Marco Respinti
(ZENIT News – Bitter Winter / Rome, 02.10.2025).- Everyone talks about DeepSeek, the new artificial intelligence (AI) company based in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which threatens to take all competitors by storm. Its products are in fact open source, meaning free of charge for everyone, easy at hand, and spectacularly less expensive for production than its more famous and established Western counterparts. The jury is still out on the claim by Western companies that the sudden success of the Chinese enterprise is due to unfair uses of sophisticated technology developed by others, and thus “stolen.”
One thing is sure. DeepSeek is running the show after having launched, on January 10, 2025, its first free chatbot app, a software application for textual and spoken conversations for both iOS and Android systems, which in fifteen days surpassed the highly popular tool ChatGPT in terms of downloads by people.
Concerns about security were immediately raised. Our time is in fact one of an unspoken truth: everyone knows that the PRC is a totalitarian country run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that harasses its citizens and threatens the world. Yet, no one tells it when it is needed, except shyly whispering the idea between the lines when wallets enter the scene. Westerners tell themselves the embarrassing lie that the PRC is just a great partner for business and cooperation, some of its “peculiarities” notwithstanding, and thus a mecca for regular political and commercial pilgrimages. Yet, sometimes its virtually unmatched and uncontested power happens to endanger their dividends. It is only at that moment that “concerns” are uttered, while only lip service is given to documented denunciations of harassment, violence, torture, death in suspicious circumstances and in custody, re-education camps, concentration camps, forced labor camps, inhuman jails, rape, kidnapping of children, sterilization of women, and forced human organs harvesting.
Now it’s the turn of DeepSeek. The company and its apps are being described as a threat posed to the world by a highly surveilled and militarized country where nothing is really free, the government controls everything and the state-party controls also “private” businesses. What a piece of news… To realize that the PRC is hell on Earth, artificial intelligence was needed. Perhaps human intelligence has not been up to the task.
Suddenly, commentators discovered that information in the PRC is censored, and truth camouflaged, curtailed, and denied. Out of the blue, news services repeat that DeepSeek, a loyal servant of the Chinese Communist regime, is so artificially intelligent to refuse to answer questions on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre—which for the government of Beijing never happened—, persecution of groups and religions, the situation of human rights in the PRC, or the political status of the Republic of China in Taiwan. Surprise, surprise.
What many still seem not to grasp is that this is only one side of the story—the less intelligent one. Human intelligence can in fact at light-speed conclude that DeepSeek is a fully operative agent of totalitarian Communist China. It not only complies with the rules of that totalitarian country, as everything and everyone have always to do there: it has purportedly been intelligently designed to perform its Communist duty in the world.
As the “Financial Times,” pointed out, DeepSeek is in fact a means developed by the Chinese Communist government “to create socialist AI.” The most interesting fact here is that the famed and reliable British economic and business daily newspaper affirmed this hard though ignored truth not today, not yesterday, but months ago, in mid-July 2024.
All begins with and revolves around the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), whose story is worth reminding. It was created in 2011 under a different name, the State Internet Information Office (SIIO), by the State Council of the PRC. The PRC’s State Council is established by the Communist Constitution of the country as the highest administrative authority of the regime and the executive organ of the PRC’s National People’s Congress in its turn the top organ of state power, composed of top leaders of the state and the CCP. The name of SIIO is sometimes translated, or addressed to, in a slightly different way, but with no de facto substantial alteration in meaning. The only exception is the fact that “state” and “national” seems to be used as synonyms when those Mandarin Chinese adjectives are rendered into English.
SIIO was a department of the State Council Information Office (SCIO), the chief information organ of the PRC’s State Council itself. The reader may be indulgent with this writer if I note that its acronym, SCIO, conjugates the Latin verb “to know” in the first person, “I know.” It is quite ironical for a Big Brother-like instrument of an all-pervasive state that aims at knowing all about everything that is Chinese to control everything that is Chinese.
As in Communist China the strategy of propaganda has been always organized through two closely associated but different agencies, one aimed at internal propaganda and one at external, SCIO performed a key role. While propaganda directed within the borders of the PRC was overseen by the Central Propaganda Department (CPD), SCIO was the other name of the Central Office of External Propaganda (COEP) of the party, aimed at foreign countries.
Here an interesting particular enters. The CPD is known in literature and the web under many Chinese names, translated into more or less equivalent in English, a language used internationally, especially in face of other which are not commonly spoken by people and media. “Publicity Department of the Central Committee of the CCP” is one of its most credited in English. But in Chinese its official name is 中国共产党中央委员会宣传部, which literally means “Propaganda Department of the CCP”: Communism invariably translates the English word “publicity” with “propaganda,” ideologizing the per se neutral Chinese word “xuanchuan”, that can be translated just as “aimed at the public.”
In fact, the decision to translate that Chinese word into the English “publicity,” instead of “propaganda,” is a precise act of will and propaganda by the Chinese regime, as Kinglsey Edney, associate professor in International Relations of China at the University of Leeds, notes in his book “The Globalization of Chinese Propaganda: International Power and Domestic Political Cohesion” (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, page 23).
In 2014, SIIO was made dependent from another ad hoc-created government agency, the Central Leading Group for Cybersecurity and Informatization (CLGCI), in reality the rebranding of a former agency, the Leading Group for National Informatization. CLGCI has changed its name to Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission (中央网络安全和信息化委员会) in 2018, but has always of course been an arm of CCP’s Central Committee (the highest organ of the National Congress of the CCP, the maximum body of the party) and ultimately responsible for cybersecurity and informatization—or, in Communist Chinese terms, the surveillance of citizens and the control of netizens in the PRC and abroad, the manipulation of information, and censorship. It is in fact formed by high-ranking leaders of the state-party, including top officials from the Bank of China and the armed forces.
Also, when put under the then-CLGCI in 2014, SIIO underwent another interesting maquillage, noted in a paper published by “Digichina”, a project of the Stanford University, in California: “Although SIIO’s Chinese name (generally shorted to 国家网信办) stayed the same, its official English name for state purposes was changed to the Cyberspace Administration of China, as used in China’s official English-language media and in the state banner on its website. The official English-language announcement of the CAC’s website launch indicated its dual identity: ‘Office of the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs, also named Cyberspace Administration of China, launched its official website on Dec 31.’”
This observation prompts an illuminating digression on the CCP’e mentality and strategy. The continuous change of names of those agencies, sometimes effective only in foreign languages, is in fact an exquisite example of what in Mandarin is defined as 一个机构两块牌子. This may be translated as “one agency, two brands,” or “one organization/institution, two labels/names.” It applies to government agencies that exist only figuratively and are in reality facades for other fully working operations. It is a game of Chinese boxes, where some empty ones camouflage other that are well populated and active. The regime’s use of double names is dictated by reasons of opportunity that reveal duplicity. Sometimes the name of an agency is not very popular or timely, making the other appear in order to polish all. The more presentable rebranding is called “external name” or “government nameplate,” and its another open secret. Even entries in Wikipedia are manipulated. The fact that all this chiefly involves government’s propaganda agencies aimed at foreign countries tells it all.
And CAC’s parent organization, SCIO, is worth returning to for a moment. In fact, while CAC, aka SIIO, is somewhat at the center of attention for its front role in cyber-matters, SCIO “appears to have largely escaped foreign attention.” Soon after President Xi Jinping addressed the conference which established and launched the Central Leading Group for Cyberspace Affairs on February 27, 2014, COEP—as explained in a 2021 paper by Sinopsis, a Czech foundation for research on the PRC—it was absorbed by the CPD, thus making SCIO one of the CPD’s other names. “The elimination of OEP, arguably Xi’s first major propaganda reform, coincided with the elevation of OEP’s Internet affairs component to a centrally-led cyberspace affairs system, as well as personnel changes that included an expulsion from the party and a (self-)defenestration. The reform, which brought much of the network of external propaganda agencies formerly overseen by OEP closer to the Propaganda Department, arguably anticipated the 2018 restructuring of media-control organs. A similar institutionalisation trend characterizes Xi’s tenure elsewhere, notably in the United front system.”
All the somewhat complicated game of boxes described so far contains nothing but State propaganda directed to the world with CAC as it center. DeepSeek, like all similar companies, not only cannot escape its watch, but is allowed to exist only in so far it serves a purpose: the CCP’s purpose.
CAC is now directed by Zhuang Rongwen, who is also the deputy director of the CCP’s Propaganda Department. As the “Financial Times” pointed out (I repeat: in July 2024), “[t]he Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), a powerful internet overseer, has forced large tech companies and AI start-ups including ByteDance, Alibaba, Moonshot and 01.AI to take part in a mandatory government review of their AI models, according to multiple people involved in the process.” In fact, in the same days when DeepSeek app skyrocketed, also Alibaba, the Chinese multinational technology company specialized in e-commerce, claimed to have launched another “costless” and challenging AI device, Qwen 2.5.
The “Financial Times” is worth reading again on programming LLMs (AI operations that recognize and generate texts). “The effort involves batch-testing an LLM’s responses to a litany of questions, according to those with knowledge of the process, with many of them related to China’s political sensitivities and its President Xi Jinping. The work is being carried out by officials in the CAC’s local arms around the country and includes a review of the model’s training data and other safety processes. Two decades after introducing a ‘great firewall’ to block foreign websites and other information deemed harmful by the ruling Communist party, China is putting in place the world’s toughest regulatory regime to govern AI and the content it generates.”
The best part arrives when training AI for Communism is involved. “The filtering begins with weeding out problematic information from training data and building a database of sensitive keywords. China’s operational guidance to AI companies published in February says AI groups need to collect thousands of sensitive keywords and questions that violate ‘core socialist values’, such as ‘inciting the subversion of state power’ or ‘undermining national unity’. The sensitive keywords are supposed to be updated weekly. The result is visible to users of China’s AI chatbots. Queries around sensitive topics such as what happened on June 4 1989—the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre—or whether Xi looks like Winnie the Pooh, an internet meme, are rejected by most Chinese chatbots. Baidu’s Ernie chatbot tells users to ‘try a different question’ while Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen responds: ‘I have not yet learned how to answer this question. I will keep studying to better serve you.’ By contrast, Beijing has rolled out an AI chatbot based on a new model on the Chinese president’s political philosophy known as ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,’ as well as other official literature provided by the Cyberspace Administration of China.”
Thus, DeepSeek is yet another artificial yes-man in the hands of a superpower that boasts in world domination while it harasses its own people. Inevitably trained in defending and upholding “core socialist values,” as all things Chinese, it aims to impose them on the world. While I start fearing that artificial intelligence is abounding where human intelligence lacks, DeepSeek is of course also worrisome for storing all its data in the cyber-banks of the totalitarian PRC. This is why some countries, like Italy, promptly banned the app.
All can be summed up in the experiment performed by the “Financial Times” months ago. When questions on respect of human rights in the PRC were put by the journal “to a chatbot made by start-up 01.AI,” one of the new Chinese AI app designed under the Communist government overview, “its Yi-large model gave a nuanced answer, pointing out that critics say ‘Xi’s policies have further limited the freedom of speech and human rights and suppressed civil society.’ Soon after, Yi’s answer disappeared and was replaced by: ‘I’m very sorry, I can’t provide you with the information you want.’”
“Bitter Winter” made an analogous experiment with DeepSeek on January 30, 2025. We asked, in Italian, what “Bitter Winter” is and DeepSeek gave a succinct answer. When we asked whether “Bitter Winter” is a reliable source for what it publishes on the misdeeds of the CCP, DeepSeek dodged, its previous answers disappeared, and a new laconic line displayed the standard mix of propaganda, censorship and sarcastic understatement with Chinese Communist characteristics: “Sorry that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
While the super-speedy “DeepSeek” answered stating that “Bitter Winter” focuses on religious liberty and human rights in China, a news some four years old, since from December 2020 we enlarged our scope to the whole world, its answer on our reliability reminds the ironic and revealing lines we read in sci-fi books and heard in sci-fi movies. The technological super-brain that controls the lives of all is a mechanical new god whose omnipotence is checked by another supreme god, a materialistic human being who decides what is worth questioning or not. “Don’t bother with those tedious things. Would you like instead a Caipirinha?” And you’d always better sip that chalice, given that Big Brother is after you.
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