China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history
Without commenting on the evidence or the conclusion, I just want to say that the link between evidence and conclusion seems extremely weak - I'm pretty sure the Mongol hordes also never attacked a non-bordering country yet it would be laughable to call them non-aggressive.
The epistemics at work here...
China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history
The "non-bordering" part is doing an enormous amount of work here. Choosing only to attack bordering countries is perfectly compatible with conquering much of the world. Arguably, if conquering the world were a country's sole goal, then going after immediate neighbors one at a time is usually the best strategy.
nor have they ever tried to overthrow a foreign government by covert or manipulative means
Hong Kong? Taiwan? (In both cases, the "foreign" part is kind of in dispute, Hong Kong more so.) The fact that the post doesn't mention Taiwan at all raises my eyebrow.
China is a very inward-looking country compared to other major powers. Only 0.1% of Chinese residents were born abroad, much fewer than the 15% in America and 14% in France
The fact that China lets in very few immigrants does not provide evidence against the hypothesis that they think they're better than everyone else and that the world should belong to them. If they also had near-zero emigration and trade with the outside world, then the term "inward-looking" would fit. But this is about as far from "inward-looking" as you can get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion.
This is understating the case. The post does not mention disappearing dissidents, Uyghurs, or reeducation camps. I'll also point at CCP attempts to police speech across the globe, such as by pressuring companies to not mention Taiwan as a nation separate from China.
Choosing only to attack bordering countries is perfectly compatible with conquering much of the world
While that is true, even in that case I don't think China would be a threat to the United States based on an analysis of the world map.
The fact that the post doesn't mention Taiwan at all raises my eyebrow.
The Chinese disputes with Taiwan, or on the Indian border, aren't a threat to the West. Likewise, the Chinese conflicts involving Uyghurs, Tibetans, and to a lesser degree their maritime borders don't reflect the kind of foreign meddling that I'm talking about, which is ideologically motivated overseas intervention or conspiracy of the kind practiced by America, the Soviet Union, and the British and French Empires.
But this is about as far from "inward-looking" as you can get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
This is also not the kind of "universalist missionary ideology" behavior I'm referring to. My understanding is that Belt and Road is a bunch of construction ($800B) and investment ($600B) contracts and that the largest recipients are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, and then other recipients include Indonesia, Iraq, and the Congo.
Random details:
The fact that China lets in very few immigrants does not provide evidence against the hypothesis that they think they're better than everyone else and that the world should belong to them
You didn't see this outright but I would flag that "thinking you're better than everyone else" doesn't imply "thinking the world should belong to you." Many cultures think they are the best.
I'll also point at CCP attempts to police speech across the globe, such as by pressuring companies to not mention Taiwan as a nation separate from China.
I do agree with a counterargument you didn't make, which is that China is just militarily and especially navally weak, but that basically all countries that become rich and powerful become aggressive even if they're peaceful beforehand. One could say that in 1895 it would be wrong to predict "Who cares about American industrialization? They have almost no army at all and have barely left their far-away continent" when in reality Americans would be dismantling their regimes and empires after becoming more powerful. I'm not sure how to evaluate this general notion but maybe it's true.
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion. In China there’s no private ownership of land and no independent judiciary.
Yes, this is all true and really important, regardless of what you think about China re: AI policy.
I think a missing mood in a lot of discourse is that the US has historically been an imperfect standard bearer for these principles, and today is straying further from them in alarming ways. But that doesn't make it less important that the CCP explicitly rejects them. Conversely, there are some things the CCP can be admired for in terms of state capacity and effectiveness. "Communism with Chinese characteristics" is actually pretty good in some ways; they just need to drop the "communism" part! This is of course extremely unlikely / unrealistic, but if they could just pick some better 19th and 20th century European intellectuals to base their political philosophy around, the whole world would be better off...
if they could just pick some better 19th and 20th century European intellectuals to base their political philosophy around
as the author says
In China there’s no private ownership of land
glancing at the details of how this works, one could stipulate they're already one third of the way to George
1This reminds me of the Tucker Carlson interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin's discussion of Russian and Ukrainian history seemed bizarre and unmotivated to some of my friends, but it seemed to me like the obvious intent was to explain how he understands Russia and Russia's legitimate interests, in order to draw an intelligible distinction between aggressive and defensive acts along lines that might not otherwise make sense to foreigners with different assumptions, so that we wouldn't be forced to construe Russia's campaign in Ukraine as aggressive.
He was trying to explain how not to have a domino theory about Russia in Ukraine.
Other commenters have complained about your "only ever attacked people sharing a border" threshold. The map of the world doesn't really help the US. Not only would we be pretty unhappy if China conquered all of Eurasia going border-by-border, but a small country in the Americas participating in the Belt and Road initiative could invite China to establish some sort of protectorate, after which China would only have to traverse a series of borders to get to the US. Likewise, saying that the Uighurs in Xinjiang are within China's borders doesn't help; the Tibetans didn't always used to be and now they are, except for the refugees in India, which now shares a border with China.
But of course it's equally no good to assume that a state will behave aggressively just because it could. What you would need to develop to be persuasive here is the same class of task Putin attempted when speaking with Carlson: some idea of how Chinese state decisionmakers understand themselves, and their national interests, that credibly constrains anticipations so that we can have some sense of what sorts of actions they are and aren't likely to take.
For instance, many Americans would likely assume that "no attacks without shared borders" would preclude an invasion of Taiwan by the People's Republic of China, but in fact both governments notionally agree that they're in the same country, so to the Chinese, it would be intraborder, not even cross-border.
To me, I think the "likelihood to dominate others" factor is less salient than the "likelihood to produce safe AGI" factor. Are there good arguments that China is better on AGI safety?
I'm generally against "race with China" frame, because whatever is going to happen after AGI is going to be much weirder even in non-extinction scenarios, but if we consider unusually-non-weird scenarios, I think you miss multiple unpleasant ways to project power, which are not "conquest", but functionally are hard to distinguish from conquest in negative consequences. For example, if all China-friendly dictatorships get AGI-derived tech first ("deploy total mass surveillance with this one trick, first ten countries get discount"), it's going to be very unpleasant, even if China inself won't anything bad directly.
I am glad this article exists, particularly because those of us who live in the U.S. should always be scrutinizing our own biases and patriotic framings.
That said, I think a fulsome discussion of whether China would use AGI to control other nations should at least include the following topics: 1) Uyghurs, 2) Tibet, 3) Taiwan, and 4) Chinese investment and contracting in Africa. I'm not an expert here—someone else can probably think of additional case studies.
I also think that, granted that the U.S. is a much more bellicose country on the international stage, I'm not sure if a non-intrusive country is likely to stay that way if given a total and complete advantage over other countries. On the one hand, history seems to show that countries will use their decisive military advantages to dominate other countries if they are able. On the other hand, if China got aligned AGI first, then it seems like they would have everything they could ever want at their fingertips and they would only need to care about the rest of us a tiny bit to respect our autonomy.
If country-autonomy is really part of the Chinese cultural DNA, perhaps their aligned AGI would even assist in protecting country autonomy. If the AGI did that forever, it would either be because Chinese attitudes toward intervention remained constant (unlikely) or the Chinese created an aligned but incorrigible AGI such that respecting country autonomy got locked in forever.
That said, I think a fulsome discussion of whether China would use AGI to control other nations should at least include the following topics: 1) Uyghurs, 2) Tibet, 3) Taiwan, and 4) Chinese investment and contracting in Africa.
I don't understand the relevance of Uyghurs or Tibetans, who are within China's own borders. The Taiwan conflict is in close to the same category. Chinese investment and contracting isn't imperial or manipulative in the CIA-style sense I was talking about. My understanding is that Belt and Road is a bunch of construction ($800B) and investment ($600B) contracts and that the largest recipients are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, and then other recipients include Indonesia, Iraq, and the Congo.
I'm not sure if a non-intrusive country is likely to stay that way if given a total and complete advantage over other countries.
That makes sense. I added the following addendum:
Addendum: It would have been mistaken for a European to say, in 1895, "Who cares about American industrialization? They have almost no army and have barely left their far-away continent." Soon afterward that European might find the Americans replacing his regime or dismantling his empire. So a counterargument here is that in general, countries that become wealthy and militarily powerful become aggressive regardless of how passive they seemed before. Under this reasoning, China has had limited imperial ambitions in the past only because it e.g. lacked naval superiority. This has to be an argument based on a general view of human nature and government.
However, your point below is not true I think:
On the one hand, history seems to show that countries will use their decisive military advantages to dominate other countries if they are able
The American government discussed but ultimately did not decisively defeat the Soviet Union when they alone had the atom bomb. I'm not sure how "decisive" that would have been, though, because the Soviets had a strong conventional position and I'm not sure how many atom bombs were available in 1946.
Often I see people claim it’s essential for America to win the AI race against China (in whatever sense) for reasons like these:
Those claims slide between a few different actual threat models:
The Dario quote points to (3) with unusual directness. The “race rather than slowdown” ending of AGI 2027 also supposes that our AI lead will create interest in overthrowing the Chinese government. But most of the quotes I gave as examples above are interpreted as (1): that an AI-enabled Chinese government would overthrow Western governments.
My main point here is that (1) seems unfounded to me. China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history, nor have they ever tried to overthrow a foreign government by covert or manipulative means. China is also unique among nuclear powers for its unconditional no-first-use policy, which at face value implies they would withhold a nuclear response to even an overwhelming conventional invasion. Further:
More broadly, China is a very inward-looking country compared to other major powers. Only 0.1% of Chinese residents were born abroad, much fewer than the 15% in America and 14% in France, fewer even than the 0.3% and 3% in India and Japan respectively. The Chinese government has peacefully compromised on almost all border disputes in central and southeast Asia, often taking a minority of the contested territory. (The Indian border is the exception.)
To many American voters and elites, tracing back to Woodrow Wilson more than 100 years ago, “the justification of America’s international role was messianic: America had an obligation, not to the balance of power, but to spread its principles throughout the world” (Kissinger). That isn’t the historical attitude of the Chinese government, whose leaders perceive foreign intervention or expansion as threatening to Chinese identity and culture.
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion. In China there’s no private ownership of land and no independent judiciary.
If you think it’s prudent to disable and overthrow the Chinese government when it becomes achievable militarily, then that’s certainly one (bellicose) position you could hold. Then you could say that a downside of losing the AI race is that the CCP may defend itself. But it’s unwise to project this ideological aggression onto the CCP itself without evidence.
Addendum: It would have been mistaken for a European to say, in 1895, "Who cares about American industrialization? They have almost no army and have barely left their far-away continent." Soon afterward that European might find the Americans replacing his regime or dismantling his empire. So a counterargument here is that in general, countries that become wealthy and militarily powerful become aggressive regardless of how passive they seemed before. Under this reasoning, China has had limited imperial ambitions in the past only because it e.g. lacked naval superiority. This has to be an argument based on a general view of human nature and government.