Tag: China

Through a Glass, Darkly: America’s Long Misreading of China

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia. By James Bradley

By the time Henry Luce’s LIFE magazine was churning out colorized visions of a democratic, Christian China under the steady hand of Chiang Kai-shek, the die had already been cast. Not in Beijing or Nanjing but in Washington and New Haven, where a potent combination of missionary fantasy, elite delusion, and diplomatic theater spun the most expensive fiction in American foreign policy. It might well turn out to be the most expensive misunderstanding in American history. James Bradley’s fascinating The China Mirage tells that story in a way few books have. It’s less a cautionary tale and more a generational hallucination, one whose ghosts are still rattling around the White House Situation Room today.

This is not a subtle book, and that’s its strength. Bradley writes with the fervor and sardonic tone of a man watching a slow-motion car crash that everyone else mistook for a victory parade. The narrative he unspools is less about China itself and more about the American invention of China, an invention powered by an astonishingly small handful of men: Henry Stimson, Henry Morgenthau, and above all Henry Luce, whose boyhood in China as a missionary’s son formed a kind of mythic cradle for the 20th-century China Lobby. Their China was a Christian China, a Westernized China, a China that never really existed.

This is the mirage of the book’s title, and Bradley makes clear that it has cost America dearly.

At the heart of The China Mirage is a claim that would sound like conspiracy if it weren’t so well-sourced: that Chiang Kai-shek, Madame Chiang, and her brother T. V. Soong orchestrated the most successful foreign public relations campaign in American history. Under the pretext of fighting Japan, they extracted huge sums of money and military hardware from FDR, which either went into their own pockets or flowed toward Chiang’s guerilla war with Mao. With the Soongs’ impeccable English, Wellesley diplomas, and Methodist polish, they seduced a generation of American policymakers into believing that Chiang’s faltering, corrupt regime spoke for China. Luce, with his vast media empire, did the rest, featuring Chiang and Madame Chiang on LIFE’s cover more often than most American celebrities, opening women’s clubs and Manhattan drawing rooms to China donations, and making millions of Americans believe they were elevating the noble Chinese peasant.

The result: billions in aid, doctored diplomatic cables, falsified briefings to the president, and a country misled into war. Read more »

Monday, January 20, 2025

Rather than OpenAI, let’s Open AI

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

In October last year, Charles Oppenheimer and I wrote a piece for Fast Company arguing that the only way to prevent an AI arms race is to open up the system. Drawing on a revolutionary early Cold War proposal for containing the spread of nuclear weapons, the Acheson-Lilienthal report, we argued that the foundational reason why security cannot be obtained through secrecy is because science and technology claim no real “secrets” that cannot be discovered if smart scientists and technologists are given enough time to find them. That was certainly the case with the atomic bomb. Even as American politicians and generals boasted that the United States would maintain nuclear supremacy for decades, perhaps forever, Russia responded with its first nuclear weapon merely four years after the end of World War II. Other countries like the United Kingdom, China and France soon followed. The myth of secrecy was shattered.

As if on cue after our article was written, in December 2024, a new large-language model (LLM) named DeepSeek v3 came out of China. DeepSeek v3 is a completely homegrown model built by a homegrown Chinese entrepreneur who was educated in China (that last point, while minor, is not unimportant: China’s best increasingly no longer are required to leave their homeland to excel). The model turned heads immediately because it was competitive with GPT-4 from OpenAI which many consider the state-of-the-art in pioneering LLM models. In fact, DeepSeek v3 is far beyond competitive in terms of critical parameters: GPT-4 used about 1 trillion training parameters, DeepSeek v3 used 671 billion; GPT-4 had 1 trillion tokens, DeepSeek v3 used almost 15 trillion. Most impressively, DeepSeek v3 cost only $5.58 million to train, while GPT-4 cost about $100 million. That’s a qualitatively significant difference: only the best-funded startups or large tech companies have $100 million to spend on training their AI model, but $5.58 million is well within the reach of many small startups.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that DeepSeek v3 is open-source while GPT-4 is not. The only other open source model from the United States is Llama, developed by Meta. If this feature of DeepSeek v3 is not ringing massive alarm bells in the heads of American technologists and political leaders, it should. It’s a reaffirmation of the central point that there are very few secrets in science and technology that cannot be discovered sooner or later by a technologically advanced country.

One might argue that DeepSeek v3 cost a fraction of the best LLM models to train because it stood on the shoulders of these giants, but that’s precisely the point: like other software, LLM models follow the standard rule of precipitously diminishing marginal cost. More importantly, the open-source, low-cost nature of DeepSeek v3 means that China now has the capability of capturing the world LLM market before the United States as millions of organizations and users make DeepSeek v3 the foundation on which to build their AI. Once again, the quest for security and technological primacy through secrecy would have proved ephemeral, just like it did for nuclear weapons.

What does the entry of DeepSeek v3 indicate in the grand scheme of things? It is important to dispel three myths and answer some key questions. Read more »

Monday, November 29, 2021

Complementarity and the world: Niels Bohr’s message in a bottle

Posted on by Ashutosh Jogalekar

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Niels Bohr (Getty Images)

Werner Heisenberg was on a boat with Niels Bohr and a few friends, shortly after he discovered his famous uncertainty principle in 1927. A bedrock of quantum theory, the principle states that one cannot determine both the velocity and the position of particles like electrons with arbitrary accuracy. Heisenberg’s discovery foretold of an intrinsic opposition between these quantities; better knowledge of one necessarily meant worse knowledge of the other. Talk turned to physics, and after Bohr had described Heisenberg’s seminal insight, one of his friends quipped, “But Niels, this is not really new, you said exactly the same thing ten years ago.”

In fact, Bohr had already convinced Heisenberg that his uncertainty principle was a special case of a more general idea that Bohr had been expounding for some time – a thread of Ariadne that would guide travelers lost through the quantum world; a principle of great and general import named the principle of complementarity.

Complementarity arose naturally for Bohr after the strange discoveries of subatomic particles revealed a world that was fundamentally probabilistic. The positions of subatomic particles could not be assigned with definite certainty but only with statistical odds. This was a complete break with Newtonian classical physics where particles had a definite trajectory, a place in the world order that could be predicted with complete certainty if one had the right measurements and mathematics at hand. In 1925, working at Bohr’s theoretical physics institute in Copenhagen, Heisenberg was Bohr’s most important protégé had invented quantum theory when he was only twenty-four. Two years later came uncertainty; Heisenberg grasped that foundational truth about the physical world when Bohr was away on a skiing trip in Norway and Heisenberg was taking a walk at night in the park behind the institute. Read more »

Monday, May 4, 2020

Free Ding Jiaxi!

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

Editor’s Note: Dear Reader, if you could share this interview on social media, by email, etc., it might be helpful in securing Ding Jiaxi’s release.

by Emrys Westacott

After several weeks of sheltering in place, being holed up in quarantine, or just experiencing a dramatically restricted mode of living due to the ongoing Covid 19 pandemic, it is quite natural to start feeling a little sorry for oneself. A wholesome remedy for such feelings is to think about other people who are also shut up, sometimes extremely isolated, and suffering much more serious kinds of deprivation. They do not have at their fingertips, thanks to the internet, an abundance of literature, music, film, drama, science, social science, news, sport, or funny cat videos. Nor are they casualties of fortune, shipwrecked and marooned by bad luck or the vicissitudes of market economies. Rather, they are the victims of deliberate and unjust oppression by authoritarian governments.

One such person is Ding Jiaxi.

By any standards, Ding is a remarkable individual. Born in 1967 in a remote village in the mountains of Hubei province in central China, he won admission to Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, one of the top institutions for engineering research in the country. After graduation he conducted research in aircraft engineering, and while doing this simultaneously studied law and passed the bar exam. In 1997 he decided to switch careers and began working as a lawyer. In 2003, with a few partners he started a law firm that under his direction became highly successful over the next ten years, eventually bringing in an annual income of 25 million RMB. Read more »

Monday, September 28, 2015

Politics as Art, Art as Politics: Ai Weiwei and William Kentridge

Posted on by Sue Hubbard

by Sue Hubbard

Ai Weiwei: Royal Academy, London until 31th December 2015

William Kentridge: Marian Goodman Gallery until 24th October 2015

Key-1The Chinese artist, designer and architect, Ai Weiwei has come to be regarded as a creative figure of global stature, largely because of his personal bravery and strong social conscience in speaking out against the repressive Chinese government. He has been imprisoned for his pains and galvanised a generation of artists. On his return to China in 1993, after twelve years in America, his work began to reflect the dual influences of both his native culture and his exposure to western art. He cites Duchamp as “the most, if not the only, influential figure” in his art practice. As a conceptual artist Ai Weiwei starts with an idea – for example China's relationship to its history – addressed in this major show at the Royal Academy by Table and Pillar, 2002, and made, as part of his Furniture series. A salvaged pillar from a Qing dynasty (1644-1911) temple has been inserted into a chair to form a totemic work. Having spent a month in China in 2000, I can confirm that Ai Weiwei has every reason to be concerned about the destruction of his cultural heritage which, when I was there, was daily being destroyed to make way for ‘modernisation'. Coloured Vases, 2015, further questions notions of value and authenticity by illustrating that fake antiquities are made with exactly the same techniques as authentic vases. In classic postmodernist style Ai Weiwei's objects take on the characteristics of a Barthian ‘text' to be deconstructed by those who are able to ‘read' and decode them.

Read more »

Monday, May 11, 2015

Corridor of Opportunity

Posted on by Ali Minai

by Ali Minai

ScreenHunter_1189 May. 10 14.08Two recent events – the visit to Pakistan by Chinese President Xi, and the horrific assassination of Pakistani human rights activist and social entrepreneur, Sabeen Mahmud – have once again put Pakistan's restive province of Balochistan “on the map” – at least for those who pay attention to the affairs of this turbulent region. Balochistan – where the ancestors of whales once grazed on land and through which the armies of Alexander and Queen Victoria passed on their way to unforeseen futures – is once again today a land of boundless opportunity and endless tragedy, depending on who one listens to. Let us begin by listening to the ghosts of history.

For millennia, Balochistan – or Gedrosia as the Greeks called it – has been the land between lands: A vast and arid expanse lying between the West and the East that ambitious conquerors or hardy travelers have occasionally chosen to brave at their own risk. Eight millennia ago, one of Earth's oldest civilizations thrived in the north-central part of the province, leaving their traces in the ruins of Mehrgarh. At some ancient and uncertain date, a great pilgrimage site arose at Hinglaj on Balochistan's Arabian Sea coast. Revered as “Nani ka Mandir“, Hindus hold it sacred to the goddess Durga. Others have suggested that its original association was with the Sumerian goddess Inanna – also known as Ishtar, Nannai, Nana, Naina Devi, and possibly the same as the Persian Anahita – Naheed – and the Greek Athene. It is even reported that a Khariji hyper-Islamist state on the lines of today's ISIS once existed in the heart of this land, though time has erased its memory from the land much as it has largely erased the land of Balochistan from the historical memory of great civilizations. But that may be about to change.

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