China has a Master Plan For AI You Probably Haven’t Heard About
The quietest AI revolution on Earth
Here’s something that should blow your mind. China isn’t chasing AGI. It’s building an AI-powered society on a schedule.
While Silicon Valley obsesses over model benchmarks and the latest hype about Skynet breaking out of the lab, Beijing quietly released a 10-year roadmap that reads less like a research manifesto and more like a national operations manual for rewiring an economy. It’s tempting to write it off as political theater.
But if you actually read the plan, you realize it’s asking a deeper question:
What if the future of AI isn’t about who builds the smartest system but who embeds it more deeply into their society?AI and Industry & Business: Turning AI into an Everyday Utility
China’s plan treats compute the way utilities treat electricity. Capacity, latency, and pricing are managed as public resources, not private bets. Regional “intelligent computing” hubs are connected through a national power and compute backbone designed to make GPU power stable, predictable, and increasingly clean. Once compute becomes dependable, business models can plan around it instead of gambling on access.
The China blueprint also establishes clear service frameworks for businesses that don’t live in labs. Through pilot programs, Model-as-a-Service and Agent-as-a-Service are being standardized so companies can purchase outcomes (e.g. auditing, logistics, quality control) instead of tinkering with raw APIs.
And the same logic extends to data. Ownership, licensing, and monetization are being codified so datasets become tradeable assets rather than legal risks. Publicly funded research data is being opened for reuse, and synthetic data production is emerging as a government-supported industry.
The goal for China is that every company is an AI-native enterprise, designed from the ground up around flow of data, automated feedback and ultimately continuous AI-powered decision making. These organizations aren’t retrofitting existing workflows; they’re poised to invent new ones where prediction and learning are dependable and accessible parts of the operating core.
This is the largest country in the world validating our theory of the AI Great Replacement where all enterprise software will be rewritten in the next 5-10 years.But this isn’t constrained in China to large enterprises and mega cities. Local governments are accelerating this shift through compute vouchers that subsidize GPU hours for smaller companies. It’s not headline material, but it’s what adoption looks like in practice: lowering the entry cost until the long tail joins the curve.
Put together, the business environment is being engineered for usage rather than spectacle for a world where value comes from how many industries adopt practical AI and push it deeply into their operations. Remember the absorption rate of new technology and not how many headlines announce it is what is important. All of this structure may seem bureaucratic, but it’s exactly how most of the market makes technology decisions: they buy reliability, not novelty.
This differs markedly from the US where we are in near-unrestrained competition for private market winners to dominate each of these areas. When this happened for bandwidth what happened was an inevitable crash due to overcapacity and eventually a “back door” transition of bandwidth into a semi-utility. Remember all that “dark fiber” from the 90s and 00s? It is now more than fully utilized, but it took a long time, and access is still not trivial for businesses.
AI and Society: Schools That Learn and Jobs That Adapt
Unlike most national tech roadmaps, China’s AI strategy doesn’t bolt social policy on at the end. It starts there. This probably isn’t surprising given they are an education and social order obsessed society.
With education as the centerpiece, “Smart companions” and adaptive teaching systems are being written directly into how schools function. Imagine a classroom where learning plans update daily, teachers spend less time grading, and feedback loops run in real time.
The real innovation isn’t the gadgetry; it’s the oversight. Teachers, parents, and administrators can see, audit, and correct how algorithms make decisions, AI is the fabric, rather than a mystery.The plan also takes on work displacement head-on. Each major AI rollout includes risk assessments for affected jobs, dedicated retraining budgets, and measurable targets for job creation in emerging sectors. Retraining isn’t an afterthought; it’s scheduled alongside deployment. The goal is keeping workers in motion as technology shifts underneath them.
Governance, too, is treated like an experiment. Ministries are running small-scale “AI social trials,” integrating AI into public procurement, and expanding services into rural regions before scaling nationwide. Policy isn’t declared; it’s tested, measured, and then rolled out.
If China has demonstrated anything, it is that it has control and power to push through and execute government plans, right or wrong. And this one feels pretty right. Right now you can read daily statements from the CEOs of the most innovative Silicon Valley AI companies and VCs telling everyone that they will lose their jobs soon without any mention of the societal impact of that transition. This is objectively awful and suboptimal for people with such large megaphones and sets up a future of societal conflict in the USA.
So, we keep winking at Skynet without trying to deal with the extremely predictable human consequences that are coming. Instead we are expecting “the market” to sort it out, which is code for damn the consequences. Unsurprisingly, we see attention-grabbing headlines trumpeting early employee cuts when they should be trumpeting integration of AI and retraining their loyal teams. [See our writeup of the Salesforce hacking of their customer service teams].
In the last few decades we saw a similar lack of restraint with both the development of social media and in the 90s with globalization at all costs. The largest irony, of course, is that OpenAI is still a non-profit with a mission to protect humanity. There appears to be no trace of this mission except the release of latest progress papers from its scientists which falls far short of the mission. And in the meantime the headlines are full of their efforts to transition to a for-profit entity and to lose the ‘shackles’ entirely.
Is China the perfect picture of altruism in this scenario? Of course not. But social order is paramount to their government’s mission and keeping people productively educated and employed has always been how that social order is maintained. While their goals may be about control, its farsightedness is remarkable and we could all learn a lesson from that.The Big Question
Will it all work? Possibly not. Bureaucracy moves slowly, and coordination at this scale is messy. But the ambition is unmistakable. China is in the race to build ever-smarter models through unrestrained competition. However it is also charting a different race: the race: to make AI an ordinary part of daily life, from power grids to classrooms.
Which approach is right? Should progress be measured in breakthroughs, or in adoption curves? We think it’s both. And a dual vision may quietly outpace all others before we notice.
We’d love to hear what you think. Is China’s 2035 AI plan visionary, overreaching, or just inevitable? Share your take.Want to dive deeper?
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