The rise of Chinese tech in face of US tech hegemony

In January 2025, the world was introduced to DeepSeek, a newly developed Chinese AI model. Not only did this model perform better than its competitors, including OpenAI's ChatGPT and Meta's Llama, its developer claims that its the cost of developpement was much cheaper as well. This came as a surprise for many, and the US stock market, whose growth was driven by the highly speculative artificial intelligence sector, saw around a 1 trillion dollar decrease in market value during the Deepseek announcement. This has been the culmination of China's effort in order to rise as a technological powerhouse and remove its reliance on US made technology. The announcement of Deepseek represents a shift in the current global order, where China's technological rise is unfolding amid growing tensions with the United States, which has long maintained dominance in the global tech sector. Despite being the world's largest manufacturer, for years China remains highly dependent on U.S. software and hardware, with most of its computers and mobile devices running on American made software, such as Windows or Android. This reliance has been identified as a national security risk, prompting Beijing to push for self-sufficiency and technological leadership. However, breaking free from U.S. tech dominance presents several challenges. Developing a competitive operating system from scratch is costly and time-intensive, while China's software industry still lags behind Silicon Valley. Moreover, China's historic dependence on Western proprietary technologies has slowed its ability to innovate independently. Chinese efforts to innovate are further hindered by U.S. trade restrictions, particularly export bans on critical technologies like semiconductors. In response, China has adopted strategic initiatives to boost its own domestic tech sectors, which include government backed initiatives and R&D projects and the use of open source programming as a way to bypass restrictions. In fact, unlike OpenAI, Deepseek is an open source AI model, which means that it is publicly available and can be modified, used, and shared by anyone. In my presentation, we will look at historic Chinese efforts to shed itself from its reliance on US technology, the role of open source software and China current position in relation to the US