By Tom Fowdy
One of the most prominent foreign policy objectives of the previous Biden administration was to crush the technological development of China. In what Jake Sullivan described as a "small yard, high fence" strategy, the Biden presidency went further than the previous Trump White House ever did, imposing sweeping export bans aimed at China's semiconductor and chip-making sector, seeking to deprive them of critical manufacturing technology and advanced AI chips, with officials crowing that they had almost certainly crippled Beijing.
The policy of containment was primarily motivated by a desire to prevent China from being able to develop advanced military technologies, which would place the United States at a strategic disadvantage while also defending US dominance over key technology supply chains, which China risks surpassing in. The US, of course, has consistently adopted ideological reasoning in its approach to China's technological development, believing erroneously that "China can't innovate" and that all of its technological successes are merely "stolen" or "appropriated" from America.
It, therefore, came as a massive shock when, contrary to all expectations, China suddenly unleashed an AI system that instantly passed ChatGPT in its effectiveness and quickly became the number one of its kind worldwide. This new application, known as DeepSeek, is superior in every way and has demonstrated in the space of days that Biden's attempts to constrain China's AI capabilities have amounted to pretty much nothing. Social media, of course, was awash with trolling attempts asking the bot about controversial Chinese political questions, which it could not answer, thus lampooning it over censorship accordingly. Yet, these politically motivated barbs do not scratch its explosion in popularity.
China has done the unthinkable; it has shown it can surpass the United States in Artificial Intelligence, despite the American belief that waves of export restrictions were a bona fide solution to stopping it, thus challenging the fundamental tenants of American strategy that believed Beijing was a Soviet Union tier opponent that was not capable of matching the United States due to the constraints of its political system. After all, Americans believe that the completely "free", competitive market is the ultimate driver of progress through its social Darwinist "survival of the fittest" structure.
Indeed, as much as this has a negative humanitarian impact that cares little for people's welfare, there are of course some merits to this argument, we are blind if we cannot see America's global success. It is a fiercely competitive country, and the zealous attitude Americans take to their own personal endeavors contrasts sharply with the increasingly pessimistic and relaxed character of British people. However, this worship of capitalism and "competition" not only misunderstands China but also underestimates it.
The American caricature of Beijing as a static Communist dystopia also fails to comprehend the fiercely competitive nature of Chinese and East Asian society in general, which is far more strenuous than America throughout every dynamic of life and, in its own way, is just as commercial. The US, however, has long been duped by its own propaganda pertaining to China, believing that all of its achievements and economic development are purely a result of "theft" and "unfair trade practices" coming at America's own expense. Therefore, as it goes, hard-line policies will force China into stagnation by depriving it of foreign technology and ultimately forcing it to take the same path as the Soviet Union. The fact that China is the largest commercial and trading nation on the planet has been persistently ignored in favor of these silly cliches that have duly underestimated China's capabilities. Thus, as always, every successful Chinese innovation is not only written off as "theft" of some kind but then quickly branded as a "national security threat" and thereafter banned, and I have little doubt in my mind that DeepSeek will ultimately meet that fate in the United States. I mean, as I write, they are coercing TikTok to sell.
But does this not reveal a greater irony about America? A nation that loves and thrives upon competition sure does hate it, and they have little tolerance for products and solutions that seem to be better than they have. I am hoping, perhaps in vain, that DeepSeek will somehow be a wake-up call that the only way for the United States to better China is to ultimately better it in a game of fair play through their own innovation.
We don't want an America that is insecure, paranoid and eliminates competition from the market under the subtle belief they "can't compete with it," we want the same America that leapfrogged the Soviet Union in the space race by landing on the moon. We want optimistic, fair competition, not McCarthyist, defeatist drivel that denies the strategic challenge they face.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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