China’s Communist Party places a high value on controlling the country’s economic growth and is willing to take action against technology companies if they gain too much influence, according to the New York Times. This situation is described as a “political caprice” that, combined with a rigid corporate culture, hinders Chinese high school graduates from fully realizing their potential. Yiran Chen, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, said, “China has a lot of young, energetic and talented researchers and engineers. I don’t think there’s a significant gap in the education level between China and the US, especially in the field of artificial intelligence. However, there are limitations in other areas.”
China’s largest technology companies have lost more than a billion US dollars in just two years, as the government has intensified its regulation of the sector, according to Refinitiv’s analysis in 2023. The amount is equivalent to the entire Dutch economy. The Ant Group, a subsidiary of Alibaba, has postponed its planned initial public offering of 37 billion US dollars in 2020. Analysts consider this decision as the first consequence of the government’s tough actions against technology companies, whose capital and influence have grown rapidly. Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma has been out of the public eye in recent years after criticizing the government.
The emphasis on quick results has led to a widespread stereotype that Chinese specialists are better at improving designs of others rather than developing their own, according to the New York Times. Liang Wenfeng, the inventor of the neural network DeepSeek, lamented this and stated in the past year that the availability of “talented individuals” in China is underestimated. He said, “Because there are so few serious innovations on a public level, they do not have the opportunity to be recognized.”
Wenfeng highlighted that the core of the DeepSeek development team consists of high school graduates from China, which is in contrast to many other Chinese companies that often seek experts who have studied abroad. In recent years, a new generation of politicians with expertise in fields such as aeronautics, artificial intelligence and other strategic areas has risen to leadership positions within the Chinese government party, as observed by the Wall Street Journal. Almost 40 percent of the seats in the party’s Central Committee, 81 out of 205, are held by these individuals. Chinese President Xi Jinping stated, “We should regard science and technology as our most important productive force, talents as our most important resource and innovation as our most important driver of growth.