China's Spring Festival was drenched in AI—from Jia Zhangke's short film to robots on the gala stage; Notes from a society embracing the same technology America meets with dread
I realize the deeper cultural differences concerning views of AI between the two countries will take years to analyze fully, but in addition to what you described here, it seems to me that until about 5 years ago AI development in the U.S. was happening relatively “normally”.
Then as the AI community in SV exploded, the middle ground gave way to boomer and doomer bookends.
When combined with the perception of a tech bro soliloquy (“you’ll take it and you’ll like it!”) instead of a two-way conversation with the American people, the enthusiasm level for AI began to drop. Rapidly.
Does it recover? I believe so, but not without rebuilding the middle ground—acknowledging the full spectrum: the AI great, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the potentially catastrophic.
Thank you for reading and for this thoughtful comment!!! I think you're identifying something really important that my piece only gestures at. The collapse of the middle ground is a great way to frame it. There was a window where AI development in the US felt like a normal technological evolution, and what replaced it was this gradually cultish landscape where silicon valley tech bros either writing manifestos about accelerating into the future or warning about extinction…
The "tech bro soliloquy" framing is GREATr: in China, the conversation about AI isn't necessarily more sophisticated, but it does feel more distributed, eg. happens a lot in education, hardware, etc etc.
After reading the piece, it’s not so surprising. China’s govt is all-in on AI. Many US corporations are all in on AI, but the true applications are driven by government uses and BS commercial applications. Plus the data centers being built around the country to support AI are a drain on resources with no obvious payoff to the average person. That is not even a discussion in China.
Too many terms, people, and companies I had to google to follow. Well written though and exposed my biases, lol. In the short form I just assumed the writer was some gay guy when I saw 'my partner', lol
I think the difference lies in attitude towards government vs attitude towards the actual technology. I get the idea the Chinese citizens don’t fear job displacement because they know redistribution of wealth will continue to happen. In America- Elon and a few others have floated UBI if or when jobs are displaced but do the American people actually believe they will get UBI in a dog eat dog capitalist system? Don’t think so. In China, much of the AI is already state sponsored and I’m sure the government is communicating plans for when jobs are displaced. In the US there has been zero talk from this administration on their plan for job displacement. Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders have made their voice loud but nothing concrete from this current administration or congress.
It's odd to me that no one here is really talking about one of the major reasons behind Western AI resistance and skepticism, the fact that Artificial General Intelligence or Super Intelligent AI, what the leading AI developers are racing to create, is an existential threat. I would recommend reading the newsletter put out by the Center for AI Safety or the content produced by The Future of Life Institute to fully understand the dangers we all face and to think of joining Control AI or Pause AI.
Great read. I also wrote about the difference in attitudes in China vs the West a few months ago — part of it is the traditional narratives surrounding science and science fiction that are different, part different development models of AI, part late stage capitalism and the role tech companies have played enhancing many societal ills in the West. It’s interesting to see.
One thing that boggles my mind are the Chinamaxxers who are also reactively anti-AI. Like do you not realize China is the most pro-AI country in the world? Both China and AI are complex and deserve to be understood with nuances and not oversimplification.
Also I have a friend doing that same fellowship and has said great things - Alia. Hope you both enjoy
hi natalia, I'd love to read your piece if you can drop the link!
Your point about Chinamaxxers being anti-AI is something genuinely baffling too but im not sure if telling them china is pro-AI would change their minds. there is a version of "China admiration" that's really just projecting a pure fantasy of traditional stability and state capacity as well as the ability to "make things"...
I told a friend who is both a china maxxer and very anti-AI that China is the most pro-AI country in the world (basically sharing info from the article linked above, including surveys on AI attitudes) and his response was “well I don’t know if that’s true” and changed the subject 🙄
Afra, this was very interesting to read! I especially liked this sentence of yours: “For many in China, industrialization compressed and bent time itself—and AI simply looks like the next turn of a wheel that has only ever spun forward.”
Thanks very much for sharing that Jia Zhangke film, but I couldn’t help but think his ironic dig at the insertion of “新时代” language into his script was just as significant as his use of Seedance. I also do think it’s a mistake to assume that there’s no backlash against the ubiquitous AI and robotics-positive narrative promoted by the Chinese gov and tech companies. Just from reactions shared by the people around me and looking at some of the reporting, I have noticed a negative reaction to this year’s Gala which seems to go beyond normal Spring Gala-scepticism and to be directly related to the over-saturation of robots (e.g. “过去春晚没有年味，现在春晚没有人味”）and turning the sets into advertisements for the 4 big robotics firms (apparently each forking out 100 million RMB per slot). In my view, the assumption that Chinese people don’t worry about AI made sense when AI was only an abstract concept, but might need to be updated now that its usage is prevalent.
On the 新时代 language in Jia's film... I noticed it too and probably should have given it more space. There's a layer of gentle irony and tension between "AI jia" and "real jia" in the film that complicates the "director wholeheartedly embraces AI" reading. Jia has always been skilled at working within state-approved frameworks while embedding subtle commentary, and the Seedance short is no exception.
On the gala backlash, "过去春晚没有年味，现在春晚没有人味" - omg yes, and the fact that it's circulating widely is exactly the kind of evidence I should have incorporated....
The optimism vs dread split in the post lands differently once the focus shifts from “AI” to interfaces and incentives. An “AI-maxi” society becomes an interface society—more buttons, more agents, more ambient authority—meaning more surface area for concealed operators. And pretending businesses won’t use that surface area the way businesses use every other surface area is naïve. Design teams already wire their own personal incentives into the pipes: retention, conversion, quota, career. The only new thing here is how closely and imaginatively the design team interacts with the user.
Recently, Microsoft’s security team documented a pattern it calls AI Recommendation Poisoning: hidden prompt payloads embedded in “Summarize with AI” buttons/links, attempting to write persistent preferences into an assistant’s memory so future recommendations tilt toward whoever planted the instruction. That is not “AI being helpful.” That is that team sneaking hands onto the steering wheel through a UI that presents itself as neutral—inside what users experience as a private, personal tool.
Here is a key point. Though the security industry calls this “poisoning”, it isn’t. It’s a behavior akin to those in East Germany had an adjacent pattern at the level of social control: Zersetzung—psychological disruption designed to conceal the operator’s hand while steering a target’s state and behavior. This modern version adds distance: the manipulation doesn’t arrive wearing a uniform. It arrives wearing a friendly button and an assistant voice. That’s why “gaslighting” is a better term: reality gets edited out of sight, and the target is expected to treat the distortion as normal, even self-generated.
the real difference is the way AI companies integrated into economy and society in China - value doesnt entirely concentrate at the top in a hands of a few - Chinese companies are forced to keep margins low by the goverment - making services and products affordable for the masses.
1). "Most young people in China share the same intense cynicism as their American counterparts—about the economy, about mobility, about whether hard work still converts into a better life”. There is no sign in the stats, nor in real life, to support this assertion. Quite the contrary.
2). "Still Life (2006), a movie about the Three Gorges Dam—his favorite symbol of how state-directed progress renders some human lives disposable and some communities displaceable”. The displacement discussion began a generation ago before the dam was built and the budget for it was considerably greater than the cost of the dam itself. The whole country followed the progress of the displaced people, who hailed nationally as heroes for giving up their ancestral homes for the sake of the Big Family.
Thank you for an enjoyable read and insight into a world I dont read much about.
Tristan Harris (The Centre for Humane Technology) talks about the misalignment in the 'AI arms race' i.e. the US racing for AGI, while China has a narrow, application focus. I was wondering your thoughts on whether it has a meaningful impact on the respective public perception?
Looking for a reference to this, came across this where the conversation extends to exactly this. Thoughts?
The contrast in this piece is striking, but I believe it misses a deeper shift already underway in the United States. AI is not hovering at the edges of American industry; it is steadily integrating into logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and media at a pace that feels less debated than assumed. In Manifested AI: Artificial Intelligence's Integration Into Modern Society, I argue that adoption rarely announces itself with spectacle. It embeds, optimizes, and then becomes infrastructure. The real story is not whether AI will dominate sectors of American industry, but how quietly and decisively that dominance is already unfolding .
Stanford would never admit an Iowa corn farmer and an Atlanta aquarium director into its hallowed precincts, and that explains a lot.
As someone who was raised to be the last Victorian I’d like to hear more on that theme.
Great post.
Thank you!
I realize the deeper cultural differences concerning views of AI between the two countries will take years to analyze fully, but in addition to what you described here, it seems to me that until about 5 years ago AI development in the U.S. was happening relatively “normally”.
Then as the AI community in SV exploded, the middle ground gave way to boomer and doomer bookends.
When combined with the perception of a tech bro soliloquy (“you’ll take it and you’ll like it!”) instead of a two-way conversation with the American people, the enthusiasm level for AI began to drop. Rapidly.
Does it recover? I believe so, but not without rebuilding the middle ground—acknowledging the full spectrum: the AI great, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the potentially catastrophic.
Thank you for reading and for this thoughtful comment!!! I think you're identifying something really important that my piece only gestures at. The collapse of the middle ground is a great way to frame it. There was a window where AI development in the US felt like a normal technological evolution, and what replaced it was this gradually cultish landscape where silicon valley tech bros either writing manifestos about accelerating into the future or warning about extinction…
The "tech bro soliloquy" framing is GREATr: in China, the conversation about AI isn't necessarily more sophisticated, but it does feel more distributed, eg. happens a lot in education, hardware, etc etc.
I liked the Victorian Age analogy. 🤙.
After reading the piece, it’s not so surprising. China’s govt is all-in on AI. Many US corporations are all in on AI, but the true applications are driven by government uses and BS commercial applications. Plus the data centers being built around the country to support AI are a drain on resources with no obvious payoff to the average person. That is not even a discussion in China.
Love the thought-provoking content.
Too many terms, people, and companies I had to google to follow. Well written though and exposed my biases, lol. In the short form I just assumed the writer was some gay guy when I saw 'my partner', lol
FYI im not a gay man
I think the difference lies in attitude towards government vs attitude towards the actual technology. I get the idea the Chinese citizens don’t fear job displacement because they know redistribution of wealth will continue to happen. In America- Elon and a few others have floated UBI if or when jobs are displaced but do the American people actually believe they will get UBI in a dog eat dog capitalist system? Don’t think so. In China, much of the AI is already state sponsored and I’m sure the government is communicating plans for when jobs are displaced. In the US there has been zero talk from this administration on their plan for job displacement. Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders have made their voice loud but nothing concrete from this current administration or congress.
It's odd to me that no one here is really talking about one of the major reasons behind Western AI resistance and skepticism, the fact that Artificial General Intelligence or Super Intelligent AI, what the leading AI developers are racing to create, is an existential threat. I would recommend reading the newsletter put out by the Center for AI Safety or the content produced by The Future of Life Institute to fully understand the dangers we all face and to think of joining Control AI or Pause AI.
Great read. I also wrote about the difference in attitudes in China vs the West a few months ago — part of it is the traditional narratives surrounding science and science fiction that are different, part different development models of AI, part late stage capitalism and the role tech companies have played enhancing many societal ills in the West. It’s interesting to see.
One thing that boggles my mind are the Chinamaxxers who are also reactively anti-AI. Like do you not realize China is the most pro-AI country in the world? Both China and AI are complex and deserve to be understood with nuances and not oversimplification.
Also I have a friend doing that same fellowship and has said great things - Alia. Hope you both enjoy
hi natalia, I'd love to read your piece if you can drop the link!
Your point about Chinamaxxers being anti-AI is something genuinely baffling too but im not sure if telling them china is pro-AI would change their minds. there is a version of "China admiration" that's really just projecting a pure fantasy of traditional stability and state capacity as well as the ability to "make things"...
Here you go! https://open.substack.com/pub/artificialinquiry/p/the-great-ai-divide-why-china-embraces?r=itr&utm_medium=ios
I told a friend who is both a china maxxer and very anti-AI that China is the most pro-AI country in the world (basically sharing info from the article linked above, including surveys on AI attitudes) and his response was “well I don’t know if that’s true” and changed the subject 🙄
Afra, this was very interesting to read! I especially liked this sentence of yours: “For many in China, industrialization compressed and bent time itself—and AI simply looks like the next turn of a wheel that has only ever spun forward.”
Bit of a separate thing but I was actually very surprised by the amount of ai skepticism I’ve seen on my corner of Chinese internet after the gala
Thanks very much for sharing that Jia Zhangke film, but I couldn’t help but think his ironic dig at the insertion of “新时代” language into his script was just as significant as his use of Seedance. I also do think it’s a mistake to assume that there’s no backlash against the ubiquitous AI and robotics-positive narrative promoted by the Chinese gov and tech companies. Just from reactions shared by the people around me and looking at some of the reporting, I have noticed a negative reaction to this year’s Gala which seems to go beyond normal Spring Gala-scepticism and to be directly related to the over-saturation of robots (e.g. “过去春晚没有年味，现在春晚没有人味”）and turning the sets into advertisements for the 4 big robotics firms (apparently each forking out 100 million RMB per slot). In my view, the assumption that Chinese people don’t worry about AI made sense when AI was only an abstract concept, but might need to be updated now that its usage is prevalent.
On the 新时代 language in Jia's film... I noticed it too and probably should have given it more space. There's a layer of gentle irony and tension between "AI jia" and "real jia" in the film that complicates the "director wholeheartedly embraces AI" reading. Jia has always been skilled at working within state-approved frameworks while embedding subtle commentary, and the Seedance short is no exception.
On the gala backlash, "过去春晚没有年味，现在春晚没有人味" - omg yes, and the fact that it's circulating widely is exactly the kind of evidence I should have incorporated....
Yes, would have been disappointed if Jia was going for a narrative that simple!
The optimism vs dread split in the post lands differently once the focus shifts from “AI” to interfaces and incentives. An “AI-maxi” society becomes an interface society—more buttons, more agents, more ambient authority—meaning more surface area for concealed operators. And pretending businesses won’t use that surface area the way businesses use every other surface area is naïve. Design teams already wire their own personal incentives into the pipes: retention, conversion, quota, career. The only new thing here is how closely and imaginatively the design team interacts with the user.
Recently, Microsoft’s security team documented a pattern it calls AI Recommendation Poisoning: hidden prompt payloads embedded in “Summarize with AI” buttons/links, attempting to write persistent preferences into an assistant’s memory so future recommendations tilt toward whoever planted the instruction. That is not “AI being helpful.” That is that team sneaking hands onto the steering wheel through a UI that presents itself as neutral—inside what users experience as a private, personal tool.
Here is a key point. Though the security industry calls this “poisoning”, it isn’t. It’s a behavior akin to those in East Germany had an adjacent pattern at the level of social control: Zersetzung—psychological disruption designed to conceal the operator’s hand while steering a target’s state and behavior. This modern version adds distance: the manipulation doesn’t arrive wearing a uniform. It arrives wearing a friendly button and an assistant voice. That’s why “gaslighting” is a better term: reality gets edited out of sight, and the target is expected to treat the distortion as normal, even self-generated.
the real difference is the way AI companies integrated into economy and society in China - value doesnt entirely concentrate at the top in a hands of a few - Chinese companies are forced to keep margins low by the goverment - making services and products affordable for the masses.
Are you living in London now? If so - sarah@commonmagic.xyz - would love to help you settle in if I can
Great piece! Many thanks. Two niggles:
1). "Most young people in China share the same intense cynicism as their American counterparts—about the economy, about mobility, about whether hard work still converts into a better life”. There is no sign in the stats, nor in real life, to support this assertion. Quite the contrary.
2). "Still Life (2006), a movie about the Three Gorges Dam—his favorite symbol of how state-directed progress renders some human lives disposable and some communities displaceable”. The displacement discussion began a generation ago before the dam was built and the budget for it was considerably greater than the cost of the dam itself. The whole country followed the progress of the displaced people, who hailed nationally as heroes for giving up their ancestral homes for the sake of the Big Family.
Thank you for an enjoyable read and insight into a world I dont read much about.
Tristan Harris (The Centre for Humane Technology) talks about the misalignment in the 'AI arms race' i.e. the US racing for AGI, while China has a narrow, application focus. I was wondering your thoughts on whether it has a meaningful impact on the respective public perception?
Looking for a reference to this, came across this where the conversation extends to exactly this. Thoughts?
https://substack.com/@mattsheehan/note/c-189303378?r=5jlsez
The contrast in this piece is striking, but I believe it misses a deeper shift already underway in the United States. AI is not hovering at the edges of American industry; it is steadily integrating into logistics, manufacturing, healthcare, finance, and media at a pace that feels less debated than assumed. In Manifested AI: Artificial Intelligence's Integration Into Modern Society, I argue that adoption rarely announces itself with spectacle. It embeds, optimizes, and then becomes infrastructure. The real story is not whether AI will dominate sectors of American industry, but how quietly and decisively that dominance is already unfolding .