How the CCP Tries to Export Censorship and Brainwashing to the Free World via AI

A wall, which originally only imprisoned its own people. Now, Beijing is attempting to quietly transplant this wall into the phone of every person, onto every server, and into every conversation with AI worldwide.

This is not a conspiracy theory. This is a documented reality that is currently happening.

I. From the "Great Firewall" to "Export-Version Censorship"

For years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has constructed a world-unseen system of information control—blocking Google, shielding Wikipedia, and deleting every single word regarding the June Fourth (Tiananmen) incident of 1989, causing the Xinjiang camps, Tibetan oppression, and the persecution of Falun Gong to completely disappear from the internet within China. This system has a vivid nickname: the Great Firewall. Its logic is simple: any truth that threatens the party's legitimacy to rule is erased; any content that aligns with the party's narrative is vigorously promoted.

However, the physical boundaries of the Great Firewall ultimately stop at the national border. People outside of China can still search freely, read freely, and think freely.

Now, the rise of artificial intelligence has given Beijing an unprecedented opportunity: to quietly export this system of censorship and brainwashing, under the guise of "open-source models" and "low-cost AI assistants," to the free world.

II. Evidence is Not Guesswork, but Test Results

When DeepSeek emerged, it shocked the American tech industry. In early 2025, this Chinese AI product briefly surpassed ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app in the Apple App Store. But when users began testing it, they discovered disturbing facts:

When asked what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989, it replied: "Sorry, this is beyond my current processing scope, let's change the topic."

When asked about the situation of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, it recited the CCP official line by rote: Uyghurs "fully enjoy the right to development, freedom of religious belief, and protection of cultural heritage."

When pressed on the Western view of this issue, the AI suggested that users "visit China in person and not be misled by false information."

MRC researchers used hexadecimal encoding to ask DeepSeek about Uyghur human rights—it first recognized the encoding and provided an answer containing content such as "mass surveillance, forced labor, and cultural suppression," but then automatically deleted this response and returned to the preset evasive phrase.

The research organization Promptfoo found that as many as 1,156 prompts involving sensitive CCP information would trigger this refusal mechanism, while other questions involving Taiwan would directly generate pro-Beijing propaganda content.

Even more alarming is that even when DeepSeek is downloaded to a local device and run offline, the same censorship remains. Tests by Enkrypt AI found that even if users managed to bypass trigger-word filtering, 91.2% of DeepSeek's answers regarding sensitive Chinese issues still leaned pro-CCP government.

This indicates that the problem is not a technical flaw in a particular filter, but a fundamental implantation of values in the model's training.

III. Legal Requirements: The Party's Will Written into Training Data

This is not an individual choice by a single company like DeepSeek. This is a legal requirement of the People's Republic of China.

China's core regulatory legislation for generative AI—the "Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services"—explicitly requires AI service providers to adhere to "socialist core values," prohibiting content that could overturn the state power, incite division, or disrupt economic and social order.

At the end of 2025, Beijing went further, releasing a draft regulation stating that any AI system simulating human personality must be consistent with "socialist core values," including principles such as patriotism, social harmony, respect for authority, and collective responsibility. AI-generated content must not undermine national unity.

In other words, any AI operating legally within China must have its training data, alignment goals, and content filtering based on the party's ideology as the yardstick. This is not corporate self-discipline; this is a national decree.

A journalism professor at Fudan University wrote in a journal under the Central Propaganda Department as early as late 2024 that China "needs to think about how to make the globally sweeping generative AI provide an alternative narrative different from 'Western-centrism'."

The intention is now crystal clear.

IV. Not Only Content, but Cognitive Frameworks are Polluted

Some might say: an AI refusing to answer about Tiananmen might just be political sensitivity, not an active attempt to brainwash foreign users.

This view underestimates the severity of the problem.

The research paper "Echoes of Power: Investigating Geopolitical Bias in Large Language Models from the US and China" conducted a systematic comparison between ChatGPT and DeepSeek, finding that on issues involving geopolitics, international relations, human rights, and governance, American models tend to use international law, multilateral institutions, and democratic norms (such as individual rights) as a framework, while Chinese models emphasize national sovereignty, national unity, historical grievances, and geopolitical stability—which are precisely the narrative frameworks Beijing loves most.

This bias is subtle, which is exactly where the danger lies. Users will not see a pop-up prompt saying "You are being indoctrinated with the CCP worldview." They will only feel that what this AI says "also makes sense," and their understanding of the Taiwan issue, the Tibet issue, and the origin of the COVID-19 virus will unconsciously drift toward Beijing's position.

The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service's 2026 International Security Report explicitly pointed out:

DeepSeek "hides key information when discussing issues related to Estonian security and implants Chinese propaganda content in its answers."

The Qwen series of models under Alibaba, downloaded over 9.5 million times between October and November 2025, became the basis for approximately 2,800 derivative models, including a Brazilian legal research platform and a chatbot customized for Ugandan languages.

This means Beijing's ideological framework has been quietly embedded into Brazil's legal system and African language education through the "open-source ecosystem." Those developers may not be aware, and the end users are even less so.

V. Stealing Technology to Strengthen the Censorship Machine

What is even more outrageous is that while Chinese AI companies replicate Western technical capabilities, they strip away the neutral or even critical stances on human rights issues found in Western AI systems, using these capabilities specifically to strengthen the censorship system.

Anthropic released a report in February 2026, pointing out that three Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax—used approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts to conduct over 16 million unauthorized interactions with Claude, with the goal of using "distillation" technology to replicate Claude's capabilities into smaller, cheaper models. Among them, DeepSeek, although having the fewest interactions, used the most complex and sophisticated methods, including using Claude to build the Chinese government's censorship capabilities.

Please stop and read this sentence carefully: DeepSeek used the Claude capabilities stolen from Anthropic to build tools that help the CCP censor dissent.

This is a complete betrayal of technical ethics and an open provocation to the international community.

Facing this threat, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google announced in April 2026 that they would share attack intelligence through the "Frontier Model Forum," an industry body, to jointly respond to the behavior of Chinese AI companies stealing their models—this was the first public coordinated defense action between the three major competitors, marking the official entry of AI competition into the era of national security.

VI. The Free World Needs a More Lucid Recognition

Facing the above evidence, there are still many voices in the free world saying: there is no need to overreact, open-source AI promotes innovation, low-cost models help developing countries, we should not engage in technical nationalism...

These arguments are not entirely without merit, but they ignore a fundamental difference:

Western AI companies—including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, whose products have various controversies and flaws—are not required by their governments to implant specific political party ideologies into their training data and content alignment. They face congressional hearings, public criticism, and independent audits; their political leanings can be questioned, challenged, and held accountable.

Chinese AI companies are different. Their "value alignment" is directly prescribed by the regulations of the Central Propaganda Department and the Cyberspace Administration of China. They cannot not do this; their legitimacy depends on it. When these models go abroad, they carry a worldview that has been vetted by the party and serves the party's power.

The CCP is attempting to use generative AI to provide the global community with an alternative narrative "different from Western-centrism." Translated into plainer language: it wants to use AI to tell a "China story" to the world that has no Tiananmen, no Xinjiang camps, no Taiwanese subjectivity, and no Tibetan suffering.

This is not cultural diversity; this is systemic historical revisionism and the distortion of reality.

VII. Conclusion: That Wall Should Not Go Out

The horror of the Great Firewall is not only that it blocks information, but also that it lets

The people living within it gradually come to believe that the blocked content "never existed" or "was always a lie." After decades of information control, a significant proportion of young Chinese people genuinely do not know what happened in 1989, truly believe that Xinjiang is a "vocational skills education and training center," and genuinely think the Taiwan issue is merely the unreasonable fuss of separatists.

This is one of the most profound forms of violence the CCP inflicts on its own people: not with guns, but with the deprivation of cognition.

Now, Beijing hopes to export this system. Not through propaganda mouthpieces – which have long been recognized and guarded against by the free world – but through AI assistants used daily by hundreds of millions, through foundational weights embedded in Brazilian legal databases and Ugandan language models, through technological tools that appear "neutral and objective" yet are built with the Party's worldview.

The free world must recognize the nature of this threat: this is not a technological competition, it is a cognitive war.

We can welcome technological innovation and discuss open cooperation, but there is one bottom line that must not be blurred: any AI system that builds political censorship and ideological indoctrination into its core training level should not be considered a neutral technological tool and should not be integrated into our education, legal, medical, and information systems without scrutiny.

That Great Firewall has already caused immeasurable cognitive damage to the Chinese people.

It should not be allowed to go global.

References: Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service 2026 International Security Report, Research commissioned by the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency, China Media Project, Anthropic's February 2026 Distillation Attack Report, U.S. House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, The Dispatch Fact Check, Voice of America, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), etc.