Worried for the future of China, the most influential and popular modern Chinese writer, essayist and thinker Lu Xun (1881-1936) dared his fellow Chinese nearly a century ago: 不灭中文，把灭中国 (Save China, or Save Chinese). A fierce critic of the Confucian worldview, and hailed by Mao Zedong as the twentieth century revolutionary “sage,” Lu Xun relentlessly appealed to the Chinese people to reject lock, stock and barrel inward-looking, obscurantist and traditional thinking thriving within the linguistic boundaries of classical Chinese, well-preserved and protected by Confucian Classics. Two years after Lu Xun’s call to the nation, the Chinese Communist Party was born, which chose Save China.
The country’s radical and progressive thinking youthlistened to Lu Xun and launched a New Culture Movement in the month of May in the year 1919. Also called the May Fourth Movement, it ushered in Chinese renaissance and enlightenment in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The most remarkable feature of the Movement was the language reform movement leading to the birth of vernacular Chinese – or, 白话 Bǎihuā，a form of writing style in Chinese that uses the spoken language instead of more formal and traditional or Classical Chinese (文言Wényán). Thus, China was saved and (Classical) Chinese perished.
Zoom over to the year 2025. On February 27, on the eve of the Chinese New Year and a mere 5 weeks after DeepSeek chatbot outsmarted OpenAI, the Chinese official media showed the Chinese president warmly greeting Liang Wenfeng, the young chief of the “unknown” AI start-up DeepSeek. Most people in China as also China watchers abroad glanced over the picture and gave it a passe as a good PR exercise as politicians are known to do. Or, some might have even thought Xi’s first high-profile encounter with Liang, Jack Ma and other private entrepreneurs in years was a sign that “political winds” in Beijing were changing.
The truth however is, troubled by slow-growing economy for some years now, and a “fatal” combination of the embarrassing failure of Xi-guided “dual circulation policy” and a China which is increasingly isolated by the West and Chinese economy which is staring into “decoupling” by the US economy, the CPC leader Xi Jinping’s shaking hands with Liang and Jack Ma and other captains of the industry was a political gesture symbolizing that from now on the Party rule and legitimacy will be more and more dependent on factors not directly within the purview of the CPC control. In other words, the policy of “private sector leads public sector” (民进国退 Mín jìn guó tuì ) will gradually dominate over the prevailing “public sector leads private sector” (国进民退 Guó jìn mín tuì) outlook.
At another level, in a remarkable twist, now, a century later, it seems rather extraordinary that in today’s modern or modernizing China, a recent high-tech achievement – largely if not entirely – is being attributed to the Classical Chinese writing system discarded hundred years ago. When China’s home-grown AI development firm DeepSeek shook up the artificial intelligence tech industry and the world in late January – and DeepSeek AI model is still unbeaten – the country’s intelligentsia is gung-ho about Chinese writing system becoming the key “code” to open the door to the future.
Moreover, as the global AI industry, for the fear of losing out the market share is “freaking out over China’s DeepSeek?” Domestic discussions in China have become obsessed with the linguistic competency of Mandarin Chinese over alphabetic languages in artificial intelligence coding. Interestingly, to all those who do not speak Mandarin, DeepSeek team of tech experts experienced several advantages in language comprehension by training on Chinese characters instead of English alphabet during the data-training phase. Calling a ‘stroke’ – a line or dot used in the writing of Chinese ideograms “strokes of genius” – an article in a Hong Kong news daily, the South China Morning Post, claims DeepSeek’s AI edge may come from its Chinese lessons.
Furthermore, the ongoing debates in the Mandarin-speaking world have begun to focus on whether the global tech and investment landscape is stunned by DeepSeek’s success because the AI chatbot is Chinese and it was developed in China. On February 15, just short of a month after DeepSeek seemingly appeared from nowhere and blindsided all its Western or American competitors, Singapore-based widely read Chinese language media outlet asked in a major article on its English webpage: why has DeepSeek astonished the West? “Frankly, DeepSeek caused a sensation in the West and grabbed global headlines largely because it was developed in China by the Chinese in the midst of US-China competition,” it replied. Hysterical Sinophobia and exchange restrictions with China have bred Western ignorance of its progress, the author, a US academic, further added.
A day earlier, responding to reporter’s questions with a smile after his strongly-worded speech at the Munich Security Conference on Sino-US relations, foreign minister Wang Yi, attempted to prod his foreign audience to start using the Chinese chatbot. Accompanied by the conference host, German diplomat Christoph Heusgen, this was a rare sight to see the veteran Chinese diplomat churn out a number of ancient Chinese proverbs to “attack” the US. No wonder, in China, Wang Yi is widely respected for his Chinese language proficiency and is popularly called 金句部长 (Jinju buzhang) or “Minister of Golden Phrases.” Interestingly, the proverbs, taken out from the ancient Chinese classic I Ching, or Book of Changes, were not easy to translate.
Knowing fully well how grossly China is misunderstood by the West, Wang Yi’s smile suggested more of smirk than grin as he asked his mostly non-Chinese listeners to “turn to DeepSeek for some help.” Surely, it is foolhardy to mistake the seasoned Chinese diplomat as too naïve to be unaware how China is often misunderstood in the West. Is it true that the West always gets China wrong? To know the answer, a quick glance at the titles in the last five years would suffice. Here is a random list: “China is dangerously misunderstood in the West,” “What the West gets wrong about China,” “China foreign policy grossly misunderstood in the West” “Why modern China is most misunderstood,” “7 ways we misunderstand China,” etc. and so on.
Though unrelated, the phrase “hysterical Sinophobia” used by the US scholar and Wang Yi seeming eager in Munich to seize the chance to proudly flaunt China’s DeepSeek “moment” – or as some in the West are calling it China’s “Sputnik Moment” – both capture and reflect respectively the post-DeepSeek national “euphoria” in China. So far, the Sinophobic West’s retaliatory measures against DeepSeek include accusations that the Chinese AI chatbot is communist Chinese government’s “trojan horse”; it’s banned by the government in Italy; Trump views DeepSeek success a wake-up call for the US tech industry and a threat to America’s high-tech hegemony, etc.
Additionally, less than a month ago, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Darin LaHood (R-Ill.) have moved a bi-partisan bill in the House and written to 47 governors seeking ban on the use of DeepSeek on all federal government devices. Such a move is bound to have chilling effect on Western businesses willing to experiment with DeepSeek, observed The Economist. In essence, the question the US academic asked was meant to underline a point, i.e., by banning DeepSeek the governments in the West are making the proverbial mistake of “throwing the baby out with bath water”? Meaning, is the hostility towards DeepSeek part of the Western anti-China prejudice? Perhaps true. Or else, why would Wang Yi retort asking his western audience to seek help from DeepSeek at the Munich Security Conference?
Reacting to the arbitrary, unfair, and one-sided “decoupling” of AI by the US with the aim to destroy China’s science and technology industry, Wang Yi echoed the national sentiment in citing DeepSeek during the Two Sessions as a symbol of China’s continuous achievements in technological innovation in recent years. Besides, the Mandarin-speaking foreigners didn’t need AI translation to find out that the proverbs used by Wang Yi in Munich were a mix of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist sayings. Implying that unlike the US and West, China believes in sharing with the outside world its scientific and technological innovations. To most Chinese, DeepSeek’s open-source model has broken the “high walls” of technology monopoly of companies such as OpenAI.
