From Industrial Power to Algorithmic Sovereignty
By Javier
Surasky
China
occupies a central place on the artificial intelligence power map.
Trying to
explain its relevance by the number of companies, models, laboratories,
datasets, publications, or patents it produces is a mistake, since the key to
its position lies in the way it organizes its technological development, making
AI a matter of state policy: infrastructure, use in public administration, a
driver of consumption, and a tool for geopolitical positioning.
Unlike the U.S. model we examined earlier, focused on giving freedom to large private
companies, venture capital, and advanced semiconductors, China uses state
capacities through systemic planning strategies to integrate AI into the real
economy: manufacturing, health, education, logistics, trade,
telecommunications, public services, smart homes, humanoid robotics, and
digital government.
The
starting point of that strategy was the 2017 New Generation Artificial
Intelligence Development Plan, which set goals for 2030 and aimed to make the country a global center of AI innovation. By 2025, that
strategy was entering a new phase, more oriented toward organizing an
intelligent economy in which AI cuts across productive sectors, consumer
markets, and state structures, as reflected in the “AI Plus” initiative, in its
more ambitious version adopted by the State Council in August 2025, aimed at
transforming the paradigms of production and social life and accelerating the
formation of an intelligent economy and society.
In 2026, in
a further step, the expansion of AI Plus was announced to also cover the
promotion of new-generation smart terminals, AI agents, large-scale commercial
applications, and open-source ecosystems.
What this
process tells us is that China is thinking about AI as a deployment
infrastructure: models, devices, networks, data centers, energy, vertical
applications, standards, financing, and mass adoption, going far beyond a
purely technical view. This is consistent with the 17 measures announced in
June 2026 by the Ministry of Commerce to integrate AI into consumer goods and
services.
In terms of
power, China’s strategy shifts AI from competition between models to daily life and the reorganization of production and
consumption.
China’s
strength rests on its scale: the country brings together an enormous user base,
major digital platforms, local governments with implementation capacity,
universities, public institutes, technology companies, dense industrial chains,
and a public policy aimed at turning AI into productivity through the
development of startups, some of which have become leading companies such as
Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, and DeepSeek.
StanfordHAI’s AI Index Report 2026 indicates that China has already become the world
leader in the volume of publications, citations, and AI patents, as well as in
industrial robot installations, and that the performance gap between U.S. and
Chinese models is narrowing quickly: in March 2026, Anthropic’s leading model
was only 2.7% ahead of DeepSeek.
DeepSeek
expresses, better than any other case, a key dimension of China’s power in AI:
the search for efficiency under constraints. The limitations imposed by the
United States on Chinese access to advanced semiconductors changed its
conditions, pushing the Asian country to optimize its own architectures,
training processes, costs, and hardware use. External pressure functioned,
paradoxically, as an incentive to strengthen national AI capabilities.
Nevertheless,
China’s weak point remains its computing infrastructure, especially because
U.S. export controls on advanced chips and related technologies directly affect
the ability to train and deploy frontier models. In response, in
January 2025, China established its National Artificial Intelligence Industry
Investment Fund, with registered capital of more than 8 billion dollars, aimed
at accelerating strategic investments in infrastructure, cutting-edge
technologies, and national AI capabilities.
On the
basis of these data, we can say that competition between China and the United
States has shifted toward the material conditions that make AI possible.
Open source
is another piece of the architecture China is promoting. Its 2026 plan
explicitly included support for open-source AI communities, a new challenge to
the U.S.-backed geopolitics of AI, since Chinese open models can serve as tools of influence by being more accessible to developers, medium-sized
companies, universities, and countries with lower computing capacity.
Equally
important for understanding China’s place on the AI map is its regulatory
capacity: it was one of the first countries to adopt specific rules for
generative AI through the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative
Artificial Intelligence Services, in force since 2023, which establish
obligations for providers of generative AI services offered to the public in
China in areas such as security, content, data protection, and alignment with
the values defined by the state as guidance.
In 2025,
that regulatory architecture advanced into the traceability of synthetic
content with the adoption of measures on the labeling of AI-generated content,
requiring explicit and implicit labels, including visible marks and metadata,
to identify content generated or synthesized through AI.
This shows
that in China, AI governance is integrated into a broad conception of national
security that includes social stability, informational sovereignty, and political control of the digital environment, and that operates as a
state-defined limit on innovation.
Also in
2025, the Cyberspace Administration of China and the National Development and
Reform Commission issued guidelines to expand the use of large AI models in
government affairs, a fundamental dimension for understanding the Chinese
model, in which AI is not understood as a commercial product but as a tool of
government, useful both for improving services to the population and for
strengthening state capacities for surveillance, social classification,
informational control, and centralized management, one of the tensions in
China’s use of AI that its critics point to.
China also
seeks to present itself as a promoter of more inclusive global AI governance,
sensitive to the needs of the Global South: during the 2025 World Artificial
Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, the Global AI Governance Action Plan was
published, with workstreams that include promoting international cooperation in
the development of infrastructure, standards, security, data, sustainability,
open source, and capacity-building, while also supporting a greater role for
the United Nations in the development of global AI governance.
This
narrative once again shows China’s willingness to confront the United States on the geopolitical plane: faced with a technological order centered on large U.S.
companies and conditioned by export controls, Beijing promotes a language of
digital sovereignty, development, cooperation, openness, and inclusion, even as
the tensions between its discourse and its practice are evident in matters of
surveillance, censorship, and rights.
China’s
position is therefore that of an innovative and regulatory power, one that
promotes openness, open source, and international cooperation, but maintains
strong control within its own borders.
Key facts
- Since 2017, China has had the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, a national strategy that set goals for 2030 to turn the country into a global center of AI innovation.
- In July 2025, China promoted the Global AI Governance Action Plan, with an emphasis on international cooperation, infrastructure, standards, security, inclusive development, sustainability, open source, and the role of the United Nations.
- In August 2025, the State Council deepened the initiative through AI Plus, aimed at integrating AI into key economic and social sectors, and in 2026 the Chinese government announced a new expansion of AI Plus to incorporate the promotion of AI agents, smart terminals, large-scale commercial applications, and open-source communities.
- The country has created a National Artificial Intelligence Industry Investment Fund with registered capital of around 8.2 billion dollars.
- Stanford HAI’s AI Index Report 2026 shows that China is already a leader in the volume of publications, citations, and AI patents, as well as in industrial robot installations.
- Since September 1, 2025, China has had legislation in force on the labeling of AI-generated content, and in October of that same year the country issued guidelines to expand the use of large AI models in government affairs.
- Reuters reported in June 2026 that DeepSeek had reportedly closed an investment round totaling more than 50 billion dollars.
- China’s Ministry of Commerce adopted 17 measures to integrate AI into consumer goods and services, including smart electronics, homes, public services, and humanoid robots.
- China’s main strategic vulnerability lies in access to advanced semiconductors, manufacturing equipment, and frontier computing capacity, and its main strength lies in its domestic market and in its ability to define long-term, interconnected strategies for industrial policy, state financing, regulation, infrastructure, companies, data, standards, consumption, and technological diplomacy.