What follows is the full article behind my latest video. It is also, in part, my own story of moving between the Sinophone and Western worlds, which felt like the right way to open this publication. From here on, my video scripts will be adapted into full articles here, free for everyone, with deeper notes and mind maps that won’t make it to YouTube reserved for paid subscribers. (If you prefer to listen, press “Listen” in the mobile app.)

Intro: The DeepSeek Contradiction

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of China’s radical technological rise.

We all remember how DeepSeek disrupted the global AI industry in 2025, proving that state-of-the-art Chinese models could rival Silicon Valley’s top systems at a fraction of the cost.

However, in a leaked transcript of a closed-door meeting from 2026, DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng acknowledged that his company still covets Western tech and relies heavily on NVIDIA chips smuggled illegally from the US — while sarcastically saying that NVIDIA is “digging its own grave” by forcing DeepSeek to integrate with Huawei’s Chinese chips, which will eventually dismantle NVIDIA’s ecosystem.

How can the engineers who desperately rely on the Western technological ecosystem be so determined to dismantle it?

That contradiction runs through an entire generation.

Countless Chinese intellectuals have spent decades studying the West: attending Western elite universities, working with its top scholars, trying to understand why America became so powerful. Yet many of those same people have a mindset of resenting the Western system they have spent their lives trying to master.

I know, because I used to be one of them.

Growing up in China, I absorbed a story that shaped how I saw the world before I even realised it was a story. It centred on China’s century of humiliation, which began with the Opium War against Britain and ended with modern China’s rise. It’s the story that justifies the operating system of our country today.

To be clear, when I was young I also learnt plenty about the darker history of the Communist Party by climbing the Great Firewall. But there was something so powerful hidden in that particular story of Western humiliation that it overshadowed all the others.

To gain a better understanding of our world, I studied Chinese culture with top sinologists at Nanjing University before working with Grammy-winning gurus in Shanghai's most globalised entertainment and tech industries.

And when I eventually arrived in Britain to study at the Royal College of Music, I was hoping the free market of ideas here could show me why this small island had become one of the world’s most innovative societies, despite being portrayed in China as the source of our humiliation. By finding out what we got wrong about that chapter of history — and what we got right about our own culture — I think I discovered the deeper mindsets that explain one of the strangest paradoxes of my home country:

The more China resents Western technological power, the more obsessively it studies it and becomes it.

I’ll show you how we inherited more than a story about humiliation. We inherited a diagnosis of why China was humiliated — and that diagnosis defined the deeper mindsets behind the radical technological rise today.

The Wound That Built Our Deeper Minds

To understand where the mindsets came from, we have to see one thing first. The story of a century of humiliation, beginning in 1839, is not only taught to every child in China as historical fact. More importantly, it functions as overarching guidance for life.

We were told that China had always been a unified, homogeneous country of vast scale. Then came Britain’s rapidly expanding opium trade. The Qing government tried to stop it; Britain responded with a war, defeated the Qing, and seized Hong Kong. That defeat set off a cascade of further foreign invasions, collapses of unity, and then the catastrophic Japanese conquest. Then, the hundred years of humiliation finally started to be erased by the founding of the new China in 1949.

The sentiment accelerated when we watched the sacred ceremonies celebrating Hong Kong’s return to the motherland in 1997, with vivid, moving speeches about the Opium War. We watched popular TV dramas about the war. In the Opium War Museum in Dongguan, we saw the British merchants William Jardine and James Matheson portrayed as criminals running a drug cartel — without ever realising the irony that across the border, in central Hong Kong, major companies, buildings and streets still carry those same names with immense respect.

As children raised in that emotional environment, our ultimate goal was to centre our careers on rebuilding our traumatised country and erasing the humiliation brought by the West. Through my own efforts, I achieved that goal: a career as a composer on some of China’s most popular films, games and concerts, shown around the world. The validation felt real when I stood in the world’s largest steel-structure stadium in Beijing in 2016, programming a live performance of Chinese-style pop in front of tens of thousands of people.

Then I decided to break out of China’s siloed cyberspace to better understand our system in a Western context by studying overseas. Britain was the first destination that came to mind. And here, by researching original archives and watching open debates I could never access before, I found what we had got wrong about that story all along.

What We Got Wrong About the Wound

For the first seventy years after the Opium War, “national humiliation” simply wasn’t in the vocabulary of ordinary Chinese people, or even the elites.

In the records of that era, the war carried a very different meaning from the one I was familiar with. Opium was legal across most of the nineteenth-century world — British families used it routinely, even to treat infants. And what made China’s consumption uniquely massive was domestic: Chinese merchants and farmers had made tobacco so cheap and popular since the eighteenth century that opium smoking spread through it.

Then, watching the British opium trade drain the country’s silver reserves, the Qing emperor decided to crack down through xenophobic violence rather than rule of law. The authorities arbitrarily besieged and imprisoned British merchants in Guangzhou to force them to stop the trade. Meanwhile, ordinary Chinese people mostly wanted to keep trading. Then the British used military force to compel the Qing to normalise trade. Locals secretly aided the besieged British merchants and soldiers, and many of those locals, alongside the British, later became the first migrants to Hong Kong. They were refugees fleeing the Qing authorities’ persecution. Read from the ground level of those archives, the war looks more like the British together with Chinese merchants against a tyrannical ruler. Even the Qing authorities didn’t treat giving away a barren island to refugees as humiliation at the time. They themselves soon began growing opium at scale to compete in the very market they had once punished the British for supplying.

Why does any of this matter for modern tech wars? Because if the way we interpret the original humiliation is drastically different from how the people who lived through it did, then we could be learning the wrong lesson when we direct technological power today.

The crisis revealed by the Opium War was real, but the strong national sense of humiliation arrived later, largely with the Japanese army. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Japan waged brutal wars targeting not only the Qing military but also civilians. The turning point was the Port Arthur Massacre in 1894. During the First Sino-Japanese War, Japanese troops systematically slaughtered an estimated 20,000 Chinese civilians at the port. That massacre is where the Chinese sense of national humiliation, as a mass emotion, truly begins.

After the Qing emperor abdicated in 1912 and the new Republic faced a rising, militaristic Japan, the new government consolidated official “national humiliation days” as commemorations of the Japanese invasions and wrote the framework into school curricula.

Then in 1949, the Communist Party inherited all of these separate experiences and compressed them into a single hundred-year story. The arithmetic works beautifully for them: the century of humiliation conveniently ends in 1949, with “the Chinese people have stood up.” What the Party’s narrative changed was the Opium War’s place in the story — pulling it from the margins to the origin point.

And counterintuitively, the official line treats Japan as part of the Western powers — a country that rose by absorbing Western technology, rather than a totalitarian society deviating from the Western ideas. In this telling, the blame for the humiliation’s origin lands on the collective Western model.

The Chinese military even published a book arguing that China needs unrestricted warfare against a humiliation that began with the British-led Opium War. Some viral clips by Chinese commentators have gone further, celebrating selling more fentanyl to the US as payback for the Opium Wars.

This narrative vilified British colonisation, even though the nineteenth century had produced no such sense of national humiliation at the time. And by combining those events into a single Western-originated wound, you change the lesson taught to future generations.

This is how the West became the scapegoat in our deeper minds in the first place.

What We Got Right About Our Sinophone World

But this is where the story becomes much more than history.

The century of humiliation story teaches one lesson above all others: never be weak again. And in the modern world, weakness means technological dependence more than anything else.

That lesson explains the hunger behind China’s tech rise.

Then came globalisation, through which our hunger found its knowledge. Generations of Chinese students went to study in the West and brought the frontier knowledge home. I am a beneficiary of this, too.

The amplifier of capability, though, came from something much older. Despite what we got wrong about the humiliation history, there’s something we got right about our own culture: a genuine unity at vast scale, far more organic and real.

A unified Sinophone world is defined, first, by its language. Chinese characters are so structurally stable that people thousands of miles apart, speaking mutually unintelligible dialects — or separated by several dynasties — can understand each other perfectly through the same writing system. This locked in a shared historical consciousness that transcended geography and time.

The unity was physical too. An agrarian civilisation bound people to their homeland, and the Grand Canal — the world’s longest artificial waterway — stitched the empire together, carrying grain from the wealthy south to feed the military shield in the north.

And it was ideological: the imperial civil service exams incentivised everyone seeking power to memorise the same Confucian texts, eroding local identities in the process.

It matters for technology more than it might sound. What China inherited from all of this was an unusually powerful mechanism for spreading knowledge, infrastructure and standards across an enormous population at speed.

As a result, Chinese citizens today have a much deeper attachment to an ancient, unified Sinophone culture than outsiders imagine.

When I talked to my friends inside major tech firms like Tencent, ByteDance and MiHoYo, I found that although none of them fully agreed with the official lines, they all admired one thing: the sheer scale of a culturally unified Sinophone world — the resources, the massive homogeneous market, the self-sustaining tech ecosystem it enables.

We often imagine a sealed cyberspace would hold a country back. In practice, China’s siloed internet was mostly sealed off in the humanities. In technology, it fuelled a wave of spontaneous domestic innovation that rebuilt the entire Western platform stack from scratch — and then turned that rebuilt stack into a fierce rival of the West, powered by the scale of the unified Sinophone market.

WeChat, TikTok, Temu — and the giants behind them, Tencent, ByteDance and Alibaba — would not exist if Instagram, X and Amazon had not been blocked there. DeepSeek and Kimi would never have had to meet massive domestic AI needs and then made global headlines if 1.4 billion people had not been barred from using ChatGPT and Claude.

So China’s tech rise went far beyond copying. It learnt from the West inside an unusually large protected market, then scaled what it learnt across an enormous industrial agglomeration.

Those industry gurus completely understand that none of their tech stack works without that mechanism built on vast, sealed territories and cyberspace.

And that also happens to be exactly what the Chinese authorities want to keep. A sealed internet functions as a shield for the Party’s legitimacy: the thing that presumably holds those vast territories together. The Party’s mindset then reinforces “digital sovereignty”: a siloed cyberspace that keeps the domestic tech stack running on its own.

This is what we got right about our culture: the obsession with a unified Sinophone world is real, and it built real capability. But it carries a side effect. It leans heavily towards hypersensitivity to national humiliation — anything that presumably threatens the unity, whether historical or modern.

We are all familiar with the joke: there are three things a person cannot escape in life — birth, humiliating China, and death.

And this is how the paradox is amplified. The same system that enables technological independence also makes every form of Western pressure feel like another humiliation.

The Misdiagnosis Driving the Tech War

Take Huawei. The tech giant was heavily sanctioned by the US, citing extensive evidence of state-linked intellectual property theft, cyber espionage, and aid to anti-West forces like the Iranian regime. But inside the humiliation mindset, the sanctions read as one thing only: the strong keeping China weak again. So the Party elevated Huawei into an absolute symbol of national pride, gave it massive state resources, and made it the foundational hardware provider for nearly every Chinese tech firm — including DeepSeek. It produced a stronger Chinese competitor, which triggered more US restrictions, which confirmed the story again.

This is a feedback loop.

Under this climate, Huawei became untouchable. It even barred domestic customers from posting viral videos of its EV’s gesture-controlled doors failing. As the nation’s pride, the company can now portray any feedback on serious quality problems as national humiliation that aids Western adversaries. A malfunctioning car door, treated as a wound to the nation.

This mindset that treats accountability as humiliation takes us straight back to the misdiagnosis I mentioned at the beginning.

We misattributed the historical wound in our deep minds to Western technological power, symbolised by Britain, a society of civil liberties and parliamentary governance. Whereas the sharpest sources of that historical suffering were Japan’s totalitarian and militaristic system and the Qing dynasty’s own tyrannical rule. The totalitarian ideas in the story were quietly exonerated. The freest ideas were made the original villains.

From that misdiagnosis, one conclusion was drawn: the West’s strength stems from its technology, enabled by its exploitation of China. And the political model beneath the technology — like the liberties, the open debate, the constraint on power — is either irrelevant or the disease itself.

So the West became two things at once in our minds: the source of our humiliation, and the benchmark of the strength we needed. That’s why DeepSeek treats ending dependence on the West through obsessive learning as a matter of national survival — and reads every Western restriction as fresh proof that survival is at stake.

And yet, we have to be honest about this: the remarkable innovation by Chinese genius minds in the country is real. So the open question of our era is more than whether China can innovate. It’s whether a country can indefinitely extract the fruits of a system created by its adversaries without confronting the system that made those fruits possible. The answer will shape far more than China.

It took me a long time to see these mindsets, because they were difficult to see from inside. I know they’re real because I lived inside them, and reconstructing that reality was some of the hardest intellectual work of my life. Everything I wrote and discussed stemmed from that process.

And the paradox is the one I can’t stop thinking about.