DeepSeek and Destiny: A National Vibe Shift
How an AI startup reignited the concept of national destiny (国运)
A guest piece by Afra, freelance writer and podcaster [Jordan: I highly recommend this show!] with working experience in tech and crypto. Personal site here.
DeepSeek’s winds have already been blowing for some time, but this particular gale seems to have real staying power.
President Trump characterized DeepSeek as “a wake-up call,” Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang called it “earth-shattering,” and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei deigned to come on ChinaTalk to discuss fears of powerful AI within “authoritarian systems of government.”
On Chinese social media, the discussions took on a life of their own, with the most popular use case being the calculation of one’s Ba Zi (八字) and astrological chart, using the social media tag “AI玄学” (AI Mysticism). Users weren’t just seeking their personal fortunes — they saw the nation’s destiny itself shifting through DeepSeek’s emergence. These conversations are a swirling mix of collective jubilation, national pride, and gleeful satisfaction over America’s “China envy,”1 often accompanied by playful banter.
Yet amidst this discourse, a deeper and more resonant question emerges: could this be a sign of China’s technological ascension? Is this evidence that Guoyun (国运) — the nation’s long-awaited destiny — has finally arrived?
First, what is Guoyun 国运？
The term 国运 combines two characters: 国 (guó, “nation/state”) and 运 (yùn, “fate/destiny/fortune”). This concept emerged from traditional Chinese cosmological thinking, where the destiny of the state was seen as intertwined with celestial patterns and dynastic cycles.2 This term, once confined to the ornate dialogue of period dramas set in imperial China, has begun to surface with increasing frequency on my social media timeline.
The Guoyun narrative around DeepSeek began when Feng Ji 冯骥, creator of the globally successful game “Black Myth: Wukong,” declared it a “national destiny-level technological achievement.”
The discourse gained momentum when Zhou Hongyi 周鸿祎, Chairperson of Qihoo 360, positioned DeepSeek as a key player in China’s “AI Avengers Team” against U.S. dominance. This sentiment echoed across media, with headlines like “Is DeepSeek a breakthrough of national destiny? The picture could be bigger” and “DeepSeek triggers U.S. stock plunge; can it really change the nation’s destiny?"
For Chinese netizens, discussions about politics on social media are often marked by subtlety and veneration with trepidation (for reasons that require little explanation). However, during the 2025 Chinese New Year, the discourse expanded far beyond politics and DeepSeek into a cacophony of cultural euphoria —a wave of self-congratulatory enthusiasm that evolved into something larger culturally. This included the movie Nezha 2, which shattered box office records and surpassed Inside Out 2 to become the highest-grossing animated film of all time (with patriotism-fueled consumption boosting the box office performance), TikTok refugees flooding Xiaohongshu, and advanced Unitree robotics performing during the Spring Festival Gala. These achievements seemed to occur against a historical backdrop where technological and cultural advances carry deeper significance about China’s rightful place in the cosmic order.3
The Guoyun discourse extends beyond tech leaders, media commentary, and social media posts.
President Xi Jinping has woven the concept of destiny into official rhetoric, though carefully stripped of its more superstitious elements. Speaking at the 19th Academician Conference of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in May 2018, Xi declared, “Innovation determines the future; reform concerns national destiny. The field of science and technology is the area most in need of continuous reform 创新决胜未来，改革关乎国运。科技领域是最需要不断改革的领域.” This statement aligns with his broader techno-nationalist vision, explicitly linking technological advancement to China’s strategic future.
A 2024 People’s Daily article discussing Xi’s thoughts emphasized that “cultural confidence is a major issue concerning national destiny 坚定文化自信，是一个事关国运兴衰...的大问题"。
This rhetorical shift signals a carefully calibrated blend of traditional Chinese concepts with modern governance — a bridge between ancient ideas of dynastic cycles and contemporary aspirations for technological supremacy.
Beyond superstition: is this a collective myth-making or post-pandemic yearning for certainty?
It would be a mistake to dismiss this discourse as mere superstition or propaganda.
The COVID-19 pandemic marked a watershed moment in Chinese society’s relationship with national destiny. To me, Zero COVID became a mirror polished to cruel clarity, reflecting a China I no longer recognized. During the rigid cycles of lockdowns and reopenings, I didn’t see my parents for two years, my grandmother was hospitalized, and my cousin was confined to his university dorm for three whole months culminating in a severe mental breakdown. Friends lost loved ones due to a lack of timely treatment options. Back then, seeing how waves of people wanted to “run (润)” from China, I thought for the first time that I might never return to China, and that I might become part of the Chinese diaspora forever.
COVID created a collective trauma that many Chinese are still processing.
But this experience has paradoxically reinforced a certain earnest faith in China’s future among ordinary citizens. The optimism in the discussion of Guoyun might represent a complex emotional response to the uncertainty and trauma from the COVID era — a blend of traditional fatalism with genuine aspirations. Having weathered the pandemic’s disruption, many ordinary Chinese seek reassurance about the future through familiar cultural frameworks. ‘National Destiny’ provides exactly that — it’s a narrative that contextualizes current struggles within a larger, ultimately triumphant story. It’s therapeutic.
The discourse around 国运论 (guóyùn lùn, or “national destiny theory”) reveals parallels to America’s historical myth-making. Perhaps the most striking similarity between China and the US is their unwavering belief in their own exceptionalism and their destined special place in the world order. While America has Manifest Destiny and the Frontier Thesis, China’s “national rejuvenation” serves as its own foundational myth from which people can derive self-confidence. Through countless repetitions across state and social media, this narrative has become deeply ingrained in China’s national consciousness.
The wounds behind techno-nationalism
Where myths nurture the national consciousness, technology has become the battleground where China’s historical narrative demands its vindication. The roots of China’s techno-nationalism run deep, drawing emotional power from China’s “century of humiliation.” U.S. actions — chip controls, the attempted TikTok ban, tariffs, investigations of Chinese scientists, and suspicions of Chinese espionage — rekindle the historical trauma of humiliation.
For decades, China has been portrayed as a mere copycat or thief of Western innovation. Each technological breakthrough now serves as vindication, a refutation of that dismissive narrative — this shame has never truly been resolved. As Kevin Xu elaborated on DeepSeek’s open-sourced nature, “It’s all for the validation and approval,” — a sharp acknowledgment that when Chinese engineers share their code with the world, they’re not just demonstrating technical prowess but seeking to heal a wound in the national psyche:
In the Chinese open source community, there is this thing that I would call open source “zeal” or “calling” (开源情怀)
Most engineers are thrilled if their open source projects — a database, a container registry, etc-- are used by a foreign company, especially a silicon valley one. They’d tack on free labor on top of already free software, to fix bugs, resolve issues, all day all night. It’s all for the validation and approval.
Implicit in this “zeal” or “calling” is an acute awareness that no one in the West respects what they do because everything in China is stolen or created by cheating. They are also aware that Chinese firms have been taking for free lots of open source tech to advance, but they want to create their own, contribute, and prove that their tech is good enough to be taken for free by foreign firms -- some nationalism, some engineering pride.
So if you want to really understand why DeepSeek does what it does and open source everything, start there. It’s not a political statement, not to troll Stargate or Trump inauguration, or to help their quant fund’s shorts on NVDA (though if that were the case, it’d be quite brilliant and savage)
The drive to prove oneself on behalf of the nation is expressed vividly in Chinese popular culture. I couldn’t stop thinking about Illumine Linga (临高启明), an open-source collaborative novel that has captivated China’s engineering community and become a phenomenon of its own. The story follows modern Chinese engineers who time-travel to the declining Ming dynasty, right before China was conquered by the Manchus, bringing industrial equipment and technical knowledge. They gradually industrialize Hainan and Guangdong provinces before expanding outward with the ultimate goal of establishing global hegemony.4
Though ostensibly just fiction, Illumine Linga pulses with the heartbeat of China’s “Industrial Party” (工业党) — that loose constellation of engineers, programmers, and technically-minded patriots united by an almost religious faith in technology as destiny’s instrument. The novel serves as a sharp allegory for contemporary aspirations: technological mastery as the path to national resurrection and global respect.5
In the Western intellectual tradition, technology and data have undergone phases of detached scrutiny — viewed first as tools of emancipation, and later as vectors of control. Foucault’s panopticon mutated into Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism; Wiener’s Cybernetics birthed both Silicon Valley and Snowden’s disclosures. This academic back-and-forth assumes a fundamental premise: technology can theoretically exist as a neutral substrate awaiting ideological imprint.
However, in my impression, China’s techno-discourse never evinces such “purity.”
From its inception, technology has been semantically encased in the shell of techno-nationalism. In China’s history textbooks, Qian Xuesen’s missiles for the Two Bombs, One Satellite program were never just missiles, but brushstrokes in the narrative of “standing up again.”6 Yuan Longping’s hybrid rice strains didn’t merely feed millions; they were genetic correctives to the “Century of Humiliation,” each harvest a quiet refutation of the colonial-era belief that China couldn’t innovate.
On Chinese New Year’s Eve, a fake response to the “national destiny theory” attributed to Liang Wenfeng circulated widely online, with many believing and sharing it as authentic. This response claimed that DeepSeek’s open-source decision was merely “standing on the shoulders of giants, adding a few more screws to the edifice of China’s large language models,” and that the true national destiny resided in “a group of stubborn fools using code as bricks and algorithms as steel, building bridges to the future.” This fake statement—notably devoid of wolf warrior rhetoric—spread virally, its humility and relentless spirit embodying some values people hoped Chinese technologists would champion. Meanwhile, the real Liang Wenfeng remained silent after DeepSeek’s rise. A month later, he appeared on CCTV sitting beside Tencent’s Ma Huateng at Xi Jinping’s symposium for top business leaders.
The public’s fascination with Liang showed no signs of waning. In Silicon Valley, his previous interviews were swiftly translated into English and meticulously analyzed, while in China, his rise also inspired mystical interpretations—during the Spring Festival holiday, Liang Wenfeng’s ancestral home in Zhanjiang, Guangdong transformed into an impromptu tourist attraction, drawing feng shui masters eager to study the geomantic properties of his family residence.
Humans have always sought ways to calculate the incalculable. Perhaps that’s what makes the conversation around Guoyun so captivating: it’s not just about predicting the future, but about sense-making in China’s present.
I first encountered the term “China envy” in
‘s spy mania!. I believe this term encapsulates some shift in sentiment that deserves deeper exploration.I will skip other related concepts about “national destiny,” including how Chinese emperors employed court astrologers, consulted the I Ching, and the concept of the Mandate of Heaven.
Additional signs of China’s 国运 emerging include the new marriage law (which broadly supports women’s rights and economic independence), the global success of “Black Myth: Wukong,” NeZha 2’sa performance at the box office, and the Spring Festival Gala featuring more diverse and open programming than in previous years, indicating some deeper vibe shift.
As Illumine Linga has grown in length, this collaboratively written novel has expanded to encompass diverse themes: women’s rights, Marxism, power struggles, military strategy, and aesthetics, among many others…And of course, public reception to the novel is diverse. Some Chinese readers find it embarrassingly nationalistic, while others dismiss its premise as simplistic fantasy. It’s worth noting that this work doesn’t represent universal sentiment—large segments of China’s tech community remain either unaware of Illumine Linga or view it with skepticism rather than admiration. But again it does captures the validation-seeking mentality so precisely.
I think Illumine Linga and Industrial Party 工业党 might require a whole other essay to untangle.
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The thing that strikes me most about this excellent piece is the staggering similarity of some of these narratives to....the US some decades ago. It would be presumptuous to cast these lines of thinking as a mere echo of American progress narratives but it is hard not to read them as a direct challenge!
One particularly interesting way this plays out is the direct assault by particularly strident China boosters on Silicon Valley as the best way of technological progress. That's coupled with the insistence that the party has somehow fundamentally cracked the best way to do technological progress.
Interesting article, but I wonder how much this "national vibe shift" extends beyond tech circles; as someone living in China, I have perhaps seen only very limited evidence of increased optimism on the ground (I know - China is big, I see only a sliver). It'll be interesting to see how the Trump administration plays into any vibe shift, so far it seems like it could go either way, with some people celebrating cuts to USAID , but also reacting angrily to increased tariffs and so-called "interference" with Taiwan.
This article (https://www.sinification.com/p/xu-jilin-on-sexuality-boredom-and) featuring an interview with Xu Jilin makes an interesting contrast to the phenomenon described here. He suggests that modern youth are uninterested in grand theories and more concerned with practical aspects of daily life. On the whole, I would probably lean more towards that kind of theory; not that I think China is facing decline, but slowing growth has probably reduced young people's expectations, and I agree with Xu that these trends aren't unique to China.