Beijing's race for the smartest computer: how China is rising to AI superpower
No state in the world is pushing artificial intelligence as decisively as China. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the West may not dominate a global key technology.
This was one of the first comprehensive assessments in a major German publication: how far has China really come on artificial intelligence? For the Handelsblatt special section Technology of the Future, I worked with colleagues in Beijing, Düsseldorf and San Francisco – and along the way met Min Wanli, head of research at Alibaba.
What it’s about
In 2017, China made a state doctrine of what had long been visible in Beijing: becoming the world’s leading AI power by 2030. The plan is backed by hard money – in 2017 alone, 48 percent of global AI investment came from China, only 38 percent from the United States. The reportage traces how the state and the country’s tech corporations work hand in hand toward the same goal.
The core line
“We are determined to become one of the dominant players.” With that sentence, Min Wanli – formerly a Google researcher, now AI chief at Alibaba – sums up China’s ambition in a Handelsblatt interview. It is not a wish. It is a plan, with milestones, subsidies, and a national division of labour.
China’s advantages
Four factors make the country so strong in the global AI race:
- Data in unlimited supply – more than 800 million online users, few data-protection concerns
- Political priority – AI is a top-down matter, from the president to provincial governors and city mayors
- Coordinated industry – Baidu (autonomous driving), Alibaba (smart cities), Tencent (healthcare), iFlytek (speech recognition) each have an assigned mission as part of a “National Team”
- Investment volume – billions every year, often state-backed
Where China lags: semiconductors (the US controls roughly half of global production, China only four percent) and basic research. The country is trying to close both gaps at speed, including by setting up its own development centres in Silicon Valley.
Min Wanli and Alibaba’s “ET Brain”
Min Wanli was hailed as a wunderkind in China, went to the United States, worked at IBM and Google, returned home, and has spent the past five years driving AI at Alibaba. His programme “ET Brain” promises efficiency gains in solar production, traffic management, and recycling. At the time, he was constantly travelling Europe, trying to win German industrial customers for Alibaba’s cloud services.
What came of it
Much of what the reportage described as a trend in 2018 is now reality. China’s AI industry has continued to grow and has produced its own models – DeepSeek demonstrated in 2025 just how much the balance has shifted. Min Wanli has since left his Alibaba role. His thesis about a “race to set the standard” still holds: whichever country sets the benchmark also shapes the economy of the coming decades.
The original cover story for the Technology of the Future special ran to 754 column lines – the opening paragraphs are reproduced in the print box below (in the original German), the full text is on handelsblatt.com.