What do you think?
Rate this book
Chinese Power and Artificial Intelligence
This book provides a comprehensive account of Chinese AI in its various facets, based on primary Chinese-language sources. China’s rise as an AI power is an event of importance to the world and a potential challenge to liberal democracies. Filling a gap in the literature, this volume is fully documented, data-driven, and presented in a scholarly format suitable for citation and for supporting downstream research, while also remaining accessible to laypersons. It brings together 15 recognized international experts to present a full treatment of Chinese artificial intelligence. The volume contains chapters on state, commercial, and foreign sources of China’s AI power; China’s AI talent, scholarship, and global standing; the impact of AI on China’s development of cutting-edge disciplines; China’s use of AI in military, cyber, and surveillance applications; AI safety, threat mitigation, and the technology’s likely trajectory. The book ends with recommendations drawn from the authors’ interactions with policymakers and specialists worldwide, aimed at encouraging AI’s healthy development in China and preparing the rest of the world to engage with it. This book will be of much interest to students of Chinese politics, science and technology studies, security studies and international relations.
320 pages, Paperback
Published July 29, 2022
2 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 10, 2024
This book, by former CIA employee William Hannas and a dozen China specialists, based at CSET in Georgetown University, sources extensively from China’s own public 5-year plans, New Generation AI policy documents and other edicts. It makes no guesses at China’s motivations, instead allowing the State to speak for itself. A resonant statement from Chapter 8 intones:
“This is not conjecture, profiling or analysis but China’s stated position. We should believe them.”
One might summarize this book in the following way; working with China is to work WITH its military. To work with the Seven Sons of National Defense universities, or PLA affiliated institutions is to work FOR the Chinese military.
The book, while fact-based and neutral, sets out an alarming timeline for China’s capacity for full military confrontation with all world powers, particularly the USA, before 2040 and likely in the early 2030s. Not only will AI accelerate sensitive and increasingly military- and national security-related areas such as genomics, biotechnology, advanced materials, quantum computing and by extension food security issues, but even impacts cryptography (particularly decryption of foreign assets and systems), information warfare and fully autonomous reconnaissance, target interception and full decision making within kill-chains as the military increasingly embed AI within not only management systems of the Army, Navy and to a lesser extent air force and rocket force, and ultimately its on-the-field weapons systems.
On the home front, China's radical surveillance state includes smart doors that pull IDs and device numbers from individuals, scans face and body and selectively opens or not for geofenced individuals. "Anti-terrorism swords", which are tools designed to be plugged into an individual's phone or other device in order to download and analyse the full contents, are also in regular use. Emotion-detection systems by remote sensor detection of bloodflow in the face attempts to read individuals' emotions. Predictive policing, increasingly informed by AI, encroaches on the area of thought-crime and pre-crime, simultaneously invoking 1984 and Minority Report.
The export of these surveillance technologies to other authoritarian regimes is already in progress and heralds a world in which runaway AI is accelerated even further into unknowing and technologically less capable nations through trade.
Despite the foregoing there are weak points to China’s AI abilities. A distorted population age, brought on by the devastating One Child policy, combined with the brain drain of researchers who leave to work in liberal democracies and Western nations, has meant that a sizeable dearth of research talent exists in-country. Not enough Chinese pass high school (around 3 in 10), but an inordinate amount of them become post-graduates with not enough of a State Controlled commercial market to absorb them. The solution therefore is heavy reliance on recruiting foreign talent, converting ex-pats into returnees who will be bled for their knowledge within physical centers, as well as traditional espionage, extra-legal appropriation of technology and heavy patent activity. Further, the Chinese state has bent its own “corporate” market to its will, with both megacorps like BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei) as well as a raft of highly funded start-ups all functioning as progressively more interlocking arms of the Chinese State, energetically developing AI technologies for military purposes first, and civilian deployment almost at the same time for equally repressive and surveillance-laced means at home.
Issues pertaining to basic research, which China lacks, relevant data for useful tasks, which are swamped by the larger data-gathering exercises of the state, and lack of specialized chips all constitute the hardware and technical difficulties China faces. Their efforts to retake Taiwan, most likely by using an AI-empowered military, and further aggressive recruitment of foreign talent, will eventually address this.
The below are selective notes covering each chapter of this extensive work. The book should be mandatory reading for all directors of companies that work meaningfully in research, artificial intelligence and with global research institutions. My highest recommendation.
“This is not conjecture, profiling or analysis but China’s stated position. We should believe them.”
One might summarize this book in the following way; working with China is to work WITH its military. To work with the Seven Sons of National Defense universities, or PLA affiliated institutions is to work FOR the Chinese military.
The book, while fact-based and neutral, sets out an alarming timeline for China’s capacity for full military confrontation with all world powers, particularly the USA, before 2040 and likely in the early 2030s. Not only will AI accelerate sensitive and increasingly military- and national security-related areas such as genomics, biotechnology, advanced materials, quantum computing and by extension food security issues, but even impacts cryptography (particularly decryption of foreign assets and systems), information warfare and fully autonomous reconnaissance, target interception and full decision making within kill-chains as the military increasingly embed AI within not only management systems of the Army, Navy and to a lesser extent air force and rocket force, and ultimately its on-the-field weapons systems.
On the home front, China's radical surveillance state includes smart doors that pull IDs and device numbers from individuals, scans face and body and selectively opens or not for geofenced individuals. "Anti-terrorism swords", which are tools designed to be plugged into an individual's phone or other device in order to download and analyse the full contents, are also in regular use. Emotion-detection systems by remote sensor detection of bloodflow in the face attempts to read individuals' emotions. Predictive policing, increasingly informed by AI, encroaches on the area of thought-crime and pre-crime, simultaneously invoking 1984 and Minority Report.
The export of these surveillance technologies to other authoritarian regimes is already in progress and heralds a world in which runaway AI is accelerated even further into unknowing and technologically less capable nations through trade.
Despite the foregoing there are weak points to China’s AI abilities. A distorted population age, brought on by the devastating One Child policy, combined with the brain drain of researchers who leave to work in liberal democracies and Western nations, has meant that a sizeable dearth of research talent exists in-country. Not enough Chinese pass high school (around 3 in 10), but an inordinate amount of them become post-graduates with not enough of a State Controlled commercial market to absorb them. The solution therefore is heavy reliance on recruiting foreign talent, converting ex-pats into returnees who will be bled for their knowledge within physical centers, as well as traditional espionage, extra-legal appropriation of technology and heavy patent activity. Further, the Chinese state has bent its own “corporate” market to its will, with both megacorps like BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and Huawei) as well as a raft of highly funded start-ups all functioning as progressively more interlocking arms of the Chinese State, energetically developing AI technologies for military purposes first, and civilian deployment almost at the same time for equally repressive and surveillance-laced means at home.
Issues pertaining to basic research, which China lacks, relevant data for useful tasks, which are swamped by the larger data-gathering exercises of the state, and lack of specialized chips all constitute the hardware and technical difficulties China faces. Their efforts to retake Taiwan, most likely by using an AI-empowered military, and further aggressive recruitment of foreign talent, will eventually address this.
The below are selective notes covering each chapter of this extensive work. The book should be mandatory reading for all directors of companies that work meaningfully in research, artificial intelligence and with global research institutions. My highest recommendation.
December 30, 2022
Very well-researched w/ thorough citations, including many Chinese primary sources. Combines perspectives from many experts which was the right approach for this approach given how vast the topic area is.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews