Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.
Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.
For something shorter, you can see Arnaud Bertrand's recent review. https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-book-the-west-refu... The review is behind a paywall, but not expensive.
If you want to read policy documents directly (primary source), try the State Council / Chinese government policy database: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/ and https://sousuo.www.gov.cn/zcwjk/policyDocumentLibrary
They also provide official translations: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/
For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.
I think the author wrote a twitter post with a summary of the content, and someone on twitter who had read the original Chinese source also chimed in with a summary
In communist or post-communist countries like China and Russia, the percentage of government workers is extreme. To them, all social action is political action, and that includes economic. Since there is only one party allowed, any economic action (and thus political action) which threatens the CCP is unacceptable. They leave other private companies alone.
The CCP is bad and this conclusion is justified not only in theory as a distant observation of ideological concepts, but from their behaviors around the world which echo some of the causes of World War 2. That doesn't mean Chinese AI companies are bad, but the CCP will certainly find ways of using it for its purposes. For now, they're quite far behind on AI, but they deserve credit for optimizing for some use cases which masks poorer generalization.
...you've almost achieved enlightenment on the nature of the majority of HN comments: vibes-based, off the cuff braindumps, where an idea is examined as it is being typed. It's great for tech and software discussions where many commenters have good knowledge or even mastery, but on "exotic" topics, an incorrect take can be voted to the top because it sounds right by affirming the biases of the majority. If you're a practitioner in a non-tech field and a topic in your field comes up for discussion on HN, be ready to be disappointed - and be ready to question all the other correct-sounding comments in areas unfamiliar to you.
In Netherlands, the government wants to reduce emission, so it incentivizes people to isolate their homes better, and to use heat pumps instead of gas heating. On the other hand, if you actually try to install a heat pump, you'll run into all sorts of regulation issues: the unit can't be too big, there are only a few specific places where you're allowed to place it, a ton of people can object to it, permitting takes years if at all. Oh and if you isolate your house, then voila, during the current heat wave it's a constant 35 C in your home. So you try to install AC and you run into permitting/regulation issues. So you then use a super inefficient portable AC that just barely lowers the temperature by 3 C and uses 4x more energy, and that's fine. facepalm
And the government and banks also want to combat money whitewashing, so they incentivize people to use digital payments and discourage cash. Police could look at you suspiciously merely for having too much cash on hand. On the other hand, NATO and also a bunch of government agencies are warning about war and encouraging people to have lots of cash at home for emergencies.
"They" do not "clearly" want one or the other. Different government branches can have different, conflicting priorities.
The Netherlands is tiny. China has 1.4 billion people, and its state apparatus is orders of magnitude bigger. Forget about coordinating the population, even coordinating the tens of thousands of local government bodies has always been a huge problem. All the previous dynasties have said that governing such a large country is a huge pain.
Xi is not personally in charge of the censorship bureau. The top government sets broad direction and KPIs, while local governments and government agencies are given a lot of leeway for implementation as they see fit. And frankly you cannot run a large organization any other way — there is no large company in the world where the CEO micromanages everything without burning out. The KPI is "social stability", and as long as this is kept and there are no grave problems like corruption, it's not the top government's job to dictate how the censorship bureau do their work.
Furthermore, many people tend to be risk averse, and would rather instinctively deny something than to take chances. There was a famous scene in the Jiang Zhemin days in which Jiang said something frank in some meeting with a foreign politician. Then the cameraman was like "uuh should we record this?" and his boss was "no, cut it away". Then Jiang said "why shouldn't we record this? of course this should be recorded!" This risk-averse attitude is still pervasive in a lot of places. It's not just DeepSeek that's "paranoid", everybody implementing censorship rules is paranoid similarly. This likely won't change until the current censorship bureau generation retires, and gets replaced with the next generation that's more confident.
Finally, whatever Poland did pre-1989 has absolutely nothing to do with China. There are no similarities no motives or circumstances. You can't just lazily lump random Soviet-era countries together with China just because you give them both the "communist" label. China's adaptation of and motivation for adoption of communism is wholly different from the Soviet Union.
Or because they're human and that's what humans have always done. If the US is no longer a check on China, what will happen to Taiwan?
Frankly, you seem to be arguing that the US is somehow uniquely bad when, in actuality, The US has been hegemonic during a time of incredible peace and minimal imperialism.
The issue is one of incentives. The US needs cheap foreign labor because of deindustrialization policies in the 60s and 70s. These were arguably passed as a check on labor power since socialism was still looking potentially ascendant at the time. Whatever the reason though, the contemporary US is reliant on keeping foreign wages down and domination of the oil trade. Imperialism grows out of this need for external resources to maintain economic growth. It would be less relevant to us if we had better fundamentals, but we traded those away to avoid letting certain demos get wealthy and powerful.
China's play is more mercantile. They benefit most from stable trade conditions. They get richer the more customers they have. They benefitted massively from becoming an industrial trade partner with the US in the 60s and 70s. Because of this, they have completely different foreign policy objectives. All they need to do to win is normalize relations and build trade infrastructure. Its way cheaper than imperialism.
For the world. Compare the those 70 years to the previous 70 years. Regime change and intervention is significantly better than full scale invasion, total war and colonization of other people.
> China's play is more mercantile.
Because they are held in check by US power. Remove the US and China is taking what it wants.
I mean maybe, but China's industrial strategy isn't well served by war. I just don't see the structural incentive.
Russia, China and Iran all make public statements as if they abide by international law and everyone else are the law breakers, while their measurable actions are shockingly contradictory.
It is their actions that have caused the US reactions, but many people present them as if they occur in a vacuum.
The AI race sits within this context, with a constellation of concerns that most people do not think about. Of course the AI engineers have their own motivation, the companies will share some of that motivation combined with their business trajectory and governments will get involved with it for the justifications they see.
I say this because we see the same thing used as an argument against China. "If they overtake us, they'll do imperialism (like us)." Again, it says more about us than them.
A better reading (IMHO) Of the situation is that China believes that AI shouldn't be used simply to mint a few more trillionaires but the benefits should be shared with society. Why do I say this? Because we now have 70+ years of China doing exactly that. The transformation in China all the way from rural villages to Tier 1 cities has been utterly astounding. China has lifted ~800M people out of extreme poverty.
In some ways we're at a similar point to the late 1990s and 2000s when Microsoft execs complained that Linux, being free, destroyed intellectual property value. Linux should be a perfect example of how people can and do act altruistically, or at least not in a way to bait-and-switch to enrich themselves.
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistory/comments/1d26grm/in_the_...