The “DeepSeek Moment:” China and the Crisis of American Confidence with Kaiser Kuo

China's recent achievements in artificial intelligence, exemplified by DeepSeek's breakthrough LLM, represent more than just technological advancement - they signal a fundamental shift in global innovation dynamics. While Chinese companies have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in areas from EVs to social media to AI, U.S. responses continue to follow a predictable pattern: disbelief, anger, accusations of theft, and blame. This recurring cycle reveals both China's evolved capacity for coordinated technological development and deep-seated American anxieties about what this means for U.S. technological primacy. Drawing on his extensive experience analyzing both societies, Sinica Podcast host Kaiser Kuo explores how China's innovation ecosystem has matured, why its successes continue to surprise Western observers, and what this tells us about the structural, cultural, and epistemic barriers to understanding China's technological transformation. The talk examines how China's rise has challenged core assumptions about the relationship between political systems and innovation, market economies and state guidance, and ultimately, about American exceptionalism itself — and whether it can accommodate China's own brand of exceptionalism.
Kaiser Kuo is the host and co-founder of the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China that has run since April 2010 — for its first six years from Beijing, and since 2016 from the U.S. as part of SupChina. The show features in-depth conversations with scholars, journalists, diplomats, analysts, and others who work to better understand China in all its complexity.
Benno Weiner is Associate Professor of History at Carnegie Mellon University where he specializes in the ethnopolitics of twentieth-century state and nation making along China’s ethnocultural borderlands. He is the author of The Chinese Revolution on the Tibetan Frontier and co-editor of Conflicting Memories: Tibetan History under Mao Retold.