Doesn’t matter – the rapid Chinese expansion that is closing the gap with American still threatens – specifically in AI.

According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, China is a near-peer competitor with the US in AI and advanced computing (Lewis 2019). Some authors even consider China to be ahead of the US and at the forefront, globally, in some fields such as quantum computing (Whalen 2019). Following the idea of threat perceptions intertwined with a change in material capabilities, and examining China’s “aggregate power” in ETs, we can observe that the country has made significant advances in various areas while still lagging behind the US in overall technological and research performance (Paszak 2019; Brooks and Wohlforth 2016). This is particularly true of semiconductors (Levine 2020).

Nevertheless, the country’s growing and expansive relative ET capabilities, advancements, and incremental growth over a short period of time have positioned it as a threat toward the US. This is supported by US officials’ accounts of the ETs, who have stated that “in many ways, it is less important whether their technology is ‘as good as ours’ than whether it is good enough to render our capabilities ineffective” (Carter 2018, p. 5). Former US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper also voiced the widely shared concern: “I think we need to be very concerned about Chinese technology getting into our systems or the systems of our allies” (Macias 2019) (Table 2).

Artificial intelligence is seen as the sector where China’s capabilities have enhanced and come to compete with the US. While in 2019, the US was leading in four categories (talent, research, development, and hardware), and China in two (adoption and data), in 2021, China was continuously reducing the gap in important areas and challenging the US lead, while continuously improving the quality of its AI research, and eventually surpassing the EU in AI publications, according to the Centre for Innovation Data reportFootnote8 (Castro et al. 2019; Castro and McLaughlin 2021, para.7). In other assessments, such as 2018 Tsinghua University AI Development Report,Footnote9 China seems to have already secured a leading position in AI, ranking first in the total of AI research papers, highly cited AI papers worldwide, AI patents, and AI venture capital investment and second in the number of AI companies, in addition to the largest AI talent pool.

While China still lags behind in the realm of core AI technologies, such as hardware and algorithm development, and also in top-tier talent where it sees a significant gap with the US, this weakness has already been acknowledged and addressed by establishing an AI talent training system under the auspices of China’s Ministry of National Education, supported by the “AI Innovation Action Plan for Institutions of Higher Learning” (Imbrie et al. 2020). According to the latest AI Index report of Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (2023), there has been a significant surge in Chinese AI publications, increasing 2.3-fold since 2015.Footnote10 China dominated the field between 2010 and 2021, accounting for 39.78% of global AI publications, followed by the EU at 15.05% and the US at 10.03%.Footnote11 As stated in a Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence report in 2022, China leads in AI publications, surpassing both the US and the EU, with 22% of total publications, and ranks second in private investment in AI technologies. In 2021, China ranked first in AI publications by sector, followed by the US and the EU. Also, China holds nine positions, in the top ten institutions in the world in 2021 ranked by number of AI publications in all fields, while also leading in Natural language processing publications, AI publications in speech recognition and computer vision, as well as in AI journal publications (Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence 2022).Footnote12 In addition, China has been actively exporting AI technologies, either under the Digital Silk Road (DSR) project or via direct trade agreements with individual countries (Greitens 2020), such as with Serbia, which maintains close trade and tech relationships with China in more general terms (Le Corre and Vuksanovic 2019). Huawei alone was able to sell AI-based surveillance equipment to 50 countries along with other tech giants like Hikvision, Dahua, and ZTE (Feldstein 2019). As a result, over 60 countries exclusively use Chinese AI surveillance technology, most of which are in Africa and Latin America, while 36 of them have signed onto China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Feldstein 2019). Furthermore, China signed an agreement with 71 countries to deploy smart city public security projects and 447 research partnerships and 145 R&D labs in different parts of the world (Cave et al. 2019).Footnote13

In terms of Big Data, China’s market value was around US$9 billion in 2021, marking a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.72% since 2014 (Statista 2021). In comparison, the US market stood at US$21 billion. However, according to forecasts, China is projected to reach a market size of US$42.4 billion by the year 2027 (Businesswire 2020). Close examination of the growth rate of the Big Data industry in China reveals a consistent increase from 2018 to 2021. For instance, while the growth rate was pegged at 18% in 2020, recent estimates suggest that the Big Data industry saw a 30% growth in 2021 (Slotta 2023). This growth is not solely attributed to the sheer volume of data produced, with estimates predicting China will generate approximately 48.6 trillion gigabytes annually by 2025, supported by more than 1 billion internet users. In addition, China generated the most zettabytes of data.Footnote14 These developments constitute deliberate efforts put forth by the CCP since the mid-2010s to exploit data as the fundamental resource of the future global economy and governance system (Liu 2021; Thomala 2023). This concerted effort reached its apex with the unveiling of the comprehensive “Action Plan on Promoting Big Data Development” in 2015 (Gorman 2021). The primary aim of the Action Plan was to leverage Big Data by incorporating it into various sectors such as healthcare (through the extraction of individual health data), transportation, manufacturing, geographical data, and public security (The State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2015).