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The Chinese Communist Party published a national AI gameplan that specifies blurring the lines between the civil and military to achieve Beijing’s global technological supremacy, author Wynton Hall details in his upcoming book, Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI (HarperCollins).
The debut solo book by Hall – a longtime collaborative author, social media director for Breitbart News, and a distinguished fellow at the Government Accountability Institute – details the complex and often murky world of AI and the global race for AI dominance. Hall describes CODE RED as intended to inform “conservatives and fair-minded moderates who sense that they should learn more about AI for themselves and their children but have felt too overwhelmed to dive in.”
In the United States, the country’s tech elites are locked in a heated race to be the first to develop functional artificial general intelligence (AGI), widely considered to be an AI technology that functions as effectively and quickly as a human brain. On the other side of the planet, however, the Chinese Communist Party is focusing the efforts of its entire apparatus to beat America there, with overtly stated military goals for its technology.
As Hall details in CODE RED, while the Chinese Communist Party is consistently investing in overpowering the United States in almost every field, its urgency regarding AI was born following a landmark computer achievement in, of all things, board games. In what Hall describes as a “Sputnik moment” for China, “DeepMind’s AI system AlphaGo defeating the world’s best players of the ancient strategy game Go, including a humiliating defeat of the Chinese champion, Ke Jie.” The game, played in May 2017, made major Chinese state media headlines and, Hall narrates, greatly alarmed Party leaders.
“Months later, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) released its New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan,” Hall writes, “boldly declaring ‘By 2030, China’s AI theories, technologies, and applications should achieve world-leading levels, making China the world’s primary AI innovation center.'”
“For many in the West, the proclamation barely registered or sounded like science fiction. But China, with its long view of history, bet otherwise,” he continues. “The regime understood that AI was the key to its ultimate goal: global military dominance.”
A full English translation of the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan is available in full online. It features an entire subsection on what China calls “military-civilian integration” – effectively forcing civilian tech companies into offering all of its knowledge and development to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The paper sets out a list of directives, including to:
- Deepen implementation of military-civilian integration development strategy, to promote the formation of an all-element, multi-field, high efficiency AI military-civilian integration pattern.
- Establish mechanisms to normalize communication and coordination among scientific research institutes, universities, enterprises and military industry units.
- Promote military-civilian sharing and joint use for all kinds of platforms in accordance with the requirements of deep military-civil integration related provisions.
The paper ultimately calls for the Party to “promote the overall layout and open sharing of science and technology innovation platforms and bases.”
To fuel this ambitious plan for global AI domination, Hall narrates, China has built up an unparalleled “human capital” surplus, fueled by graduating more college and graduate students in technological fields than any other country, including America.
“Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers are Chinese,” Hall notes .”China produces nearly twice as many AI-relevant PhDs as the United States does.”
“The disparity grows even wider at the undergraduate level. In 2022, China awarded nearly six times as many undergraduate bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering than the United States did,” he adds.
In the United States, Chinese technological products are also designed to actively harm Americans. Products such as the AI tool Deepseek and the infamous social media outlet Tiktok have become largely popular in the United States; tens of thousands downloaded Deepseek when it debuted and Tiktok is a staple in American middle and high schools. In his book, Hall also quotes a senior PLA member, strategist Zeng Huafeng, who nakedly declared that China must use “information and popular spiritual and cultural products as weapons to influence people’s psychology, will, attitude, behavior and even change the ideology, values, cultural traditions and social systems.”
Elsewhere in CODE RED, Hall tackles the close ties between leftist organizations, including the Democrat Party, and America’s leading AI developers, fears of AI forcing the destruction of millions of jobs in the near-term, and what the development of human-esque intelligence means for the value of human life and understanding of the soul.
English (US)