China's AI Strategy Is Actually Working
The west keeps scoring china's ai progress using silicon valley's playbook. wrong game, wrong metrics, wrong conclusions.
While we obsess over foundational models and parameter counts, china built something else. an ai deployment machine. Not the prettiest code. Not the most elegant architectures.
But it works. at scale. Today.
Consider facial recognition. Western researchers published the papers. Chinese companies deployed to a billion users. While we debated ethics committees, they iterated through ten product cycles. The technical gap closed not through breakthrough research but through relentless implementation. A thousand small optimisations compound faster than waiting for the perfect algorithm.
The pattern repeats across verticals. Autonomous vehicles in Shenzhen don't match Waymo's sophistication. But they're carrying real passengers, learning from millions of edge cases, improving through deployment rather than simulation. Medical AI in shanghai hospitals lacks our regulatory approvals but processes more patient data in a month than our pilots see in a year.
This isn't about surveillance states or authoritarian efficiency. It's about fundamentally different development philosophy. Silicon valley builds cathedrals - beautiful, architected, years in the making. China builds bazaars - messy, pragmatic, alive with commerce from day one.
Their researchers aren't publishing in nature because they're too busy shipping features. Their models aren't winning benchmarks because they're optimised for inference cost, not accuracy metrics. Their companies aren't raising billion-dollar rounds because the state already wrote the check.
The real innovation happens in deployment infrastructure. While OpenAI perfects GPT, Alibaba connects ai to ten thousand manufacturing lines. While we theorise about AGI alignment, they're aligning supply chains. The future isn't won by who builds the best model. It's won by who builds the best pipeline from model to market.
Western AI strategy assumes technology primacy - build the best tech, markets follow. China assumes market primacy - deploy working tech, excellence follows. both can work. But only one is working at population scale right now.
The uncomfortable truth - our AI’s write better poetry while theirs schedule more deliveries. Guess which matters more for economic transformation.
The race isn't about reaching AGI first. It's about reaching product-market fit a million times over. China's messy, pragmatic, deployment-first approach looks less impressive in research papers. But infrastructure beats innovation when the game is implementation at scale.
They're not trying to win our game. They changed the game.
And their strategy is actually working.