False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

China has a government-led tech industry 
that prioritizes AI and is aimed toward 
control and global domination.
China’s guiding ideology and its resulting tech-
industry landscape contrast sharply to those of 
the United States. Instead of free-market 
capitalism, the Chinese government champions 
a hybrid form of socialism and capitalism. This 
features a relatively protected market presided 
over by a strong, centralized and authoritarian 
state.
As a result, China’s tech industry is largely 
shielded from foreign competition. That’s 
especially true of the industry’s “big three 
”companies, each of which can be likened to an 
American counterpart: roughly speaking, Baidu 
is like Google, Alibaba is like Amazon and 
Tencent is like Facebook. Both Google and 
Facebook are banned from operating in China, 
and Amazon has been heavily impeded from 
gaining a foothold there.
Meanwhile, China’s tech industry enjoys strong 
support and guidance from the Chinese 
government. For instance, the government 
provides Chinese universities with enormous 
amounts of funding for tech research. It also 
practices the sort of grand-scale economic 
planning, policy-making and tech-industry 
nurturing that the US government eschews.
AI provides a case in point. The Chinese 
government has explicitly formulated a goal of 
becoming “the world’s primary AI innovation 
center” by 2030. And it’s already backing those 
words with action. For example, it’s currently 
building a two-billion-dollar AI research park 
outside of Beijing, and it’s piloted compulsory AI 
courses at 40 high schools as of 2018.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is working 
closely with China’s tech industry to accomplish 
its own objectives, which are two-fold.
The first is to control its population. One chilling 
example of this is its development of a social 
credit score. This works a lot like your financial 
credit score – only it’s designed to rank citizens’ 
overall 
trustworthiness, 
not 
just 
their 
creditworthiness. Points are deducted from 
people’s scores for infractions like violating 
traffic signals. These scores then determine 
decisions as prosaic as whether an individual 
needs to pay a deposit to rent a bike. This might 

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sound like science fiction, but a pilot version of 
the system has already been tested in the city of 
Rongcheng, in Shandong province.
The Chinese government’s second objective is 
to use its economic clout to topple the United 
States as the world’s dominant superpower. 
Since AI will be one of the predominant 
technologies of the future, China will receive a 
significant economic boost from its rapidly 
developing AI sector. The author estimates that 
it could expand China’s already burgeoning 
economy by 28 percent by 2035.
The stage is being set for an increasingly fierce 
global competition between the United States, 
China and their respective allies – a competition 
in which AI will determine who emerges the 
victor.