When the dragon learns to think
Why China may lead the next AI revolution and how the West might answer
Image generated with GenAI.For centuries, the dragon slept. It’s vast, scaled, and still.
It watched the world from behind the mountains.
But now, something stirs beneath the smoke.
This time, the dragon isn’t just breathing fire.
It’s learning to think.
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The smartphone was only the rehearsalWhen China embraced the smartphone, it didn’t just adopt new hardware — it rewrote the script.
In the West, mobile was a convenience.
In China, it became infrastructure.
WeChat turned into a digital city-state. It’s part messenger, part wallet, part citizen ID.
TikTok wasn’t just a viral app. It was a cultural missile, launched at speed and scale.
This wasn’t isolated brilliance.
It was systemic convergence of policy, platforms, and population.
And it wasn’t the last time the dragon moved fast.
Solar, EVs, and DeepSeek: Speed is the strategyWhile other nations debated climate, China blanketed rooftops with solar.
While Detroit hesitated, China scaled EVs.
Today, BYD outsells Tesla in China and it’s building factories across Southeast Asia and Europe.
Then came DeepSeek, an open-source LLM that quietly shocked the world.
Its performance was on par with leading models.
Its release? Fully transparent.
It didn’t shout.
It simply arrived trained, tuned, and ready.
China’s strength isn’t just its size.
It’s its singularity.
One government.
A vertically integrated economy.
A tech stack that runs from silicon to software to citizen.
Where others fragment, China fuses.
Where others argue, China deploys.
This isn’t improvisation.
It’s orchestration.
The dragon doesn’t sprint.
It sweeps.
Tariffs and trade wars may dominate headlines
but the next Cold War will unfold in code.
The battlefield is AI.
The prize is influence.
China knows this.
And it’s acting accordingly with tighter ecosystems, state-linked models, and long-term funding.
It has banned crypto.
But it’s building AI into everything else, from city-wide surveillance networks to state-backed cloud infrastructure like Alibaba Cloud, anchoring its AI ambitions at scale.
Meanwhile, the U.S., fragmented, decentralised, slower to coordinate faces a different choice.
It can’t out-centralise China.
But it might out-open it.
Can Web3 match the dragon’s pace?Ironically, the closest the West has to China’s rapid iteration model…
might be Web3.
Like China’s tech economy, Web3 is loose, fast, and unforgiving.
There are no business hours. No permits. No committees.
Launch. Break. Iterate.
Fail in public. Ship in days.
In 2024 alone, Web3 poured over $2 billion into AI startups , fuelling a wave of decentralised experiments.
Think Golem, offering permissionless compute.
Think SingularityNET, building decentralised AI marketplaces.
But here’s the paradox:
The dragon bans crypto, yet embraces Web3 weaving blockchain into healthcare systems and state-guided metaverse dreams.
With $14 million in annual support across Beijing and Hong Kong’s crypto hubs, China’s Web3 isn’t a wildfire.
It’s a controlled blaze.
Western Web3, chaotic, permissionless must now outrun this orchestrated ascent.
If China builds AI through order,
Web3 builds it through emergence.
One is a dragon.
The other a wildfire.
This story frames the West through Web3 as China’s primary counterweight.
But that’s only part of the picture.
Across the world, others are shaping AI in quieter, more deliberate ways.
The EU, with its AI Act, isn’t chasing speed. It’s building frameworks.
India’s AI Mission is weaving intelligence into its digital public goods.
Singapore is aligning innovation with long-range state strategy and sovereign data policies.
These aren’t dragons.
And they aren’t wildfires.
They’re something else:
Gardens.
Growing under different suns, with different rules but growing all the same.
The race is not just binary.
It’s ecological.
We once looked to China for factories.
Then for phones.
Now perhaps for minds.
Because the dragon is no longer sleeping.
And this time, it doesn’t just move.
It learns.
And in doing so,
it may change the code of global power, line by line.
References:
ByBit: https://learn.bybit.com/web3-experts/web3-ai-projects/
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/02/11/deepseek-ai-chip-export-ban-trade-war-us-wont-win.html
When the dragon learns to think was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.