The Challenger and the Outsider: Why are China and Russia Interested in Promoting AI Development?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies have produced huge impacts on our lives thanks to the breakthroughs in data, algorithms, and computing power. The rapid technological changes have set the stage for the global digital race, unleashing a flurry of AI nationalism for the governments to rein in new technologies. Among them are two global contenders, China and Russia, which formulated AI policy and mobilized massive resources to gain a prominent role in the global tech race (Wright 2019). Why would the political leaders of these two countries want to pursue such ambitions with a global vision? Understanding AI development strategies in these countries are of interest to us due to the implications. Unlike other pioneers in the AI field, such as the US and UK, China and Russia have similarities in their non-democratic governance structures, affecting how they develop and apply AI technologies in the domestic and global arena. The necessity of maintaining political power at home tends to create a higher incentive for the leaders in these countries to channel the AI technologies towards more such areas as surveillance, monitoring, and military dominance than other civilian purposes. Careful analysis of national strategies indicates that different political motives coupled with economic advantages led to two divergent strategies on AI development in China and Russia. While China aims to maintain the party power by promoting an AI-powered competitive economy and emphasizing social control, Russia wishes to develop its AI capacity to harness further its military might and disinformation efforts that help to keep its competitive advantage vis-à-vis the West.
Chinese strategy for AI development
In recent years, AI has become a top priority for Chinese leaders who aim to take the global lead in becoming a “science and technology superpower” (Lee 2018). In this regard, the government issued “Next Generation AI Development Plan,” a national strategy adopted in 2017 that lays out the government`s intention to promote the wide-ranging aspects of AI development, including the research and development, industrialization, skills acquisition, and setting standards and regulations (Webster et al. 2017). Under the “innovation-driven” strategy, the Chinese government aimed to possess the AI industry in civilian and military spheres worth over $150 billion by 2030, surpassing the US in such capacity (Kania 2017). The policy orientation of the Chinese government for AI development appears to rely on an important logic: coexistence of the government role as guiding player with an intense dynamism of private sector breakthroughs. Unlike the free-market approach to AI policy that characterizes government policy in the US, China has heavily promoted a state-backed policy of “indigenous innovation” to develop AI technologies through various support mechanisms that have taken multiple forms ranging from basic research to commercialization (Feigenbaum 2017). The government`s support policy for AI development seems to be closely linked to four important elements that drive the AI industry: hardware chips, data input for AI algorithms, fundamental research for algorithm development, and the AI ecosystem for commercial purposes.
The central government indeed played an important role, but much of the momentum behind AI in China has been driven by private-sector tech firms thanks to their access to big data and government support for the commercialization of AI in potential markets (Duranton et al. 2018). The tech giants Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent and start-ups have already been on the cutting edge of AI technologies such as image and voice recognition, which translated into new products, including self-driving cars and automated personal assistants. In 2018, the Chinese government announced that Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, iFlytek, and SenseTime are officially the country’s “AI champions,” meaning that they have acted flexibly within a regulatory environment vis-a-vis foreign competitors provided that they cooperate with the government (Jing and Dai 2017)
Although China’s aim to grab competitive advantage as an early mover and increase new frontiers for economic growth remains to be an important motif to spur the AI development, the leadership’s political rationale should not be ignored from the observation. Put it differently, the political leadership appears to be reasoning that competitive economy and state security that new AI revolution drive will help maintain Communist Party’s control in the country (Hoffman 2021). Indeed, China’s goal to reach AI supremacy aims to increase economic growth through the digital economy and innovative industries. The rhetoric and performance of continuous economic growth have de facto replaced the Marxist ideology of CCP, becoming an important means of its political legitimacy to sustain political stability. The political leaders clearly understand that maintaining the current pace of economic growth in the confrontational era characterized by both digital disruptions and geopolitical tensions is likely to exhaust in the near future with the current economic model of low-wage manufacturing and dependency on foreign technologies. For this reason, the government launched “Made in China 2025”, a state-led industrial policy aimed at updating its manufacturing base and achieving self-reliance on technology by developing high-tech industries (McBride and Andrew 2019). The government plans to make AI development the backbone of the technology-fueled digital economy that adds high value-added growth. To this very end, Xi Jinping repeatedly mentioned in his speech at the 19th Party Congress in 2017 the importance of integrating the digital economy with a brick-and-mortar economy for economic growth. Estimations support the economic vision of the leaders: according to the PwC report, AI will bring around $7 trillion to the Chinese economy by 2030, an increase of 26.1% of its overall GDP (Rao and Verweij 2018). At the same time, AI technologies can improve productivity levels of the Chinese economy by optimizing production and reducing overcapacity while modernizing other sectors, including agriculture.
The other important rationale that drives China’s ambition to develop AI capacity, as the language of the strategy indicates, appears to stem from the Party’s concerns for domestic political control (Hoffman 2018). The gist of the issue, as Walton puts it, is that “political control is dependent on economic growth and economic growth requires the modernization of information technologies, which in turn, have the potential to undermine political control” (Walton 2001). Domestic political control is a matter of state security for CCP. An important aspect of state security that prioritizes the protection of CCP’s power is so-called the policy of social management policy in which the “government manages its relationship with society to ensure that it remains in power” (Hoffman 2015). Such concerns emerged after the leadership change in 2012 that brought Xi Jinping to power. The new leadership perceived that CCP was incapable of responding to rapid socio-economic changes that the new digital age precipitated. The political leadership is clever enough to grasp the possible political costs such changes might pose. If left alone and unaddressed, the civic dissatisfaction over the issues outside of the Party’s purview can lead to a high level of political dissent and accompanying demands for political opening. To avoid the Tiananmen scenario, CCP has started to heavily use sophisticated technologies, transforming itself into “tech-augmented” authoritarianism. As a part of such a system, the government introduced the so-called Social Credit System that aims to re-establish its control over every aspect of personal lives through mass surveillance and influence people’s behavior. As a clear manifestation of “digital Leninism,” Social Credit System generates ratings for individuals based on their behavior, the content of their posts, financial records and gives them different grades (Chin and Wong 2016). The social credit system heavily relies on information sharing among agencies along with surveillance networks, including speech and face recognition and credit records. To enable a mass surveillance system through AI technologies, Chinese authorities planned to install around 600 million cameras in every corner of the country (Wall Street Journal 2015). As a whole, advances in AI and big data have helped the CCP uphold and expand power by improving its capacity to manage relations with overall society.
Russian national strategy for AI development
The ongoing race in AI development marked a new reckoning in technological progress for another country, Russia, that has long contended for global superiority. Although Russia is already late to the global race, the government has started the debate on AI development at the national level by facilitating the mobilization of financial and human resources across the technical, industrial and academic realms. Acknowledging contemporary economic and security implications of AI, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that AI is “humanity`s future” and the leader in the field of AI would become “the master of the world” (Markotkin and Chernenko 2020). For this, the government adopted the “National Strategy for the Development of Artificial Intelligence” in 2019 to foster Russia`s technological catch-up with other advanced countries through 2030. The document came under the broader national program of “Digital Economy.” A 20-page strategy outlines the Russian concept of AI, guides government and private sector activity, and promotes the potential development of AI technologies in key areas that Russia sees comparative advantage (Sukhankin 2019).
The Russian interest in unfolding AI development strategy in fact did not start as a government-led initiative but as individual demands within different bodies in the government. To this matter of national importance, the state became an important player with its investment mechanisms in promoting AI research, nurturing human talent, and building infrastructure and regulatory systems (Gaaze 2019). In contrast to China, the state involvement in Russia in AI policymaking has distinct features that align with its personalist political structure. Instead of handling the strategy to institutional actors, the political leaders outsourced the whole process of drafting the strategies, developing AI technology, and conducting related projects to a handful of politically connected individuals at the top of Russian state corporations such as Sberbank, Rosatom, and Rostekh (Petrelle et al. 2021). The realities of the state-dominated policy landscape and investment environment in Russia have revealed another important feature of AI development: a noticeably weak involvement of private actors in the AI ecosystem compared to its competitors. Currently, Russia has merely 217 start-ups working on AI compared to thousands in the US and China.
The analysis of the official policy suggests an important insight into the thinking of Russia’s leaders: the harnessing of homegrown AI technologies can help fulfill an objective of diversifying the resource-dependent economy while setting it free from the dependency on technology imports (Nocetti 2020). However, apart from economic considerations, as seen in the Chinese case, the potential application of AI technologies in Russia is closely connected to the political logic that keeps the leaders in power. In the authoritarian context of Russia, the political leaders tend to see the necessity of AI nationalism through the prism of power politics: they want to mobilize strategic resources towards AI technologies to gain military superiority in the international arena.
The objective of Russian leaders to promote AI technologies is directly connected military industry complex. The industry has a clear advantage of taking the lead for Russian AI development (Horowitz et.al 2018). First, the industry has always been a crucial pioneer behind the technological advancement of Russia during and after the Soviet Union. Also, the increasing Russian investment in introducing the latest AI technology to the armed forces informs the political leaders` view that AI is being militarized and behind in this race. The investment in military AI seems to be based on Kremlin`s reasoning that in the fierce race over AI domination, Russia has only comparative advantage over the West in two domains: conventional and defense technologies and high-impact, low-cost asymmetric warfare (Polyakova 2018). The open-access information allows us to conclude this strategy: the Russian defense sector managed to monopolize the research and applications of AI for the market.
In fact, high-level representatives at the Ministry of Defense have occasionally hinted that the Russian army already possesses several AI-enabled autonomous weapons, including unmanned aerial vehicles and underwater robots (Bendett 2017). Putin himself acknowledged that the Russian military already developed Poseidon, the unmanned autonomous vehicle at a deep-sea level that can carry nuclear weapons, traveling on a global range. An important player in introducing AI technology to the production of new weapons systems is Rostec, a giant state-owned military conglomerate (Petrella et al., 2021). As an important actor, Rostec was involved in formulating a roadmap for 5G technologies, blockchain, and industrial internet. The corporation’s vast arms already extended to use AI for promoting its own civilian and military products. For the civilian AI, Rostec bought a 12.5 percent share in NtechLab, a company that develops FindFace facial recognition technology through its subsidiary, Yota Holding (Kozlov 2019). In military fields, several subsidiaries of Rostec are actively working on developing new AI-based weapons systems. For instance, Kalashnikov developed a combat technology based on neural networks that can identify targets and make appropriate decisions (Smith 2017). Various types of autonomous aerial vehicles developed by the Russian military were vigorously tested in the Syrian civil conflict from 2016 onwards (Sukhankin 2017).
Apart from economic rationale, advancing applications of AI in the military is important for the political regime in at least two ways: the technological superiority in the army is a means to promote Russia`s global superpower status, and a strong military represents a national prestige that the political leaders can use to spur the populist rhetoric. Russia is the world’s second-largest arms exporter after the US, the fact that the politicians, including the president, manipulate as a part of the rhetoric of national greatness. Such populist rhetoric of “great power fighting against the external enemies” already became a new discourse that feeds the legitimacy of the rotten regime of President Putin, who stayed in power for two decades without reorganizing the country’s oil-dependent economy (Kolesnikov 2020). Recently, however, the political leaders started to get convinced that the current condition of the military does not live up to that rhetoric. Thus, they showed an interest in AI technologies as a part of their campaign to catch up on a defense modernization on par with other great powers, the US and China.
Conclusion
The piece raises important questions about the rationale behind AI strategies in China and Russia. The analysis indicates that the Chinese government approaches the AI development policy by designing a unique policy for data collection and creating an innovation ecosystem in which strong top-down state support promotes bottom-up private initiatives. The policy behind AI development seems to advance the political motives of the party leaders regarding the transition to a knowledge-based competitive economy. In contrast, the state-led policy of AI development in Russia reveals that drafting and implementing AI policy was outsourced to a handful of important state-owned companies with a close affinity with the president. Unlike China, the Russian leaders seem to comprehend the regressive nature of their capabilities and thus aim to gain a comparative advantage in AI technologies by focusing on AI-powered military weaponry.
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