Radioflash! Episode 18: Chinese Sensing Advances

China’s advancement in sensing technology is moving at pace. A new report examines in detail where the country might be catching up with the United States.On 20th January, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) DeepSeek artificial intelligence chatbot was released, based on the DeepSeek-R1 Artificial Intelligence (AI) model. The Hangzhou DeepSeek AI company, which developed the model, has claimed its chatbot outperforms US rivals like OpenAI. It also claimed that DeepSeek’s large language model cost $5.6 million to train. This is notably less than that spent on comparable US offerings.Whatever the long-term effect of DeepSeek, the news thrust Chinese technological innovation into sharp relief. Advances such as these could have major strategic ramifications for accepted US technological pre-eminence. Not least of which in the sensing domain, which a report entitled China’s Remote Sensing, published in December 2024 by OTH Intelligence, discusses in detail.In this Radioflash! episode we talk to one of the report’s authors Tate Nurkin, a previous Radioflash! guest, about Chinese advances in sensing technologies across the board: How will the Chinese government and armed forces collect, process, store and use all this sensor data? What will be the impact of the dual use sensing technology being developed by the PRC? What effect is corruption having on China’s ability to secure the sensing capabilities the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) needs? Likewise, what impact will the PLA’s recent reorganisation of the Strategic Support Force into the Information Support Force have on PLA sensing capabilities writ large? All these topics, and more, come under discussion in this latest episode.