Why Microsoft is Quietly Abandoning China

Microsoft Corp. has quietly wound down its five-year retreat from China, shuttering offices, closing retail stores, and cutting thousands of jobs, while continuing to sell Azure and AI services to Chinese companies such as ByteDance Ltd. and Shein. The pullback highlights the decoupling of the world's two largest economies, even as Microsoft's Beijing R&D center trained alumni who now lead rivals like DeepSeek and SenseTime. Separately, former Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji, who steered China into the World Trade Organization in 2001 and oversaw a 12-fold increase in trade, has died at age 97, prompting an outpouring of grief on Weibo.

Alice Han and James Kynge break down Microsoft’s five-year retreat from China — shuttered offices, closed retail stores, and thousands of jobs wound down — while the company quietly keeps selling Azure and AI services to Chinese giants like ByteDance and Shein. They dig into what’s driving the pullback, whether this is the decoupling everyone’s been warning about, and the irony that Microsoft’s Beijing R&D center helped train alumni now leading rivals like DeepSeek and SenseTime. Then: former Chinese premier Zhu Rongji — the man who steered China into the WTO in 2001 and became known as “China’s Thatcher” — has died at 97. Alice and James look at his legacy, from a 12x increase in China’s global trade to the tens of millions of state-enterprise workers laid off along the way, and what the surprisingly unscripted outpouring of grief on Weibo says about China today. Finally: Typhoon Dolphin has weakened to a tropical storm, but not before forcing over a million evacuations, grounding 40% …