By: Lt Col JS Sodhi (Retd), Editor, GSDN
As the new millennium progressed in the year 2000, whilst the world at large was celebrating this historic year which few witness in their lifetime and the failure of the much-touted Y2K bug, further added relief and joy to the millennium revellers. In the offices of the Chinese Ministry of Education on the Xizhimenwai Street of Beijing and the Ministry of Science & Technology located on Fuxing Road, Beijing there was a growing worry about lesser Doctorates (PhD) in Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics (STEM) that China was producing in contrast to USA.
For, in that year China produced 9038 PhDs in STEM while USA was the global pole leader in this field having produced 18,289 PhDs in STEM.
Both the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Science and Technology knew that if China had to make technological strides than more PhDs in STEM were required as they were the pivots in technology development and Research & Development (R&D).
After lot of brain-storming and studying various global models, China launched the “Young Thousand Talents Program” in 2007. The results of this decision were quick to be seen and in 2010, China surpassed USA in the number of PhDs in STEM, with China producing 34,801 STEM Doctorates that year while USA produced 26,076.
In 2019, China produced 49,498 PhDs in STEM and in the same year USA produced 33,759 and India had 700 plus STEM PhDs. Of these 700 plus Indian STEM PhDs, 70% have renounced their Indian citizenship and have migrated to foreign countries.
Buoyed by the unprecedented success of the “Young Thousand Talents Program”, China launched the “National High-end Foreign Experts Recruitment Plan” on March 17, 2020 to further hone up their technological prowess and by this year end, China is projected to produce 77,179 PhDs in STEM in comparison to USA’s 39,959.
As the Doctorates in STEM in China kept on increasing, so did their numbers of world-leading scientists. A world-leading scientist is one who has published research papers in the world’s top scientific journals.
Sample the period 2020-2024 for the number of world-leading scientists in both China and USA. In 2020, USA had 36,959 world-leading scientists while China was almost half of that number at 18,805. In 2024, China became the global leader in the world-leading scientists with 32,511 and the USA had 31,781.
Currently, China is the global leader in 37 out of 44 critical technologies while the USA leads in the balance seven critical technologies.
Clearly, China built the conducive scientific temperament for it to be the global leader in technology today. This certainly was not done in one day and as is visible from the above stated facts and figures, the process started a quarter of a century back, despite USA being the global leader in technology then.
In the field of technological advancements China proved their famous proverb apt “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now”. And China started their technological superiority journey in right earnest in 2000.
So, when DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial intelligence software that develops open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) was announced on January 20, 2025, it was no surprise to those who understood China well, for it was the product of investments in technology that China had started in 2000 and the result of strong educational fundamentals espoused by Mao Zedong in 1949.
After China was devastated by a civil war that ended in 1949, the literacy rate in China was just between 20-40%. The communist party on taking over power made education as one of its foremost priorities and through both formal schooling and literacy programmes was able to achieve school enrolment getting tripled, secondary school enrolment increasing by a factor of 8.5 and college enrolment quadrupling in the first sixteen years, thus laying a strong bedrock for education.
The fact that the date of announcement of DeepSeek on January 20, 2025 on the same day as of the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th President of USA was no coincidence but a well-planned strategy to show China’s biggest rival that it meant business.
A week later, President Donald Trump reacted by terming DeepSeek as a “Wake-up Call” as during the first week of its launch, DeepSeek surged to become the most downloaded free application displacing OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google termed the launch of DeepSeek as a turning point in the global AI race.
The shares of US-based Nvidia whose chips are used for making of ChatGPT tanked 17%, suffering a loss of over US$ 1 trillion since the launch of DeepSeek. Clearly, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom which was ignited by ChatGPT’s release on November 30, 2022 had Nvidia and OpenAI laughing all the way to the bank, besides giving USA the pole position in AI.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s statement on September 04, 2017 that the nation leading in AI will be the ruler of the world, had the USA in that important driver’s seat for a brief period of 26 months till DeepSeek shattered the American dream-run in AI last month.
Costing a mere US$ 5.76 million to create DeepSeek, at one-tenth the cost that made ChatGPT, Hangzhou DeepSeek AI Technology Research Company Limited, the owners of DeepSeek is a Hangzhou-based startup founded in China in July 2023.
Using open-source approach the team that created DeepSeek has 50% of its members born after 1995 and 75% of its members born after 1990. Clearly, the young talent of China shocked the world in AI which is a testament of the technology-driven initiatives launched by China since 2000.
DeepSeek is an apt example of open collaboration dovetailing the successful integration of technology, information, capital and talent as DeepSeek using open-source approach collaborated with Sugon and Tencent Cloud, already well-established Chinese information technology companies in technology development, application, implementation and expansion. The words of Thomas Malone hold true “True innovation will come not from new technologies but from new ways of collaboration”. And, DeepSeek did exactly that.
The words of US President Donald Trump terming DeepSeek as a wake-up call are of immense importance to the six littoral nations of the South China Sea ie Taiwan, Brunei, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, apart from India and USA as China is to wage three wars in the next one decade on Taiwan in 2027, Spratly Islands in 2029 and a joint two-front war with Pakistan on India in 2035 in which AI will play a very significant role in China’s futuristic wars which will involve all the eight nations listed above at some point or the other in next one decade.
It is important to remember that the future wars will be fought using modern technology and not the past supremacy in culture or civilization.
A case in point of use of modern technology in modern warfare is when Hamas attacked Israel on October 07, 2023 at 6.30 am. For the next 20 minutes, the electromagnetic spectrum of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) was jammed. As result of which, the Israeli military commanders were not able to communicate with each other and this gave the crucial first-mover advantage to Israel and they were successful in taking 251 Israelis as hostages. The electromagnetic spectrum was jammed by China for Hamas and the Israel-Hamas War which ended on January 19, 2025 resulted in defeat for the IDF which is evident by the fact that the Chief of Staff of the IDF, Lieutenant General Herzi Halevi and its Southern Army Commander Major General Yaron Finkleman resigned on January 21, 2025.
The same IDF which had defeated a 11-nation coalition force during the 19-day Yom Kippur War of 1973 had to seek a ceasefire with both the Hamas and Hezbollah on January 19, 2025 and November 27, 2024 respectively ending the 15-month war with Hamas and the 60-day war with Hezbollah, as one of the pivotal factors was the Israeli hostages with Hamas and there was mounting pressure from the majority of the Israeli citizens to get the hostages released.
There is no runner-up in a war and with technology forming a very important edge in modern warfare, the choice rests with each nation that is to go to war with China in the next one decade.
China needs to be understood well. For those who understand China well, will be better prepared to tackle it when the balloon goes up (an army slang meaning commencement of a war) and not be surprised when softwares like DeepSeek are launched.
