The belief that China is a country only good at adopting technologies at scale has been a “misperception”, according to Mehran Gul, the author of 'The New Geography of Innovation', a recently published book that maps the rise of new tech powers around the world. “The geography of innovation is shifting”, the book, which came out in July, concluded. Covering tech start-ups across China, the UK, Singapore and Canada, among other countries, Mehran Gul said China today “is the only competitor” against the U.S. “Others are trying, but they’re not good enough to be dangerous”, writes Gul, winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, who previously covered tech topics for the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the United Nations. “The rise of DeepSeek and China’s open-source AI models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen, have proved that China’s AI research is strong”, Gul said in an interview.
In September, DeepSeek’s landmark peer-reviewed article on its R1 reasoning model was published by the British journal Nature, marking a significant leap for China’s AI community. Meanwhile, Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen family is powering the world’s top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to AI developer platform Hugging Face. Gul said start-ups in developed countries “tend to rely overwhelmingly on Chinese models”. For example, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, reported that 80% of his portfolio companies used foundation models from China, Gul said. “The open source lead can in the future translate into a platform lock-in where companies both in the U.S. and other countries are much more used to working with Chinese models”, he said. “In that one important respect, China does have a lead already that can widen over time.”
Talent is one of the most critical advantages China has, Gul said. In 2022, 47% of the world’s top AI researchers were from China, but only 12% worked in the country, second to the U.S., which attracted 57%. But this represented significant progress because in 2019 China was not in the top five in terms of retaining the best AI talent worldwide. “The bigger question is how China would attract non-Chinese talent,” Gul said. “This is where the U.S. really stands apart from China. The U.S. doesn’t rely solely on American talent, but it’s getting people from all over the world, including its primary adversaries.” However, in late September, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to impose a USD100,000 application fee for H-1B visas, which allowed American companies to sponsor foreign workers with specialized skills, such as scientists, engineers and computer programmers, the South China Morning Post reports. Meanwhile, China introduced a K-visa category to attract promising young talents.
