Executive Summary
The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has developed a coherent, centralized AI strategy to serve its national ambitions for economic modernization, global influence, and internal governance. The overarching strategy is a composite of overlapping plans, including the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan (NGAIDP), Digital China, and the Cyber Sovereignty doctrine. AI is at the core of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CPC) vision for technological self-reliance and state security.
This brief outlines how the PRC combines industrial policy, ideological oversight, and data-driven central planning to advance AI. China’s current push for AI dominance leverages decades of CPC policy development to produce “indigenous” design collaboration across military, commercial, and academic research. Its plans create digital platforms in commerce, finance, and communications nationwide to collect data and integrate AI, and harness the advantages of its designated “national champions” to efficiently produce computer chips, self-driving electric vehicles, batteries, and rare earth minerals.
Despite the clear advantages of China’s centralized planning and top-down execution in AI development, its layered strategy creates internal contradictions that at times hinder progress. While the CPC retains firm ideological control over the direction and purpose of AI deployment, the actual implementation of policies occurs across a sprawling and often disjointed bureaucratic system. This complexity is not incidental; it is a structural feature of China’s governance model, where overlapping mandates, local experimentation, and interagency competition coexist with national strategies and political doctrines. However, regional managers’ short-term political calculations can trump longer term technological advancement and commercial innovations. Additionally, The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) requires all actors to align AI design with “core socialist values,” which means that AI design, and even the type of raw data collected, is shaped to comply with political sensitivities. Understanding these institutional frictions is essential to grasping both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of China’s AI trajectory.
Key Takeaways
- China’s AI strategy is built and layered atop decades of ideological and institutional planning. From Deng Xiaoping’s reform era to Xi Jinping’s digital governance, AI has been folded into evolving doctrines of modernization, centralization, and techno-political control, rather than developed as a discrete or standalone policy initiative.
- The CPC sees AI as a strategic asset to reinforce, not disrupt, Party dominance. AI is embedded in national governance as both an industrial tool and an ideological instrument, used for surveillance, censorship, and “social governance” purposes that align with core Party interests.
- This brief consolidates, in one place, the full scope of CPC policies guiding AI development. It offers an accessible mapping of national strategies, historical context, and institutional actors, providing a foundation for understanding how AI fits into China’s broader goals of state control, global competitiveness, and innovative government.