Chinese e-commerce colossus Alibaba has taken its first venture into developing artificial intelligence home devices by launching its voice assistant speaker, which has drawn comparisons to Amazon's 'Echo'.

China, home to one of the most advanced mobile payment infrastructure in the world, has adopted facial payment technology.

Online spending in China has increased by 32 percent per year in the last five years, reaching $967 billion in 2016, according to a new report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), which explores what makes China's rapid internet growth unique - and how foreign companies can crack vibrant digital markets.

A number of China's leading technology firms have partnered on a pioneering new smart city initiative that has been created to ensure the smooth integration of emerging technologies designed to transform major cities.

Artificial intelligence (Al) is regarded as a key to drive the world's future development. Although Europe and the United States are dominated by private enterprises, while the Mainland China is led by national entities, the core of AI formation, in fact, is rested on available top-notch talent. The 2017 Global AI Talent White Paper released by the Tencent Research Institute in December last year stated that there are approximately 300,000 AI researchers and practitioners in the world, while the market demand for AI talent is in millions. In the first 10 months of 2017, the demand for AI talent was twice of that in 2016. The report suggests that the bottleneck is education - though there are 20,000 graduates from related disciplines each year, the number is far from adequate to meet the demand.