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Opinion
China offers an alternative to Western ‘technofeudalism’
China’s answer to the Western model focuses on planning, an open source approach and whether the new technology earns its place in society
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Simon S.H. Chan is the head of technology of the Greater Bay Area and global lead of Emerge at Edelman.
At the turn of the century, global innovation followed a Western script. Silicon Valley dominated the world in innovation. Europe exported standards and governance. Asia, in contrast, was cast as the manufacturer, assembler and consumer.
But the global innovation order is shifting. According to the latest Edelman Trust Barometer, change is under way not only in technical capability but also in public sentiment. In China, 72 per cent of people trust artificial intelligence (AI), compared to 32 per cent in the United States and 28 per cent in the United Kingdom. Similar patterns hold across India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand as developing Asian markets consistently outperform Western and developed peers on public trust in innovation.
This matters as without trust, even the most advanced technologies stall. Where trust is high, adoption accelerates, institutional alignment strengthens and public-private collaboration deepens. This serves as a powerful catalyst, especially for a country like China, whose innovation strategy is tightly interwoven with national development goals and the self-sufficiency mission. These dynamics play out against a broader philosophical divergence in how innovation is governed.
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