This week, Chinese technology has shown the West the challenge it faces – ruthless, implacable and impossible to ignore. The unveiling of the Chinese artificial intelligence model DeepSeek has not only disrupted the business models of America’s tech behemoths; it has also shown that, in the race to develop the tools for economic hegemony, Beijing is set on supremacy. The launch of DeepSeek came just days before the CIA’s conclusion that, on the balance of probabilities, the Covid virus was incubated in a Wuhan lab – a man-made killer, not a product of nature’s evolutionary mischief. China stands revealed as a power bent on using science to secure not human flourishing but geopolitical dominance for its Leninist leadership.
DeepSeek is a technological breakthrough of staggering boldness. It processes information at a fraction of the cost of existing AI systems. As one commentator noted, models which have been assumed to need the power of a Ferrari to function have been overtaken by an e-bike. Its ability to perform apparently endless useful functions at high speed and low cost has already led to it becoming the most downloaded app in the US.
But DeepSeek is no neutral fact-checker, no autonomous cruncher of data. It is, like every enterprise in China, a weapon in Xi Jinping’s armoury. One user who asked about the Uighurs – the Muslim population of the province of Xinjiang who provide Beijing with slave labour – found that DeepSeek is hard-wired to serve regime interests. Just as it started to give an honest answer, referencing the widely reported human rights abuses, the words fluttered from the screen to be replaced with the message: ‘Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.’ A similar response greeted an inquiry about the Tiananmen Square massacre. The bot said it could not answer because it was designed ‘to provide helpful and harmless responses’.
There is nothing harmless about DeepSeek. The speedy and cheap information it brings users is a Shirt of Nessus – a prize that ensnares and weakens those who adopt it. Every keystroke entered, every question asked, every task initiated sees information flow to the ultimate owners of this technology – the Chinese state and the Communist party which runs it. There is nothing artificial about the intelligence Beijing gains about the West from this model.
There is nothing artificial about the intelligence Beijing gains about the West from DeepSeek
China’s understanding that technology offers the means to weaken the West is not new. TikTok has already provided Beijing with a way to mine western citizens’ data for its own ends. And while China gathers information, it also creates dislocation. TikTok has, aptly, been described as a weapon of mass distraction, making communication an exercise in simplification, exaggeration and polarisation.
It would require an industrial level of naivety not to see the dangers in the nature of Xi’s regime. But that is what our government appears to be displaying. A few weeks ago, Rachel Reeves travelled to China – a journey she seems to have made on her knees – imploring Beijing to ‘invest’ in the UK. She was given £600 million for her trouble. The Democratic Republic of Congo, by way of comparison, has received $3.8 billion worth of investment from China.
To secure that ‘investment’, the British government has had to ignore not just China’s theft of British intellectual property, its intimidation of Chinese dissidents here, its repression of the democrats in Hong Kong we once pledged to protect, its re-education camps and use of forced labour in Xinjiang, its menacing of Taiwan and its illegal annexation of territory in the South China Sea, but also its colonisation of territories from Djibouti through Sri Lanka to Mauritius. Mauritius, which the UK government wants to pay upwards of £9 billion to lease our own sovereign territory in the Chagos Islands.
The belief that China was a partner whose investment could provide us with the growth every government wants to secure is not, of course, new. It is frightening to remember that until five years ago the UK government was happy to allow Huawei – which, like every enterprise in China, ultimately serves the state – to run our 5G broadband networks. It would have provided a hostile state with an invaluable surveillance window into Britain. It was only warnings that the US would no longer share intelligence with Britain if Chinese kit were embedded in our communications infrastructure that forced a change of mind. China, too, could easily have ended up running our nuclear power stations, with equal risks for security.
Those mistakes were, at least, corrected. Now, however, when the scale and malevolence of Chinese ambition is clearer than ever, our government whores after their money. It is humiliating.
Xi thrives on western weakness. He follows the Leninist maxim: push in the knife and if you encounter steel, withdraw. If you encounter mush, push on. The present government’s policy on China is pure mush. The knife threatens us all.
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