China wants to achieve hegemony over the planet in 2050. The date is not arbitrary. It responds to the outcome of a geopolitical design reiterated by Xi Jinping before the bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In his speeches he has insisted that China will then "stand up among all the nations of the world". Something that he will achieve after reaching the "front ranks of innovative countries", throughout the period in which we find ourselves and that goes from 2020 to 2035. Xi Jinping wants China to acquire global primacy and thus put an end to , to the century of the restoration of its power (1949-2050) with an irresistible technological superiority that established the Asian superpower as the first artificial civilization.
With this road map, which reminds us that ancient China thinks in centuries, Beijing wants to leave behind the hundred years of uninterrupted decline that it suffered from the defeat in the opium war of 1842 until Mao's victory over Chang Kai Chek in 1949. Since then, China has not stopped slowly climbing the ranks.
Then, after becoming the world's factory with Deng Xiaoping, it has done so at an accelerated rate. In 2013 it achieved the status of the first commercial power and, since 2017, it wants to be the first technological power on the planet. In fact, it has chosen technical power and, specifically, progress in artificial intelligence (AI), as the tool that gives it the leadership that it now openly disputes with the United States.
That this is so is evidenced by the fact that Washington has decided to put all its efforts into preventing it. There it is, if not, the turn given by the North American technological policy from 2008 onwards. It shows an upward trajectory of belligerence toward China that has been unqualifiedly endorsed by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Remember the structural hostility displayed by the hawks of the Pentagon and the State Department towards the USSR during the cold war.
Jack Sullivan, President Biden's adviser on these issues, explained it in September 2022 at the presentation of the Special Competitive Studies Project. He said that the US was not content to simply maintain an advantage over China in AI and other exponential technologies, but wanted to expand it at any price, because in them lies the geopolitical future of the 21st century.
The US goal is to win, however, the race for strong or general AI before China does. Hence, the Biden Administration maximizes its own capabilities and works to limit those of the enemy with initiatives such as the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative and the Chips and Science Act.
Why is this competition so important? Because China conceives AI in finalist terms and not just instrumental. It does so with a scale design that functionally neutralizes ethical constraints, by subordinating them to the ultimate goal of establishing a perfect AI-cracy. For this you need to reach a strong AI before anyone else.
Thus, it would obtain a competitive advantage based on a machine intelligence capable of substituting the human one and replacing it with another infallible and virtuous one at the same time. An AI from which the moral limitations, ethical ambiguities and analytical errors that accompany the performance of human intelligence would be excluded and, thanks to it, the Confucian ideal of virtue could be materialized.
That is, the ability to decide and, therefore, to direct individual and collective actions under the exclusive guidance of an intelligence that demonstrates its superiority by safeguarding the harmony of what is governed under it. Whether it's someone's life, a specific society or the planet.
The political, economic and military impact that establishing a Confucian AI-cracy would give China would give it a civilizational superiority similar to that which marked the passage from the Stone Age to the Metal Age. In addition, it could do so without losing social control, since China functions as a macro platform of applications and services of a political nature that maximize that control, thanks to multiple AI systems that vigilantly manage the system of incentives and punishments that guarantee order. .
In this way, if China achieved strong AI before anyone else, it could “stand above other nations”, as Xi Jinping proclaims, due to the steps that would provide it with deadlier weapons, more competitive companies and a government capable of guaranteeing full control. social. And all this in a world increasingly stressed by demographic pressure, the scarcity of natural resources, the effects of climate change and the economic transformation produced by automation.
Therefore, the geopolitical priority that China gives to wanting to lead the innovation process that leads to artificial knowledge is understandable. Xi Jinping announced this in 2017 when he stated that he wanted to turn his country into the world's leading AI innovation center by 2030. Since then, multimillion-dollar public investment in AI has been driven by it, which is working at scale and has already placed it in parity with the US according to the Stanford University index.
But, above all, as we saw above, a renewed Confucian mentality that wants China to technologically recover the millennial purpose of the Tianxia: to be a power that centripetally orders everything that is "under heaven". A virtuous power that seeks harmony based on its ability to be infallible and irresistible as an alternative to the government of the world against the United States, which it sees increasingly questioned as a superpower due to the exercise of a centrifugal and disorderly power that only counts on help from the small and dysfunctional group of global democracies.
Entering the 21st century, China shows its willingness to assume planetary hegemony in the Confucian way. It wants to be an artificial civilization where knowledge is not power, but power. A power that would rest on an AI without limits and that would be managed by an elite that would invoke a digital Confucianism, which considers that the greater the intelligence, the greater the knowledge, the greater the power and the greater the success. In short, a vertical and hierarchical AI-cracy, where machines and human beings will coexist without conflicts under a harmonious order administered by the mandarinate of the Chinese Communist Party. The perfect Cyberleviathan. Hobbes resignified by Confucius.
