China’s leadership recognised nearly a decade ago that AI is power. It gives militaries an edge, economies access to fast-track development, and governments a chance to expand international and geopolitical influence.
As Beijing seeks global ascendancy with the technology, ASPI’s China and AI teams are tracking its strategies, tactics and progress, with the aim of raising awareness and helping democracies set the policies to respond.
ASPI’s new newsletter, AI Under Heaven, uses primary sources to uncover and analyse key developments in China’s AI landscape, with a particular focus on domestic and international strategy. Once you strip away the futuristic veneer of the technology, the Chinese government’s goals for AI turn out to be its old and familiar ones: control and stability at home, and ascendancy and influence abroad.
China’s well-developed AI products and governance are already allowing it to wield influence over a variety of companies and countries – and they want in. As AI Under Heaven has reported, the Cyberspace Administration of China announced on 15 July that Apple had successfully registered as a server provider for AI. That means Apple is required to ensure its AI products in China uphold Chinese Communist Party regulations on information control, including those around censorship and propaganda.
AI Under Heaven has also covered 29 countries’ signing last month to join the World AI Cooperation Organization in Shanghai. These were mainly nations with relatively weak AI capacity and governance, so China, with asymmetrical power in this area, will have influence in deciding such issues in its favour.
AI was a ‘strategic technology leading the future’, said a 2017 Chinese policy planning document. The technology had seismic implications for national security that could lead to geopolitical and social upheaval, said the document, which laid out the country’s AI roadmap.
It advocated state coordination to nurture a market-driven AI ecosystem focused on key strategic tasks and to encourage an atmosphere of ‘open source and openness’ including ‘actively participating in global research and development and governance of AI.’
The Chinese state exerts control not only by closing off and shutting down; it knows it can also exert control by opening up. An open AI environment allows Beijing to forge connections, build trust, and get in on the ground floor. China has more leverage if it’s the one controlling the foundations of this ground-breaking technology.
Nine years later, much of Beijing’s plan for AI has come to pass. China has a plethora of AI labs, driven by commercial competition but also supported by state subsidies and encouraged to work on tasks of national importance. By sharing research, they have built AI models that can compete with US AI products around the world, and can be downloaded and adapted for free. Their products are now being used to build the foundations of this swiftly developing technology, from Silicon Valley to Java. China’s diplomats are busily putting their mark on AI governance and standards through bodies such as the United Nations, and encouraging nations around the world to join them.
Consider this newsletter’s name: AI Under Heaven. In ancient China, ‘All Under Heaven’ fused geography and political mandate. In this notion, the ruler was the centre of a power radiating out over the horizon, encompassing all under heaven. Chinese scholars and state media still use the term to invoke China’s vision for a new international order.
China is betting that AI will help deliver that order. In a Politburo study session in 2018, President Xi Jinping noted that AI had the potential to create a ‘leading goose effect’, referring to the V-shape of a flock of geese in flight. Xi understands that leading in the right technologies can determine the fortune of nations. The powerful Cyberspace Administration of China wrote in People’s Daily in 2024 that harnessing AI in the 21st century might do for China what the industrial revolution had done for Britain in the 19th.
Other countries must rely on the United States and China for AI, but some can be much more than onlookers on the sidelines. Australia, for example, has natural advantages, such as the geography for data centres, to become useful to AI development.
Understanding China’s strategies with and through AI will also be mandatory in the global AI race. But there are still few researchers watching Chinese AI. If policymakers want to get ahead of China’s next move, then the country’s AI ecosystem needs greater scrutiny.
ASPI’s experts and this newsletter provide the scrutiny that technologists, policymakers and analysts need to understand China’s bid to become the next great technological superpower.