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China has reaffirmed its commitment to the One-China principle, stating that Taiwan is not a sovereign nation but an inseparable part of Chinese territory.
Counselor at the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Nigeria, Dong Hairong, made this known on Thursday at a Media Salon held in Abuja by the Centre for China Studies and the Centre for Contemporary China-Africa Research.
Hairong reiterated that recent developments involving Taiwan showed the need for greater international understanding of the Taiwan question and China’s territorial position.
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She cited the recent visit of Taiwan regional leader, Lai Ching-te, to Eswatini, as well as a reported engagement between some Nigerian journalists and Taiwanese officials, as examples of what she described as attempts to advance separatist narratives.
“Taiwan has been an inalienable part of Chinese territory since ancient times,”
“Taiwan has never been a country, was never one and will never be,” Dong said..
On his part, Convener of The Alternative Movement, Otunba Segun Showunmi, stated that Nigeria should deepen strategic cooperation with China, noting that Beijing had emerged as a major global economic and technological power.
Showunmi said Nigeria stood to gain more from stronger ties with China than from separate engagements with Taiwan.
“In another 100 years, what Nigeria will gain from a firm relationship with China, Taiwan will not be able to provide in 1,000 years,” he said.
Also speaking, Provost of the Anti-Corruption Academy of Nigeria and Director of the Centre for China-Africa Research, Prof. Ghali Ibrahim, said the One-China principle had gained broad global recognition because Taiwan lacked the legal status of a sovereign state.
“Taiwan is not an independent sovereign entity but rather a territory that is part of China,” he said.
The White House has declared that Chinese entities are running coordinated, industrial-scale campaigns to steal American artificial intelligence technology — and that it intends to fight back by working more closely with US companies to identify, expose and ultimately hold accountable the foreign actors exploiting their systems.
The warning came in an internal memo from Michael Kratsios, Director of Science and Technology Policy, who wrote that the administration had obtained new information confirming that “foreign entities, principally based in China” were systematically copying American AI advances through a process called distillation. The technique involves operating thousands of individual accounts on AI platforms — appearing to function as ordinary users — while coordinating attempts to extract proprietary information about how the underlying models work, then applying that extracted knowledge to build and train competing systems.
“The aim,” Kratsios wrote, was to “systematically undermine American research and development and access proprietary information.” He outlined four responses the White House would pursue: sharing more intelligence with US AI companies about the actors and tactics involved; better coordinating with those companies to counter the attacks; developing best practices for identifying, mitigating and remediating distillation campaigns; and exploring how the administration can hold foreign actors accountable.
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The memo named no specific entities and detailed no concrete enforcement actions. The White House declined to comment beyond its contents.
China’s embassy in Washington pushed back with vigour. A representative called the memo an example of “unjustified suppression of Chinese companies by the US” and rejected the framing of theft entirely. “China is not only the world’s factory but is also becoming the world’s innovation lab,” the representative said. “China’s development is the result of its own dedication and effort as well as international cooperation that delivers mutual benefits.”
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The companies that have actually experienced distillation activity have been less diplomatic in their descriptions of it. Anthropic earlier this year said it had identified distillation attacks from three Chinese AI laboratories — DeepSeek, Moonshot and MiniMax — finding all three had been working to copy Anthropic models through coordinated exploitation campaigns. OpenAI has made similar accusations against DeepSeek specifically. None of the three Chinese laboratories responded to requests for comment.
DeepSeek is the most prominent name on that list. The Hangzhou-based startup upended the global AI industry when it released its R1 reasoning model last year, claiming it had been developed for a few million dollars — a fraction of the hundreds of billions that American competitors like OpenAI, Google and Microsoft have been spending. The announcement triggered a sharp sell-off in AI-related stocks as investors recalculated whether the massive capital expenditures of US firms were as defensible as assumed. DeepSeek subsequently became one of the world’s most widely used AI models before suffering a major outage last month. The company is expected to release a new version imminently.
The distillation accusation, if accurate, would reframe DeepSeek’s cost advantage in a way that carries significant implications for how the global AI race is understood. The American narrative has been that Chinese labs are building capable models on the cheap because they are exploiting research that US companies paid for — not because they have discovered more efficient methods independently. The Chinese counter-narrative is that the efficiency gains reflect genuine engineering innovation and that accusations of theft are a political instrument designed to suppress competition.
