How Hangzhou Spawned Deepseek and Unitree

Zilan Qian is a fellow at the Oxford China Policy Lab and an MSc student at the Oxford Internet Institute. What conditions made DeepSeek possible? Despite widespread debate, much of this discussion remains concentrated at the macro-level of nation-states or the micro-level of tech companies. In prevailing narratives, DeepSeek is either seen as a symbol of China’s rising technological prowess or a lone disruptor challenging a top-down innovation system. Hangzhou 杭州, the city where DeepSeek is based, rarely takes center stage. A closer examination of Hangzhou’s emerging tech ecosystem reveals that DeepSeek did not appear by chance. Hangzhou is the home of six other emerging tech companies — nicknamed Hangzhou’s “six little dragons (六小龙)”: Unitree (宇树科技) and Deep Robotics (云深处科技), two of China’s leading robotics companies; Game Science (游戏科学), which produced China’s first AAA game Black Myth: Wukong; BrianCo (强脑科技), a brain-machine interface innovator; and Manycore Tech (群核科技), the world’

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