Even Chinese leadership is somewhat skeptical about AI maximalism [0] with worries about "AI Washing" by enthusiastic cadre trying to climb rungs [1], and evoking Solow's Paradox [2].
There is still significant value in AI/ML Applications from a NatSec perspective, but no one is actually seriously thinking about AGI in the near future. In a lot of cases, AI from a NatSec perspective is around labor augmentation (how do I reduce toil in analysis), pattern recognition (how do I better differentiate bird from FPV drone), or Tiny/Edge ML (how do I distill models such that I can embed them into commodity hardware to scale out production).
It's the same reason why during the Chips War zeitgeist, while the media was harping about sub-7nm, much of the funding was actually targeted towards legacy nodes (14/28nm), chip packaging (largely offshored to China in the 2010s because it was viewed as low margins/low value work), and compound semiconductors (heavily utilized in avionics).
Pointing to Solow’s Paradox is kind of weird to me. Productivity growth accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, so it’s easy to tell a story where the computer age simply didn’t accelerate things until it had sufficiently penetrated the economy. If AI follows the same pattern, betting big on it still makes sense: China would probably be the predominant superpower if the computing developments of the 70s and 80s were centered there instead of the US.
The point is that just like in the US, Chinese decision-makers are increasingly voicing concerns about unrealistic assumptions, valuations, and expectations around the capabilities of AI/ML.
You can be optimistic about the value of agentic workflows or domain specific applications of LLMs but at the same time recognize that something like AGI is horseshit techno-millenarianism. I myself have made a pretty successful career so far following this train of logic.
The point about Solow's Paradox is that the gains of certain high productivity technologies do not provide society-wide economic benefit, and in a country like China where the median household income is in the $300-400/mo range and the vast majority of citizens are not tech adjacent, it can lead to potential discontent.
The Chinese government is increasingly sensitive to these kinds of capital misallocations after the Evergrande Crisis and the ongoing domestic EV Price War between SoEs, because vast amounts of government capital is being burnt with little to show for it from an outcomes perspective (eg. a private company like BYD has completely trounced every other domestic EV competitor in China - the majority of whom are state owned and burnt billions investing in SoEs that never had a comparative advantage against BYD or an experienced automotive SoE like SAIC).
> The point about Solow's Paradox is that the gains of certain high productivity technologies do not provide society-wide economic benefit
Some people certainly argue that about the computer age, and it’s not totally unsupported. But I don’t think the evidence for that interpretation (as opposed to a delayed effect) is strong enough that I’d want to automatically generalize it to a new information technology advance.
To be clear, I don’t think China’s reticence is necessarily wrongheaded. But “we will usher in an age of undisputed dominance in a decade or two instead of right now from this investment” is a weird argument, especially from a government as ostensibly long-term focused as China.
> To be clear, I don’t think China’s reticence is necessarily wrongheaded. But “we will usher in an age of undisputed dominance in a decade or two instead of right now from this investment” is a weird argument, especially from a government as ostensibly long-term focused as China
The most important priority for any government is political stability. In China's case, the local and regional government fiscal crisis is the primary concern because every yuan spent on subsidizing an industry is also a yuan taken away from social spending - which is entirely the responsibility of local governments after the Deng reforms. This is why despite China being a large economy has only just caught up to Iran and Thailand's developmental indicators in the past 2-3 years.
The meme of a "long-term focused China" is just that - a meme. Setting grand targets and incentivizing the entire party cadre to meet those targets or goals is leading to increasingly inefficient deployments of limited capital and led to two massive bubbles busting in the past 5 years (real estate and EVs). The Chinese government doesn't want a third one, and is increasingly trying to push for capital to be deployed to social services instead of promotion-targeted initiatives.
Also, read Chinese pronouncements in the actual Putonghua - the translations in English make bog standard pronouncements sound magnanimous because most people who haven't heard or read a large number of Chinese government pronouncements don't understand how they tend to be structure and written as well as the tone used.
Oh I don’t doubt any of this - it’s just that you don’t usually see the CCP publicly making arguments that they need to sacrifice the long term for the short term. They have a brand for how they public ally justify their decisions, and it’s definitely about the inevitable, long arc of Chinese history of whatever.
> it’s just that you don’t usually see the CCP publicly making arguments that they need to sacrifice the long term for the short term
They do.
These kinds of statements and discussions happen all the time - in Chinese. The "long-termism" trope is largely an English language one because outsiders either severely degrade or severely fawn Chinese policymaking. Additionally, because most outsiders don't speak or understand Chinese, the spectre of China is often used as a rhetorical device to help drive decisionmaking and using "long-termism" is an easy device for that. A similar thing used to be used with Japan in the 1980s and Germany in the 2000s.
And what actually is the long term value of investing tens of billions in (eg.) AGI versus a similar amount in subsidized healthcare expansion in China? Applications based usescases and domain specific usecases of AI/ML have shown the most success from an outcomes perspective for both National Security and Economic usecases.
AI/ML has a lot of value, but a large amount of the promise is unrealistic for the valuations provided in both the US and China. THe issue is in China, an AI bubble bursting risks leaving local and regional governments holding the bag like during the real estate crisis because the vast majority of capital deployed in subsidizes came from regional and local government's budgets, and takes a large amount of capital away from social service expansion.
For a lot of Chinese leadership, the biggest worry is Japanification, which itself set itself due to the three-way punch of the 1985 Endaka recession, the 1990 Asset Bubble bust, and the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Much of China's financial leadership and regulators started their careers managing the blowback of these crises in China during that era or were scholars on them. As such, Chinese regulators are increasingly trying to pop bubbles sooner rather than later especially after the past experiences dealing with the 2015-16 market crash and the Evergrande crisis. Irrational exuberance around AI is increasingly being viewed through that lens as well.
There is still significant value in AI/ML Applications from a NatSec perspective, but no one is actually seriously thinking about AGI in the near future. In a lot of cases, AI from a NatSec perspective is around labor augmentation (how do I reduce toil in analysis), pattern recognition (how do I better differentiate bird from FPV drone), or Tiny/Edge ML (how do I distill models such that I can embed them into commodity hardware to scale out production).
It's the same reason why during the Chips War zeitgeist, while the media was harping about sub-7nm, much of the funding was actually targeted towards legacy nodes (14/28nm), chip packaging (largely offshored to China in the 2010s because it was viewed as low margins/low value work), and compound semiconductors (heavily utilized in avionics).
[0] - https://www.zaobao.com.sg/news/china/story20250829-7432514
[1] - https://finance.sina.com.cn/roll/2025-09-30/doc-infsfmit7787...
[2] - https://m.huxiu.com/article/4780003.html