you see that, at least for EVs and intelligent driving, the Chinese companies are leading. It's not a comparative study with the foreign, let's call them legacy MNCs.

But the reality is that the Chinese have completely disrupted this sector. They've taken advantage of the sea change technologically when EV is not quite a black slate, but close to it in terms of being a very different product from a combustion engine car. And when it comes to the intelligent driving technologies, well, as I mentioned, it's not just a matter of it being three to five years ahead in technological terms of the competition.

It's a question of who has the price structure and the networks already in place to offer the product ahead of their competitors. And it's very difficult to see how, in the case of free intelligent driving technology, which BYD is now offering across, again, at least 20 or so of its models, even other Chinese carmakers are going to be able to compete, let alone the foreign players.

Well, if what's happening in China is any indication as to what will happen outside of China, where Porsche saw their deliveries drop 28%, they've cut back their dealer network, we're seeing a downturn in sales. GM had to do a $5 billion write-off because of what's happening in China. Foreign auto brands are just getting...

slacked in China. And so because of the competition that's there, and that competition now looks to be heading overseas to places like here in Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and elsewhere, looking for new markets. Those of you, again, in the United States, you will not be able to drive any of these cars because there's 100% tariff put on top of them, which I think is really unfortunate because these cars are just fantastic.

Fantastic. I mean, there's so much cool stuff. If you love gadgets, you will love being in some of these cars. I mean, and I've had a chance to get into a couple of them here. And when I was in Indonesia, most of the grabs, which is like the Uber there, are

Geelys and GACs, Guangdong Automotive, they're Chinese EVs and they're a lot of fun. And so I feel sorry for folks in the United States that won't be able to enjoy some of this Chinese tech because it is a lot of fun. I'm going to put a link to John's ISEAS report in the show notes so you can check it out.

and then we'll put some links to some of these deep-seek stories that we talked about at the beginning of the show. John, thank you so much for coming by again to update us on these trends. We'd love to kind of make this a more regular appearance given the pace of change that's happening in both the automotive and the AI sectors. Really appreciate your time. Just a reminder, John is a senior fellow at the Asia Society Switzerland and the director of EastWestFutures.com.

He's frequently out here in Southeast Asia and travels all over Europe as well, following Chinese and global tech. So, John, thank you so much for your time today. Always a pleasure, Eric. And that'll do it for this edition of the show. Kobus and I will be back again next week with another episode of the China Global South podcast. So for Kobus, who's off this week because he's traveling, I'm Eric Olander. We'll see you again next week. Thanks so much for listening.

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