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 has insisted that China will then “rise among all the nations of the world”. Something he will achieve after reaching the “top ranks of innovative countries” throughout the period we are in, which runs from 2020 to 2035. Xi Jinping wants China to acquire global primacy and put an end, in this way , in 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 roadmap, which reminds us that millennial China thinks in centuries, Beijing wants to leave behind the hundred years of uninterrupted decline that it suffered from the defeat in the Opium War of 1842 until the victory of Mao over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Since then, China has continued to climb slowly. Then, by becoming the factory of the world under Deng Xiaoping, it has done so in an accelerated manner. In 2013 it achieved the status of first commercial power and, since 2017, it wants to be the first technological power on the planet. In fact, he has chosen technical power and, specifically, advances in artificial intelligence (AI), as the tool that gives him the leadership he is now openly contesting in the United States.

That this is the case is evidenced by the fact that Washington has decided to do everything in its power to prevent it. There is, however, the turn that American technology policy has taken from 2008 onwards. It shows an upward trajectory of belligerence toward China that has been unabashedly embraced by the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. It recalls the structural hostility deployed by the hawks of the Pentagon and the State Department towards the USSR during the Cold War. It was explained in September 2022 by Jack Sullivan, adviser to President Biden on these issues, during the presentation of the Special Competitive Studies Project. He said that the US was not content to maintain a simple advantage over China in AI and other exponential technologies, but wanted to expand it at any cost, because here lies the geopolitical future of the 21st century. The American goal is to somehow win the race to achieve strong or general AI before China does. That is why the Biden Administration is maximizing its own capabilities and working 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 of AI in finalist terms and not just instrumental ones. It does so with a scale design that functionally neutralizes ethical conditioning by subordinating them to the ultimate goal of establishing a perfect AI-cracy. That’s why you need to get a strong AI before anyone else. Thus, it would obtain a competitive advantage based on a machine intelligence capable of replacing the human one and replacing it with another one that is both 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 materialize. That is, the ability to decide and, therefore, to direct individual and collective actions under the exclusive guidance of an intelligence that demonstrates its superiority by safeguarding the harmony of what is governed under it. Whether it’s someone’s life, a specific society or the planet.

The political, economic and military impact that establishing a Confucian AI-cracy would provide to China would grant it a civilizational superiority similar to that which marked the transition from the Stone Age to the Metal Age. Moreover, it could do so without losing social control, as China functions as a macro-platform of political applications and services that maximize that control, thanks to multiple AI systems that effectively manage and monitor the AI ​​system. incentives and punishments that guarantee order. In this way, if China achieves a strong AI before anyone else, it could “rise above other nations”, as Xi Jinping proclaims, because of the steps that would provide it with more deadly weapons, more competitive companies and a government capable of guarantee 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 therefore understandable the geopolitical priority that China gives to wanting to lead the innovation process that leads to artificial knowledge. It was announced by Xi Jinping in 2017 when he stated that he wanted to make the country the world’s leading center of AI innovation by 2030. Since then, he has been pushing for a multibillion-dollar public investment in AI, which works at scale and places it already in equal contention 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 millennial purpose of Tianxia: to be a power that centripetally orders everything that is “under the sky”. A virtuous power that seeks harmony from its ability to be infallible and irresistible as an alternative to the government of the world in front of the USA, which it sees increasingly questioned as a superpower, due to the exercise of a centrifugal and disordered power, which only counts on the help of the small and dysfunctional group of global democracies.

Entering the 21st 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 be managed by an elite that would invoke a digital Confucianism, which believes that the more intelligence, the more knowledge, the more power and the more success. Finally, a vertical and hierarchical AI-cracy, where machines and human beings will coexist without conflict under a harmonious order administered by the Chinese Communist Party leadership. The perfect Cyberleviathan. Hobbes resigned by Confucius.