Chinese Tech Isn’t the Enemy
On a recent tour of an enormous, impressive set of artificial-intelligence labs in Beijing, I saw a scene straight out of Silicon Valley: Bright 20-something Chinese researchers with hipster glasses and pink streaked hair sat at row after row of open tables, headphones in, working hard. Projects ranged from innocuous applications like the AI-enabled bicycle share Mobike or the online education portal VIPKid, to ones the U.S. government may find worrying, like Face ++, which is widely believed to be the world’s most powerful facial-recognition software. It can be used to sort photos, but the Chinese security services also use it to ensure they can find any potential “troublemakers” on any street corner in Beijing.
After years of being relatively naive about China’s “all of society” push to catch up and dominate key technology sectors, in its waning days, the Pentagon’s Silicon Valley warning about Chinese tech investments in the U.S., and President Donald Trump then taking up a steady anti-China drumbeat.
