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    "parsed_content": "Whose AI Will Rule The World?\n As AI changes everything, the Chinese seem more optimistic than the Americans. Why?\n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n \n Bright Woo for Noema Magazine\n \n \n \n \n \n EssayTechnology & the Human \n \n \n \n \n \n By Jacob Dreyer \n \n \n September 10, 2026 \n \nXBlueskyEmailLinkedInFacebook\n \n \n \n Credits\n \n Jacob Dreyer is an editor and contributing writer for Noema based in Shanghai.\n \n\u201cWhat appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy\u2019s resources.\u201c\u2014Nick Land\nSHANGHAI \u2014\u00a0Today, China and the United States are co-creating a powerful new technology that changes how we think, communicate with each other and understand what consciousness itself means. Some compare it to the invention of fire, or electricity. But a more apt analogy might be the invention of writing: a system that both liberates our thoughts \u2014 and constrains them.\nWhen did civilization, as a collective archive of thoughts put down into writing, first begin? Do those beginnings encode certain tendencies into the users of language today, whether those using the language are aware of it or not? Our world has two dominating cultural source codes: one from the West, however construed, and the other that began in Yinxu, Henan, around 3,500 years ago, where the written Chinese language emerged in the form of prophetic oracle bones. Scholars like Yuri Pines have long argued that the ideographic nature of the Chinese script was the primary engine of its cultural continuity.\nTake \u6587, the root word for writing, literature, culture, civilization. The oracle bone inscription was of a person\u2019s body, undergoing a painful ritual transformation of tattooing or scarification. Originally, the word meant \u201cinterlocking patterns.\u201d And that is what the Chinese language and civilization form: a huge mental map of interlocking patterns. The written Chinese language is what makes China, China.\nToday, the dominant mechanism by which information is transmitted in China is transitioning from the Chinese language to digital networks that communicate in binary or qubits. Paradoxically, this algorithmic form of consciousness is deeply compatible with the traditional Chinese civilizational source code. The concept of an individual being part of a larger network of thought and action transitions seamlessly into the digital age. A civilization whose thinking has always been about the optimized, visual juxtaposition of concepts finds its ultimate realization in the neural network.\nLanguage And The Origins Of The Chinese State\nYou Shou (1906\u20131994) was a prominent Chinese archaeologist and master calligrapher. She argued that the oracle bone script (jiaguwen) and the bronze inscriptions (jinwen) were intrinsically linked to the materials that were used to make them: the bones, the human labor, the metal, the climate. The Chinese characters emerged from the Chinese people and the Chinese landscape; the people and the land predated the words, and the words described and sought to control the people and the land, in a literal sense.\u00a0\nYou\u2019s theories linked the development of character stroke structures to the physical tools, labor and materials (bone, bronze, stone) used by ancient peoples: The act of writing was the consummation in and about Yinxu, the place where they were developed, from a hierarchical social structure to the work of the workers who provided the bones and metal in the first place. The evolution of Chinese characters, You wrote, tracks China\u2019s development as a society, with new ways of seeing literally inscribed in the language. Recent examples would be Japanese loan words like zhuyi (\u4e3b\u4e49, \u201cism\u201d) or jingji (\u7ecf\u6d4e, \u201ceconomy\u201d), or new compound words like diannao (\u7535\u8111), which means computer. By analyzing character structures, she traced changes in early Chinese geography, social organization and ancient ritual practices. The words, she thought, were invented as a way to answer questions about the order of the cosmos.\nThe oracle bones were a little like a Ouija board; the person preparing them did not know the outcome in advance. The priest or diviner would pose a question, usually to the high god Di or the ancestors, then apply heat to ox shoulder blades or turtle shells. Shang scribes routinely split a single question for the spirits into positive and negative outcomes: It will rain tomorrow or It will not rain tomorrow. Heated, the bone would crack and the holy man would read a response to his question. Auspicious divine answers, dates and consequences would be recorded on the bones. The Shang had intense self-doubt; they couldn\u2019t go to war or plant crops without performing rituals to check in with God. The priests, surrounded as they were by the stench of blood and bone, asked God: What is going to happen to us?\n \n \n \u201cAnd that is what the Chinese language and civilization form: a huge mental map of interlocking patterns. The written Chinese language is what makes China, China.\u201d \n \n \n \n Facebook\n Twitter\n Email\n \n \n \nAnd yet, much as the story of Adam and Eve is about forbidden knowledge, the Shang didn\u2019t think of God as telling them these things; what they were doing was more like eavesdropping on divine knowledge. They lived in a world where all of human life was enveloped in the safety of ritual. But by using oracle bones to solve trivial, anxious survival puzzles, they accidentally built the infrastructure of the Chinese mind: assigning an unalterable, concept-driven visual symbol to a natural phenomenon. It was an act of cosmic taming. They were bringing the terrifying, unpredictable movements of ancestors, rivers and seasons into a stable, legible linguistic architecture. Like today\u2019s five-year plans, the oracle bones were not economic forecasts; they were magical, state-directed inscriptions designed to conjure a reality into existence.\nThese archaic concepts shape the language of Chinese statecraft today. For example, \u76df or alliance, which is used to describe the European Union and ASEAN, consists of a bowl or vessel (\u76bf) at the bottom topped by the character for bright or clear (\u660e), which originally depicted a window illuminated by the moon or by a sacrificial fire. In ancient times, to seal a political pact, lords dug a pit, slaughtered a sacrificial animal (often a bull or dog), cut off its left ear and caught the blood in a bronze vessel (\u76bf). The lords smeared raw blood on their lips and swore an oath to the gods (\u660e). The \u76df character thus physically encodes the wet, copper flavor of shared blood that bound ancient factions together.\nYinxu was, some say, a city of perhaps 150,000 people, and had no physical walls but was sharply divided by class. The Shang elite lived in a state of ritualistic intoxication. Occupying grand palaces, they spent their days hunting big game on the Henan plains (elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers still roamed the warm, humid landscape); drinking vast quantities of warm, herb-infused wine from heavy bronze jue vessels; and conducting military raids on neighboring tribes. Their entire psychological reality was geared toward validating their lineage through conspicuous feasting and violence.\nShang craftsmen, meanwhile, enjoyed a privileged, middle-tier status, protected by the state because they produced the technology of power. In industrial quarters like Xiaomintun, they operated massive, hyper-coordinated bronze foundries. The vast majority of the population were ordinary peasants whose lives were grindingly hard. They did not live in houses; they lived in pits dug into the earth and covered by rough timber and thatch roofs to shield them from the freezing winters.\u00a0\nAside from bronze, Yinxu\u2019s largest industry was bone tool production. In a single workshop site, archaeologists uncovered millions of discarded animal bones (primarily cattle, pig and deer) that had been systematically carved into arrows, hairpins and awls. The city must have smelled of boiled animal fat, charcoal smoke and raw marrow. When a king died, or when a major palace foundation was laid, hundreds of human beings were systematically executed to serve as structural or spiritual filler. Captured prisoners were bound, decapitated or dismembered by the dozens, their heads buried in neat, geometric rows in the palace plazas to appease the high god Di and the royal ancestors. To keep the world from collapsing, the Shang kings had to unleash torrents of human blood, torch bones with fire and mobilize hundreds of thousands of hands to dig earth and melt bronze.\n \n \n \u201cA civilization whose thinking has always been about the optimized, visual juxtaposition of concepts finds its ultimate realization in the neural network.\u201d \n \n \n \n Facebook\n Twitter\n Email\n \n \n \nI first learned of You Shou while researching the history of the Cultural Revolution in Harbin. She was at the center of a group called the \u201ceight weirdos,\u201d Harbin scholars who were singled out for torment by Red Guards who were trying to eradicate the \u201cfour olds,\u201d (\u56db\u65e7): old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits. The Communist project had to crush scholars like You Shou because her work revealed that the Party was not a radical break from the past, but an unwitting captive of it. The uncanny image of a hierarchical and violent Chinese elite who used semi-mystical techniques to conjure a future into being was too uncomfortable, heresy to the notion of a New China.\nNone of the great ethicists of ancient Chinese culture \u2014 Confucius, Laozi and friends \u2014 lived in Yinxu. All of that came later. But the invention of language was a prerequisite to their work.\u00a0\nThe conclusion might be that today, as the world stumbles terrified into future climate change and cultural decadence, that sometimes, the sacrifices work. The AI being built is not a good in itself; the questions we ask it may be as trivial as the Shang asking the oracle bones what part of the forest was a good place to hunt. But the platform created may birth systems, ideas and thoughts which we cannot currently imagine, in formats that exceed our wildest dreams. That\u2019s what happened to the Shang, anyway.\nThe Scientific Sovereign\nFor the past few months, I\u2019ve been corresponding with Pan Jianwei, China\u2019s quantum computing champion, trying to understand his views on how Chinese science fits into the world and what the significance of quantum computing will be for China\u2019s future. Pan\u2019s adviser, Anton Zeilinger, won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. Working in Zeilinger\u2019s lab, Pan was part of the elite team that achieved the world\u2019s first experimental demonstration of quantum teleportation in 1997. When Zeilinger asked Pan what his long-term dream was, Pan famously replied: \u201cTo build a world-class quantum physics lab in China.\u201d By 2016, Pan had become the mastermind behind Micius, a satellite that enables quantum communication across vast distances. Pan is largely seen as one of China\u2019s most likely candidates for the Nobel. But China has bigger fish to fry.\nQuantum computing replaces the traditional language by which computers organize information with a new way, our understanding of which originated with Albert Einstein\u2019s theories. While classical computers rely on binary logic \u2014 processing information through rigid transistors as individual bits that must be strictly a 0 or a 1 \u2014 quantum computing uses qubits. Qubits are particles that exist based on two seemingly contradictory concepts: superposition and entanglement. Superposition means a qubit can exist in multiple states simultaneously \u2014 a complex, fluid blend of both 0 and 1 at the same time. Entanglement is a unique connection where qubits become linked, allowing a change in one to instantly dictate the state of another.\nBy manipulating these fluid probabilities rather than processing data step by step, a quantum computer can map out massive, complex solution spaces all at once. In this sense, quantum computing is to computing what Chinese characters are to the Roman alphabet: Both apparently fulfill the same function, but the way in which they do so is radically different.\n \n \n \u201cAI may birth systems, ideas and thoughts which we cannot currently imagine, in formats that exceed our wildest dreams. That\u2019s what happened to the Shang, anyway.\u201d \n \n \n \n Facebook\n Twitter\n Email\n \n \n \nIn recent months, the White House has been tweeting about quantum supremacy alongside the usual half-baked AI-generated images; in the 2025 National Security Strategy, quantum is mentioned, along with AI and biotech, as a field that the U.S. must not cede to rivals like China. It\u2019s seen as important because if China breaks through on quantum computing, it\u2019ll have a way around traditional public-key encryption and be able to read all of America\u2019s secrets.\n \n \nAlthough he is increasingly prominent in China\u2019s political ecosystem, Pan is not a member of the Communist Party. His allegiance lies with the Jiusan Society, one of China\u2019s eight legally sanctioned political parties. Rather than being elevated to an administrative role like, for example, Chen Jining, the environmental scientist turned Shanghai party secretary, Pan continues to manage his quantum lab in Hefei. In a China increasingly more interested in social development through advanced computation rather than human resources, that position might be equally powerful \u2014 and a lot more fun. Instead of wasting time navigating the standard, hyper-competitive and granular grant application cycles that consume Western researchers, Pan just gets large sums of money transferred into his jurisdiction. Under Xi Jinping\u2019s mandate for absolute \u201csci-tech self-reliance,\u201d Pan\u2019s operational authority means that if he identifies a critical bottleneck, the state quickly funnels funding and manpower directly to him.\u00a0\nHis work and influence extend far beyond university walls to the commercial monetization of his discoveries. QuantumCTek was founded by his academic research team, for example. In a massive vote of confidence, China Telecom acquired a 23% stake in the firm to build out unhackable national communications infrastructure based directly on Pan\u2019s proprietary hardware. In this sense, Pan exemplifies a new class in China: politically untouchable, trusted enough to receive a blank check for funding and proactively supported in commercialization by state-owned entities.\nIn an email to me, Pan shared five pages of thoughts of his own and other quantum scientists in China. In short, he said, China\u2019s government believes that technological change creates economic change creates political change. It also believes that the world is on the brink of a technological revolution driven by AI, quantum computing, biotech, new energy sources, materials science and other fields. In the tradition of the Shang, the Chinese are ready to make any sacrifice, as long as the new language that is being created is one they understand.\u00a0\nAs Hong Ding, a Chinese Academy of Sciences academician, put it in an email to me:\nBasic science \u2026 expands, revises or deepens our understanding of the laws and mechanisms themselves. It asks a question whose answer we genuinely do not know, and \u2014 this is the part that never stops surprising me \u2014 the answer, pursued for its own sake, later reshapes the world.\nA New Golden Age?\nMichael Kratsios is an alumnus of arguably the two most forward-looking incubators of science policy in the world today: Thiel Capital and Tsinghua University. Today, he is Trump\u2019s science adviser. In his report on reforming American science, which he presents as being the biggest revision to American science policy since Vannevar Bush\u2019s postwar \u201cScience: The Endless Frontier,\u201d we see one of the most concrete and detailed indications yet that the Trump administration is adopting Chinese mechanisms, inspired by a close and meticulous study of what makes the Chinese model successful.\u00a0\nKratsios likely wouldn\u2019t admit it, but his report represents a fundamental shift away from the traditional, decentralized Western model of free academic inquiry toward a centralized, mission-driven, state-backed system that mirrors Beijing\u2019s tech-governance model. For example, echoing a long-time Thiel idea, the report fiercely critiques traditional, consensus-driven Western academic peer-review boards as sluggish and conservative; by definition, peer review means that new ideas must be checked by the gatekeepers of the old. Kratsios proposes a \u201cbroader menu of selection mechanisms,\u201d specifically introducing \u201cgolden tickets\u201d that empower individual, state-appointed reviewers to unilaterally fund highly ambitious, high-risk proposals without consensus approval. That\u2019s exactly what high-flyer scientists like Pan Jianwei have: They\u2019ve earned the trust of the system and are treated as partners in a venture capital fund.\nThe centerpieces of the Kratsios report are the \u201cGenesis Mission\u201d and a newly funded National Science Foundation initiative called \u201cX-Labs.\u201d These are explicitly structured as \u201cManhattan Project-style\u201d efforts designed to build highly focused, multidisciplinary independent research organizations that apply AI directly to accelerated scientific productivity, totally bypassing legacy academic boundaries. Kratsios is effectively recreating the structure of China\u2019s National Laboratories and State Key Laboratories (such as Pan Jianwei\u2019s quantum facilities in Hefei or Fudan University\u2019s Xuemin Institute, itself modeled on the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton).\nBut even if the U.S. adopts many Chinese methods, it lacks the critical ingredient of Chinese science success: Chinese people. Lots of them. Effectively, Kratsios is proposing to make up for this gap by letting AI, a \u201ccountry of geniuses in a datacenter\u201d as Dario Amodei once put it, do for America what millions of Chinese STEM graduates do for China.\nDemocratic critics (like Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California) have explicitly denounced this policy, noting that the administration \u201chas been systematically destroying the U.S. science enterprise.\u201d Dan Wang and Julian Gewirtz criticized Trump policies in The New York Times for emulating China, particularly the proactive way that the Pentagon is seeking to supervise Anthropic, which they allege is a direct copy of China\u2019s state capitalism.\n \n \n \u201cIn the tradition of the Shang, the Chinese are ready to make any sacrifice, as long as the new language that is being created is one they understand.\u201d \n \n \n \n Facebook\n Twitter\n Email\n \n \n \nBeijing doesn\u2019t nationalize tech firms; it integrates the state into private enterprises. But to be fair to Kratsios, China\u2019s science structure is clearly working, and the degree of integration between policymakers, fundamental research (in fields like materials science or chemistry), burgeoning fields (like batteries) and global domination of supply chains, can feel new. The Thiel wing of the Trump administration is seeking truth from facts. The questions for Americans are: Is the overall strategy of rivaling Chinese scale effects via AI likely to work? And: As we pursue these processes, how will our own society change? Are we comfortable with that?\nIn 2014, Thiel wrote in his tech-founder bible \u201cZero to One\u201d that China is a society characterized by definite pessimism: The Chinese believe that tragic disaster lurks, so they make comprehensive plans to avoid it. In contrast, American society of the Vannevar Bush era (the 1950s) was one of definite optimism: America made plans because it believed that the future was bright. These outlooks don\u2019t neatly map onto countries today (if they ever did), but if anything, as AI changes everything, the Chinese seem more optimistic than the Americans.\nThe Silicon Valley radicals adjacent to Thiel \u2014 and therefore the White House \u2014 have been making provocative remarks about science for some time. For example, Curtis Yarvin recently asserted that NASA was founded by Nazis who\u2019d gone to Alabama. Yarvin\u2019s claim rests entirely on the historical reality of Operation Paperclip, the American mission to relocate top German scientists and engineers to the U.S. during the final stages of World War II. China today resembles the U.S. then: an industrial superpower that senses it is not quite as sophisticated as the decadent power it wishes to replace. From this vantage point, Kratsios (a former instructor at Tsinghua who knows what the Chinese are thinking as well as any American government official) doesn\u2019t want the U.S. to be eclipsed.\u00a0\nThe Chinese AI policy that American policymakers like Kratsios are inspired by proceeds with great clarity: There is a list of problems and AI is being used systematically to solve those problems. The Chinese assume that private companies and new technologies that depend on government support and the participation and consent of the population should serve that population. And as with the rest of their products, what happens in China doesn\u2019t stay in China, but is exported to whoever will take it, which increasingly means the Global South.\nWhen AI Runs The World\nNot long ago, I was invited to Nanning, the capital of Guangxi Province, a three-hour train ride from Shenzhen but culturally a backwater. The Chinese five-year plans allocate different tasks to different regions: Big cities like Beijing and Shanghai are for capital-heavy innovation and research, which Guangxi is positioned to disseminate to Southeast Asia. Inside the China-ASEAN Artificial Intelligence Application Cooperation Center, a digital display advertised different AI applications: agriculture, logistics, public safety, manufacturing, local finance, healthcare and education. China invites leaders from Vietnam, Laos and Indonesia to this place and says: Look, we figured out how to use AI to make our farmers richer, our factories better, our streets safer. We can do that for you too.\nNanning itself felt like a display of what Chinese style development could bring. Technically, this is the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, with ethnic minorities such as the Zhuang dominating. Signs on government buildings are bilingual. Nanning\u2019s nominal GDP per capita sits at nearly $10,000, double Vietnam\u2019s and nearly five times higher than in Laos or Cambodia. And the infrastructure, public safety and general atmosphere is excellent. So the vibe of the AI center was very much showing off: All this could be yours. Sign on the dotted line.\nThe Chinese government\u2019s AI+ plan focuses on applications in sectors that the government has a role in and often in places where the population can\u2019t afford what others can (high-quality education, healthcare, etc.). AI is understood as a tool, or perhaps a commodity like electricity, and the Chinese plan is to use that tool to solve Chinese problems \u2014 reducing the cost of electricity, safeguarding the country\u2019s food supply, providing national healthcare via AI-driven medical solutions. China\u2019s civilization, patriarchal and authoritarian though it may be, has a clear goal in mind: make Chinese people safer, richer, stronger and, ultimately, more Chinese.\n \n \n \u201cAI is understood as a tool, or perhaps a commodity like electricity, and the Chinese plan is to use that tool to solve Chinese problems.\u201d \n \n \n \n Facebook\n Twitter\n Email\n \n \n \nAt the recent World AI Conference in Shanghai, I saw an ancient Chinese scroll painting underneath a fancy screen made by CamScanner. The proximity of the pair seemed to underline the message that Chinese tech companies are expected to serve Chinese civilizational needs \u2014 as defined by the government. Even when this feels like an afterthought, it\u2019s politically important for Chinese AI companies to symbolically pledge allegiance to their country\u2019s heritage.\nThat\u2019s them; American civilization is different. Many aspects of the Chinese model would not fly in America. Surveillance, for example. Look at the backlash to Flock. A government that makes decisions for individuals without asking for their permission is, generally, an unwelcome idea in the States.\nBut Americans need not adopt any of China\u2019s specific solutions to ask the important questions: What is AI actually doing for Americans? Is the general population in control, or are the Silicon Valley oligarchs? And which system \u2014\u00a0China\u2019s state-directed planning or America\u2019s obviously eroded democratic capitalism \u2014 will be more universally acceptable over the long term?\u00a0",
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