China Builds AI as a State Stage

🇨🇳 China Builds AI as a State Stage

RMIT professor Haiqing Yu in Made in China Journal describes the 'state builds the stage — enterprises perform' model: pillars: energy, computing, chips, talent, licensing. Since 2023, the 'war of a hundred models' has been underway, from which champions like Z.AI/Zhipu are emerging.

🌍 AI is being built as state infrastructure: government procurement guarantees demand for domestic chips, energy surplus — cheap 'AI factories,' licenses select models, and Huawei is building the Ascend/CANN stack as an alternative to CUDA. This reduces the impact of US restrictions.

👤 The analysis is free and provides a reading map for the news: Chinese LLM releases are a 'performance' on a stage where the rules are set by government procurement, licenses, and standards. This allows for a more critical assessment of the hype around Chinese models and Western statements.

Source 1: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2026/09/23/chinas-approach-to-ai-infrastructural-statecraft-managed-pluralism/ Source 2: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826102