Technology Archives - Friends of Socialist China

Nvidia spy scare – Ruling class turns on itself as chip blockade of China fails

In the following article, Gary Wilson argues that the scandal engulfing Nvidia co-founder Jensen Huang – over his relationship with Alice Huang, a former executive of Singapore-based data centre company Megaspeed whom US intelligence agencies claim was working for China’s Ministry of State Security – is in reality a fight within the US ruling class over how best to wage its economic war on China.

On one side stands Huang, who has lobbied hard for the right to sell China second-rate chips – both for profit and to keep China’s artificial intelligence industry dependent on US technology. On the other stands the national security apparatus, which wants a total blockade.

Gary notes that the intelligence agencies kept their file on Alice Huang for at least a year, never gave Jensen Huang the warning routinely offered to those targeted by foreign intelligence, and then leaked the story to the press – days before Donald Trump’s scheduled summit with Xi Jinping in Shenzhen. He also highlights the racist and sexist “dragon lady” trope at the heart of the media coverage, and the way the scandal threatens to revive the climate of the discredited “China Initiative”.

Since the article was written, events have moved quickly. On 12 November, Nvidia announced that Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and board member with immediate effect, following further reports that he had also had a relationship with a senior Nvidia executive who reported directly to him. Chief financial officer Colette Kress has been appointed interim CEO. Analysts expect the episode to strengthen calls in Washington for tighter export controls on China.

Whatever the outcome of this factional struggle, as Gary concludes, China’s drive for technological self-reliance is defeating both blockade and dependence as methods of imperialist control.

Beyond profits: Why China’s social planning will outpace US tech drive

In the following article, Sara Flounders – a long-standing anti-war activist, co-director of the International Action Center and a contributing editor of Workers World – argues that the real divide in the age of artificial intelligence is not between humans and machines but between profit-driven markets and socialist planning.

Sara contrasts the approach of the US tech giants – Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are expected to pour some $5.3 trillion into AI infrastructure between 2025 and 2030, almost entirely contingent on short-term returns to shareholders – with China’s state-led strategy, in which technological advancement functions as public infrastructure, comparable to electrification in the 20th century.

She highlights China’s investment in skills (at least 11 Chinese universities run dedicated rare earth degree programmes, while the US offers no comparable undergraduate degrees); the world’s first offshore, wind-powered, underwater data centre, inaugurated near Shanghai in June – an idea Microsoft trialled and then abandoned because it didn’t fit “quarterly return models”; and the national “East-West Computing Strategy”, under which new data centres in the western hubs must source at least 80 percent of their electricity from clean energy. Meanwhile, in the US, speculative data centre construction is straining power grids and provoking rising anger in local communities.

As Sara concludes, advanced technology always arrives embedded within social relations: “Billions of people can benefit from deliberate planning decisions rather than watching a handful of billionaires capture the rewards of collective technological advancement.”

US tech leaders are urgently calling for rules on AI – China already has them

In the following article, Madeline Carr, Professor of Global Politics and Cybersecurity at University College London, points out that, while US tech leaders are increasingly calling for governments to regulate artificial intelligence – portraying China as “the difficult final participant in a governance system that the US and its allies must first create” – China has in fact already built an extensive system of AI rules, assessment, filing, technical standards and government oversight.

She traces the development of this system in stages, from Beijing’s 2022 rules on algorithmic recommendation services, through regulations on AI-generated content and generative AI services, to the AI Safety Governance Framework 3.0 published in September 2026, which addresses frontier risks such as highly autonomous systems, the misuse of chemical, biological and nuclear technologies, and the possibility of humans losing control of advanced AI.

By contrast, the Trump administration favours a “minimally burdensome” approach, leaving US companies free to privatise the rewards of AI while exporting its risks. Silicon Valley’s ethos of “move fast and break things”, Professor Carr writes, is “untenable for companies whose own leaders now warn that their products could cause catastrophic harm”. China, meanwhile, “is already ahead of the curve”.

China’s AI rise – can jobs and education keep pace with the rise of the robots?

In the following article, Chen Jiaqi, a journalist with CGTN, looks at how China is preparing its workforce and education system for the spread of artificial intelligence and robotics. Chinese manufacturers now account for more than 97 percent of global humanoid robot shipments, and the article details the measures being taken to ensure that technology uplifts rather than displaces working people: assessing AI’s impact on jobs, expanding AI training and skills assessment, formally recognising new occupations such as embodied intelligence robot technician, and introducing new interdisciplinary university degrees.

This people-centred approach – summed up in Xi Jinping’s call to “develop AI for the positive and for good”, under human control and in the service of shared prosperity – stands in sharp contrast to that of the United States. Washington’s AI Action Plan, tellingly titled “Winning the Race”, prioritises stripping away “red tape and onerous regulation”, shows minimal concern for the social impact of the technology, and sets the goal of “unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance”. The aim is to “win AI”, so that a handful of US tech giants can extract monopoly rents from the rest of the world.

China, by contrast, treats AI as a tool for development – its own and that of the Global South – and promotes open-source models, international cooperation and global governance of the technology.

Hangzhou’s two transformations: frontier technology and ecological civilisation

In the following article, Friends of Socialist China co-editor Carlos Martinez draws on a recent visit to Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province, to examine how the city has become at once a centre of frontier technology – home to DeepSeek, Unitree Robotics and Alibaba – and a testing ground for ecological civilisation.

Carlos traces both transformations back to Zhejiang’s “Eight-Eight Strategy”, launched in 2003 when Xi Jinping was provincial Party secretary, and shows how public institutions have created the conditions for innovation while directing it towards wider developmental goals. He sets out the material record of the green transition – distributed solar overtaking coal, clean rivers and a restored West Lake, a metro network that has grown fivefold in seven years – while also confronting the contradiction at its heart: the AI and cloud-computing industries that make Hangzhou a technology leader are among its fastest-growing sources of electricity demand.

The direction of technological change, he concludes, is a political choice, requiring “long-term planning, public investment and institutions capable of subordinating private profit to the common good”. The article complements Gary Wilson’s recent analysis of the US chip blockade and the discussion on AI and the new quality productive forces at our recent Socialist China Conference.

The US blockade that helped bring down the Soviet Union is failing against China

In the following article, Gary Wilson, writing for the US Marxist newspaper Struggle-La Lucha, examines Washington’s attempt to choke off China’s access to the most advanced computer chips and chipmaking equipment, and compares it with the technology blockade that imperialism waged against the Soviet Union for four decades.

Gary recalls how, from 1949, the CoCom system barred the sale of advanced machinery, electronics and computers to the socialist countries, backed by the threat of nuclear annihilation. Forced into a ruinous arms race, the Soviet Union came late to the computer revolution, and was then pulled into a second race – in computer technology – just as the Reagan military build-up intensified. Rather than using the plan to master the new technology, the Gorbachev leadership abandoned planning altogether, opening the road to capitalist restoration.

China, the article argues, faces the same test under very different conditions. Its Five-Year Plan treats artificial intelligence as a tool of production, putting it to work in factories, hospitals, railways and schools to raise productivity across the economy. And unlike the Soviet Union, China stands deep inside the world market – the source of around one-seventh of global goods exports – so it cannot be cut off without disrupting production worldwide. Each ban slows its access to the newest technology but pushes it harder to develop its own.

Gary also highlights the material foundations of AI – chips, data centres, power grids and nuclear reactors – where China’s planned build-out contrasts sharply with a US in which private monopolies restart old reactors to feed their own data centres. And crucially, China spends less than two percent of its GDP on its military, avoiding the burden that bled the Soviet economy.

The decisive question, he concludes, is who controls the productive forces and for what purpose: private profit or society’s needs. As Gary has argued previously, a class analysis of AI is badly needed on the left.

Sanders, Bannon and an AI ban aimed at China

The following important article by Gary Wilson brings a much-needed class analysis to bear on the debate over AI safety, artificial general intelligence and recursive self-improvement – an issue that has until now been conducted almost entirely in the abstract language of “humanity versus the machines”.

Gary’s starting point is a one-day Pro-Human Assembly held in Washington on 15 September, at which Senator Bernie Sanders shared a platform with Steve Bannon, and at which Sanders and Congressman Greg Casar promoted their proposed Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act. The question posed from that stage was how to keep artificial intelligence under human control. But, as Wilson observes, there is no “human control” in general: every one of the leading AI systems is owned by somebody, financed by somebody and put to work by somebody.

Artificial superintelligence does not exist. What does exist is Palantir’s Maven Smart System, running on a Pentagon contract worth nearly $1.3 billion and used to identify and prioritise targets in the war on Iran; Palantir’s ELITE, which assigns confidence scores to addresses where ICE may find the people it is hunting; and the algorithmic systems already used across warehousing, construction, transport, healthcare and gig work to set the pace of work, evaluate performance and determine pay. None of these is the target of the proposed ban.

The article argues that the core target of the current debate is China. Gary traces the convergence between Sanders’ call for export controls and international agreement, Bannon’s demand that Chinese nationals be removed from US laboratories, and Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei’s proposal for an industry slowdown that must on no account go far enough to let Chinese companies catch up – noting the obvious contradiction that the US companies built their models by appropriating the accumulated labour of millions of people without permission or payment, and now want the US government to stop Chinese companies doing to them what they did to everyone else.

The machines already have human owners.

The most advanced chips are owned. The data centers are owned. The models are owned. The military networks are owned and controlled by the government. The products of millions of people’s labor have been gathered into privately owned systems whose owners determine who may use them and for what purpose.

Now those same corporations and the U.S. government are arguing over how fast those systems should develop, how tightly they should be regulated and how to keep China from acquiring the same capabilities.

The machines that ought to worry us already have names, budgets and contracts.

Maven sorts targets.

ELITE sorts addresses.

They are under the control of the U.S. monopolies and the U.S. government. The ban proposed in Washington would leave both running. Its target is China.

Chinese ambassador calls for UK and China to cooperate on AI

Chinese Ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang recently contributed an article to the Guardian newspaper calling for the two countries to cooperate on AI. He begins by noting that: “Like the steam engine, the harnessing of electricity and the internet before it, it has the potential to transform how we work, live and interact.

“But every technological revolution brings challenges as well as opportunities. As AI systems become more capable, people are asking legitimate questions. How can AI remain safe, accountable and under human control? How should its development be governed? How can its benefits be shared more widely?”

He adds: “These questions were at the heart of the 2026 World AI Conference, held… [recently] in Shanghai.”

Keeping the main focus on the Global South he notes that China will develop international AI-application cooperation centres with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and its fellow BRICS countries.

But that does mean there is not ample space and opportunities for China-UK collaboration:

“China and the UK have much to gain from working together. The UK has a competitive edge in frontier research, life sciences, financial services and AI innovation… In healthcare, combining British strengths in biomedical research with China’s capacity to deploy AI at scale can accelerate drug discovery, improve medical imaging and enhance healthcare delivery… Policymakers, researchers and business leaders from China and the UK need to increase exchanges and translate dialogue into joint research, commercial partnerships and closer cooperation on AI governance.”

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation is tailor-made for the Global South

The 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference was held from July 17-20 in Shanghai, featuring a keynote speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping and the formation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO), a new intergovernmental body headquartered in the city, with 29 founding members.

Between July 16-18, President Xi Jinping and Foreign Minister Wang Yi held bilateral meetings with high level guests attending the conference along with the concurrent High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance.

On the afternoon of July 16, President Xi Jinping met with the President of Kazakhstan Kassym-Jomart Tokayev.

President Xi noted that, in a world undergoing profound and complex changes unseen in a century, the China-Kazakhstan relationship has stood the test of time and grown ever stronger. The permanent comprehensive strategic partnership has maintained excellent development and demonstrated huge cooperation potential and broad prospects. He emphasised that steadily advancing bilateral cooperation across the board serves the fundamental interests of the two countries and two peoples. China will work with Kazakhstan to implement the four global initiatives and enhance coordination and collaboration in multilateral mechanisms including the United Nations, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and the China-Central Asia mechanism to jointly uphold international fairness and justice.

President Tokayev extended warm congratulations on the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and commended China for its remarkable development achievements under the wise leadership of President Xi. Kazakhstan views its relations with China as a top foreign policy priority and is committed to continuously strengthening the permanent comprehensive strategic partnership with China. Kazakhstan is in complete agreement with President Xi’s important observations on the bilateral relations and will make vigorous efforts with China to translate them into action.

The next day Xi met with Prime Minister of Cambodia Hun Manet.

President Xi stated that having stood in solidarity and supported each other throughout the years, China and Cambodia have forged an ironclad friendship that has stood the test of time and weathered storms. History has proven that the China-Cambodia friendship is not built on any single occasion or particular issue. Rather, it is rooted in a consensus that transcends the evolving international landscape and has been passed down through generations. It is a precious asset shared by both sides. He emphasised that in the great endeavours of governing and strengthening the Party, the Communist Party of China has formed the thought on party building for the new era, which will continue to galvanise the mighty force driving Chinese modernisation. As this year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Cambodian People’s Party, China stands ready to strengthen experience sharing with the Cambodian side on party building and state governance.

China’s open-weight AI exposes the fiction behind Wall Street’s boom

The following article by Gary Wilson, an editor of the US socialist newspaper Struggle – La Lucha, offers a sharp Marxist reading of the summer’s turmoil in AI stocks – and of why the release of powerful open-weight models by Chinese firms has sent such a shock through Wall Street.

In July, the arrival of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s V4 – open-weight models matching the strongest systems from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google – triggered the worst week for US chip stocks in over a year and briefly cost Nvidia its crown as the world’s most valuable company. Wilson argues that the panic exposed the hollowness of the whole AI boom, which rests not on profits already earned but on the promise that a handful of US corporations will exercise a monopoly over the technology and charge the world a toll for every use.

Drawing on Marx’s concept of fictitious capital, he shows how a thin layer of real income has been made to support a towering mass of debt and inflated valuations – with AI-linked firms now accounting for around 40 percent of the value of the S&P 500. Open-weight models threaten to make the assumed monopoly impossible, which is why Washington is turning from market competition to coercion, deploying export controls and national-security pretexts to defend a monopoly that competition has in reality already broken.

Against this, the article counterposes the vision set out by Xi Jinping in Shanghai – of AI developed openly as a shared asset of humanity – and the material foundation, created by the 1949 Revolution, that allows China to direct investment towards public use rather than private rent.

China–Ethiopia AI cooperation delivers life-saving weather forecasting

Two days after the Financial Times warned darkly of China’s “AI diplomacy” in the Global South, here is what that supposedly sinister campaign consists of in practice.

The Xinhua News Agency reports on China–Ethiopia cooperation in artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, centred on something relatively unglamorous yet genuinely life-saving: weather forecasting. The Ethiopian Meteorological Institute has been working closely with the China Meteorological Administration, and most of the institute’s experts have now been trained at Chinese institutions – short courses and full academic programmes covering satellite data analysis, climate forecasting models, atmospheric research and disaster risk management.

The centrepiece is the deployment of MAZU, China’s AI-powered multi-hazard early warning platform, which combines machine learning with physical forecasting models and meteorological satellite data. Ethiopian scientists, trained by visiting Chinese colleagues, now operate it themselves to issue real-time alerts for droughts and flash floods. This has profound significance for a country on the front line of a climate crisis it did nothing to create: accurate early warning of drought and flooding is the difference between a managed emergency and a humanitarian catastrophe.

Ethiopia is the first country in Africa to receive the system, and the institute’s deputy director general says it intends to become a regional knowledge hub, sharing its expertise with meteorological services across the continent – technology transferred, then transferred onward, on African terms.

Ethiopia also became one of the 29 founding members of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO) in Shanghai on 16 July, a body whose stated purpose is to ensure that AI development is “beneficial, safe, and fair”.

Xi Jinping outlines China’s vision for the future of artificial intelligence

On 17 July, Xi Jinping delivered the keynote address at the opening of the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai – his first in-person appearance at the conference since it began in 2018, and coming a day after 29 countries signed the agreement establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (WAICO), a new intergovernmental body headquartered in Shanghai. The event was attended by President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Prime Minister Hun Manet of the Kingdom of Cambodia, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul of the Kingdom of Thailand, Secretary General of the United Nations António Guterres, and official representatives, business leaders, scholars and researchers from more than 100 countries and international organisations.

In the following analysis for Friends of Socialist China, Carlos Martinez examines the significance of Xi’s speech and the launch of WAICO. He argues that they represent a direct alternative to Washington’s approach – encapsulated in the Trump administration’s “Winning the Race” AI action plan, with its export controls, model restrictions and pressure on allies to join a technological blockade of China.

Where the United States treats artificial intelligence as a weapon in a zero-sum contest for supremacy, Xi calls for “open source, openness, collaboration and sharing”, and for AI to be developed as a common asset of humanity, with its benefits extended to the Global South. It is, Carlos writes, a democratic, multipolar and socialist vision: technology as a public good, serving people before profit.

Chinese AI models achieve Mythos-level performance in cybersecurity benchmark

The following original contribution for Friends of Socialist China is by İbrahim Can Eraslan, a Turkish socialist and student of Chinese Law and Governance at Tongji University in Shanghai. He examines a striking development in the global technology race: the emergence of Chinese artificial intelligence systems that now rival the most advanced Western models in the strategically sensitive field of cybersecurity – achieved, remarkably, under conditions of escalating US technological warfare.

Eraslan shows how Washington’s campaign of export controls and suppression is producing the opposite of its intended effect. By restricting access to the United States’ AI systems – even shutting down Anthropic’s frontier models worldwide at three days’ notice – the US is driving governments and enterprises across the Global South towards cheaper, open-weight Chinese alternatives that cannot be embargoed or switched off by executive order. In closing the gap through algorithmic ingenuity and open development rather than raw computing power, he argues, China’s socialist system is once again outcompeting monopoly capitalism in the technologies that will define the twenty-first century.

Chinese medical team helps Zimbabwe complete country’s first neuromodulation surgeries

A Chinese medical team has helped Zimbabwe carry out its first Deep Brain Stimulation and first Spinal Cord Stimulation surgeries – major neuromodulation procedures used to treat Parkinson’s, drug-resistant epilepsy, post-stroke rehabilitation and chronic pain. The Zimbabwean side led the operations, with Chinese surgeons providing technical support. The technology, developed by Tsinghua University and commercialised by Beijing PINS Medical, meets internationally advanced standards but is significantly cheaper than the US equivalents, making it genuinely deployable in African health systems.

The lead Zimbabwean neurosurgeon, Dr Nathaniel Zimani, captured its significance: “If China wasn’t there, we may get this technology 20 years from now. Because of this collaboration, we’ve advanced such medical technologies by 20 years in our country… It’s teaching us how to fish, than giving us fish.”

The work is being carried out with the help of the 23rd Chinese medical team sent to Zimbabwe since 1985, representing four decades of continuous medical cooperation, now part of the China-Zimbabwe “all-weather community with a shared future”, under which China has pledged to support Zimbabwe’s development and to oppose external interference and illegal sanctions.

It is worth setting this beside the West’s engagement with Zimbabwe over the decades. Britain ruled the country – then Rhodesia – through nearly a century of brutal settler-colonialism, dispossessing the Black majority and fighting a vicious war to prevent independence. When Zimbabwe finally won its liberation in 1980, and in the early 2000s reclaimed its land, the West responded with an illegal sanctions regime that inflicted enormous suffering. Two models of engagement, side by side: one built on plunder, white supremacy, colonialism and neocolonialism; the other on solidarity, development and knowledge transfer.

China’s courts draw a line in the sand: AI cannot be an excuse to fire workers

Artificial intelligence is reshaping the world of work at breakneck speed, and almost everywhere the same question is being asked: who pays the price when a machine can do your job? Across much of the capitalist world the answer has been brutally simple – the worker does. In China, the courts are giving a very different answer.

In this detailed original analysis for Friends of Socialist China, İbrahim Can Eraslan examines a landmark ruling handed down by the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court on the eve of International Workers’ Day 2026, which found that a technology company had unlawfully dismissed an employee after replacing his role with AI. Far from being an isolated case, Eraslan shows how it builds on a consistent and growing body of jurisprudence in Beijing, Guangzhou and beyond, all resting on a single principle: that voluntary AI adoption is a business decision, and that companies which automate must therefore shoulder the corresponding social responsibilities rather than dumping the costs onto their workforce.

Crucially, Eraslan situates these rulings within China’s wider policy architecture – from the 15th Five-Year Plan’s commitment to assessing AI’s employment effects, to proposals for compulsory employment impact assessments before large-scale AI deployment – and contrasts this socialist, employment-first approach with the ‘employment at will’ doctrine of the United States and the patchwork protections of the European Union. The result, he argues, is one of the first coherent national legal frameworks anywhere in the world for managing AI-driven job displacement: not Luddism, but a principled insistence that the fruits of technological progress be shared and that its costs not be socialised onto working people.

He concludes:

China’s courts have drawn a line in the sand. AI is welcome. But AI cannot be an excuse to fire workers. The cost of progress must be shared, and the burden must not fall on those who can least afford to bear it. In a world where capital everywhere is racing to automate labor out of existence, China’s socialist legal system is saying: not so fast.

China and the Global Green Revolution – a webinar review

Friends of Socialist China’s US committee recently organised a hybrid event in Portland on the theme ‘China’s Global Green Revolution’, co-facilitated by Sara Flounders and Carlos Martinez, alongside seven contributors to the book China Changes Everything. The discussion explored how China’s lead in renewable energy, reforestation, ecological agriculture and green technology is reshaping the global response to the climate crisis – and why defending that contribution against the new cold war matters for the whole of humanity.

The following review, by Lyn Neeley, summarises the speakers’ contributions, from record-efficiency coal plants and the race for lunar helium-3 to glow-in-the-dark street plants and saltwater rice. A recording of the event is available via the International Action Center.

Brazil’s Lula hails China-developed surgical robot as ‘incredible’

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently performed a simulated surgery from 1,400 kilometres away, using a Chinese-built Toumai MT-1000 surgical robot – the world’s only commercial remote surgery system supporting all major specialties. He remarked: “It is incredible to see up close how innovation can expand access, save lives, and further strengthen Brazil’s Unified Health System.”

Brazil’s Unified Health System is one of the largest free, universal public health systems on the planet. Chinese surgical-robotics technology, developed by Shanghai MicroPort MedBot, is being integrated in the service of a public, free-at-the-point-of-use system. At the cancer hospital Lula visited, annual patient throughput has already risen from around 400 to 680 since the Toumai was installed.

China is now Brazil’s largest trading partner, with two-way trade of around $188 billion in 2024. As Lula has put it, China is Brazil’s “best partner.” This cooperation goes well beyond soybeans and other primary commodities; it includes assisting Brazil’s industrial strategy and working closely on cutting-edge medical technology.

Why has China blocked Meta’s purchase of Manus AI?

When China’s National Development and Reform Commission ordered Meta to unwind its $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus on 27 April, Western media reached predictably for its standard toolkit: “authoritarian overreach”, “arbitrary intervention”, an assault on the “democratisation of technology.” What this framing systematically obscures is the substantive legal, strategic and political logic behind the decision.

The two pieces collected here provide that missing context. Sara Vivacqua’s investigation, published by the progressive Brazilian outlet Diário do Centro do Mundo and translated into English by the author, dissects both the legal architecture of China’s decision and the character of the company it rejected. Manus is not simply a commercial product; it is an autonomous AI agent – capable of operating inside authenticated platforms, accessing local sessions and executing complex multi-step tasks – built by Chinese engineers in China, with Chinese state support, before a hasty relocation to Singapore (presumably for purposes of regulatory evasion). The NDRC’s ruling establishes a clear and consequential precedent: jurisdictional control follows where technology is built and who builds it, not where a holding company is incorporated.

But Sara goes further, placing the ruling in the context of what Meta actually is. The company’s integration into US military AI development, its Llama models deployed across federal agencies and Five Eyes intelligence partners, its partnership with defence contractor Anduril, and its documented history of global electoral interference through the Cambridge Analytica scandal – all of this reframes the acquisition not as a business deal but as a potential intelligence operation. The question the Western press refuses to ask is the obvious one: why would any sovereign state hand strategic AI infrastructure to a company that functions as an arm of the US national security apparatus?

Below Sara Vivacqua’s article, we reproduce a Global Times editorial making the complementary case from a Chinese regulatory perspective: that the decision is legally grounded, internationally consistent, and entirely compatible with China’s continued openness to foreign investment in non-sensitive sectors. The EU, the US and Japan all operate comparable review mechanisms; the difference is that when China uses them, it is treated in the Western media as evidence of authoritarianism rather than ordinary statecraft.

Together, these two pieces offer what the mainstream coverage has failed to provide: a clear-eyed account of a decision that is legally sound and strategically coherent.

How China Blocked Zuckerberg’s Espionage Project with Manus AI

Meta, owned by Mark Zuckerberg and the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, found itself frustrated this Monday (27^th April) in its attempt to appropriate Chinese artificial intelligence technology.

How the US lost its chip war on China

The following article by Gary Wilson, originally published in Struggle La Lucha, argues that the United States has effectively lost its attempt to contain China’s rise and preserve US monopoly control over advanced technology through semiconductor export controls. The Trump administration’s recent decision to allow renewed exports of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to China, albeit with restrictions and fees, is a tacit admission that the chip war has failed. “The chip war did not revive US industry. It exposed its fragility.”

Tracing the origins of the chip war to the Obama-era Pivot to Asia, the article situates semiconductor restrictions within a broader strategy of military, economic, and technological containment. Under Trump and Biden, this evolved into an aggressive weaponisation of global supply chains, using export controls, sanctions and alliance pressure to block China’s access to advanced chips, manufacturing tools and software ecosystems.

Gary observes that China’s response was decisive and systematic. Through long-term state planning, and integration of AI into production and infrastructure, Chinese firms – Huawei in particular – have made rapid advances in domestic hardware and systems design. By compensating for individual chip inferiority with massive, coordinated clusters, China narrowed performance gaps and accelerated technological self-reliance. Export controls, instead of halting progress, intensified China’s drive toward technological sovereignty.

The fallout has been global. US reshoring efforts have yielded little fruit thus far; the US’s allies have been forced to absorb substantial losses, and trust in US-controlled supply chains has reached an all-time low. Allowing Nvidia exports is therefore essentially a retreat aimed at preserving residual influence through software dependence. The article concludes that monopoly enforcement has reached its limits: coercion cannot replace production, and the era of US-dictated technological dominance is ending.

Imperialist monopoly capitalism cannot outplan a system organized for long-term development. Coercion cannot substitute for production. Sanctions cannot replace planning… What comes next will not be decided by chips alone. It will be decided by which social system can organise production, labor, and technology to meet real needs over time. On that terrain, the chip war has already delivered its verdict.

When the White House quietly approved renewed exports of Nvidia’s H200 AI accelerators to China — with a 25% fee attached — it marked more than a policy adjustment. It marked the effective collapse of Washington’s semiconductor containment strategy.

After years of escalating export controls, sanctions, and alliance pressure, the United States is now conceding what the chip war made clear: China cannot be technologically frozen, and U.S. monopoly control over advanced technology is no longer enforceable.

Intelligence artificial, profits fictitious

In the following article for Struggle La Lucha, Gary Wilson argues that the US economy’s apparent strength is illusory, sustained not by genuine productivity or innovation but by speculation — particularly around artificial intelligence. He describes the so-called AI revolution as a massive financial bubble: stock prices have soared far beyond the real value produced by technology or labour, echoing the speculative manias of the past.

The author observes that capitalism’s need for constant expansion drives investors to seek new frontiers when previous ones — such as smartphones and social media — stagnate. Artificial intelligence, and especially the dream of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), has become the latest speculative frontier, attracting trillions in investment despite limited real-world returns. Big tech companies have seen valuations reach absurd levels, even as AI products remain unprofitable.

This “fictitious prosperity”, built on credit and hype, fuses finance capital with US imperial ambitions. The military, intelligence agencies and tech monopolies now form a military-tech-industrial complex, with AI development justified in terms of national security and global dominance. “Silicon Valley has metastasized into a merger of big capital, big tech, and big war. The empire’s newest weapon isn’t a missile — it’s the algorithm.”

In contrast, China treats AI as a practical tool for production — applying it to manufacturing, logistics, and energy — rather than a casino for speculative profit.

China, by contrast, is treating AI not as a casino chip but as a tool. Instead of betting on abstract intelligence for future profit, China applies AI to real sectors — manufacturing, logistics, energy, and urban planning… While the U.S. bankrolls hype, China retools for production. This isn’t just a tech race — it’s a clash between two systems: finance-driven capitalism versus planned development.

The author was among the speakers at our webinar on DeepSeek and the challenge to US technological hegemony, held in February 2025.

The U.S. economy isn’t booming — it’s levitating. What keeps it up isn’t productivity or innovation, but speculation.

The so-called “AI revolution,” hailed as a new industrial dawn, is in reality a massive bubble — a speculative fever driving stock prices far beyond what the technology can actually deliver.

The anatomy of a bubble

A speculative bubble forms when the price of something — like tech stocks — rises far beyond its real, sustainable value.

That real value comes not from market hype or quick profits, but from workers’ labor power — their capacity to create more value than they’re paid for.

But in a bubble, prices rise not because real production or value creation is expanding, but because investors are chasing promises — each betting that someone else will pay even more for the same asset.

The pattern isn’t accidental. It’s built into capitalism itself.

Step one: Capital needs to expand

Capitalism runs on an “expand or die” engine. Every firm must grow constantly to survive — outspending, outproducing, and out-innovating its rivals.

When one wave of growth slows, capital hunts for another.