A heinous crime committed in Sweden has once again made international news. On Tuesday, three people were murdered in central Uppsala while inside a barbershop. A 16-year-old suspect has since been detained. In February, 10 people were shot dead at a school campus in the city of Örebro.

In a way, both of these incidents have contributed to an image of Sweden as a fundamentally broken society, one that is overwhelmed and increasingly incapable of dealing with the effects of immigration and social anomie. There is more than a grain of truth in this telling, but the reality is far more muddled than most people appreciate. There are real and serious problems, of course, but these problems have a nasty habit of not lining up with many of the convenient narratives which are popular on both the Left and the Right.

For a start, it’s useful to point out that the crude homicide rate in Sweden sits around 1.1 homicides per 100.000 people. This isn’t particularly outstanding for a wealthy Northern European country, but it is still a very low murder rate. The number is deceptive, however. The spectacular gun violence for which Sweden has become infamous is not evenly distributed across the population. Almost invariably, both the perpetrators and the victims of such violence are immigrants, and usually second-generation immigrants at that.

One can contrast this state of affairs with Sweden’s neighbour, Finland. Finland has a higher homicide rate than Sweden in crude terms, yet lacks the latter country’s problems with immigrant gang violence. Ironically, this produces a situation where many Swedes and Finns alike feel that Finland is safer and more stable, even though the actual risk of dying violently is higher.

This is the true problem festering in Sweden today. Far from being a society on the verge of turning into something out of a Mad Max film, Sweden is home to two parallel universes which only rarely intersect.

The problem isn’t that Sweden is becoming more dangerous for Swedes — the empirical numbers clearly do not bear this theory out. Instead, and perhaps more critically, Sweden is becoming increasingly uncertain and uncomfortable. The issue of gang violence doesn’t loom so large because it’s a return to an older, more brutish chapter of history; in fact, the opposite is closer to the truth. Like the rapid ageing of societies such as South Korea or Japan, the real source of angst here is the feeling of being cut adrift without a map for the future.

This sense of anomie is possibly even more acute within immigrant suburbs themselves. Swedish gun violence is usually perpetrated by second-generation immigrants whose parents are as powerless to transmit their own culture to their children as Swedish society seems to be when it comes to assimilating them into the majority culture.

Deindustrialisation, a loss of collective meaning, and rapidly collapsing birth rates are widespread problems across the West; Sweden is far from unique in this regard. But in South Korea or Japan or Singapore, the ability to focus those worries around one group or one issue is more limited. Though nobody here would ever admit it, in a way many Swedes are secretly grateful for this kind of dramatic and macabre gangland violence. As terrible and shocking as the situation is, one is left wondering: if it weren’t actually there, would we then have to invent it?

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Malcom Kyeyune is a freelance writer living in Uppsala, Sweden

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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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