DeepSeek’s Collision Course with Xi

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Assistant Editor

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 13, No. 3, March 2025

By Vaibhav Panwar

President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing, 5 September 2024. Source: President Paul Kagame via Flickr.

Fresh from the highs of DeepSeek’s ‘Sputnik moment’ in the AI race, Xi Jinping hosted a rare meeting with the titans of industry — notably the tech sector — in Beijing on February 16th. The event was attended by heads of BYD, Huawei, Deepseek, and other stalwarts. However, amidst these giants stood a tiny man with a big pedigree: Jack Ma. The tech baron from Hangzhou, who once pulled the strings of one of China’s largest tech conglomerates, The Alibaba group, is renowned for his influence. The company had its fingers in profitable pies like online wholesaling, e-commerce, and online transactions. Its fintech arm, Alipay, had racked up north of a billion users by the end of 2020. Ma was having a dream run: in October 2014, he found himself on the front page of newspapers around the world when the recently concluded Alibaba IPO breached the $25 billion mark – the biggest ever— leaving the world in awe of his role as the symbol of Chinese entrepreneurial spirit and China’s sprawling economy. Ma’s empire was firing on all cylinders; on single’s day 2019 — China’s answer to Black Friday — Alibaba and its subsidiaries did $38 billion in sales in 24 hours. Now, fast-forward to fall 2020: another Alibaba entity, ANT Group, was about to go public, all set to raise north of $35 billion based on the pre-subscriptions. The largest stock-offering in history was set to take place in Shanghai, creating a landmark moment for the Chinese economy, and cementing Ma’s status as one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs. Beijing, however, was not so comfortable with the market consolidation of the tech giant from Hangzhou — or for that matter — the public criticism lobbed by Ma against Chinese banks at Shanghai’s Bund Conference. To nobody’s surprise — besides, perhaps his own — Jack Ma was called in for regulatory meetings by the Chinese central bank (PBOC) shortly after his remarks. Soon, the Chinese regulators would go on to pull the plug on the IPO right before the launch day, which was widely believed to be a disciplinary move against Ma over his comments. Ma was subsequently gone from the public eye, until he popped up in Japan a couple of years later.

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Amodei’s AI Plan To Democratize China

Posted on January 16, 2025 by admin

Image of US and Chinese flags painted on computer chip.

Flags of the USA and China on a semiconductor. William Potter.

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2025

By Anders Corr

A new strategy that could peacefully democratize China and other autocratic states was published recently. By ensuring a democratic lead in artificial intelligence (AI), its benefits could be used to incentivize autocracies into nonaggression against democracies. Then, AI could unblock information and defeat autocratic censorship, ultimately improving education in autocracies to the point that Chinese people themselves would successfully drive and achieve democratic reforms.

While using the stick of military AI to deter autocracies has long been discussed, the idea of using the carrots from AI to buy peace with autocracies, and then using the same technology to defeat censorship and achieve democratization in those countries, had not, to the best of this author’s knowledge, been published before October. Continue reading →

Italy’s New Government: Business as Usual

Posted on January 30, 2023 by Assistant Editor

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 2023

Lorenzo Ammirati

The image depicts a poster with a stylized black-and-white illustration of a woman wearing a military-style uniform and cap, reminiscent of fascist propaganda art. The background features the Italian flag with vertical green, white, and red stripes. Below the image, in bold black and red text, is the label "MUSS-MELONI", which is a play on the names of Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, and Giorgia Meloni, the Italian politician. The image appears to be a piece of street art or protest art, criticizing Meloni by drawing a parallel between her and Mussolini.

Poster of Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy Party, 2022. Source: Duncan Cumming via Flickr.

Nationalist identarian right-wing party Fratelli d’Italia (“Brothers of Italy”) was the only major Italian party to oppose former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi’s “national unity” coalition government which governed Italy between February 2021 and September 2022. Among the key campaign promises made by Fratelli d’Italia’s leader and current Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni during the electoral campaign of September 2022 was a break with the economic policies of the Draghi government. However, the first Italian female Prime Minister has thus far demonstrated the opposite orientation.

In fact, Meloni’s sphere of decision making on economic policy is severely limited. Italy’s extremely high levels of public debt (above 150% of GDP) coupled with weak trust from financial markets and the European Union’s tight fiscal rules make it very costly (both financially and reputationally) for any Italian government to finance new public policies. Additionally, investments are currently mainly being made through the European Union’s Recovery Instrument, an ad-hoc fund created after the COVID-19 pandemic which lends money for EU approved projects, greatly constraining the power of the Italian government.

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Nixon and Kissinger Talk China: Satire

Posted on May 6, 2022 by Assistant Editor

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 10, No. 5, May 2022

A black and white image depicting Former President Nixon and Henry Kissinger engrossed in conversations the White House.

Former President Nixon and Henry Kissinger engrossed in conversation, 1972. Source: Wikimedia.

Tony Zielinski
Attorney at Law

Editor’s note: This satire is meant for purposes of humor and should not be interpreted as historically accurate.

Henry Kissinger: Mr. President, I suggest we open up formal relations with Communist China and they will be our allies against the Soviet Union.

President Nixon: Do you feel we can trust their leader, Mao Tse Tung?

Henry Kissinger: Mao Tse Tung is the greatest mass murderer in history. He is responsible for more deaths than Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. He is a ruthless unscrupulous tyrant. So my answer is a most resounding yes.

President Nixon: Yes…I think I understand and can work with someone like that.

Henry Kissinger: A big challenge will be how we deal with Democratic and free Taiwan. They have been great friends and allies. Communist China regards them as a renegade state and China will not rest until they conquer Taiwan and take away their freedoms. China will subjugate them to unspeakable brutality because they dared to have freedom of speech, freedom of press, and the right to vote for their elected representatives. Mao will never forgive them.

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The Risks of AI: An Interview with Georgetown’s Helen Toner

Posted on January 14, 2022 by Assistant Editor

Journal of Political Risk, Vol. 10, No. 1, January 2022

Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University.

Anders Corr, Ph.D.
Publisher of the Journal of Political Risk

The JPR interview with Helen Toner, the Director of Strategy at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) at Georgetown University, was conducted via email between 4 January 2022 and 13 January 2022.

Corr: What are the national security risks and benefits of AI?

Toner: This is a huge question! AI is a general-purpose technology, meaning that—like electricity or the computer—its impacts will be felt across practically all industries and areas of society. Accordingly, it presents a huge range of potential risks and benefits from a national security perspective. One way of trying to summarize the possibilities might be as follows: the benefits will largely be in line with the kinds of benefits we have seen from increasingly sophisticated computing technology more generally: greater efficiency and accuracy, as well as the ability to perform tasks at scales impossible for humans (think: how Google search trawls the web). In terms of risks, one breakdown proposed by Zwetsloot and Dafoe is to think in terms of risks from accidents (i.e. unintended outcomes from using AI), misuse (i.e. the deliberate use of AI to cause harm), and structural changes (i.e. how progress in AI shapes surrounding systems and dynamics). I realize this is fairly abstract, but it’s impossible to enumerate specific risks without narrowing the scope to particular application areas, time frames, and actors.

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