Background to Polycrisis: Origins of the Chinese Ascendancy

DeepSeek is a Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company which is changing the nature of global competition in the sector. DeepSeek is the answer to America’s OpenAI (ChatGPT’s maker), the difference being that it is offered free of charge. It makes money only by way of selling services to investors but in terms of ownership and rights of usage is an exemplar of open-source technology. Thus, upon its arrival on the market it demolished American high-tech AI companies, causing $1 trillion losses in the New York stock exchange and the NASDAC in January 2025. In important respects DeepSeek “de-marketized” AI, by-passing paywalls and bringing the landscape to the public domain. Now all applications built on DeepSeek can deliver high performance translations, undermining many private companies in the market and damaging their profits. This is perhaps the most important advanced contemporary form of competition, which has become political – others call it “new Cold War” – between China and the United States. Another instance is competition over semi-conductors and their fundamental materials constituting their main base of production, the so-called Rare Earth Elements and Minerals (REEMs), which are abundant in China and Africa – one of the reasons why Chinese capital is so much involved in sub-Saharan Africa – but not so much in the rest of the world.