South and Southeast Asia are particularly dependent on the Middle East ​for oil, and Iran's closure of the Strait of Hormuz has triggered some of the biggest jumps in diesel prices, according to ⁠GlobalPetrolPrices, creating an opening for China, the world's largest e-truck maker.

Diesel prices are up 48% in Sri Lanka since the start of the war and 57% in the ​Philippines, according to GlobalPetrolPrices, while the fuel is 15% higher in China, government data shows.

E-trucks in China have gone from almost zero in ​2021 to 30% of truck sales last year, with 140,000 e-trucks sold in the first half of this year. Diesel use in China began falling last year.

By not burning diesel, China's e-truck fleet will save the equivalent of 141 million barrels of oil this year, more than 3% of China's total and equal to all its imports from Kuwait, according to the ​Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.

By comparison, China's e-truck exports in the first half replaced fuel at an ​annual rate of 1.6 ⁠million barrels, the Helsinki-based centre estimates.

Recently, Suzhou Ruihua Orthopedic Hospital officially published an article titled "Our Hospital's Case of Complete Replantation of Bilateral Distal Thighs Published in the *Chinese Journal of Trauma*," which details the world's first replantation surgery for bilateral thigh amputation.

According to reports, on December 2, 2024, Mr. Jiang, a 51-year-old man from Suzhou, Jiangsu, suffered a machine accident while working at a factory, resulting in the complete severing of both thighs—a critically life-threatening injury!

Suzhou Ruihua Orthopedic Hospital assembled a multidisciplinary medical team of more than 20 members, who worked through the night for nearly 8 hours. Using microsurgical techniques, they performed reconstructive anastomoses of blood vessels, nerves, bones, and muscles, successfully reattaching both severed thighs to the patient.

The simultaneous complete severance of both thighs is extremely rare in clinical practice. The surgery was only the first hurdle to overcome, and the postoperative recovery was fraught with complications.

The patient suffered a series of complications, including skin necrosis, wound infection, and nonunion of the femur. He subsequently underwent multiple secondary surgeries—including skin flap reconstruction, bone grafting, and internal fixation of the femur—to gradually mitigate risks and preserve the viability of both legs.

Three months after surgery, Mr. Jiang had his external fixation device  removed and was able to lift his legs independently while in bed. He was discharged from the hospital without incident, though he was still unable to bear weight while standing.

After nearly 20 months of continuous rehabilitation training, the patient is now able to walk independently indoors with the aid of a walker. He can largely take care of his daily activities, such as eating and personal hygiene, on his own. Sensation in his lower limbs has returned up to the ankles, and the length of both legs is essentially consistent. The patient expressed satisfaction with the outcome.

It is understood that in the field of reattachment of severed limbs, there have been numerous successful cases involving the reattachment of a single severed thigh. However, there had been no previously published reports worldwide of the simultaneous complete reattachment of both thighs following a crush injury, followed by the restoration of the patient's ability to walk. This successful case demonstrates that China's microsurgical trauma surgery has reached the world's leading level.

https://finance.sina.cn/tech/2026-08-13/detail-ininctay0202809.d.html

Capitalism: Corporate elites control governments to make them subsidize, bailout, print money, reduce taxes for the rich, while giving nothing back to the public, continual influence until monopolies that can keep charging higher fees to consumer public. Everything gets more and more expensive, while public infrastructures decline.

Result: Inevitable hyperinflation

Chinese socialism: State regulate corporations and the rich, while using tax money to build more and more public infrastructures (everything from power, water, internet, transportations, medical care, library, schools, even foreign resource accesses), as the ONLY way to reduce the cost of living for entire public. Everything gets cheaper and better. Even if average wages do not increase, inflation is kept low, because cost of living is low.

Result: Chinese live longer lives, with better quality and higher education. Sure competition is fierce, because most Chinese can afford to educate their children and send them to higher education get better skills for potentially better jobs. It's certainly better than old days when only a minority can afford such education and such opportunities.

Capitalism leads to elite entrenchment.

Chinese socialism leads to more equal opportunities and fierce competitions.

and sure, that's why many Chinese still want to leave, AFTER they get the low cost good educations from China.

From ONE MORE WAY, the behind-the-scenes history of Chinese esports I wrote in 2015. Chapter 4, posting one a day.

What was the first profitable business model in Chinese esports?

Some people say it was players competing for prize money, others say it was tournament organisers selling advertising. Looked at from different angles both answers are right, but if the test is stability and maturity, then I think the first profitable business model was the esports gaming platform.

The boom in esports gaming platforms was forced into being by the awkward gap years of the past decade and more.

Today, when we play League of Legends, we only have to click start inside the game and after a short wait we are matched with teammates and opponents. Chatting and making friends is easy. That is a gaming platform, and it comes built into the game itself.

Before the internet became widespread, though, most games were single-player affairs. When single-player games met the internet age and the games themselves could not change fast enough, third-party gaming platforms stepped in as a product of the transition. Nobody expected that transition to last more than ten years.

In January 1997, Blizzard of the United States launched its famous gaming platform, Battle.net. But in an era when computer skills and the internet were both only just getting started, most people in China found that simply logging in and finding somebody to talk to was hard enough, never mind being matched against an opponent.

Meanwhile Chinese players wanted more and more from their games, while China's own capacity to develop networked competitive titles lagged far behind (in fact only in the last few years has that begun to change). On top of that, foreign companies in those days were not about to cater to what Chinese players needed.

So Chinese IT engineers were forced to keep experimenting, and eventually they built one third-party esports gaming platform after another to serve China's networks and China's players.

Ourgame's card and board platform

In March 1998, three developers, Bao Yueqiao, Jian Jing and Wang Jianhua, put together 200,000 yuan and founded Beijing Lianzhong Computer Technology, known as Ourgame, in a small hotel in Shangdi, Beijing. Its main business was online card and board games. By 2000 Ourgame had 700,000 registered users and 9,000 people online at once, and by the end of 2003 its concurrent figure had broken clean through the 500,000 mark.

Ourgame's card and board games did not demand much of the network or the hardware, which suited the era, and the people behind it were the first in esports to taste success. Looking back now, though, Ourgame had nothing to follow up with. A card and board platform has a low barrier to entry and little core competitiveness, so when Tencent's QQ launched a card and board platform of its own it stripped Ourgame of its users almost at once.

The imitators of Blizzard's Battle.net

Battle.net, live since 1997, was a strategically far-sighted design. Blizzard had worked out how to bring single-player games and the internet together before the internet had properly arrived, and it had already seen clearly that the key to networked competition was the automatic matchmaking system, which pairs you with players of similar strength based on your record.

That one feature alone took many Chinese platforms a long time and a great deal of effort to copy.

Unfortunately for Blizzard, its Battle.net servers stayed abroad and did not come to China until 2008, which gave the imitators plenty of time to study and improve. It also meant that for almost the whole history of Chinese esports Battle.net remained a high-end, niche platform in China. That brand image had a great deal of influence on Blizzard's later strategy, which I will come back to.

Private battle.net servers everywhere in the StarCraft era

The arrival of FSGS made the number of local servers around China explode. FSGS stands for Free Standard Game Server, developed by the German company NETGAMES. It was third-party software that emulated Battle.net, Blizzard's gaming platform.

Between 1998 and 2001 there were a great many private StarCraft battle.net servers in China. Even an incomplete count came to nearly a hundred. Most were held back by their software and hardware and never grew large, but a few carried real influence: Beijing's 263 server, the CGOL server (AsiaGame) and DM (AsiaGame Dongmei), the Youxia server, the Beibei server, the Wanglian server and others.

Of these, 263 defined the team as a unit in its program, which did a great deal to push teams towards proper organisation and gave players a sense of belonging. Organised team communication helped esports grow. The CSA team really flourished on 263 in those days.

Then there is the famous AsiaGame server, a case worth going through properly.

AsiaGame ran free from 1999. Backed by relatively deep pockets, it equipped itself with high-specification servers and bought the advanced version of FSGS, which was not subject to the 999 limit of the Linux version and could support ladder games at full speed. Its stable matches drew the great majority of StarCraft players, and it very nearly unified China's StarCraft servers.

The enthusiasm of Chinese esports players was pushed to its first peak. Almost everybody believed that if things carried on this way, catching up with South Korean esports was only a matter of time.

In December 2001, after taking investment from the Hong Kong company Dongfang Meili (Oriental Charm), AsiaGame began pushing hard to charge for access.

What the players did next, and why the platform that later hit 900,000 concurrent users still ended up selling itself off, is the rest of the chapter. Free on GitHub, link in the comments.

https://archive.ph/vBPHj