Alex Colville

London

Freelance Writer at Freelance

Articles

Flooding in Hunan Drowned Out

2 days ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Chinese official media cover catastrophic floods in Henan in 2021. SOURCE: Xinhua. Missile strikes by Israel and the United States against nuclear sites in Iran have dominated the headlines across the world this week.
DeepSeek’s Democratic Deficit

4 days ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

DeepSeek’s R1 model has only been in the public eye since this February, but governments and tech companies have moved fast to adopt it. Institutions as disparate as the Indian government, the chip maker Nvidia, and a host of bodies from the Chinese local government have announced that they will deploy the model. And China’s central government has lost no time in exploiting the broader implications of this private company’s success.
A Trump Card for China’s Media

1 week ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

The sources chose not to leave their names, fearing retaliation from the US government. Six long months ago, these words would have been nearly unthinkable in a mainstream news article from a US media outlet. Such language is now commonplace. And late last month, as the Trump administration made a full-fledged assault on international students at Harvard, they even came from the most unlikely of sources: China’s government-run Xinhua News Agency.
China’s Global AI Firewall

2 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

If you had asked DeepSeek’s R1 open-source large language model just four months ago to list out China’s territorial disputes in the South China Sea — a highly sensitive issue for the country’s Communist Party leadership — it would have responded in detail, even if its responses subtly tugged you towards a sanitized official view.
China’s Slow March Toward Cyber IDs

3 weeks ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

On May 19, China’s top law enforcement agency released measures for the roll-out of “cyber IDs” (网络身份认证), a new form of user identification to monitor internet users. Although the measures were released as a draft over the summer last year, they have only just been finalized, and will come into effect in mid-July.
AI Joins China's Primary Schools

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

On May 13, China’s Ministry of Education released guidelines for integrating AI into the earliest stages of child education. According to the guide, schoolchildren will be introduced to the key concepts driving AI, as well as its basic uses and best practices. By the time students reach high school, they will learn to build simple algorithms of their own. But despite allowing schoolchildren to use AI as a learning aid, the guide prohibits them from using generative AI alone for their work.
Redacting History

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

Last week marked the 17th anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, a 7.9 magnitude tremor that devastated Sichuan province and tragically took the lives of nearly 100,000 people. On the May 12 anniversary this year, one particular Wenchuan-related item surged to the top of search engine Baidu and hot search lists on the social media forum Weibo. It involved an impromptu interview given on location one week after the 2008 quake by Li Xiaomeng (李小萌), a reporter from state broadcaster CCTV.
From Mao to MAGA

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

The Cultural Revolution is barely mentioned in modern China, yet it has never been more relevant. While scholars have long pointed to the excesses of Maoism as a parallel for Xi Jinping’s authoritarian leadership, they have also spotted echoes in the chaotic populist forces Donald Trump has conjured up within American democracy.
China's AI Job Mirage

1 month ago | chinamediaproject.org | Alex Colville

With 12 million fresh graduates soon rushing into China’s already competitive job market, help is on the way, according to the People’s Daily. On April 7, the newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the country’s leadership, ran an article listing how AI was turbo-charging supply and demand in the job market, pointing to over 10,000 AI-related jobs on offer at a spring recruitment center in the city of Hangzhou.
DeepSeek: A Tool Tuned For Social Governance – Analysis | Flipboard

2 months ago | flipboard.com | Alex Colville

2 days agoPerplexity’s CEO on fighting Google and the coming AI browser warAravind Srinivas discusses his partnership with Motorola, fighting Google, and why AI assistants are coming for browsers. Aravind Srinivas is battling Google to get his Perplexity AI assistant preinstalled on Android phones.