WHAT CHINA’S AI APPROACH MEANS FOR ASIA
China is showing it can pursue both frontier and diffusion progress at the same time. For Asia, this may prove more consequential than who tops the next model leaderboard.
Chinese AI may arrive not through a download button but on a factory floor: embedded in a robot, machine-vision system or production line bought from a Chinese supplier.
This is already starting to happen in Southeast Asia. In Singapore, autonomous vehicles from WeRide and Pony.ai are already carrying passengers. In Vietnam, Yingshen Intelligence announced it had signed agreement to deploy AI robots in footwear factories. And in Malaysia, ZTE is among the technology partners behind an AI-enabled warehouse in Selangor.
For emerging economies, the attraction may be less about whether a Chinese model beats the best American system by a few points on a benchmark and more about whether it performs the required task at one-tenth or one-hundredth of the cost.
The two powers are now competing on different axes. Washington built its technology wall around technologies whose scarcity conferred power; China is responding by trying to make increasingly capable AI abundant.
And abundance is its own kind of leverage. It is harder to sanction and even harder to reverse. America’s technology wall has not fallen but China’s AI strategy is spreading faster than the wall can expand.
Diana Choyleva is founder and chief economist of Enodo Economics and a keynote speaker on global macroeconomics, China, and US-China strategic competition. She is also a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.