Today, however, China has the means, motive and opportunity to commit the equivalent of technological murder. When it comes to the mobilisation of the whole-of-society resources needed to develop and deploy AI to maximum effect, it may be just as rash to bet against China.
The data highlights the trends. In AI publications and patents, China leads. By 2023, China accounted for 22.6 per cent of all citations, compared with 20.9 per cent from Europe and 13 per cent from the US, according to Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025. As of 2023, China also accounted for 69.7 per cent of all AI patents. True, the US maintains a strong lead in the top 100 most cited publications (50 vs 34 in 2023) but its share has been steadily declining.
The US also outdoes China in top AI research talent — but the gap is narrowing. According to a report from the US Council of Economic Advisers, 59 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers worked in the US in 2019, compared with 11 per cent in China. But by 2022 that ratio was 42 per cent to 28 per cent.
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long-term advantage often comes down to how widely and deeply technologies spread across society. And China is in a good position to win that race (although murder might be pushing it a bit!).
Education is another tell. Major Chinese universities are implementing AI literacy programmes in their curricula, embedding skills proactively before the labour market demands them. The Ministry of Education has also announced plans to integrate AI training for children of all school ages. I’m not sure “engineering state” fully captures China’s relationship with new technologies, but decades of infrastructure building and top-down co-ordination have made the system unusually effective at pushing large-scale adoption, often with far less social resistance than you would see elsewhere. The use at scale, naturally, allows for faster iterative improvements.