The vague adjective ‘Asian’ is still deployed by some sections of the media to describe the ethnicity of sexual ‘grooming gangs’, which in towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale and Telford have involved men of predominantly Pakistani Muslim heritage. Now, a week after the horrific stabbing of three young girls in Stockport was the catalyst for nationwide riots, the term is being used to describe gangs of mostly Muslim counter-protesters. 

The BBC and Channel 4 are among those guilty of opting for the fudge ‘Asian’, rather than more accurately describing those involved as ‘Muslim’. Unfortunately, this ambiguous racial descriptor puts many non-Muslim Asians at risk during these increasingly febrile times.

It firstly must be stated in unequivocal terms that these Muslim thugs on patrols to fight with the usually white far-Right thugs do not represent all Muslims or speak for the religion as a whole. But to use the term ‘Asian’ is remarkably imprecise. In an article earlier this week, the BBC reported on clashes breaking out in Bolton between rival groups. It predictably referred to one side as largely ‘Asian men’, while the other side were ‘waving England flags’. Strangely, the article describes these ‘Asian men’ shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’, but it does not require a PhD in theology from Oxford to know that Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Atheist and Agnostic ‘Asians’ don’t use the phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’. In the same way that the BBC wouldn’t describe those responsible for the Holocaust as ‘European’, it should not be something similar with these riots. It has almost zero explanatory power.

Meanwhile, Chief Correspondent at Channel 4 News Alex Thomson published a video on X showing a gang of ‘Asian’ men beating the pulp out of a lone ‘white’ man on the street in Middlesbrough. The disturbing post was later deleted. Indeed, Thomson had been on the receiving end of criticism for using ‘Asian’. Similarly, when Darshna Soni, Communities Editor at Channel 4 News, reported events following trouble at a Birmingham pub on 5 August, she referred to ‘a group of young Asians’ and ‘older guys in the community’ quelling the unrest. But who exactly are the ‘young Asians’ and the ‘community’ Soni speaks of?

Part of the problem is no doubt informed by political correctness, which is motivated by a fear of causing offense. But by attributing thuggery to a whole continent, no one really gets blamed, because it encompasses 4.5 billion people and an area of over 44 million square kilometers.

Not all of the counter-protesters are religious zealots — many of them, like on the anti-immigration side, will be bored young men with nothing better to do and no community bonds to stop them treating their part of the world like a dump. But ‘Asian’ is not the most accurate description. It merely heightens the fear among communities who are themselves extremely fearful of what’s happening in our country right now.

The UK needs to hold the media accountable for failing to accurately describe counter-protesters. Failing to do so could endanger many Asians and may just make the far-Right even more dangerous. That is a fear no one would like to see realized.

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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