The murder of notorious Quran burner Salwan Momika this week has shaken Sweden to its core. But this incident only tells part of the story of the brutal violence which has become increasingly commonplace in the Scandinavian country.

Just a day before the shooting of Momika, a relative of internationally wanted drug dealer Rawa Majid — also known as “The Kurdish Fox” — was killed in a suburb just outside Stockholm. This swiftly followed a suspected gang murder in the small university town of Lund, where a career criminal was gunned down by a 17-year-old at a train station. Yet the statistic which most shockingly lays bare the extent of Sweden’s descent into criminality is that there were 30 bombings across the country in January alone — more than one a day.

These would be staggering numbers for any Western democracy, and Swedish politicians are now likening the situation to “civil war”, albeit a lopsided war between gangs and the authorities which has spread nationally. Intelligence services estimated last year that there are around 62,000 people in Sweden (the total population is just over 10.5 million) who are active in or have direct connections to gangs, while criminal clans with roots in Turkey, Syria and Somalia now operate within the country’s borders. Former deputy police commissioner Mats Löfving has claimed that many of these people come to Sweden with the sole intention of taking part in organized crime.

Löfving’s candor sticks out in a debate characterised by trepidation around fanning the flames of xenophobia, imagined or real. At the heart of the matter lies the fact that a high proportion of criminals — especially the so-called ”child soldiers”, adolescent hitmen as young as 11 recruited by gangs — are the children of immigrants.

It would seem, therefore, that integration in Sweden has actually taken a significant step backwards. While the Left searches for answers in unemployment numbers and social inequality statistics, Right-wingers frequently insist that it is a more straightforward cultural issue. In this telling, Sweden has admitted too many immigrants from cultures which hold drastically different views on crime, gender equality and conflict management. The result is a volatile mix of youth crime, ethnic disputes, religious extremism and broader cultural decay. This has become an overwhelming, near insoluble problem for the Swedish government.

To stop the daily bombings and shootings, the Social Democratic opposition has gone so far as to propose police visitation zones across all of southern Stockholm, an initiative it opposed just over a year ago when put forward by the conservative government. Confidence in the authorities has not been helped by national police chief Petra Lundh’s admission that she doesn’t work past five o’clock on weekdays and very rarely works at the weekend.

Even Swedes living in affluent neighborhoods are scared as bombs go off without warning across the country, killing innocent victims as well as intended targets. A citizen being in “the wrong place at the wrong time” has become a sardonic mantra among Swedish journalists and police representatives.

The government tightened citizenship rules last month but closing the borders remains politically contentious, despite Sweden’s governing coalition consisting of three right-of-center parties. As a result, ghettos outside cities such as Stockholm, Göteborg, Malmö, Örebro and Linköping are filling up with people who never learn Swedish and live on welfare grants, in some cases, for the rest of their lives. As of December 2022, at least 100,000 of those were ”undocumented”.

This reality, not to mention the fact that the country is host to around 800,000 illiterates thanks to mass immigration, sits in stark contrast to the public image Sweden likes to project of a highly-educated modern democracy which exports engineers and medical researchers to the rest of the world. Politicians can express their bafflement, but nothing will change until they acknowledge how their policies have created this disturbing new criminal landscape. Drastic action is now needed on mass immigration and the gang violence that inevitably comes with it. Otherwise, Sweden will continue on its current path towards perpetual chaos.

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Jens Ganman is a Swedish freelance writer and the author of 13 books.

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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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