Chapotraphouse

I remember asking deepseek about planning a trip to Beijing and it suddenly stopped generating when it mentioned Tiananmen Square (in the context of visiting the place).

If I were a liberal I wouldn’t shut up about it

It has guardrails on political topics which is quite chinese, if you ask me

Yep, if you ask it political questions in general, even in the context of let's say European or North American politics, it still will refuse to respond unless you word your question in a weird roundabout way. It's just a generic guard rail that tries to avoid talking about politics in general because well, they're just parrots after all and parrot whatever is in their training data, which is... the whole internet basically. I doubt Deepseek or any company for that matter wants to deal with another Microsoft Tay incident

I this a problem with political theory or a problem with the PDF format?

edit: If I run DeepSeek with opencode and point it at a Mao PDF it just asks me to install some tools to extract text from PDF files.

I can't read this PDF — this model does not support PDF input, and no extraction tools (pdftotext, pymupdf, pypdf, etc.) are available on this system to convert it to text.
Options:
1. Install a tool (e.g. pypdf/pdftotext) so I can extract and analyze the text — I'd need to exit plan mode to install.
2. Copy-paste the text content directly into the chat.
3. Provide the source text as a .txt or .md file.
Which would you prefer?

Once I provide a tool it eventually gives me this output on a copy of combat liberalism

PDF is now readable via the pymupdf binary you installed — the extraction worked. Here's the analysis.
Analysis: Combat Liberalism — Mao Tse-tung (1937)
Provenance / document characteristics
- 12-page scanned PDF (Adobe Acrobat 10.114 "Paper Capture" OCR layer; no native text).
- Foreign Languages Press, Peking 1965 booklet — 3rd ed. (2nd revised translation), translated from Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II (Peking, Aug 1952).
- Written September 7, 1937; a propaganda essay against political passivity within the CCP during the anti-Japanese war period.
Structure / content (essay body, pp. 1–3)
1. Thesis: Active ideological struggle is the weapon for Party unity; every Communist must wield it.
2. Definition of liberalism: Rejection of ideological struggle, standing for "unprincipled peace" → decadent, philistine attitude and political degeneration.
3. Eleven enumerated types of liberalism:
 1. Avoiding principled argument to preserve personal relationships.
 2. Irresponsible private gossip instead of open organizational criticism.
 3. "Worldly wise" passivity, playing safe to avoid blame.
 4. Putting personal opinions over orders; claiming privileges while rejecting discipline.
 5. "Struggle" waged only for personal attack, spite, revenge.
 6. Hearing incorrect/counter-revolutionary remarks without rebutting or reporting.
 7. Indifference to the masses; failing to conduct propaganda/agitation among them.
 8. No indignation or intervention when the masses' interests are harmed.
 9. Half-hearted, planless, "muddle along" work.
10. Veteran vanity: disdaining minor tasks, slipshod work and slack study.
11. Refusing to correct one's own known mistakes — liberalism toward oneself.
4. Analysis/harm: Liberalism is a "corrosive" that eats away unity, cohesion, discipline, and Party–masses ties. Root cause: petty-bourgeois selfishness (personal interests placed above revolutionary ones) → ideological, political, and organizational liberalism.
5. Critique of liberal Marxists: Treat Marxism as abstract dogma — "talk Marxism but practise liberalism; apply Marxism to others but liberalism to themselves."
6. Condemnation: Liberalism is a manifestation of opportunism, fundamentally conflicting with Marxism, negative in spirit, and objectively aiding the enemy.
7. Prescription: Overcome liberalism with positive-spirited Marxism; the true Communist is big-minded, staunch, principled, subordinating self to the revolution; loyal Communists must unite to oppose liberal tendencies.
Note: Back pages contain the original Chinese text, garbled by the OCR layer.