CHINA WATCHAI Governance Is not Just Top-Down in China, Research Finds
Political scientist Xuechen Chen said traditional Chinese values and market driven factors have also driven moves to regulate generative AI platforms.
China-watchers arguing that Beijing’s artificial intelligence controls are dependent on its authoritarian government are peddling a “stereotypical narrative,” according to new research.
Xuechen Chen, associate professor in politics and international relations at Northeastern University in London, has co-written a paper that explores how traditional Chinese values and commercial interests have also played a part in self-regulatory guardrails on AI being introduced.
The argument is made in a peer-reviewed paper, “State, society, and market: Interpreting the norms and dynamics of China’s AI governance,” published by the Computer Law & Security Review.
The prevailing view of President Xi Jinping and the Chinese Community Party’s grip on the running of China, where dissent and anti-government views are heavily censored, has left many Beijing observers convinced that technological oversight in the country is top-down.
But Chen said it was a “stereotypical narrative” to argue that all safeguards are handed down by the state. Such a view, she positioned, fails to recognize the impact Chinese society and cultural norms are having on technological giants such as TikTok owner ByteDance and chatbot insurgent DeepSeek.
“What we wanted to do is demonstrate that China’s AI governance, and digital governance more broadly, is not like what people imagine — a top-down, state-driven system where the national government says you should do that, and then you just do it,” said Chen.
“It’s actually not like that because in this whole governance process, there exist a wide range of different stakeholders, including obviously the state, but also the private sectors and then more recently, and I think more importantly, society.”
Chen described each of these elements — the state, private sector and society — as stakeholders in the governance debate. “They collaborate and then they co-produce these norms and regulatory mechanisms,” she added.
According to a study by Tech Buzz China and Unique Research, 23 of the 100 largest AI products worldwide by annual recurring revenue are made by Chinese developers, with the majority of them focused on overseas markets. The four largest Chinese firms — Glority, Plaud, ByteDance and Zuoyebang — together generated a combined $447 million.
That income remains well behind the biggest players in the U.S., with developers OpenAI and Anthropic making around $17 billion and $7 billion in estimated annual recurring revenue, respectively.
China does not have ratified AI legislation, like the European Union’s AI Act, but follows a more American model of market-led regulation, Chen said.
