By James Palmer
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
The highlights this week: China starts a campaign to regulate generative AI, a killing in Handan sparks outrage, and a Chinese-born professor disappears on a trip back home.
Have feedback? Hit reply to let me know your thoughts.
Can China Successfully Regulate AI?
A woman tests a VR product during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai on July 7, 2023.Wang Zhao/AFP via Getty Images
China’s internet regulator has announced a campaign to monitor and control generative artificial intelligence. The move comes amid a bout of online spring cleaning targeting content that the government dislikes, as well as Beijing forums with foreign experts on AI regulation. Chinese Premier Li Qiang has also carried out official inspection tours of AI firms and other technology businesses, while promising a looser regulatory regime that seems unlikely.
AI has been a focus of the Chinese state since 2017, when the State Council laid out a plan to become a world leader in the field by 2030. But the rush of global interest in the technology in the last year, driven in large part by the publicity of generative models such as ChatGPT, has spurred worries among officials that China is falling behind U.S. competitors and that AI-generated content could overrun the country’s controlled internet environment.
One of the concerns is that generative AI could produce opinions that are unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), such as the Chinese chatbot that was pulled offline after it expressed its opposition to Russia’s war in Ukraine.
However, Chinese internet regulation goes beyond the straightforwardly political. There are fears about scams and crime. There is also paternalistic control tied up in the CCP’s vision of society that doesn’t directly target political dissidence—for example, crackdowns on displaying so-called vulgar wealth. Chinese censors are always fighting to de-sexualize streaming content and launching campaigns against overenthusiastic sports fans or celebrity gossip.
AI regulation has become another vehicle for the concerns of an aging political leadership that doesn’t trust the young people who generate most online content. Top leaders taking a direct interest in an industry like AI is a double-edged sword for Chinese businesses. On the one hand, it grants a publicity and funding boost. On the other, it means inspection tours by officials who likely don’t know much about the field but are keen to be seen to be doing something.
China’s tech successes in the 2000s and early 2010s were helped by authorities who tended to let the market determine winners, then to back the victors. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, though, political backing has become vital—especially since the crackdowns on the tech industry that began in 2020 and wiped more than $1.1 trillion in value off the market.
The new regulations are particularly concerned about scamming, a problem that has attracted much attention in China in the last two years, thanks to a rash of deepfake cases within China and the kidnapping of Chinese citizens to work in online scam centers in Southeast Asia. Like other buzzwordy tech trends, AI is full of grifting and spam, but scammers and fakes are already part of business in China.
The political leadership’s interest in AI offers some potential to rip the government off, especially given that many officials barely understand the field. Take the AI textbooks for preschoolers, or simply attaching “AI” to any existing business in the hope of getting a grant. In China, businesses often try to jump on the bandwagon of government-approved buzzwords—and Beijing is very unwilling to admit its own mistakes.
However, the fate of cryptocurrency in China offers a more hopeful tale for regulators. Initially, there was a major boom in the industry, mostly driven by money laundering: Chinese traders could buy cheap electricity to waste on crypto mining in yuan and sell the resulting product in dollars. The Chinese government toyed with the idea of getting in on digital currency but instead cracked down. As a result, Chinese tech and finance firms generally stayed away from crypto, while Western firms invested in useless products and failed ambitions.
If China can pull off focused AI investment while steering clear of the scams that plague the field, it could hit its 2030 target. It’s possible that Beijing’s lack of effective intellectual property enforcement could even make it an amenable environment for AI development, since copyright lawsuits will likely impose major costs on the industry in the West. But AI’s chaotic sprawl sits uncomfortably with the CCP’s view of the internet as a walled, well-managed garden.
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What We’re Following
Killing in Handan. The killing of a 13-year-old boy in the small Chinese city of Handan has caused outrage and concern. Three other so-called left-behind children, or those who are left in the care of grandparents or other relatives when their parents move to the city for work, were arrested for the crime. The suspects are likely to be tried under legislation introduced last year that lowers the age of criminal responsibility to 12 years old (from 14) in some cases.
The motive for the killing is unclear. Left-behind children are often seen as lacking parental discipline, and truancy is widespread. Although tuition is free up to age 16 in China, schools in rural provinces lag behind their urban counterparts, producing dropout rates as high as 40 percent in some areas—and leading to an educational crisis.
Professor disappears. A Chinese-born professor who teaches in Japan has disappeared on a trip back to mainland China, sparking fears that he was swept up in the country’s espionage panic. Hu Shiyun, who teaches Chinese language at Kobe Gakuin University, has been missing since last August.
Hu is one of several Chinese-born individuals residing abroad arrested upon their return home, such as Australian citizen Yang Hengjun, who was found guilty of espionage in China this year. Many others have faced exit bans. The U.S. State Department currently has level-three advisory in place for China, warning that U.S. citizens should reconsider travel there due to the risk of arbitrary detention.
Tech and Business
Havana syndrome debunked. In 2019 and 2020, U.S. diplomatic personnel captured global attention with widespread claims that symptoms from headaches to brain fog were the result of an unknown weapon used by Russia and China, dubbed “Havana syndrome” after the first cluster of incidents in Cuba. Everything from sonic weapons to microwave attacks was proposed as a cause.
However, in a newly published review, the U.S. intelligence community concluded that the evidence for Havana syndrome “points away from a foreign adversary, causal mechanism, or unique syndromes.” The report comes after an investigation by five agencies last year drew a similar conclusion and the largest study yet found no brain damage or underlying physical cause among reported sufferers.
As the spy balloon panic showed last year, U.S.-China tensions can easily cause spates of paranoia.
Which Chinese leader will greet CEOs? Beijing hosts the annual China Development Forum is this weekend, a wheel-greasing event where top Western business leaders get a rare chance at facetime with Chinese leaders. But it’s still up in the air which leaders will attend. Last week, Li was reportedly pulled out. That may mean that foreign visitors get fobbed off with lower-level leaders, or it could mean that Xi himself shows up.
If the top leader does show, it would be a real signal to the rest of the Chinese government to be more welcoming to foreign businesses—although it still may not be able to overcome years of restrictions and arrests.
FP’s Most Read This Week
A Bit of Culture
For 500 years, the textbook Poems of the Masters was the standard introduction to poetry for Chinese schoolchildren, compiled around the mid-13th century and comprising around 200 poems. The very first one, “Spring Dawning,” is by the hermit poet Meng Haorun (689-740) and remains a staple of today’s curriculum.
Translator Brendan O’Kane writes, “Its apparent simplicity is deceptive. As in English, ‘dawn’ refers to both the thing that happens in the sky every morning and the thing that happens in our heads when we’re lucky: Each line of Meng’s poem finds him a little less groggy and a little more reengaged with the world around him. Spring and dawn have renewed that world for the time being—but the last line knows as well as we do that it’s only temporary.”
Spring Dawning
Translated by Brendan O’Kane
Spring slumber: I didn’t mark the dawn.
From all around, the sound of singing birds.
In the night there was a noise of wind and rain,
Flowers fell. I wonder how many?
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