Anti-Americanism in the Chinese Way
Anti-Americanism in the Chinese Way
Last week, 40-year-old Chinese Liang Wenfeng unveiled the DeepSeek AI application, an app that, with a cost of $5 million, challenged all American AI software companies and in just 24 hours dealt a blow equivalent to one trillion dollars to the Wall Street stock market.
Much has been written in the media about DeepSeek, its applications, and its development process, but let’s look at the impact of DeepSeek from another angle.
About two weeks before DeepSeek was unveiled, Donald Trump talked about the threat of China—not a military threat, but the threat of the Chinese economy. Of course, it’s not just Donald Trump who talks about the threat of the Chinese economy.
Before him, Joe Biden spoke of this threat or risk of the Chinese economy and even imposed high tariffs on some Chinese goods like steel, aluminum, and Chinese-made electric cars. Additionally, Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State under George W. Bush, also spoke about America’s heavy economic dependence on China in a podcast interview with the site Farnaz.
But when DeepSeek managed to deal a trillion-dollar blow to American companies, the perception of the Chinese economic impact on the American economy became tangible. Until then, only political and economic experts and analysts knew how vital America’s economic dependence on China was, but ordinary people on the street and small American shareholders didn’t realize the threat of the Chinese economy until DeepSeek’s unveiling, when they suddenly noticed because the value of the shares they held in AI and computer microprocessor manufacturing companies plummeted.
The point I want to make here is the function of slogans. What is the difference between the ‘Death to America’ slogan in Iran that is spoken and the ‘Death to America’ slogan in China that is enacted? The difference between these two slogans can be seen in the level of sanctions on Iran’s economy and tariffs on China’s economy.
Iran has been under American sanctions for over 40 years, and these sanctions have intensified over the past decade, so much so that the damage to Iran’s economy from these sanctions in the past decade, according to the former secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, has been more than 1,200 billion dollars.
However, the damage from tariffs on China’s economy, as research and studies have shown, has not only negatively impacted China’s economy but has also affected the American economy itself. Perhaps this is why Donald Trump currently imposes a 10% tariff on Chinese imports, while imposing a 25% tariff on Canadian and Mexican imports.
In essence, it’s better to ask what China has done to combat America, even though that country currently does not claim to be fighting. However, according to its Marxist ideology, America is not only the greatest capitalist but also imperialist.
So much so that Chinese statesmen did not have a balanced political relationship with America for 30 years after the victory of the Communist Revolution in that country in 1949.
But in the midst of this open and hostile struggle, what they gained was a poor nation and a weak economy, so much so that even the Soviet Union could not help. However, from 1979, Chinese statesmen implemented their struggle against America according to their ideology in a different way. They tried to use the Americans’ own methods.
Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, adopted a new approach in China’s foreign policy, citing the famous Chinese proverb that it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.
In the past 40 years, from changing lifestyles and interactions with the world, the result has been that China has become the world’s second-largest economy. In terms of military power and arms production, it is among the top three world powers, and in terms of economic interdependence, it has reached a point where no country, not even America, can turn its economic wheels without trade interaction with China.
China, unlike Iran, has not made grand claims about fighting America, but it has shaped its economic and political behavior in such a way that if at one time China claimed to fight and war with America and arrested the infiltrators of capitalist culture in the country—didn’t Mao carry out the Cultural Revolution in this context?—now it is America claiming economic and even cultural struggle with China because it is China that is undermining America without paying a high price.
The unveiling of DeepSeek should not be viewed only from the angle of new technology; it is better to see it through a political lens as well.
As Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, has said, from this point on, China is no longer a follower of American innovations but has become an innovator and creator of innovation itself. ‘Death to America’ in Chinese can also be a model for Iranian policymakers.