Why is China less worried about an AI dystopia than the US?
By John Liu, CNN
Hong Kong/Beijing (CNN) — Unlike in the United States, no one in China seems to be openly fretting over the prospect of humanity being destroyed by artificial intelligence soon.
There, citizens access local government services through AI-powered digital employees; students receive instant feedback on written assignments by uploading a photo; and hotel guests collect parcels delivered to their doorsteps by robots.
The wide adoption of AI in today’s China underscores the country’s embrace of the novel technology. A Morgan Stanley survey released Monday found 80% of Chinese respondents used AI at least weekly, far exceeding the 54% in the US.
Even as US tech executives and researchers urge a slowdown in AI development citing its existential threat to humanity, the Chinese public has remained comparatively unfazed.
“This technology was created to serve humanity,” said Xu Jingyuan, 22, a business student from Beijing. “We shouldn’t see it as something to fear, but as something that brings greater conveniences to our lives.”
He said the government is “absolutely capable” of managing its risks.
Xu’s comments echoed those of several people CNN spoke to this week, reflecting a divide in attitudes toward AI in Chinese and American society, as well as differing levels of trust in respective governments’ ability to handle the potential threats posed by the technology.
“In the US, there is a general public perception that without whistleblowing, big corporations could escape accountability or scrutiny due to weak government oversight,” said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at technology research firm Omdia.
“Whereas in China, I think there is this very strong confidence from the public that if any sh*t hits the fan, the government will step in.”
Analysts also point to differences in exposure to AI, public discourse around the technology, and the broader cultural and historical context as possible explanations for the divide.
In a survey by marketing research firm Ipsos earlier this year, 83% of Chinese respondents found AI-powered products or services exciting, whereas only 33% of those in the US felt similar way. Meanwhile, another survey by marketing consultancy Edelman showed that 86% of respondents in China said they trusted their own government to do what is right, compared with just 39% in the US.
A marked difference between the two nations is their political systems. While whistleblowing is routine in the US and policy debates often become messy, especially in an increasingly polarized democracy, China’s top-down power structure allows the one-party state to set agendas without facing open criticism.
Behind the embrace
In China, the ubiquity of AI, its commercial applications and robots have helped boost the public’s wide acceptance of the technology.
“Everyone I know says AI has already permeated every aspect of our lives,” said 51-year-old Shi Hongchao from China’s northeastern Liaoning province. “Everyone is either talking about it or has already started using it. It feels almost unstoppable at this point.”
In China’s hypercompetitive market, tech companies have been aggressively rolling out free AI chatbots and features built into applications people already use. Industries from filmmaking and e-commerce to manufacturing are also integrating the technology. The productivity gains and convenience have spoken for themselves.
“Most Chinese people meet AI as a cheap product first and as a debate second,” said Poe Zhao, analyst and founder of Hello China Tech, a newsletter focused on China’s tech industry. “When a technology shows up as a useful, low-cost service, people judge it by what it does for them, not by what it might do to them.”
This stands in stark contrast to the US, where industry executives and researchers have raised prominent concerns about the rapid advancement of AI and its potential existential risks. China, another AI superpower widely regarded as capable of rivaling the US, has been noticeably silent on the issue.
“Chinese warnings are quieter and use a different vocabulary. The dominant framing is loss of operational control, malicious use and social disruption, rather than human extinction,” Zhao said.
China’s intelligence chief Chen Yixin published an article last Sunday detailing the need to incorporate AI as a strategic industry into the country’s economic development, while outlining what Beijing sees as the technology’s extensive risks.
Beyond the familiar risks of hostile actors misusing AI to conduct cyberattacks, spread misinformation and steal state and corporate secrets, Chen also warned that the technology could destabilize society and threaten China’s political security. He also cited the risks posed by certain countries’ “monopolistic practices” – an apparent reference to the US for its export controls – as another concern.
Rather than public discussions and open letters about AI’s safety threats, much of the Chinese AI governance takes place behind the scenes through companies’ compliance work with the authorities’ technical standards, security assessments, and administrative filings, Zhao added.
Chinese AI companies’ development trajectories also differ from those of their American counterparts, reflecting different priorities and constraints. While Chinese AI labs have rapidly narrowed the gap with US leaders such as Anthropic and OpenAI, their models still trail the most advanced American systems, in part because of constraints on computing power and capital.
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng said in a leaked conference call with investors in July that the biggest gap between Chinese and American AI labs lies in access to the most advanced AI processors – essential for training AI models – due to US restrictions, as well as lower levels of capital investment.
Chinese AI companies are also driven more by commercial incentives to monetize and turn a profit, potentially making them less focused on developments that could trigger extreme or existential risks.
“The US is really keen on pushing the boundaries more,” Su of Omdia said. “In China, there may be less focus on frontier capability, but more focus on how to make AI more productive and commercial.”
China’s rise
China’s technological advances have coincided with the country’s rapid economic development and its rise on the global stage over the past decades. As the country’s AI industry has grown more capable, many Chinese people have come to see that progress as further evidence of China’s technological rise, Su said.
“In China, there is this very pro-AI culture,” Su said. “Technology has always been viewed as a national pride.”
That view contrasts with the US, where skepticism toward large corporations and the government has grown alongside opposition to AI data centers.
Over the past decade, Chinese technologies – from smartphones and electric vehicles to batteries and supercomputers – have increasingly gone head-to-head with US counterparts, surpassing them in some areas.
For many Chinese people, that history has created an implicit expectation that a new technology can deliver both economic benefits and might, said Grace Shao, a tech analyst and founder of industry newsletter AI Proem.
“The average person has seen how much economic gain, prosperity, and even just convenience that technology has brought to them, so there is an unspoken assumption that AI could do the same for them,” she said.
China’s people also tend to look up to the government for protection, Shao added. The Communist Party has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to assert its control over the country’s most powerful enterprises.
In 2020, Beijing launched a historic crackdown to curb the power of the country’s biggest names in sectors from tech and gaming to education, wiping out over $1.5 trillion in market value from the companies affected.
“There is built-in trust by the people that the government will act as a parental figure again to draw out the guardrails and guidelines for this new technology,” Shao said.
Shi from Liaoning is one of them.
He believes that AI’s benefits still outweigh the concerns, and the development of AI should not be slowed simply because it carries risks.
“I think we should continue to invest more heavily in AI and keep developing it. After all, restricting the technology doesn’t mean it will stop advancing,” he said. “China is a major country. It has an even greater reason to prioritize the development of AI.”
The-CNN-Wire
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CNN’s Joyce Jiang contributed to this report in Beijing.
