China and its AI model to achieve world hegemony

China wants to achieve hegemony over the planet by 2050. The date is not arbitrary. It responds to the outcome of a geopolitical design reiterated by Xi Jinping before the bureau of the central committee of the Communist Party. In his speeches he insisted that China would then return to "stand among all the nations of the world."

Something that will be achieved after reaching the "first ranks of innovative countries", throughout the period in which we find ourselves and that goes from 2020 to 2035. Xi Jinping wants China to acquire global primacy and thus end the century of the restoration of its power (1949-2050) with an irresistible technological superiority that consecrates the Asian superpower as the first artificial civilization.

With this road map, which recalls that ancient China thinks in centuries, Beijing wants to leave behind the hundred years of uninterrupted decline it suffered from the defeat in the Opium War of 1842 until Mao's victory over Chang Kai Chek in 1949. Since then, China has not stopped slowly climbing positions.

Then, after becoming the factory of the world with Deng Xiaoping, it has done so in an accelerated way. In 2013 it achieved the status of the first commercial power and, since 2017, it wants to be the first technological power on the planet. In fact, it has chosen technical power and, specifically, the advance in artificial intelligence (AI), as the tool that attributes to it the leadership that now openly disputes the United States.

That this is so is evidenced by the fact that Washington has decided to make every effort to prevent it. There is, if not, the turn given by US technology policy from 2008 onwards. It shows an upward trajectory of belligerence toward China that the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations have unapologetically embraced. He recalls the structural hostility displayed by hawks in the Pentagon and the State Department towards the USSR during the Cold War.

The U.S. goal is to win, however, the race for strong or mainstream AI before China does. Hence, the Biden Administration maximizes its own capabilities and works to limit those of the enemy with initiatives such as the National Artificial Intelligence Initiative and the Chips and Science Act.

Why is this competition so important? Because China conceives AI in finalist terms and not just instrumental. It does so with a scale design that functionally neutralizes ethical conditioning, subordinating them to the ultimate goal of establishing a perfect IA-cracy. To do this, it needs to achieve strong AI before anyone else.

Thus, it would obtain a competitive advantage based on a machinic intelligence capable of replacing the human one and replacing it with another infallible and virtuous at the same time. An AI from which the moral limitations, ethical ambiguities and analytical errors that accompany the performance of human intelligence would be excluded and, thanks to it, the Confucian ideal of virtue could be materialized.

The political, economic and military impact that establishing a Confucian IAcracy would provide China would give it a civilizational superiority similar to that which marked the passage from the stone age to the metal age. Moreover, it could do so without losing social control, since China functions as a macro-platform of applications and services of a political nature that maximize that control, thanks to multiple AI systems that effectively manage the system of incentives and punishments that guarantee order.

In this way, if China reached a strong AI before anyone else, it could "stand above the other nations", as Xi Jinping proclaims, due to the steps that would provide it with more deadly weapons, more competitive companies and a government capable of guaranteeing full social control. And all this in a world increasingly stressed by demographic pressure, the scarcity of natural resources, the effects of climate change and the economic transformation produced by automation.

It is understandable, therefore, the geopolitical priority that China gives to wanting to lead the innovation process that leads to artificial knowledge. Xi Jinping announced this in 2017 when he said he wanted to make his country the world's leading center of AI innovation by 2030. Since then, it has been driven by a multimillion-dollar public investment in AI, which works at scale and which already places it in equal conflict with the US according to the Stanford University index.

But, above all, as we saw above, a renewed Confucian mentality that wants China to technologically recover the millenary purpose of Tianxia: to be a power that orders centripetally everything that is "under heaven". A virtuous power that seeks harmony from its ability to be infallible and irresistible as an alternative to the government of the world against the US, which it sees increasingly questioned as a superpower due to the exercise of a centrifugal and disorderly power that only has the help of the small and dysfunctional group of global democracies.

Entering the twenty-first century, China shows the will to assume planetary hegemony in the Confucian way. It wants to be an artificial civilization where knowledge is not power, but power. A power that would rest on an AI without limits and that would manage an elite that would invoke a digital Confucianism, which considers that the greater intelligence, the greater knowledge, the greater power and greater success. In short, a vertical and hierarchical IA-cracy, where machines and human beings will coexist without conflicts under a harmonious order administered by the mandarinate of the Chinese Communist Party. The perfect Cyberleviathan. Hobbes resignified by Confucius.