Opinion | For the Global South, Chinese AI principles resonate deeply
The US champions AI as an autonomous agent, a content creator. China exports a vision of AI as a digital nervous system for the real economy
For the Global South, the critical question is more likely to be whether that reasoning capability can optimise fertiliser distribution in a drought or balance a fragile power grid.
As nations in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America increasingly integrate Chinese AI into their technology, Western observers often characterise this trend as a simple search for bargain-bin prices or a disregard for data privacy. This view is reductive.
The Global South’s embrace of Chinese AI is not merely economic; it is civilisational. It stems from a profound philosophical alignment between China’s “material pragmatism” – a focus on tangible utility – and the indigenous values of developing nations.
At the heart of China’s technological approach lies the ancient concept of dao-qi unity. In this philosophical tradition, the dao or the Way – abstract principles, logic or wisdom – cannot be separated from the qi, or vessel: the physical world and the tangible instruments in it. Technology is not viewed as a mere tool severed from high truth, but as the necessary embodiment of it.
This stands in contrast to the Silicon Valley ethos, which often prioritises AI as a “brain in a jar” – a disembodied superintelligence designed to generate text or video. The Chinese approach, forged in the fires of domestic industrial competition, views AI as “relational infrastructure”: a connective tissue for physical systems. It is designed to get its hands dirty.