China’s AI Moment: Manufacturing, Global Values and the (New) End of History

"The competition between China and the US over the global market for large [AI] models is essentially a contest for dominance over global political ideology." – Di Dongsheng (翟东升)

Echoing our previous coverage of Professor Di Dongsheng’s analysis, this speech is characterised by a boosterish “China-first” style that stands out among some of the more pious rhetoric common in Chinese foreign policy publications. To a certain extent, it is refreshingly unusual to come across an international relations scholar in China producing statements such as “the battle for global industrial leadership is not a win-win scenario, but a zero-sum game.”

Professor Di aims to challenge conventional theories of industrial relocation, which describe the process of manufacturing migrating to less economically developed countries as production costs rise. In his telling, it is not just labour costs, but power—particularly maritime and technological power—which has historically determined where the centre of global manufacturing lies. Hence, rather than this centre inevitably shifting to countries with lower labour costs, China’s progress in automation and AI may be able to arrest this …