Austin, Texas.

Two weeks ago, a group of Democratic lawmakers fled Texas in an act of obvious political kabuki theatre. Ostensibly, they were preventing a redistricting vote that would grant Donald Trump an additional five seats in next year’s midterms. But it was always obvious they would return and lose the vote, and next week they will do just that.

With their foreordained surrender looming, on Saturday “Fight the Trump Takeover” rallies were held in 34 states to protest Republican gerrymandering. The main protest took place in front of the Austin Capitol, yet it was clear when I arrived that, for all the media coverage, few people were willing to sacrifice a Saturday morning to oppose the return of authoritarianism to America.

A moderately-sized group of protestors, overwhelmingly white and many of them elderly, were clustered around a stage in front of the Capitol steps as “My Humps” by the Black Eyed Peas played on the PA. They held placards that said things like “GOP: Guarding Old Pedophiles”, “Fuck ICE”, “Gutless Orange Zealot Prick”, “86 47”, “Fuck Trump” and (my favourite) “Deport Melania”. The Boomerdammerung energy was strong, but they were not taking things lying down.

The MC of the event, Stephanie Gomez, led the crowd in a chant of “This is what Democracy looks like.” She heads up an organisation called Move Texas which specialises in recruiting 18- to 24-year-olds, although evidently she had forgotten to let her young friends know about this particular protest.

Gomez introduced Dr Michael Waters, who kicked off proceedings with a fiery social justice sermon. We were going backwards, he said, for apartheid was coming to Texas and we had to save ourselves. Subsequent speakers, most of whom described themselves as “organisers”, were less overtly apocalyptic but also painted a bleak picture of racial gerrymandering and rising authoritarianism.

Things brightened a little when Austin congressman Lloyd Doggett said how nice it was to see so many young people in the crowd — though, of course, most people look young when you’re almost 80. But then he referenced the Gestapo, and talked about people being disappeared off the street, and other stuff he didn’t really believe. A more sincere version of Doggett did emerge when he asked the crowd to think about what to do after the booing: they should show up and vote even in the redistricted neighbourhoods — and win.

We were about an hour into the rally before anyone mentioned the Texas Democrats who had fled. It was one of the “organisers”, a guy from the state workers union. We should be grateful, he said, because they had raised awareness of what was happening in the state. True, but they had also raised awareness of Democratic hypocrisy by skedaddling to Illinois, one of the most egregiously gerrymandered states in the union.

A drag queen, Bridget Bandit, came on and mimed to the Dolly Parton song “Go to Hell”. By this point, some younger people had joined the crowd. The speakers were getting older, however, as 95-year-old Dolores Huerta talked about her days as a labour activist, while informing the young folks that she had 11 kids and thought abortion was cool. Gomez claimed that 5,000 people had shown up, which seemed dubious considering that the pathway to the Capitol was only about one-third-occupied. Perhaps that many people had crossed the grounds, but that would have included the woman with the sign inscribed “Let’s go to heaven believing in Jesus.”

After two hours, it was time for the grand finale. Instead of the more fiery Rep. Jasmine Crockett, we got Beto O’Rourke, the greatest loser in the history of Texas politics. He made the second reference of the day to the Texas Democrats who had run away, telling us that we should thank them, and also called for a Palestinian state. Beto is only apparently real: in truth, he is an LLM trained on progressive talking points.

And then it was over. The elderly protestors packed up their sweary signs and shuffled peacefully towards their cars, afternoon pickleball, time with the grandkids, whatever. They will lose this battle. But, unlike their representatives, at least they showed up.

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Daniel Kalder is an author based in Texas. Previously, he spent ten years living in the former Soviet bloc. His latest book, Dictator Literature, is published by Oneworld. He also writes on Substack: Thus Spake Daniel Kalder.

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China is trying to catch up with America on artificial intelligence. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Zhipu AI — one of China’s six “AI tiger” LLMs — has released a new model that can rival leading US systems, including Anthropic’s Mythos, in cybersecurity tasks such as pinpointing security bugs. While this marks a milestone in China’s drive to catch up with Western AI capabilities, strong performance on a single benchmark does not mean it has taken the lead. Chinese models still lag behind their Western counterparts in broader capabilities, such as autonomous operation. Skepticism is therefore warranted before resorting to hysterical conclusions, but complacency about the geopolitical implications of China’s AI advances would be an even greater mistake.

On the infrastructure side, Chinese AI is still constrained by access to advanced chips, with American labs way ahead in computing capacity as well as investment. Analysis from earlier this year suggests that Chinese models are likely to be at least a few months behind those in the US. But they are still continuing to make progress, or that the geopolitical importance of AI will be decided only by whose LLM has ventured deeper into the technological frontier. The practical applications of AI, countries’ to capture foreign markets, and the application of AI into the real economy will matter just as much.

Here, China may hold an advantage. As with its dominance across many critical supply chains, Beijing may not need to produce the most advanced AI systems — only those that are affordable and widely deployable. In doing so, it could consolidate global influence by supplying functional, low-cost AI at scale.

Beijing seems to be pursuing exactly that path, developing an AI “open-source” strategy that offers affordable, widely available AI models for companies and individuals to use and modify as they wish. The production of the DeepSeek AI model, which matched the performance of Silicon Valley tools such as ChatGPT at a fraction of the cost for users, created goodwill among Chinese models with developers.

The four most popular models on OpenRouter, an AI hardware platform for developers, are now all Chinese. The goal for China is not only to win the frontier-model race, but to make its systems the default layer of AI adoption across industries and global markets. For most economies, the choice is increasingly between an affordable tool they can deploy now and a more robust one that may be out of reach.

And while the countries adopting Chinese models may be exposed to political pressure and cyber threats from Beijing, safer and more capable alternatives matter little if they are unaffordable. American AI companies are already under pressure to monetize products whose operating costs are rising. If Chinese open-source models become the cheap default for startups, universities, governments and businesses across the developing world, then America’s AI lead will be eroded from below.

Perhaps more concerning for America in the long run is how AI can give Chinese manufacturing even more strength, through the ongoing integration of AI as a general-purpose technology. China’s new Five-Year Plan mentioned AI more than 50 times and includes an “AI+” action plan aimed at spreading AI across the economy.

Beijing has been pioneering automation of its critical infrastructure for years, with promising recent results in increasing warplane production capacity. In that regard, China’s open-model strategy and manufacturing dominance will reinforce each other. Cheap, adaptable models accelerate deployment across the real economy while those deployments generate real-world data and use cases that can feed back into further model improvement.

The United States should not dismiss the importance of its lead in the AI race. That lead worries Beijing, not least because a more automated Chinese economy would also become more vulnerable to AI-generated cyber threats. But nor should Washington assume that China cannot catch up with American capabilities over time.

This AI competition represents part of a broader struggle over tech supply chains and geopolitical influence. Decisions over whether to adopt US or Chinese models could produce a more fragmented global reality, with different regions relying on different cloud providers, chips and security structures. The result will likely be a global economy which is divided into competing spheres, rather than one which produces a single winner.

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Miquel Vila is a political and geopolitical risk consultant focusing on industrial strategy, critical infrastructure and global supply chains.

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