Abstract
In July 2017, China’s State Council released the country’s strategy for developing artificial intelligence (AI), entitled ‘New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan’ (新一代人工智能发展规划). This strategy outlined China’s aims to become a world leader in AI by 2030, to monetise AI into a trillion-yuan ($150 billion) industry, and to emerge as the driving force in defining ethical norms and standards for AI. Several reports have analysed specific aspects of China’s AI policies or have assessed the country’s technical capabilities. Instead, in this article, we focus on the socio-political background and policy debates that are shaping China’s AI strategy. In particular, we analyse the main strategic areas in which China is investing in AI and the concurrent ethical debates that are delimiting its use. By focusing on the policy backdrop, we seek to provide a more comprehensive and critical understanding of China’s AI policy by bringing together debates and analyses of a wide array of policy documents.
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Notes
- 1.
In the rest of this article, we shall use ‘China’ or ‘Chinese’ to refer to the political, regulatory, and governance approach decided by the Chinese national government concerning the development and use of AI capabilities.
- 2.
- 3.
It should be noted that, although MIST has been tasked with coordinating the AIDP, it was the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) that released the guidance for the implementing the first step of the AIDP.
- 4.
To accompany the three steps outlined earlier, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) provides documents to flesh out these aims. The first of these, ‘Three-Year Action Plan for Promoting Development of a New Generation Artificial Intelligence Industry (2018–2020)’, has already been released.
- 5.
This term refers to ‘an actor, which lags behind its competitors in terms of development, coming up with a radical innovation that will allow it to overtake its rivals’ (Brezis et al. 1993)
- 6.
- 7.
The Chinese text (社会建设) directly translates to ‘society/community’ and ‘build/construction’.
- 8.
It is worth highlighting, however, that the Chinese are more than double the world average, and ranked first, when it comes to answering the question “whether the country is going in the right direction”, with 94% of the respondents in agreement.
- 9.
The word ‘counterterrorism’ started to be used after 9/11, with the phrase ‘cultural integration’ favoured before this (“Devastating Blows” 2005).
- 10.
The Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence (CAAI) is the only state-level science and technology organization in the field of artificial intelligence under the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
- 11.
As a practical example of this, the Court of Justice of the European Union gave judgment in Rīgas Case (2017) that has been used in defining what is meant by ‘legitimate interest.’
- 12.
This is not to imply that the West is not interested in using AI for population health management purposes, or that China is not interested in using AI for personalised health purposes. China is, for example, also developing an integrated data platform for research into precision medicine (Zhang et al. 2018). We simply mean to highlight that the order of priority between these two goals seems to differ.
- 13.
The challenges section outlines some concrete benefits of implementing AI, illustrating some perceived gains to China. A separate (though more technological than ethical) point substantiated by the article is there is a lot of medical data which could potentially be beneficial, but the data are spread out among hospitals, not used for research, and largely unstructured.
- 14.
Note that the emphasis on individual wellbeing must also be contextualised culturally.
- 15.
For arguments on the universality of human rights coming from within cultural perspectives, see J. Chan (1999) on Confucianism and human rights.
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Roberts, H., Cowls, J., Morley, J., Taddeo, M., Wang, V., Floridi, L. (2021). The Chinese Approach to Artificial Intelligence: An Analysis of Policy, Ethics, and Regulation. In: Floridi, L. (eds) Ethics, Governance, and Policies in Artificial Intelligence. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 144. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81907-1_5
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