function are freely published, giving bad actors easy access to powerful AI tools. Direct talks would not be entirely new. Messrs Trump and Xi agreed to “work together” on AI when they met in Busan, South Korea, in October. Before that, in 2024, Joe Biden secured agreement from Mr Xi that humans, not AI, would control nuclear warheads. But the pace of emerging risks is forcing a rethink about any piecemeal approach to co-operation. American and Chinese researchers already work together in less public ways. For example, some of China’s biggest labs, including Baidu, have adopted open-source code written by developers at Anthropic to govern how AI agents communicate. Several unofficial dialogues between tech bosses and retired officials from America and China have taken place in recent years, sometimes in secret. Participants say that the technical experts needed to make real progress on aligning standards are often not in the room, however. Three types of co-operation now seem possible. First, dialogue. America and China could engage in “strategic reassurance”, says one Western official. In nuclear-arms talks countries routinely discuss their plans to manage risk, build trust and reduce the chances of miscalculation. America and China may write AI rules in parallel, but not in co-ordination. “If they read the same technical papers and have a similar ground truth, they may both take reasonable actions in response,” says Karson Elmgren of the Institute for AI Policy and Strategy, an American think-tank. Second, America and China could agree on how to test the safety of models. Without sharing their findings, both sides could adhere to common measures of dangerous behaviour or ways to spot motives that do not align with those of their human creators. It is hard to distinguish data used to monitor AI safety from information important to AI development, notes Jeffrey Ding of George Washington University. By withholding the results, both sides could allay fears of leaking technical data. Third, trust but verify. If Messrs Trump and Xi were feeling ambitious, they could seek a formal agreement to develop common safety tests and share the results of such evaluations. Doing so, however, would probably require
invasive means of checking that the agreement is being respected. These could include inspections or transmitting information on data-centre activity to an international umpire, like the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which monitors nuclear material. All of these types of co-operation seem a long way off. American AI researchers are sceptical that Chinese officials are sincere. China’s AI labs have been comparatively lax on safety, perhaps because their models are not yet powerful enough to pose existential threats, or because they lack the time and money to test them. Documents accompanying DeepSeek’s v4 model, released last month, omitted safeguards common in American labs. Ryan Fedasiuk, a former Biden administration official, suggests that Chinese stated concerns about AI safety are performative and done “to make the Americans look bad”. Despite China’s public support for global governance of AI, it has so far resisted detailed discussions with America on the issue. In 2024 America sent senior security officials and technical experts to meet their Chinese counterparts in Geneva. China sent political officials who refused to discuss AI safety until America lifted export controls on advanced computer chips, according to those familiar with the talks. American diplomats complain that China has a long history of manipulating dialogue for political gain: it ended climate-change discussions in 2022 because Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan, for example. China’s AI discourse, including recent talk about Mythos, can reflect a paranoia that American labs use safety concerns to control the development of the technology. Some fret that sharing safety data is a ruse to snatch China’s tech secrets. Tong Zhao, an expert on nuclear-arms control negotiations at the Carnegie Endowment, an American think-tank, says that Chinese strategists are generally sceptical of agreements with a technologically superior counterpart. China’s history of entering into “unequal treaties” in the 19th century has made officials wary of deals that may slow their development or lock them into a second-tier status. Co-operation is all the harder because of the high stakes involved. “If we don’t win in AI, then it’s game over,” America’s treasury secretary told the Wall Street Journal in April. Mr Xi recently hailed AI as “epoch-defining”.
Soon enough, however, American and Chinese leaders may come to see AI as existential for other reasons. “Sadly, the historical evidence suggests you only see real momentum after a tragic accident,” says Mr Ding, noting the global standards set after the Bhopal chemical disaster in 1984, or the Chernobyl meltdown in 1986. AI negotiations remain a true test for human intelligence. ■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/05/07/artificial-intelligence-revives-a-cold- war-style-dilemma
A Chinese high-seas misadventure in luxury yachts A state-owned enterprise may have to walk the plank May 7th 2026 A chinese state-owned firm is fighting a Czech billionaire for control of an Italian luxury yacht-maker. The tale starts in 2012 when Weichai, a diesel- engine maker owned by a provincial government, bought out Ferretti, a sinking boat-builder. Since then, the firm has been listed in both Milan and Hong Kong. kkcg, a Czech investment group founded by Karel Komarek, a billionaire, has become the second-largest shareholder with around 23%. Weichai holds nearly 40%. But Mr Komarek and others think Chinese owners are sailing it in the wrong direction. One fear is that Weichai may try to transfer the Italian firm’s technology to China, for use in its maritime industry. This would be a problem, since Ferretti wants to expand into the lucrative maritime-security sector. The
company cannot hope to work with Western military technology if a Chinese state firm has access to it. This is one argument being used by KKCG to sway those holding the remaining 40% of shares. Shareholders will soon vote for new board members and company leadership, with results out on May 14th. Mr Komarek might get the upper hand over the Chinese state. Ferretti’s Weichai-appointed boss, Alberto Galassi, has surprisingly taken the side of kkcg. “Times have completely changed,” he said recently. This is true. The Weichai buy-out in 2012 came at the start of a wave of global Chinese mergers and acquisitions that culminated in 2016 with more than $200bn- worth of deals. But the Communist Party and many Western governments have since grown suspicious of vast amounts of capital leaving China. In Italy, Weichai faces a “golden power” law. It allows the state to intervene in deals involving strategic assets if a foreign firm’s shareholding exceeds a certain threshold. In Weichai’s case that is 40.4%. This is stopping Weichai from upping its stake and voting rights. Meanwhile Giorgia Meloni’s government is pushing another Chinese state firm, Sinochem, to sell a large stake in Pirelli, a tyre-maker. But leaders in Beijing may also want to see Weichai’s boating business scuppered. In April, sasac, the body that manages state-run companies, set up an overseas bureau to keep a closer eye on what firms are doing abroad. Part of that, a banker says, is cleaning up meddlesome minority stakes and messy acquisitions that have little connection with companies’ core businesses. The world looks less fondly on Chinese state-owned amalgamations these days.■ Subscribers can sign up to Drum Tower, our new weekly newsletter, to understand what the world makes of China—and what China makes of the world. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//china/2026/05/07/a-chinese-high-seas-misadventure-in- luxury-yachts
China thinks America is declining but still uniquely dangerous It sees Donald Trump as both symptom and accelerant of the decline May 7th 2026 In late january, as Donald Trump completed his first year back in the White House, a group of scholars in Beijing penned a report thanking the American president. Their gratitude was sarcastic, not an endorsement of Trumpian policy. But the sentiment behind it was genuine. Thank you, they wrote, to President Trump for driving away America’s traditional allies. Thank you for showing the world that China is more trustworthy and stable. Thank you for putting economic pressure on China and thus pushing it to innovate. And thank you, most of all, for illustrating that America is in its “imperial twilight”, a decaying and hypocritical power.
This report by Wang Wen and his colleagues at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University was at the strident end of Chinese discussions about America. Mr Wang, a cheerful nationalist, is known for his punchy language. But he is not an outlier. Many of China’s leading intellectuals and officials believe that American power is terminally on the wane. This has been expressed most authoritatively in Xi Jinping’s dictum that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” (He has been diplomatic enough not to say explicitly it is China versus America.) State media have long loved shining a harsh light on America’s failings, an unsubtle way of telling Chinese people they have it better. Yet it would be a mistake to doubt the sincerity of China’s verdict that America’s best days are behind it. This worldview, partly rooted in Marxist suspicion of capitalism, gained ascendancy in China after the global financial crisis of 2008. Donald Trump’s two election victories have only hardened this conviction, taken as evidence that American democracy is malfunctioning, too, in producing an agent of chaos as president. In a recent paper, Jonathan Czin and Allie Matthias of the Brookings Institution, an American think-tank, tabulate how often phrases describing American decline appear in Chinese writing. Their conclusion is that such analysis has been a consistent fixture of Chinese discourse for nearly two decades. But since Mr Trump’s return to power there has been an upswell: he is seen as both a symptom and an accelerant of American decline. A few ideas come up repeatedly in Chinese thinking about what ails America. First, there are economic problems: the financialisation of America, the hollowing out of its manufacturing capacity and soaring public debts. Next, there are military woes: the burden, and impossibility, of being the world’s policeman. Finally, and underpinning all of this, there are political defects: an ultra- polarised system, unable to sustain consensus, that is now gravitating towards self-defeating populism. The essential question is how China responds to its own assessment of a diminished America. One possibility is that leaders might opt to behave more aggressively, seeing more space opening up as America shrinks. There is some evidence of this, notably in China’s occasional economic bullying of American allies, from Japan to Canada, and in its more aggressive military posture around Taiwan and in the South China Sea. Yet its actions often take