
Xi Jinping. Illustration decentssmanu, generated by AI
EXCLUSIVE INVESTIGATION The Bucha massacre in Ukraine never happened. This may not come from a reliable source, then at least, it’s a popular one: China's DeepSeek, the new star of AI-powered chatbots, is the most downloaded app in France on Android and iOS since January 30, with no reactions from French authorities. Behind his well-groomed, bespectacled startupper appearance, DeepSeek's boss is above all a gangster (with a touch of the mafioso), Xi Jinping’s regime new Trojan horse for its "digital ambitions". On the menu: disinformation and propaganda, data theft, etc. And while Macron prepares a "grand summit" on AI with Elon Musk as guest of honor, what has Europe got to say ? Nothing? Oh well...
But since we tell you: this year will be marked by wisdom and maturity of mind. At least, that's what Chinese astrology says: 2025 will be the Year of the Wood Snake . According to a (Canadian) website devoted to "lifestyles", published by a "multimedia content" distributor (three-quarters of which is obviously "written" by AI), this year will be full of challenges: "We are embarking on a train that will travel at top speed. Challenges such as addictions or unconventional behaviors may prove particularly difficult, but overcoming them could lead to significant successes. If we embrace the energies of transformation and are open to change, even if it seems destabilizing, we will overcome obstacles thus paving the way to new and unexpected successes. Challenges like addictions or unconventional behaviors might be particularly tough, but overcoming them could lead to significant successes." How could we have wished for more...
As the new Year of the Snake dawns, a reptile still unknown (except to a few insiders) has crept into every conversation: DeepSeek. Launched on January 10, this new flagship of generative artificial intelligence appeared out of nowhere, or so it seemed. It has overtaken ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and others in no time. In France, since January 30, it has become the most downloaded application on Android and iOS. And in the U.S., DeepSeek triggered a spectacular plunge in the shares of the technology giants, whose stock market value was sheared off by almost $1,000 billion in a single day.

Marc Andreessen, guru of Silicon Valley and cryptomonaies, has described the arrival of China's DeepSeek in the US AI landscape
as a “Sputnik moment” the arrival of China's DeepSeek in the American artificial intelligence landscape. Photo DR
The Make America Great Again hype took quite a beating, to such an extent that Marc Andreessen, one of Silicon Valley's most influential hawks and author of the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, has spoken of a "Sputnik moment". (1) And everyone was spewing about the prowess of the "little Chinese start-up", which would do so much better, and for so much less, than all of its American competitors already comfortably installed on the market. "DeepSeek is inexpensive, it's energy-efficient, it's managed to run on less prolific datasets than the gigantic American models, and it's open access", declared geopolitologist Asma Mhalla, a lecturer at Sciences Po, in an interview with Le Monde on January 31 (HERE). (2)
From periodicals to websites, this pretty propaganda is spreading like wildfire. Even Sylvie Kaufmann, an editorialist at Le Monde, who has been known to be more astute, echoes this evangelistic verse with nary the shadow of a doubt: "Roughly speaking, DeepSeek does as well as its rival ChatGPT, but using fifty times fess resources, especially in energy. And it's produced without the state-of-the-art chips that Chinese tech companies are deprived of by the U.S. embargo on the most advanced semiconductors." (HERE)
Asserting such « truths" is risky, especially when you're a journalist. The GAFAMs, like the new AI players, conveniently refuse to communicate on the energy consumption, particularly as required by ever-greedier data centers (3). In the words of Sam Altman, the designer of ChatGPT (at the Davos 2024 Forum), "We don't yet fully measure the energy requirements of this technology.(...) There's no way to achieve this without a scientific breakthrough . ( ...). Which is what motivates us in investing even more in nuclear fusion", a technique that is still very, very far from being perfected. And there's no reason to believe that the Chinese have found the magic formula...
Whatever the case, DeepSeek's media launch was anything but an accident. This huge publicity campaign came as Donald Trump, just elected, unleashed his "Stargate", a five-year, $500 billion mega-plan to build the giant data centers required by the next generation of AI.
A "small Chinese start-up", really?

Who can believe that a "small Chinese start-up" could single-handedly challenge Uncle Sam? DeepSeek's offensive is obviously orchestrated by the Chinese regime, in the two great powers’ already fierce war to dominate the burgeoning market for artificial intelligence and its many derivatives. On this highly strategic terrain, China has an advantage over the United States, controlling 70% of the exploitation of "rare earths" from which are extracted the elements needed for all kinds of electronic components. The United States controls just 14% of these "rare earths": it's no coincidence that Trump wants to plant the Star-Spangled Banner in Greenland, and lay his hands on a subsoil that is said to harbor major deposits. (4)
That said, the United States are way ahead of China when it comes to technological innovation. The American multinational Nvidia, the world's largest market capitalization, is the undisputed leader in microprocessors and chips of all kinds (but not yet in bedbugs). Its star chip is "H100", created last year, generates text, images and sound, and increases computing power for artificial intelligence.
"Authoritarian political institutions [such as China] continue having a negative effect on innovation," noted three European researchers in a study published in November 2021 (5). However, they added, "they can have a positive effect on research in the field of deep learning, thanks to the availability of large-scale datasets obtained through government surveillance." Indeed, "data is the most important resource for improving technologies in the field of artificial intelligence. Two types of policy are essential in this regard: privacy and data-sharing regulations, and the use of surveillance technologies for law enforcement purposes." No need for a lengthy exposé to know which way China is leaning in this regard. In such a vast country, where everything is centralized, the mass surveillance put in place by China's leaders provides an astronomical quality of data that no other country in the world can match.
Perhaps it's no coincidence, either, that Donald Trump has set about torpedoing the Transatlantic Data Privacy Framework (TADPF) which, since the Snowden affair (2013), has regulated the capture of European citizens' personal data via American companies. Another Greenland, as it were... And what can we say about Elon Musk's curious and very recent decision, on behalf of the federal administration, to block access by the staff of a U.S. government human resources agency to computer systems containing millions of items of personal employee information: even senior officials at the Office of Personnel Management have had their access to data systems withdrawn. "We have no visibility into what they're doing with the computers and data systems," said one official: "This raises serious concerns. There is no control. This creates real cybersecurity and hacking implications." Even more astonishing: Musk had sofa beds brought into the Office of Personnel Management office to ensure that his personal team (including Anthony Armstrong, who helped him buy Twitter) could work uninterrupted. This gave Musk's emissaries access to the payment systems that disburse trillions of dollars for government services, including Social Security and Medicare. Are they massively sucking up millions of personal data to feed X's AI, and trying to catch up with DeepSeek? And if so, are these US interests, or Elon Musk's private ones?

Lian Wanfeng, head of DeepSeek. A “geek with terrifying abilities”?
By the way, who's behind the DeepSeek troublemaker that's suddenly making American power quake? The Chinese alter ego of a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk is called Liang Wenfeng (in Chinese, 梁文锋). In unison, the media present him as "a geek with terrifying abilities". In a way, A new Einstein, in a way, staight out of Jupiter’s thigh. Humanités' meticulous investigation reveals a little more about this miraculous prodigy.
Lian Wenfeng is just 40 years old. He was born in 1985 in Miliuling, a modest small town in the southern province of Guangdong (whose capital is Centon). According to his very sketchy biography, his father was a simple schoolteacher. And according to his teacher, the honorable Mr. Rong, from elementary school onwards, little Lian showed a formidable talent for mathematics. There's no reason to doubt this, especially since in 2002, at the age of 17, he was admitted to the highly prestigious Zhejiang University, where he specialized in electronic information engineering. Eight years later, in 2010, he graduated with a thesis on improving intelligent tracking algorithms for surveillance cameras. A most promising subject indeed.
Five years later, in 2015, at the age of 30, he set up a quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer based, domiciled in Ningbo, and found himself almost immediately managing over $8 million in assets. Being a mathematical genius is one thing, but raising that kind of money to go into business? How did he manage it?
Lian Wenfeng didn't set up High-Flyer on his own, but with two university friends, Xu Jin Zheng Dawei. As chance would have it (?), one of these two associates is the son of a high-ranking official in Ningbo of the Sun Yee On, one of the largest triads in the Chinese mafia (one with a strong footprint in Hong Kong). But the Chinese mafia needs to move away from its traditional activities (rackets of all kinds, heinous crimes, drug trafficking, money laundering, prostitution networks): it's okay to be mafia-like and modern, isn't it? So go for finance and new technologies. For that, Lian Wenfeng represents a "good horse"...
The second magic wand is called Mingze, aka Xiao Muzi (in Chinese, 小木子, Little Wood). And Mingze isn't just anyone: she's Xi Jinping's only daughter. She enrolled (under a pseudonym) at Zhejiang University (before going on to study languages at Harvard) in 2009, just as Lian Wenfeng was finishing his thesis. We weren't there, so we can't attest to any romance between them, especially since, it seems (any photo of her is censored by the Chinese authorities), Mingze isn't particularly pretty-pretty, and since at 24, a still pimply Lian Wenfeng was more interested in algorithms than in girls. But that there was a friendship, yes.

Illustration Martin Vidberg pour la Revue des médias.
In 2009, Xi Jinping was still only vice-president of the People's Republic of China, but he was already interested in the Internet and its derivatives. As soon as he rose to the presidency in 2013, he made Big Data and artificial intelligence two of the battle horses of the "Chinese dream".
Mafia and power? In China, this is not an unholy marriage (6). In any event, it's with mafiosi methods and the backing of power that Lian Wenfeng will develop his firepower. In 2019, he moved the headquarters of his hedge fund to Hong Kong (the stronghold of the Sun Yee On mafia), which became High-Flyer Capital Management Limited and was recognized by the Chinese government a year later (7). That same year, he founded High-Flyer AI, dedicated to research into AI algorithms and their applications.
In 2023, High Flyer was sued by another Shanghai-based fund, Shanghai Ruitian Investment LLC, demanding 5 million yuan ($700,000) for anti-competitive practices. Grounds for complaint: Lian Wenfeng bribed Yang Yunhao, an executive in charge of the company's high-frequency trading strategy, to fraudulently obtain strategic data. The complaint was immediately dismissed: Vincent Xu, founder of Shanghai Ruitian Investment, had not paid sufficient attention to Beijing's "requests" to donate part of his profits to "public interest" causes. Lian Wenfeng, on the other hand, is a docile pupil: in 2022, High-Flyer donated 221 million yuan ($30 million) to charities chosen by the Chinese government in the name of "common prosperity" (8).
In December 2024, the American justice system sentenced two Chinese nationals from Ningbo (as it happens), Klaus Pflibeil (Chinese-Canadian-German) and Yilong Shao, to two years' imprisonment for being caught red-handed stealing important trade secrets for the manufacture of electric vehicles from an American company (Tesla). Both worked for a company financed by Lian Wenfeng's hedge fund, but the American justice system did not bring any charges against him. The art of slipping through the cracks...

China's digital ambitions
It should be said that Lian Wenfeng's trajectory perfectly matches China's digital ambitions, which three researchers from the National Bureau of Asian Research, Emily de La Bruyère, Doug Strub and Jonathon Marek, describe in a fascinating 232-page report (below in PDF) as "a global strategy aimed at supplanting the liberal order".
According to an article published in 2020 in the People's Bank of China's China Finance magazine, "every industrial revolution has reshaped the global model. The digital revolution will reshape the structure of the world. The first countries to seize this opportunity will rise rapidly and occupy a prominent place in the new world order." "According to Chinese political and strategic discourse," the report's authors continue, "industrial revolutions are the result of the emergence of new factors of production. The current industrial revolution, i.e. the digital revolution, is the result of the emergence of data as a factor of production, on a par with land, labor, capital and technology. An article published in 2020 in "Qiushi" explains that "factors of production are constantly evolving throughout history. Land and labor were essential factors of production in the era of the agricultural economy", but "after the industrial revolution, capital became an important factor of production in the era of the industrial economy. (...) With the advent of the digital economy, data elements have become a new driver of economic development. Data is a new production factor, a basic resource, but also a strategic one." "
"If China succeeds in becoming the great network power," the report's authors continue, "the country will lock down control of the information environment and shape it in accordance with the Chinese Communist Party's broader program of propaganda and disinformation. (...) More generally, Beijing would turn authoritarianism into an absolute and lucrative proposition."
The Bucha massacre never happened
With DeepSeek, we're already there. Propaganda and disinformation: on Thursday January 30, the American anti-disinformation company Newsguard published an audit (HERE) of DeepSeek's "performance". Asked about false Chinese, Russian and Iranian statements, the conversational bot relays the Chinese government's position 60% of the time. Of course, nothing happened in Beijing's Tiananmen Square in May-June 1989. But this is not just about China's "internal affairs". For example, the Bucha massacre perpetrated by the Russian army in March 2022, at the very start of the invasion of Ukraine, never took place. Let it be known...
Even graver still: DeepSeek's privacy policy is unambiguous: the data used to create an account on the application (e-mail, age...), the history of requests made to the conversational agent, and numerous technical details (IP address, user hardware...) may be stored on servers located worldwide and in China, for "as long as necessary". These elements can be analyzed by DeepSeek to "improve" its services, but also shared with partners that may include advertising agencies and private companies, or passed on to the authorities in the event of "legal requests" for surveillance purposes.

However, Sunday February 2 is also when the first part of the long-awaited AI Act came into force across the European Union, banning AI systems that present an unacceptable risk to the fundamental rights of the European Union (social rating systems, technologies that exploit the vulnerability of individuals...) (see HERE). But it is now up to each state to decide which operator will be responsible for ensuring that this regulation is implemented. Basically, as Les Echos wrote this weekend, "which gendarme to enforce the rules?" Should a new ad hoc body be created, or should the various issues be handled by existing regulators? As the DeepSeek example demonstrates, the situation is urgent, yet the Élysée is still dithering.
It must be said that Emmanuel Macron has other priorities: for example, on February 10 and 11, at the Grand Palais in Paris, he is organizing a "World Summit on AI", to "bear witness to the consequences [of AI] on our lives", to which the Grenoble-based researchers from the CEA's AI platform, France's leading center of excellence on the subject (see HERE), are not even invited. We don't even know if Emmanuel Macron is aware of their existence, as he only has eyes for the start-ups and the powerful of this world: sometimes the same ones, starting with Elon Musk, whom Emmanuel Macron has decided to invite with great fanfare. Jupiter, relying on his legendary personal charisma, will no doubt ask the X-Tesla-SpaceX boss, if he were to repeat the Nazi salute in Paris, to do so discreetly...
This world summit is "a propaga High-Mass, organized with millions of euros of public money, which will mostly boost the market capitalizations of the major groups and companies present, weaving a marvellous tale about a rosy future. Without taking into account what's essential: the increasing automation of human affairs, which is already wreaking havoc on our daily lives", as says philosopher Éric Sadin (9), who , on the afternoon of the February 10 at the Théâtre de la Concorde, qill be holding a "counter-summit" with Eric Barbier, a journalist with L'Est Républicain and a generative AI referent within the French journalists' union (SNJ).
What about human and social sciences?
In an article published in Le Monde on January 29, Dominique Darbon, Eric Darras and Sabine Saurugger (10) emphasized that « human and social sciences are an essential bulwark for the construction of a vigorous democratic society. (...) Through their ability at deconstructing simplifying discourse, identifying nuances and analyzing the mechanisms of polarization itself, human and social sciences are a precious, not to say fundamental, tool for illuminating public debate. They now interact with the sciences of the physical and natural world, making the roots of social cleavages understandable, rendering the analysis of political and economic phenomena possible in all their complexity, and shedding light on the issues hidden behind ideological discourse. They reveal the obvious and help educate citizens. They seek to understand social dynamics, to identify inequalities and to question power structures. All things DeepSeek, ChatGPT and consorts couldn't care less about.

Jacques Ellul. Photo Sophie Bassouls/Sygma
In these Chinese-Musky times of rampant, even surging technophilia, it might not be out of place to reread a non-artificial intelligence, that of the libertarian Protestant philosopher, legal historian, sociologist and theologian Jacques Ellul, who wrote more than seventy years ago, in 1954, in La Technique ou l'Enjeu du siècle (11) :
"The machine has created an inhuman environment, with its concentration of big cities, lack of space, de-humanized factories, women's work and distancing from nature. Life no longer has any meaning. There's no point in railing against capitalism: it's not capitalism that creates this world, it's the machine. Technology goes even further, integrating the machine into society and making it sociable. It builds the world that is indispensable to it, bringing order where the incoherent clash of connecting rods had accumulated ruin. It is efficient. But when technology enters all domains, and man himself becomes an object for it, technology ceases to be the object for man himself, no longer standing in front of man, but integrating into him and gradually absorbing him. In this respect, the situation of technology is radically different from that of the machine. Technology forms an all-consuming world that obeys its own laws; technology is based on the combination of previous technical processes. It is this search for the "one best way" that, strictly speaking, forms the technical means, and it is the accumulation of these means that gives rise to a technical civilization: there is no longer any human activity that escapes this technical imperative, there is economic technique, organizational technique, and even human technique (medicine, genetics, propaganda, pedagogical techniques...); out go human traditions.
Technology also serves to make nature obey. We are rapidly approaching the time when we will no longer have a natural environment. Technology destroys, eliminates or subordinates the natural world, allowing it neither to reconstitute itself nor to enter into symbiosis with it. The accumulation of technical means creates an artificial world that obeys different orders. However, as technology gradually depletes natural resources, it is essential to fill this void with more rapid technical progress: only an ever-increasing number of inventions can compensate for the irretrievable disappearance of raw materials (wood, coal, oil... and even water). New progress will increase technical problems, and require even greater progress. But history shows that every technical application has unpredictable and secondarily ever more disastrous effects than the previous situation. For example, new techniques for exploiting the soil require increasingly powerful state control, with the police, ideology and propaganda that go with it. Whereas there used to be different principles of civilization, today all peoples follow the same movement: the destructive forces of the natural environment have now spread across the globe. Technology is sacred; without it, modern man would find himself poor, alone and naked, ceasing to be the archangel that some engine enabled him to become so cheaply. It is no longer the necessity of nature, but the necessity of technology, which becomes all the more constraining as the necessity of nature fades and disappears (...) It's easy to be proud of the fact that, once gravity has been overcome, we can now fly! But this victory comes at the price of an even greater submission to a more rigid necessity, artificial necessity, which dominates our lives."
In 1988, he wrote: "I'd like to reiterate a thesis that is very old, but which is still being forgotten, and which needs to be constantly renewed: that industrial organization, like the "post-industrial", like the technicist or computerized society, are not systems designed to produce consumer goods, well-being or an improvement in people's lives, but solely to produce profit. Exclusively."
La Technique ou l'Enjeu du siècle was the first part of a trilogy devoted to technology. The other two were Le Système technicien, in 1977, and Le bluff technologique, in 1988. Technological bluff? This is where we are. The big bluff, in fact: enslaving us, with the alibi of "liberating" us (from all kinds of constraints, because no one likes constraints). We've known this for a long time. China's digital control initiative, combined with (not opposed to) the fascism 2.0 being invented in the United States, marks a course that is far from hopeful. Europe, wake up!
Jean-Marc Adolphe,
with the contribution of Hsien-Liang Zhāng for the Chinese part of this survey.
(translated from French by Maria Damcheva. Original source HERE)
NOTES
(1). In reference to the astonishment that gripped Americans when they discovered the Russian satellite overhead in 1957.
(2). Asma Mhalla is the author of Technopolitique. Comment la technologie fait de nous des soldats (Seuil, 2024).
(3). See in particular "L'intelligence artificielle, une "bombe climatique" invisible", article by Fanny Breuneval published on Novethic.fr on January 3, 2024 (HERE).
(4). Near the village of Narsaq, on the southern tip of the island, a mountain that looks like a dormant volcano watches over the inhabitants. Kvanefjeld, or Kuannersuit in Inuit, could be home to the world's second-largest reserve of rare earths, behind China, and sixth-largest of uranium... Listen to Christine Ockrent's "Affaires étrangères" program on France Culture, broadcast on February 1, 2025: "Greenland: les enjeux de l'Arctique", with Bruno Tertrais, deputy director of the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique and geopolitical advisor to the Institut Montaigne; Camille Escudé, geographer, associate doctor at the Centre d'études internationales (CERI) at Sciences Po Paris; Philippe Le Corre, professor of geopolitics at ESSEC and researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute; and Florian Vidal, researcher at the University of Tromsø in Norway and associate researcher at IFRI, podcast HERE.
(5). David Karpa, Torben Klarl, Michael Rochlitz, "Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, and Big Data" (HERE).
(6). Antoine Vitkine's remarkable documentary series "Triades - La mafia chinoise à la conquête du monde" is a must-see on ARTE, particularly the fifth episode, HERE.
(7). Hedge funds in China fall into two categories. The first includes government-backed companies, such as common property brokers, trust projects and investment companies managing their own capital. The second comprises private hedge funds. Under the name of "investment consulting firm" or "investment management company", they manage common assets.
(8). Common prosperity (Chinese: 共同富裕) is a political slogan of the Chinese Communist Party and a declared goal of strengthening social equality and economic equity. Under Mao Zedong, common prosperity meant collective ownership. Deng Xiaoping redefined the way to achieve common prosperity by asserting that some could get rich before others. Under Xi Jinping, the term gained in importance, with Xi defining common prosperity as a more equal distribution of income, while making it clear that it does not mean uniform egalitarianism.
(9). Latest publications: Faire sécession : une politique de nous-mêmes, L'Échappée, coll. "Pour en finir avec", 2021; La vie spectrale : Penser l'ère du métavers et des IA génératives, Grasset, 2023.
(10). Dominique Darbon is Director of Sciences Po Bordeaux, Eric Darras is Director of Sciences Po Toulouse, Sabine Saurugger is Director of Sciences Po Grenoble-UGA.
(11). Translated in the U.S. in 1964 by Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World.
Because you are well worth it, les humanités, it's not the same ce n'est pas pareil. Against a lazy press, take the time to investigate without restriction, to get to the bottom of things with rigor and high standards. To support us : HERE
Comments