that it seems like China is saying, "Hey, we're not like America when it comes to AI. We're going to be open-weight, open-source. We're invested in trying to have multilateral agreement about frameworking. And you know, we care about making sure that humans are always in control as opposed to, you know, this AGI narrative that you see a lot in Silicon Valley."
Welcome to China Decode. I'm Alice Han.
In today's episode of China Decode, we're discussing China's aims for more AI diplomacy around the world. Chinese mathematicians win a prestigious international award. And Amy Lyons, aka Blondie in China, shares the latest in Chinese food and hospitality trends. That's all coming up. But first, let's do a very quick check-in with how the markets are starting the week in China. On Monday, markets saw gains with the Shanghai Composite and the CSI 300 both up 1.15% and the Shenzhen Component up 2.7%.
Chinese memory chip maker CXMT soared 466% on its Shanghai STAR Market debut Monday, instantly becoming China's most valuable listed company at roughly 3.3 trillion yuan — that is nearly 500 billion US dollars. All right, let's get right into it. At a recent speech at the World AI Conference in Shanghai, President Xi Jinping unveiled his vision for the future of AI led by China. He focused on the importance of free open-source AI models and training, as well as a need to open up developing countries to Chinese AI models. Now, these developing countries might be left behind by the expensive US systems like OpenAI and Anthropic. The strategy of targeting the Global South could be China's secret strategy and weapon in becoming the global leader in AI technology. All right, James, I thought that Xi's speech was a must-read. This is such an important speech from President Xi. He doesn't make them often, but when he does, you have to listen. At this AI conference, he basically delivered this speech in which he said that China needs to be a leader, particularly in the open-source models, and that the Global South has a role in being part of that ecosystem. I sent this speech to many of my friends, I have to admit, in Silicon Valley, because I really believe that this speech alone says a lot about China's AI strategy. And oftentimes in closed systems, it really pays to go to the source of what the leadership is thinking. And here we're getting a very good clue into how Xi and the leadership are thinking about AI. How are you seeing this play out in China? And is it as politicized as it seems to be in the US?
I would just like to concur with what you said about the importance of this event. This speech by Xi Jinping at the AI conference really was vital, and if you ask me, it's partly to do with the open-source question that you mentioned, but it's much bigger than that. Here we have China's new plan for artificial intelligence and disseminating artificial intelligence around the world. And to me, this illuminates a crucial part of China's even bigger plan to create a new world order. Or maybe not create a new world order, but guide, you know, certain technologies and certain trends towards the creation of a new world order. That might be a more accurate way of putting it. And in a nutshell, my sense of this plan is that it is to appeal to the Global South. The Global South, of course, has, you know, about 130 countries in it. It's by far the biggest part of the world, and as you mentioned, Alice, Chinese AI is largely open-source, almost exclusively open-source, so it can be downloaded by anyone anywhere in the world and purposed for their own particular needs. This is a big contrast, as you've also mentioned, with most of the US models, which are closed-source. And that means that, you know, as I say, the diffusion of Chinese AI into the Global South is growing far, far quicker than that of the American models. And the other thing, of course, is that Chinese AI models are much, much cheaper to use. Typically they cost about a tenth of the cost of the US models per million output tokens, and that means that this is diffusing throughout the Global South, developing countries all over the world. And I would say China's overall plan is to use technology, to use finance, building infrastructure for countries in the developing world, and then through these services that China gives to the developing world, China wants to bind these countries to it politically and use their agency to counterbalance the West. And also to write new rules — some of these rules could be rules in AI, standards for technology, and other rules as well. So I see in this conference, which was held with Xi Jinping as the keynote speaker, I see a much bigger plan developing. Do you think I'm overegging it, or do you think this is actually part of the picture?
No, I think you and I are in agreement, and I actually pulled out a couple of quotes that I think were the real highlights from his speech. These boil down to, I think, three main areas. Number one, he talks about the importance of open source, right? So in this speech he talks about seizing this rare historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration, and sharing. And then the second point that I want to raise is that he does talk about the importance of AI governance and regulation, both at a domestic level but at a global multilateral level. And here I believe that he is trying to fill in the gap or the lacuna left by the US and some of these other G7 players that are left behind in the AI race. And he says in his speech, "We should put in laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems to strengthen the line of security and ensure that AI is always under human control. And we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others." And again, I think this is a veiled reference to the US, which obviously with its frontier models is quite a bit ahead of the rest of the world. And I almost feel that a lot of the technology strategy that China has, especially in AI, is about, to your point, James, creating the antithesis to the US model. So whatever the US model is doing, I think there is a veiled reference to it being capitalistic, hegemonic, unilateral, and China wants to make it the opposite, right? It wants to make it affordable for many, open to all, and something that can be multilaterally governed and controlled. And then the third point is your point about the Global South, and that is what he calls extensive international cooperation and help with the Global South countries with capacity building to bridge the AI and digital divides. And here he's referencing the, you know, programs — the 5,000 or so programs in AI training and seminar initiatives, as well as some of these other institutions like WAICO that they've started in the last month or so. And putting that all together, it seems like China is saying, "Hey, we're not like America when it comes to AI. We're going to be open-weight, open-source. We're invested in trying to have multilateral agreement about frameworking. And you know, we care about making sure that humans are always in control as opposed to, you know, this AGI narrative that you see a lot in Silicon Valley." Whether or not he can deliver on that, or China can deliver on all this, remains to be seen, because my next question to you, James, would be: do you buy this argument that we're seeing now in Western media that there is pressure being put on Chinese companies, potentially by the state or maybe by their shareholders, to not disclose the weights in open-weight models for fear that that would be exposing their IP? It wouldn't be good for maintaining and holding on to shareholder value. You know, obviously we have seen some stories come out recently that both ByteDance and Alibaba are gating some of the models. So for instance, ByteDance has this hybrid strategy where Seedance and Seedream, which are its visual AI platforms, are closed, but other parts of the models are open-weight, and likewise for Alibaba. So maybe we end up with this hybrid system where the cutting-edge open-weight models are closed, but the rest remains widely available at a huge discount. Obviously I don't have an answer to this, but from the speech alone, my sense is that that would not be smart, and I think that Beijing and maybe the private companies agree that right now the modus operandi for China to have success is to be as open as possible so that as many people want to download their weights and then, you know, fine-tune on-prem, basically on their own hardware. Maybe I'm wrong here. I'm not looking at the big picture, but that is my sense, and that is why I think the speech is so important for setting China's AI policy.
I couldn't agree more, Alice. I remember the time I was in Beijing, actually, when the internet was sort of really kind of going mainstream — late '90s, 2000s — and at that time China was very concerned about the fact that the US effectively ruled the internet, and still does to this day. You know, it's the big US companies, the big multi-trillion-dollar companies that effectively dominate the internet right now, apart from inside China itself. And so China doesn't want to miss the boat. It doesn't want the US to win AI as well. And in fact, it wants to win AI so that in 20 years' time, whoever is doing this version of this podcast will be talking about the fact that China won AI. And that's what this whole plan is all about. And I think the political nature of the plan comes over really clearly when you see how the training that you mentioned is organized. So China's going to be training thousands of people, and the focus is going to be on the Global South. The training is going to be on how to use Chinese open-weight models. And there are going to be six major regional AI centers that are set up within regional groupings so that the training will be delivered through the auspices of these regional groupings. And the regional groupings are the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. These are all forums in which China is either a major force or the leading light. And so we can see that China is getting behind this strategy in a very major way. And I think it's true to say that WAICO, which is the World AI Cooperation Organization, which is the body that held the meeting that Xi Jinping gave his speech at, it's an intergovernmental body which is headquartered in Shanghai and led by China. It's currently got 29 members, including Brazil, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, and it aims to roughly double in size. So this is China's political land grab to get behind AI and to disseminate it into the Global South and then to set the rules of AI globally. So this couldn't be more important. It is a massive moment, I think, in technological governance and China's influence spreading around the world. So yeah, I mean, it's going to be interesting to see how it turns out. Personally, I would expect the US to have some kind of comeback, some kind of alternative plan. But let's see what happens. The last thing I'd mention is that although we said at the beginning the US has mostly closed-source models, it is beginning to move into open source as well. Nvidia has a couple of open-source models now, and we all know that Nvidia is a very powerful company. So as I always say whenever we talk about AI, this is a race. It has not got a winner so far. We shouldn't count out the US. It's vastly impressive and powerful in these areas.
I always feel, James, that it's a competition in which the two sides are running very different kinds of races. Related to this is a Substack article that I just read from an amazing guy who is a fellow at Brookings, Kyle Chan. He writes high capacity. I highly recommend for those who don't know his work. And he talks about the fact that the closed models are to Apple what open-source models are to Android. And what he means by that is the fact that Google really created an Android open ecosystem that allowed Samsung, Huawei, OPPO, all these other companies to join in on their operating system, the Android operating system, and they would collect basically licensing fees. But the idea was that you would create an alternative ecosystem so that it's not fully dominated by the Apple OS system. And that, I think, is a useful way to think about it, which is that ultimately the open-source models do a good job, I think, of ensuring that there's more market competition and providing an ecosystem in which other players — to your point, James, Miradis or Nvidia, who are getting into the open-source ecosystem as well — can come in. And it's not yet clear if China is going to, you know, in 5, 10 years, completely still dominate the open-source ecosystem. But that at least, I think, the big takeaway which people have woken up to in the last couple of months is that, hey, OpenAI, Anthropic, the closed model system isn't the only way to do things, and actually there's a very credible open-source, open-weight ecosystem where in some metrics the token usage has gone up substantially and has actually overtaken these closed-source models. Now monetization is different, where the closed-source models clearly win and outpace their open-source varieties. But certainly, I think the last couple of months, when I put all the data points together, I think that the Chinese models that have come out that are mainly open-weight have reminded people that, hey, you know, there are other ways to run models, to create value, and it's not just the closed system. And it all connects back to Xi's point. And it's funny because in some ways it reminds me of what he said many years ago about blockchain. Do you remember he was saying that China wanted to be a leader in blockchain technologies, and then a couple of years later he was talking about open source? People might be scratching their head and thinking, hey, how does that work within a closed kind of regime to some extent politically? But I think the only way I can answer this is that it is a geopolitical move to try to create an alternative non-US system. That is how I think about it in the day. So it all comes back to geopolitics, this technology question. And China's looked at the field and said, hey, well, we have hardware constraints, we have compute constraints, we have capex constraints too, and so we can't keep doing the same kind of — we can't run the same race that the Americans are in, the frontier labs in the closed models. So we have to do a different system and then get everyone else onboarded like the Android operating system so that we have a very competitive alternative system to the Apples or to the closed-source models. Okay, we'll be back with more after a quick break. Stay with us.
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Welcome back. Tong Yu and Wang Hong have become the first two Chinese nationals to win the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics in the same year, and people across China are holding it up as evidence of the country's increasing status as a science and technology power. James, I didn't realize this, but this is actually quite a rare occurrence in Chinese history. Even though we have this assumption that, you know, China's great at mathematics and Chinese people are awesome at mathematics, but actually if you look at the history of the Fields Medal, which really is kind of the Nobel Prize for people under 40 in the mathematics realm, China's only ever won it now three times. Now you've obviously got these two young people, Wang Hong, and then you had somebody from China in 1982 who won it. So it really is a big deal within the mathematics field. It's surprising because you think China must be great at mathematics. There's so many great mathematicians coming out of China, and yet they've only now won this medal three times. And this is the first female from mainland China who's won it as well. Wang Hong, and before we even get into the mathematics of it, which are really complicated, I just want to say that this has been going viral in China. I was just looking at some social media and people really getting proud about these two young people winning this prize and what it says about China's education system and excellence in STEM. But over to you. What were your first thoughts when you saw this?
It is really curious when you think about the size of the Chinese population, the vaunted nature of China's education system, the fact that, you know, within families in China, mathematics is prized very, very much. And there are many, many brilliant people in China, that China's only won the Fields Medal three times, as you said. So this is a breakthrough. I also noted the historic nature of the problems that these two had solved. One of them, Dong Yu, had solved a problem that was first posed in the year 1900. Therefore, it had been unresolved for 125 years. And he managed to crack it. So obviously these are very, very considerable achievements. The other one, Wang Hong, she solved a three-dimensional conjecture. This one had also puzzled mathematicians all over the world for over a century. So these are, you know, in their own right, very considerable achievements for mathematicians. But I think the bigger question, and you've already alluded to this a bit, is the way in which China hasn't featured too much in any of the global prizes that we can really think of. And I think this stands really as an anomaly. And so my first comment on this Fields Medal success is that it helps to slightly rebalance what I might call China's prize deficit. If we look at Nobel Prizes, for instance, there have only been 13 Chinese-born winners of the Nobel Prize since the Nobel Prize began. That is just about 1% of the total number of winners of the Nobel Prize. I would also like to ask the question, you know, why is that? Is it that China had a, you know, a difficult time in its history and education was somewhat circumscribed, or is it that there's been a bias against China? If we look at the winners of the Nobel Prize, there have now been three. We had Liu Xiaobo — he was a dissident. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010. We had Tu Youyou. She was — in 2015 she won the prize for the discovery of a novel malaria therapy, which was incidentally developed from a 4th-century traditional Chinese medicine text. So really extraordinary, if you want to read into that story further. And the other was Mo Yan, and he got the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2012. So those are China's three winners of the Nobel Prize in modern times. And, you know, when we think about the very first one, I was in Beijing at that time, it went to the dissident Liu Xiaobo, and the Chinese government reacted with great displeasure bordering on fury. It said that the Nobel Committee once again displayed its arrogance and prejudice against a country that has made the most remarkable economic and social progress in the past three decades. So that left no doubt that the mind of the Chinese government is that these Western institutions have been prejudiced against China, and that's one of the reasons, at least, why China hasn't featured that greatly in many of these prizes that we now venerate so highly.
Yeah. As an economist, I'd say we'd have to run regressions to see, you know, what were the most important variables at play — if there is an innate bias or really the education system was stacked against these Chinese mathematicians and scientists for a long period of modern Chinese history relative to Europe's. But what I did think about when I read these stories were two things. Number one is the way in which China is actually rising up the global institution rankings for universities. And number two, that it's surprising to me that, as you mentioned, James, the three Nobel Prize winners from China — it's in literature, medicine, and then the Peace Prize. It's not in areas like physics and chemistry and economics, you know, areas where, you know, I know for a fact that China is quite strong. And it all links back to even the first story that we mentioned, AI, because if you look at the breakdown, and I've mentioned this many times before, of the top-tier AI talent, and there's a couple of data sources for this around the world, the plurality — I think it's something close to 40% — is from China, mainland China. And that speaks to the fact that you've got amazing physicists, mathematicians, scientists coming out of Chinese universities that go to European, American research institutions,
Universities, labs, companies, and help develop the products and technologies in those areas. And yeah, that's not really being reflected by some of these prizes, which I find very interesting to your point. But number two, the FT just ran a piece, I believe, a week or so ago about how China is quietly rising up the rankings. It's not yet in the top 10. That's still dominated by the UK and the US in terms of top 10 universities around the world. But China now has 85 of the top 1,500 or so universities. That's up 13 from last year. The US has the most at 184, which is down from its peak of 20123. And 65% of US institutions slipped down their rankings. 40% of British institutions fell down the rankings, and 61% of Chinese institutions rose. So, you know, we're potentially going into a period, to your point, James, where maybe the deck isn't going to be stacked against these, you know, mathematicians, scientists, engineers, because now we're actually going to have serious cutting-edge research institutions and universities that allow them to do, you know, really cutting-edge and globally recognized science. But maybe I'm too Pollyannish, but I think it's connected. What do you think?
Yeah, I mean, I do definitely. I think, you know, Chinese intellectual endeavor is really on the march, and we can see that in the rise up the league tables that Chinese universities have accomplished. We can see it in so many other different areas. So I wouldn't expect history to be any guide to the future when it comes to China's ability to win Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes in the sciences such as you've just mentioned. I think it's going to be very, very closely contested, with China maybe even taking the lion's share at some point in the future. Yeah, I think we're at this pivotal moment in history, and it really is across the board, and it just says that China has risen and is now on the march.
We'll be back with more after a quick break.
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Welcome back. We're joined now by the amazing Amy Lyons, perhaps better known by her internet persona, Blondie in China. Amy has been in China for a decade and explores everything about Chinese cuisine and food trends, among other things. And you can find her on YouTube and Instagram at Blondie in China. Amy, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
Amy, thanks so much for coming on. It really is a great pleasure. You know, between Alice and me, there is no question as to who is the great culinary expert. Alice is, in fact, brilliant in the kitchen, and I am, to put it mildly, pretty hopeless. But please kick off by telling us a little bit about the food culture in China. We probably, a lot of people in the West, tend to have the view that it's a bit monolithic, that it's basically what you might get in your average standard Chinese restaurant in London or New York or Sydney or somewhere like that. Have you found any surprising discoveries as you've been going around China and presumably doing quite a bit of eating?
Oh, yes. I can really empathize with people who think that Chinese food might just be their local Chinese restaurant menu, because growing up in Australia, yes, we do have access to so much amazing Chinese food. But I didn't realize the depth of Chinese cuisine until I lived and studied in China. And it took me by surprise at first, because I remember going down the road and trying restaurant by restaurant and being like, well, that was so different to this, and this was so different from that. And then I started traveling more and realizing when it comes to China, food, just like the history, just like the culture, changes as you go from city to city, province to province, village to village. And I think that's the beautiful thing about China is it has this 5,000-plus years of history, and everywhere has been developing in its own way in kind of separate communities for the most part. So you have this really beautiful culture that's tied to the food as well. So when you're eating something, it comes back to the history, it comes back to the geography, and every single place is so different. For example, right now I'm in Kunming. It's the capital of Yunnan province. And in Yunnan, you have such a diversity in eating from the north to the south, even just from hour to hour away, because you've got like mountainous, snow-topped regions in the north, and then in the south you're bordering Laos and Myanmar. So it's super, super tropical. And you also have so many different ethnic minorities here as well. So let alone Chinese cuisine, you cannot sum up in a sentence. Yunnan food in itself, you cannot define it. So, Chinese food, there is no one Chinese food. There is no way to describe Chinese food because it is just so diverse. And that's the exciting path I've been on in the last 12, 13 years that I've been based in China. And it's been such a window into the culture.
That's incredible. And I have to say, shout out to the fact that Amy and I went to high school together. So, we've known each other since we were 13. We also did a trip to Yunnan a couple years ago where we had a lot of the cuisine, the delicacies, the mushrooms in that region. But what I love about your content, Amy, is that you really have no fear to go into the far-flung places of China and really talk to locals, be it in Yunnan, and you really show the authenticity of how people eat day-to-day. But I want to zoom out a little bit and think about social media, especially in the realm of Chinese content in the last couple years. And what I sensed, and I want to see if you feel the same way, is that when iShowSpeed, this African-American kid, showed up in China, did a lot of live streaming with Chinese creators and people, that really kind of changed the narrative about China. And then all of a sudden you see a lot of content creation about traveling to China, uncovering the real China, China maxing. You know, I'm living a very Chinese time of my life. You know, the whole shade and narrative around China has shifted, I would say, on social media in the last two years, but you've been there for longer, over a decade. How has it evolved and where do you see it going right now?
