China's rapid adoption of AI demands greater scrutiny of the social impact

South China Morning Post

13 hours ago

The first half of 2025 has witnessed a wave of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in China. The speed and extent of this trend has exceeded previous technology waves, such as the internet in the late 20th century or electricity before that.
Thanks to the country's computing infrastructure and fundamental models from developers like DeepSeek, Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings, ByteDance and Baidu, China is probably among the world's most aggressive nations in adopting AI. The new technology is easily available at a reasonable cost – for individuals it is usually free – and an army of agents is ready to help deploy AI for businesses. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
China is eager to roll out AI partly because the country is engaged in fierce competition with the US, and the priority is clearly on achieving the growth and adoption of AI. China's tech giants and start-ups must relentlessly improve their AI technologies and promote their use to businesses and individuals, or they risk becoming irrelevant if they fall behind even for a few months.
Visitors attend the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, July 6, 2023. Photo: Reuters
Chinese businesses are also rushing to deepen the use of AI algorithms in their services to cut operation costs and improve efficiency. They are doing so with urgency over fears that a delayed application of AI would put them in a disadvantaged position in the market. For many Chinese users, AI tools are already part of their day-to-day life and work.
In contrast to the perception that Beijing has placed a lot of 'guardrails' on AI, China's AI regulation so far has been limited. There are certain 'red lines'. For instance, Chinese chatbots are not allowed to generate answers that violate the country's strict online content rules, which has seen the rise of the popular game of feeding 'sensitive questions' to the chatbots and mocking their refusal to answer. Separately, China has maintained a registration system for fundamental AI models, which creates a hurdle for foreign AI companies wanting to enter the market.
But the general development and adoption of AI is done in a freewheeling fashion. In fact, China does not have a centralised agency to oversee AI in general. The Cyberspace Administration of China is in charge of
'registration' of AI models; the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is in charge of computing and cloud; and the National Development and Reform Commission oversees the use of data through its National Data Bureau'. The security and ethics of AI involve even more government departments.
The DeepSeek logo is shown on a computer screen in this arranged photograph. Photo: dpa