Why China cannot dominate the AI scene (for now)

At a recent CEO forum hosted by a university in Ipoh, a gentleman representing Universal Music regionally spoke with wide-eyed wonder about the rapid strides China is making in cutting-edge technology. To illustrate his point, he used the example of beggary in Beijing that has apparently gone hi-tech. Today, street beggars in China use smart phones and QR codes to solicit alms and store them in e-wallets.

Notwithstanding the irony that his example makes a failure of the state a symbol of China’s technological progress, there is, as with all things in life, the flipside. A Business Today report from mid-2018 revealed these ‘hip’ beggars were on the payroll of tech start-ups that paid them per scan through the Alibaba or Tencent e-wallets. These start-ups then packaged the collected user data, sold it illegally to marketers, who in turn bombarded those scanning the code with unsolicited advertising.

Given its uncanny knack for mass marketing Western technologies at a fraction of the cost, it comes as no surprise that China has commoditised beggary. You could even argue that the worldwide smart phone boom owes more than a doffed hat to Chinese business acumen.

The general reaction to compromised consumer privacy probably draws little more than mere shrugs in a society where the state’s Skynet public surveillance system rewards and punishes citizens based on ‘social credit’ scores designed by the government.

Yet it does make you wonder how China will fare in the age of artificial intelligence. If we believe the gentleman from the Universal Music, this age will belong to the East with China at the vanguard. I do not share his enthusiasm.

That China seeks to militarily and economically supplant the Western world order is plain to see, and its Belt and Road Initiative is the centrepiece of this strategy. To my mind, however, China cannot eclipse the West on either count in the next five decades. There are two broad reasons for that, reasons that have ensured American dominance of global affairs since World War II. They are information and integrity.

First, information. Few truisms are more valid in the era of social media than”he who controls information, controls the world.” Since the dawn of the 20th century, Western powers have exercised almost total control over the global media narrative.

Finding regional allies who are not looking for handouts in return for support may be Beijing’s biggest challenge in the coming years

Who is a terrorist? Who is a freedom fighter? What is democracy? What is tyranny? These terms have been moulded into global pop-culture exclusively by the West.

The heavyweights of traditional media, i.e. the BBC, CNN, Fox News, Reuters, APand AFP etc hold great sway over global opinion, and are singularly Western in their worldview. Ditto, the most popular social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Such is the scale of their pre-eminence and agenda-setting abilities that Russia’s RT and China’s CGTN networks have been forced to adopt Western stylistics in a desperate attempt to push an alternative global narrative that does not demonise them. Naturally, this has limited their impact and reach.

Additionally, the West does not merely own the most potent channels of mass communication. It also holds the most influential craftsmen and messages.

Advertising and entertainment, specifically, have proven to be outstanding tools for steering the global conversation. Both Hollywood and advertising industry giants, the WPP and Omnicom groups, have successfully crafted a ‘global’ culture and lingo that mirrors America.

That said, inheriting the global lingua franca, English, was a huge advantage for America. Once the sun finally set on the sprawling British Empire near the mid-20th century, the process of swapping ‘masters’ required very little cultural restructuring. All the US had to do was ‘Americanize’ English and sell it to a global audience in awe of its newfound superpower status. The potency of a universal language cannot be underestimated, and for all its investments in Mandarin learning centres around the world, China will never have that.

Next, a quagmire of China’s own making: integrity. From Latin America to Africa and South Asia, developing states are awakening to the realisation that ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ has suckered them into borrowing more than they could ever hope to repay, and as a result given China an unwanted buy-in into national policies.

The issue here is part perception and part fact: China has failed to separate business from politics. As a result, the Belt and Road Initiative that promises win-win partnerships is seen as an extension of China’s hegemonic desires in Asia where port building sets the stage for naval installations.

The Huawei episode is a textbook example where Western dominance of mass media and Beijing’s own strategic faux-pas have together shut out the telecom giant from Western markets in the 5G mobile network space for fears of spying and sabotage.

Even as Huawei has repeatedly and furiously pleaded its complete independence from the Communist Party, provisions in the Chinese law that mandate unconditional cooperation with the state in any manner it sees fit, have greatly hurt its ability to fight back in the courtroom and the court of public opinion.

Likewise, China cannot rely on fellow Asian technology powers, Japan and South Korea, to support its ‘principled’ stance against the West due to outstanding territorial issues and/or lingering historical grievances. Perhaps this may be Beijing’s biggest challenge in the coming years: finding regional allies who are not looking for handouts in return for support.

Consequently, burdened with the deep stain of intellectual property theft and a technology sector largely insulated from Western competition, China may compete well in the age of AI, but to suggest it will define it is fantastical.

Moreover, with another global recession looming and China’s alarming levels of public and private debt expected to burst its growth bubble in the near future, the country will have far greater problems to tackle than staying at the frontiers of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

The writer is an Ipoh-based journalist