The obscure Hangzhou hedge fund that coded a ChatGPT competitor as a side project it claims cost just $6m emerges from a concerted effort to invest in future generations of technology.

This is not an accident. This is policy.

The raw materials of artificial intelligence (AI) are microchips, science PhDs and data. On the latter two, China might be ahead already.

Really speaking, Western World had been caught napping through its lethargy while enjoying much higher standards of living!

Here in U.K., the Welfare State including the NHS and Social Services made some people opting not to work, claiming all manner of benefits! It is a common sight to see able bodied men and women selling The Big Issue magazine in street corners!

There are on average more than 6,000 PhDs in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) coming out of Chinese universities every month. In the US it is more like 2,000-3,000, in the UK it is 1,500.

In terms of patents generally, more are being filed in China than in the rest of the world put together. In 2023 China filed 1.7 million patents, against 600,000 in the US. Two decades earlier China had a third of the patents filed by the US, a quarter of Japan’s and was well behind South Korea and Europe!

While there are some questions about the quality, on some measures China now exceeds the US on what is known as “citation-weighted” patents too, which adjusts for how often new scientific papers are referred to.

Chinese lithium-ion electric batteries now cost per kWh about a seventh of what they cost a decade ago. DeepSeek is doing in AI exactly what China has done elsewhere.

While the impact of this was most visible in electric vehicles (EVs), where China is now the world’s biggest exporter, having cornered the supply chains and the science for battery technology, it stretches well beyond. BYD Auto Co., Ltd. and brand of BYD (Beyond Your Dreams, publicly listed Chinese multinational Manufacturing Company. It manufactures passenger Battery Energy Electric Vehicles (BEEVs) and Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PHEVs), in China. It also produces electric buses and trucks. The company sells its vehicles under the main BYD brand and high-end vehicles under its Denza, Yangwang and Fangchengbao brands.

Even in auto the Chinese manufacturers are now pushing the concept of “electric intelligent vehicles”, in which conventional carmakers cannot compete, especially on software development.

China’s consumer electronics companies are shifting into car manufacturing, with “dark factories” operated 24/7 by armies of AI-powered robots, now also increasingly made in China.

This innovation is partly of necessity. China does not have indigenous fossil fuels, and is electrifying at an astonishing rate, and is referred to by some researchers as an “electro state”. It now files three-quarters of all clean tech patents, versus a twentieth at the start of the century.

Last year the US National Science Board asserted China’s objective of being the world’s leading science and engineering nation was on the verge of being achieved. “We already see this in artificial intelligence, where China out publishes us, has more patents, and produces more students than the United States,” they wrote.

Delegates who accompanied the UK Chancellor Rachel Reeves to China earlier this month marvelled at how the Beijing air had been cleaned up, and indigenous electric cars were everywhere. Another UK CEO told the media of a visit to Huawei’s Oxbridge-style campus complete with spires and bridges, and its own Tube line, purely for its scientists.

Clearly, however, there are concerns about censorship, democracy and security. One of the drivers of the Chinese AI industry has been access to extraordinary amounts of data, which is more difficult to get hold of in the West.

If the US Congress was sufficiently concerned about TikTok to ban it, then surely a table-topping AI program could be highly problematic. President Trump’s argument recently was that DeepSeek’s innovation was “positive” and “a wake-up call”. China has not been prominent as the first target of Trump tariffs.

There is still an obvious balancing act for the UK government here. But this sort of innovation and its impact on the world was exactly why the chancellor visited Beijing a fortnight ago.

She said at the time she wanted a long-term relationship with China that is “squarely in our national interest” with the visit part of a “commitment to explore deeper economic co-operation” between Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and President Xi.

Other European nations such as Spain have encouraged China not just to set up factories but to transfer its advanced battery technology, for example, into Europe.

The West wants China to make its T-shirts, its tables, its TVs and EVs. But could that really now stretch into DeepSeek data-hungry AI models too? It is a deep tremor, not just for tech, but for economics and geopolitics as well. Do not be fooled into thinking that China is a benevolent country when it offers “help” with massive projects in third world countries as they all come with strings attached and possibly expansionist agendas!

Sunil Dharmabandhu

Wales, UK

by Laleen Jayamanne and Namika Raby

Gananath Obeysekere: In search of Buddhist conscience
(Baudha Hurdasakshiya Soya)

(Part II of this article appeared in The Island on Monday – 03)

Tissa Ranasinghe’s and Gananath’s Kannagi

Gananath’s Pattini book has a mysterious blue-black cover with an icon of Kannagi in Bronze sculpted by Lanka’s foremost Modernist sculptor Tissa Ranasinghe, commissioned by Gananath. What Appadurai termed Lanka’s links with ‘Indic culture’ is encapsulated in this image of the heroic figure Kannagi from the Tamil epic, striking a gesture of mourning for her husband Kovalan, unjustly killed by the king of Madurai. She kneels with her arms held raised around her head in the familiar triangular formation suggestive of the aniconic representation of the Yoni (an emblematic civilisational gesture of great iconic strength and power, in the Bronze lineage of India, which stretches back to the little bronze figurine of The Dancing Girl of Monhenjodaro itself), even as she laments the injustice. And those of us who know the legend also see that her left breast is missing. Kannagi, it is told, tore her breast and hurled it at the city of Madurai, setting it on fire with her righteous anger! Together, Gananath and Tissa have presented Kannagi in a most generative posture and gesture for the cover of the book on the Sinhala Pattini cult, the only Mother goddess of the Sinhala folk, borrowed from the Tamil Epic, to assuage and heal Sinhala male sexual anxieties and group trauma. This marvelous collaboration between Lanka’s celebrated Modernist Sculptor and Anthropologist was a multivalent, therapeutic intervention into Lanka’s cyclical interethnic violence. The book was published in 1984, one year after the state sponsored pogram against Tamils in July ‘83. Tissa’s modernist Kannagi demonstrates how an archaic ‘Maternal Archetype’ can be creatively mobilised by an artist, to express contemporary predicaments without diluting her orginal power and affective vitality magnified by the use of bronze, a resonant civilisational material.

Pattini is the Sinhala Buddhist incarnation of the Tamil heroic Kannagi and as far as I can tell she appears not to have the iconographic attributes of heroic rage and righteous anger which Kannagi embodies in the Tamil Epic. Kannagi is the step mother of Manimekalai who became a Buddhist nun, according to legend. Is it the case that Pattini is without progeny and so, as a Mother Goddess, rather like the West Asian mother Goddesses who were also virgins? As a girl, my mother and I were devoted to rituals of Mother Mary (mother of Jesus), also known as the Virgin-Mary from, let’s not forget, West Asia (in historic Palestine).

Professor Sunil Ariyaratne’s 2016 film Pattini, warrants a passing comment or two in this context as an example of the institutional consolidation of Neo-Liberal capitalist extraction and commodification of the residual vitality and power of the perennial syncretic Folk traditions of Lanka. It is a neo-traditionalist extravaganza in the genre of nostalgic revival of ‘the Sinhala-Buddhist Folk Heritage of Lanka’ which flourished recently with much fanfare and state patronage as a ‘Rajapaksha genre’. The film deals with the Kannagi legend just so as to reduce it to reinforcing the Sinhala-Buddhist ideology of purity and virginity for women through the exemplary tale of ‘the pure wife’ Kannagi and her step-daughter Manimekala, who becomes a Tamil Buddhist. Her dearest wish is to be reborn as a male so that she can indeed aspire to become a Buddha. The emphasis is on the preservation of virginity (Pathiwatha), and the enthroning of male sexuality as the route to attaining Buddhahood. The mythic epic figure of Kannagi who in her rage enacts heroic justice in the Tamil epic is converted into a parabolic emblem of virginal purity.

A Humanist Education

Gananath’s education is a strand very comprehensively covered in the film, a source of his immense openness to the world of ideas and refusal to accept them on authority without critical evaluation. The film opens at Gananath’s home in Kandy which he shares with Professor Ranjini Obeysekere who appears with her vibrant intellect and grace and ends there too. The couple are shown warmly welcoming the film crew to their house as they have done over their long engagement with numerous students, as they did with me both in Kandy and the US when I was tangled up and blue. It is worth remembering here that Ranjini is the Editor in Chief of the magnificent multi-volume translation project of the Jataka Tales into English, published just last year. It is only now that I can see how deeply Ranjini and Gananath’s scholarship is in conversation with each other.

The account of Ranjini and Gananath’s meeting at Peradeniya University while studying English Literature with Professor E.F.C. Ludowyk is one of the highlights of the film for me. Ranjini acted in the plays directed by Ludowyck and they studied English Literature at honours level together. Interestingly, though Gananath followed the Dram Soc activities on campus, he didn’t participate in any of them, his interest being elsewhere. He says, whenever he could he got onto a bus or train and travelled to distant villages to talk to villagers and monks and tape their songs (kavi). Gananath says that Ludowyck was the best teacher he has ever met and that he was responsible for directing him at every key juncture of his undergraduate life and soon after when making the unusual choice of going to a US graduate school, refusing a scholarship to Cambridge because of colonial history. Gananath’s brilliant textual analysis and exegesis of texts in Sinhala of myths and legends, especially the complex corpus of the Gajabahu legend, owes a great deal to the textual training he received from Ludowyck in ‘Practical Criticism’. We are all beneficiaries of this tradition of Literary Criticism which was part of the training we received in English Lit in old Ceylon and now continued by scholars such as Professor of English, Sumathy Sivamohan and others. Ranjini tells us that it was Ludowyck who collected Rs 10,000 from ten of his friends and handed it to Gananath to go travel the country and do what he wished soon after he graduated with English Honours. All he was asked to do was to write and thank his benefactors. So, it’s this tradition of mentorship and duty of care that Gananath and Ranjini have practiced with their own students during their long working life at American Universities.

A Counter Archive of a People’s Literature, Painting and Ritual

Though I was familiar with some of Gananath’s writing and studied a couple for the film I made, there is a major topic of his research which I didn’t know anything about and as such this film has provided an important learning experience for me. In drawing from the local non-canonical texts preserved in Temples, libraries and archives, which are written, in Sinhala by the folk and as such are anonymous, not by scholar monks in Pali, the language of high learning, Gananath has been able to piece together stories, legends of migrations from India, Kerala and Tamil Nadu and the ways in which some of these waves of migrants have been incorporated into the folk Buddhist body politic and culture. The gist of which is the seemingly heretical idea (an affront to Sinhala exceptionalism and their sense of manifest destiny as ‘pure Ariya’ Sinhala-Buddhists claiming to be the only real Lankans), that at one time, all people who call themselves Sinhala in Lanka did come from India and were indigenised through various practices and this happened in waves of migration over long periods of time. This section draws from the folk archive of poetry, ritual and Temple murals and legends such as the complex Gajabahu Myth, that bear witness to these processes of migration and acculturation, to make the case for the existence of robust muti-ethnic, diverse communities dotting the island. The legendary folk tales and rituals were, he says, imaginative, fictionalised, poetic expressions of folk memory of these migratory events, not ‘false’ accounts.

Here I want to cite a longish relevant passage from Professor Patrick Olivelle’s highly acclaimed book, Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King. Ramchandra Guha, the editor of the series called ‘Indian Lives‘ of which this is the first, says of the Lankan Olivelle that, ‘he is one of the greatest living scholars of Ancient India’. Here’s Olivelle’s argument, on the familiar opposition between History and Legend, which supports Gananath’s theoretical move with practical consequences for how we understand ourselves as Lankans.

“In a seminal remark, the historian Robert Lingat notes: ‘There are two Ashokas—the historical Ashoka whom we know through his inscriptions, and the legendary Ashoka, who is known to us through texts of diverse origin, Pali, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan. Although essentially correct, there are two problems with Lingat’s assessment.

First it is simplistic to contrast the ‘historical with the legendary’. The portrait of Ashoka I have constructed in this book is based on Ashokan inscriptions and artefacts, yet it contains a heavy dose of interpretation, translation, imagination, narrative, perhaps bias… The ‘legendery’ is not simply false and to be dismissed; it is the reimagination of the past to serve present needs, something inherently human. These narratives were meaningful and important to the persons and communities that constructed them. Their purpose was not to do history in the modern sense of the term, but to do something much more significant to them in their own time.

….There are actually not two but several Ashokas, including modern ones”.

Following this argument, we Lankans who try to practice ‘Loving-Kindness’ must be thankful that Gananath has highlighted for us at least two Dutthagaminies, in his timely essay, Dutthagamini and the Buddhist Conscience, written in the wake of the carnage of the ‘July ‘83’ state sponsored pogrom against the Tamil people of Lanka. There is the familiar Dutthagamini, taught to us in school, as a Sinhala-Buddhist, Tamil-hating ethno-nationalist, constructed from the Mahavamsa narrative taken as incontrovertible historical fact. On the other hand, Gananath presents evidence, from the Dambulla temple paintings, for a humanist Dutthagamini, who like Ashoka himself, was contrite about the mass slaughter he conducted and his killing of Elara the Tamil king.

The film shows us how Gananath makes a radical scholarly move in the late stages of his life by researching the indigenous folk of Lanka, the Veddhas. He argues against the deep-seated idea, promulgated by the ethno-nationalist Sinhala-Buddhist ideologues, that there is an ancient historical enmity between the Sinhala and Tamil folk of Lanka going back to the days of the kings, prior to colonialism. Gananath analyses the myth of origin of the Sinhala folk as represented in temple murals that show Vijaya’s arrival in Lanka from India and his marriage with the indigenous woman Kuveni. The Veddhas are the descendants, he says, of Kuveni and her children by Vijaya and are the ‘other’ or outsider, so to speak, to the Sinhala.

Through his ethnographic work on the powerful Vadi procession (perahera) in Mahiyanganaya, Gananath is able to show the ritual means through which they are incorporated into the Sinhala community. The ethnographic film, demonstrating this robust festive ritual event of staging cultural difference and incorporation, supports Gananath’s argument that the Veddas have been the true ‘outsiders’ of the Buddhist polity (in dress, culinary habits, religion), and despite that, the Buddhist culture had ritual mechanisms of incorporation of the outsider, without resorting to slaughter, while also acknowledging and respecting the awesome power of the Veddas. This section should be shown to school kids, I think, because of its liveliness and pedagogic value. Gananath acknowledges the fine scholarship of Paul E. Peiris on the Veddas and shows the colonial hostility and violence towards these indigenous folk of Lanka. Gananath’s ‘Cook Book’, also relevant to Australia’s colonial history, would have provided a global perspective on colonisation of indigenous peoples and the violent means used in casting them as ‘uncivilised primitives’, which in turn would have prepared him well to write the book on, the Veddas, Creation of the Hunter, in 2022.

What to Do, Napuru Kaleta? (In Wicked Times)

It seems to me that young scholars and artists might be able to generate a new thought or two by reading Gananath’s essays and books in relation to Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalaese Art (Campden: Gloucestershire, 1908) and Olivelle’s book on Ashoka. In this way, the monodisciplinary compartmentalisation of knowledge, ideas, can be disturbed so as to gain aesthetic nourishment to create, with what’s left, after the ravages of Neoliberal cultural nationalism’s cognitive extraction of our brains. All three distinguished, visionary Lankan scholars were writing about times when material culture and the ‘Intangible Heritage’ (A UNESCO Platform for their preservation) of Lanka and India were/are being destroyed from within, extinguished.

Some ‘transversal’ or lateral ways of understanding and connecting material practices/stuff and immaterial ideas are called for now, I believe, and these three Lankan scholars have shown us many ways in which this can be done. Let me clinch my argument by citing the full title of Coomaraswamy’s indispensable book which took 60 years to be translated into Sinhala. Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa (who also taught ‘mati-weda’) gave me this information for which I am most thankful. I read it in English as an undergraduate, quite by chance. Here’s the extended title:

“Being a Monograph on Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the 18^th Century with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsman.”

Gananath might well have known through Ludowyk that the first edition of this book was hand printed in England by Coomaraswamy himself over a period of 15 months on the same printing press (which he purchased), as the one in which the first edition of the complete works of the Mediaeval English poet Chaucer was printed by William Morris, one of leaders of the ‘Arts and Craft Movement’. There is a wonderful story I heard from a native informant of California, of Gananath’s freshman lecture at the University of California in San Diego, on Pilgrimages. On hearing Gananath recite an entire section from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales ‘by heart,’ the students gave him a standing ovation!

Felix Guattari’s Three Ecologies, (namely Social Ecology, Mental Ecology, Environmental Ecology), is another a book worth reading (now freely downloadable), alongside the others as he was a radical psychotherapist trained in psychoanalysis by Lacan, and a Left Activist in France who also collaborated with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Anti–Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1968), which was a best seller. He also worked at a humane, innovative mental health institution which was part of the radical anti-psychiatry movement of the 60s and was a wild thinker who reminds me of Gananath and also had the requisite discipline, like him, to write books that crossed generations. He died all too soon, but Gananath will turn 95 on the second of February 2025.

Finally, my gratitude to the producers of this film, the Kathika Collective whose independent spirit, deep research, dedication, and not least, the love of cinema has led to the production of this film over a long period of time, which included the hiatus of the COVID pandemic. While Dimuthu is credited as researcher, script writer and director and Chathura Madhusanka with editing and camera, a great many well wishes (acknowledged in the credits), contributed freely to this film which has not received any external funding. The spirit of education that drove this film is a truly beautiful tribute to Gananath and Ranjini Obeysekere, our indispensable mentors, both.

Yahonis Pattini Kapumahattya’s haunting voice emanating from a deep folk history (which Gananath much admired and we are privileged to hear), accompanies the long credit list.

The film is dedicated:

“To all rural folk who in their diverse ways enriched the peasant Buddhist tradition and found Buddha in that”. (Concluded)

By Professor Emeritus
I. M. Dharmadasa
Sheffield Hallam University, United Kingdom

This article summarises the history of solar energy development in Sri Lanka that I have been involved with, over the past 40 years and my thoughts on the present situation in the country. As an active solar energy conversion researcher in both academia and industry (British Petroleum Research in London), I have seen the maturity of this technology since the late 1980s and started to promote it in schools and community events in the United Kingdom.

I then extended this work to my native country, Sri Lanka, in 1991, by initiating a UK-DFID (UK Department of Foreign and International Development) funded and BC (British Council) managed Higher Education Link (HE-Link) programme. This is how I met all renewable energy promoters in Sri Lanka. This article brings back my memories from the work done in collaboration with various people, starting in the late 1980s.

During the six-year HE-Link programme, I worked with several universities (Peradeniya, Colombo, Kelaniya, Moratuwa and Ruhuna) and organised conferences, seminars and public lectures in schools and government ministries. There were only two or three small solar energy companies at that time, struggling to do business, and they all joined together to promote renewable energy initiatives in the country.

Among many interested academics, senior engineers like Dr. Ray Wijewardane joined all these events, and I met three notable entrepreneurs working in this field starting in 1985. They were Lalith Gunaratne, Pradeep Jayewardene and Viran de Perera. These three friends, who were brought up in Canada, visited Sri Lanka for a holiday after their marriages and decided to stay in Sri Lanka and start a solar energy business. Their starting work was a mobile solar water pump, but about 80% of the people who were not connected to the national grid asked for solar lighting rather than solar water pumping.

Sir Arthur C Clark also gave them a good helping hand and they started to install small solar home systems in rural areas. They also started to import solar cells and assemble SUNTEC 36 W solar modules in the country, but due to various barriers from outside, that project had to be terminated. There were numerous barriers within the country itself. P remember a newspaper article that appeared in Sri Lanka titled “Solar Power Suitable for Lotus Eaters”. After all this fantastic work in the late 1980s, Lalith returned to Canada, Viran started an eco-tourist centre, and Pradip continued to work in the solar energy field.

Most of these entrepreneurs told me that the government authorities did not listen to them due to their vested interests. For this reason, I made the decision to promote renewables as a research scholar without any connection to a commercial company. This approach worked well, and I made two or three visits to Sri Lanka in some years delivering public lectures in ministries, universities and in schools. I also wrote numerous articles in the local press and completed many interviews on applications of renewable energy sources.

Solar home systems, at early stages, had about 50 W solar panels. These were combined with lead-acid batteries to store energy and provide 5-6 lights at night. This was also enough to power a black-and-white television for a few hours. Depending on the number of lights used, the cost of such a system varied between Rs 40,000 and Rs 60,000.

Meanwhile, the Ceylon Electricity Board also worked to expand the national grid under the country’s 100% electrification programme. As the national grid is available almost everywhere, the interest in small solar home systems gradually disappeared.

There were many people in the country involved in promoting renewables, and I was able to visit Sri Lanka every year to spend a few weeks at a time and work with numerous institutes.

I also personally met almost all Science & Technology Ministers, starting from Mr Bernard Soysa, and some Power and Energy Ministers to introduce renewable energy projects. Although the government’s take-up was slow, the private sector developed very rapidly, starting many new companies for solar system installation.

Gradually, the main interest turned to the grid-tied larger solar systems installed on freely available rooftops. With the “Soorya Bala Sangramaya” programme introduced around 2016, solar roofs began to be connected to the grid via “Net Metering”, “Net Accounting”, and “Net Plus” methods. A few years ago, a 5 kW solar roof used to cost about Rs 14,00,000, but today, the cost has come down to about Rs 9,00,000. Each 5 kW solar roof installed in the country removes the need to burn 7.5 metric tons of imported coal, introducing numerous health and economic benefits to the nation, including reducing the country’s huge import bill.

I also collaborated with the ex-chairman of the Sri Lanka Sustainable Energy Authority (SLSEA), Prof. Krishan Deheragoda, to bring two 500 kW solar farms to the country, introducing larger solar farms. After promoting renewable energy over four decades, I am pleased to see numerous large solar energy systems beginning to appear in the country, including “Floating Solar Farms”.

The current government’s interest in indigenous, hydro, solar, wind, biomass and bio-gas energy, as well as the contributions from over 200 private solar energy companies to power Sri Lanka, is a very encouraging sign.

As a result of the six-year HE-Link programme SAREP (South Asia Renewable Energy Programme), the Solar Asia Conference series and the “Solar Village” project evolved. Solar Asia Conferences have taken place twice in Sri Lanka, once in Malaysia and once in India.

A pilot solar village started in 2008, and nine solar villages have been established in the country since. The concept of solar village is to empower rural communities by introducing a regular wealth creation method using solar energy and guiding them to develop themselves sustainably. This, in turn, contributes to reducing poverty and mitigating damaging climate change, benefits 80% of the Sri Lankan population who live in villages, and paves the way for the prosperity of Sri Lanka. To attract external funding and rapidly replicate solar villages in Sri Lanka, a “Solar Village SDG” community interest company (CIC) was formed in November 2024.

According to the latest SLSEA statistics, Sri Lanka has 2000 MW of solar and 200 MW of wind installations. This is 2.2 GW and a good fraction of the total power production capacity (~5 GW) in the country.

The intermittent nature of solar and wind can currently be balanced using hydropower until the fast-developing green hydrogen technology is established in Sri Lanka. When solar power is at its maximum power production during the daytime, the hydropower can be reduced simply by controlling the flow of water without any technical difficulties. With the positive steps taken by the GOSL and the private sector, Sri Lanka could become a renewable energy island in the future, giving the country many health and economic benefits and attracting many tourists from around the globe.

To achieve this noble goal, every sector in the country should work together. The general public should understand the benefits of using renewables and install more systems in the country, perhaps via “Crowd Funding”.

It is now clear that ROI (Return on Investment) from a solar roof is greater than the interest earned by keeping the money in the bank. PV companies must improve their “after-sale service” to increase customer satisfaction and help their customers get the most from their investment by promptly rectifying any issues arising from these new technologies.

The CEB has a great responsibility to gradually improve the national grid by reducing energy leakages and replacing weak transformers and grid lines to move towards a smart grid, enabling the absorption of more indigenous solar and wind energy.

(The Author is an Emeritus Professor with 51 years of university service, over 40 years of active solar energy research, and over 35 years of renewable energy promotional work. He has supervised 30 Ph.D. students and published 254 scientific articles and two books in this field.)