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 dollars, managed to challenge all American AI software companies and, within 24 hours, hit the Wall Street stock market by a thousand billion dollars.
Much has been written in the media about DeepSeek, its applications, and its development process, but let’s look at DeepSeek’s impact from another angle.
About two weeks before DeepSeek was unveiled, Donald Trump spoke of the danger of China—not a military threat, but an economic one. Of course, Donald Trump is not the only one talking about the danger of the Chinese economy.
Before him, Joe Biden spoke of this danger or risk of the Chinese economy and even imposed high tariffs on some Chinese goods like steel, aluminum, and electric cars made in China. Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. Secretary of State in George W. Bush’s administration, also spoke about the severe dependency of the U.S. economy on China’s economy in a podcast interview with the Farnahfarz website.
However, when DeepSeek managed to hit American companies by a thousand billion dollars, the idea of the Chinese economic blow to the American economy became tangible. Until then, only political and economic analysts knew how vital the U.S.’s economic dependence on China was, but ordinary people on the streets and small American shareholders didn’t perceive the danger of the Chinese economy until the unveiling of DeepSeek when they suddenly realized because the value of the shares they held, in companies making AI and computer microprocessors, 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 expressed and the ‘Death to America’ slogan in China that is acted upon? 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, causing damage to Iran’s economy that, according to the former Secretary of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution, has exceeded 1,200 billion dollars in the past decade.
However, the damage from tariffs on China’s economy, as studies and investigations have shown, has not only negatively affected China’s economy but also impacted the U.S. economy itself. Perhaps that 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 is better to ask what China has done to fight America, even though that country currently does not claim to be fighting. However, according to its Marxist ideology, America is not only the great capitalist but also an imperialist.
So much so that Chinese statesmen, from the beginning of the Communist Revolution’s victory in that country in 1949, did not have a balanced political relationship with America for 30 years.
But in the meantime, what they gained from this open and hostile struggle was a poor nation and a weak economy, so much so that even the Soviet Union could not help them. However, from 1979, Chinese statesmen executed their struggle with America according to their ideology in a different way. They tried to use the Americans’ own methods.
Deng Xiaoping, the architect of modern China, pursued a new relationship in China’s foreign policy, referencing 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, since changing its lifestyle and interaction with the world, what has happened is that China has become the world’s second-largest economy, is among the top three military powers in terms of military strength and arms production, and has reached a level of economic interdependence with other countries that no country, not even the U.S., can operate its economy without trade interaction with China.
China, unlike Iran, has not had and does not have significant claims in fighting America, but it has conducted its economic and political behavior in such a way that if at one time China claimed to fight and wage war with America and arrested the infiltrators of capitalist culture in the country—didn’t Mao carry out the Cultural Revolution in this very context—now it is America that claims to be fighting economically and even culturally with China because it is China that is undermining America without paying a high cost.
The unveiling of DeepSeek should not be viewed only from the perspective of new technology; it is better to also see it through a political lens.
As Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, has said, from this stage forward, China is no longer a follower of American innovations but has become an innovator and creator itself. ‘Death to America’ in the Chinese language can also be a model for Iranian policymakers.
