Article URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/10/the-future-made-in-china Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49155940 Points: 32 # Comments: 30
Kai-Fu Lee, the C.E.O. of the artificial-intelligence company 01.AI, lives in a mirrored high-rise in Beijing, near a procession of landmarks that emperors considered the center of the cosmos. Lee takes early meetings at a nearby hotel that could be in any country, except that the room service is delivered by robots painted in the livery of butlers and maids. State propaganda hails these robots as emblems of China’s ascent; in the hallway, most people sidestep them with the kind of indifference usually reserved for a Roomba.
Over breakfast one recent morning, Lee, wearing a white polo shirt and rimless glasses, spoke about the future with an air of sanguine curiosity. He was born in Taiwan in 1961 and built his career by following the moving frontier of opportunity. He got a degree in computer science from Columbia in the eighties and went on to Carnegie Mellon to study the fledgling field of A.I.—which he described back then as a “most promising science” that would be “men’s final step to understand themselves.” He ran speech recognition at Apple, and in 1992 appeared on “Good Morning America” to show off a prototype computer that used voice commands to record the news on a VCR. (The host, Joan Lunden, marvelled, “It’s almost going to be like a friend.”) During a stint at Microsoft, he recalls, he urged Bill Gates to buy an ambitious startup called Google, but Gates declined. Lee later became the head of Google in China.
Lee moved to investing in 2009, and planned to focus on both China and the United States, but eventually he closed his American office. “It’s two different universes now,” he told me. The countries have diverged not only over such long-standing issues as trade, Taiwan, human rights, and espionage but also, increasingly, over the politics of technology. As Lee has noted, the Obama Administration released the federal government’s first major plan for the A.I. age in 2016, but it barely registered: it came out a few days after the “Access Hollywood” tape detonated in the Presidential campaign. When Donald Trump took office, he scrapped the plan and entrusted A.I. strategy largely to Silicon Valley. When China’s government issued its own A.I. plan, soon afterward, it was dense with turgid Communist Party jargon, but it also laid out a vast industrial policy, covering applications ranging from agriculture to policing, that promised “major breakthroughs” by 2025 and “world leading” status by 2030. Lee called it an “all-hands-on-deck approach to national innovation.”
For a long time, China looked west for visions of the future. These days, it favors its own. The Chinese car company BYD recently surpassed Tesla as the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles. A popular clip shows Tesla’s C.E.O., Elon Musk, being asked in 2011 about competition from BYD, which was then known mainly for a boxy, undersized sedan; Musk laughed and said, “Have you seen their car?” Fifteen years later, China has more than a hundred automakers, competing for customers with such extravagant features as in-car karaoke, mechanical foot massagers, and video headlights that can project drive-in movies.
Lee, whose social-media posts have attracted more than fifty million followers, has a striking forecast for the two countries in which he has prospered. In his book “AI Superpowers,” published in 2018, he predicts a “new world order” with “waves of technology that will soon wash over the global economy and tilt the geopolitical landscape toward China.” That kind of prophecy suits the official mood in Beijing, where Xi Jinping, the President and the General Secretary of the Communist Party, calls technology the “main battlefield of international competition” and bluntly asserts that “the East is rising, and the West is declining.”
In July, the Chinese firm Moonshot released an A.I. model that performed comparably to its American competitors, at a fraction of the cost. Microchip stocks plunged, on fears that China will dominate A.I., much as it now dominates hardware. China produces at least seventy per cent of the world’s drones, electric vehicles, lithium-ion batteries, and solar cells. It deploys more industrial robots than the rest of the world combined, and, in medicine, it has surpassed the United States in the number of registered clinical trials. Its shipbuilding capacity is roughly two hundred times that of the U.S., and some observers in Washington worry that American stockpiles of munitions would not match China’s in a war over Taiwan.
Both countries are uneasily preoccupied with their trajectory these days. While the U.S. worries about whether it can continue a century of dominance, China is eager to restore its historical eminence, after two hundred years of what the Party sees as anomalous poverty. Zhou Bo, a retired senior colonel in the People’s Liberation Army who is now a fellow at Tsinghua University, told me, “Common sense says countries rise and fall in cycles.” But Americans, in his view, have lost that historical awareness. “They have been so strong for so long that every American believes, ‘I’m a member of the strongest nation on earth,’ ” he said. The Chinese are no less convinced of their ascendancy. A European diplomat who has attended meetings with Xi and his advisers told me, “They’re feeling like the champions of the world. They think they can contend with anybody.”
A decade ago, few people in Beijing would have predicted that China would challenge the U.S. anytime soon. China’s decades-long economic boom was slowing, and the government’s choke hold on free thought was sending ambitious people abroad. In those days, an American in China who raised the merits of the two countries was likely to have a catechistic exchange. You’d note that China was growing powerful. Your acquaintance would reply, “Not as powerful as America.”
