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Opinion
How to assess China’s real chance of winning AI race against US
Debate over whether it is ‘less than 20%’ misses the point. The right question is: does innovation work better under disciplined scarcity or profligate abundance?
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Dr Ke Meng is Hua Yu Associate Professor of School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University.
In January, a top Chinese AI researcher told an industry summit in Beijing there was less than a 20 per cent chance of any Chinese company surpassing a leading US artificial intelligence firm in the next three to five years.
The remark by Lin Junyang, until recently a technical leader working on Qwen, one of China’s most capable open-source AI models under Alibaba (which owns the South China Morning Post), made headlines. But much of the commentary missed a more important question Lin posed: “Does innovation happen in the hands of the rich or the poor?”
The United States held an estimated 74 per cent of global AI computing power in mid-2025, compared with China’s 14 per cent. Lin described the gap as “one to two orders of magnitude”. Because US labs command far more aggregate compute, they can allocate substantial capacity to next-generation research as well as product deployment. Chinese labs, he admitted, are “stretched”: just delivering products consumes most of their compute. The luxury of exploration is one they simply cannot afford.
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