I grew up and did my undergrad in China, and I’m currently doing a PhD in the US. I generally agree with the observations in the article, though I’m not sure whether I have a good model of “normal” Chinese people.
I want to add two points:
The influence of Marxism among educated and/or young people in China. Ironically, lots of people (I’m not sure about the fraction, but it feels very large to me; anti-capitalist content is usually clickbait on social media) don’t apply the same cynicism to the politics courses taught in school. It’s probably because Marxism’s description of self-interested capitalism is compatible and mutually self-reinforcing with “Dark World thinking.” Pop-Marxism is often integrated into the nationalism framework, where the CCP is seen as a beacon of socialism compared to the capitalist-controlled West.
The specific phenomenon of AI safety discourse in China. The comments and reactions I’ve seen about AI-safety incidents or statements from the US are usually mocking, seeing them as some clumsy attempt at PR / sci-fi theater marketing. This seems to match the Chinese cynicism described in the post, but I’m not sure whether it’s unique to China, because from my experience on American social media and in some personal conversations, the attitude seems pretty common in the US too, at least before the recent leap in AI capabilities. It seems to me that many Chinese people have a mindset where the Nationalism-Marxism framework is the Law of Everything, and AI is just another “there’s nothing new under the sun” productivity tool. That’s why AI is mainly seen as a stake in and battleground for China-US competition or class struggle, while AI x-risk is not even wrong within this framework, because it can’t be described in the Physical Language of labor-value theory or Chinese Great Rejuvenation, etc. I’m not sure whether rationalism can compete with this local ideology as another system of thinking.
An example that reflects both points 1 and 2 is the perception of Anthropic in China. Anthropic is widely demonized as an evil, closed, anti-China company whose purpose is Amodei’s personal dominance or AI cult, where AI safety is a laughable sci-fi justification used to sanction China or Chinese AI labs. A viral article from a Chinese AI professional (I don’t want to be more explicit because I personally know the author) expressed this viewpoint as an obvious truth, with the claim that Western labs like Anthropic will build a “Cyberpunk 2077”-style future while Chinese labs will build a communist, open-source AI utopia.
I grew up and did my undergrad in China, and I’m currently doing a PhD in the US. I generally agree with the observations in the article, though I’m not sure whether I have a good model of “normal” Chinese people.
I want to add two points:
The influence of Marxism among educated and/or young people in China. Ironically, lots of people (I’m not sure about the fraction, but it feels very large to me; anti-capitalist content is usually clickbait on social media) don’t apply the same cynicism to the politics courses taught in school. It’s probably because Marxism’s description of self-interested capitalism is compatible and mutually self-reinforcing with “Dark World thinking.” Pop-Marxism is often integrated into the nationalism framework, where the CCP is seen as a beacon of socialism compared to the capitalist-controlled West.
The specific phenomenon of AI safety discourse in China. The comments and reactions I’ve seen about AI-safety incidents or statements from the US are usually mocking, seeing them as some clumsy attempt at PR / sci-fi theater marketing. This seems to match the Chinese cynicism described in the post, but I’m not sure whether it’s unique to China, because from my experience on American social media and in some personal conversations, the attitude seems pretty common in the US too, at least before the recent leap in AI capabilities. It seems to me that many Chinese people have a mindset where the Nationalism-Marxism framework is the Law of Everything, and AI is just another “there’s nothing new under the sun” productivity tool. That’s why AI is mainly seen as a stake in and battleground for China-US competition or class struggle, while AI x-risk is not even wrong within this framework, because it can’t be described in the Physical Language of labor-value theory or Chinese Great Rejuvenation, etc. I’m not sure whether rationalism can compete with this local ideology as another system of thinking.
An example that reflects both points 1 and 2 is the perception of Anthropic in China. Anthropic is widely demonized as an evil, closed, anti-China company whose purpose is Amodei’s personal dominance or AI cult, where AI safety is a laughable sci-fi justification used to sanction China or Chinese AI labs. A viral article from a Chinese AI professional (I don’t want to be more explicit because I personally know the author) expressed this viewpoint as an obvious truth, with the claim that Western labs like Anthropic will build a “Cyberpunk 2077”-style future while Chinese labs will build a communist, open-source AI utopia.