 |
| Pix credit here (Join the March, 1971) |
Chinese President Xi Jinping delivers a keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, east China, July 17, 2026. Actually he gave two speeches on AI Governance,. The first was delivered on 1 July 2026 to mark the 105th anniversary of thje Communist Party of China. My reflections on those remarks and its text in English and Chinese may be accessed at: Reflections
on 习近平：在庆祝中国共产党成立105周年大会上的讲话 [Xi Jinping: Speech at the Gathering
Celebrating the 105th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party
of China].
The second, the the subject of my reflections here, was entitled Joining Hands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance (English) and 携手构建公正合理的全球人工智能治理体系 (Chinese). Both versions appear below. The immediate object of the remarks was to welcome the formation of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, formed on 16 July 2026, and which China's Wiki, Baidu, describes as
an independent intergovernmental international organization. It follows the purposes of the United Nations Charter, adheres to the concept of extensive consultation, joint contribution and shared benefits, and upholds the people-centered principle. Its aims are to promote international cooperation and global governance in Artificial Intelligence, ensuring the healthy and orderly development of Artificial Intelligence in a beneficial, safe, and equitable direction for the benefit of all humanity.
Representatives from 29 countries, including Madiev, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Development of Kazakhstan ; Thongsavanh, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Laos; Dar, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan ; Oreshkin, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office of Russia ; and Airlangga, Coordinating Minister for Economic Affairs of Indonesia, signed the agreement, becoming founding member states. Representatives from countries and international organizations, including United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres , attended the ceremony.
The General Secretary added some normative substance to that description in his 17 July remarks--a normative substance that was, on important ways, closely aligned with the normative substance of the General Secretary's remarks on the 105th anniversary of the CPC.
This reporting addresses the keynote address delivered by President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference (WAIC) and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance in Shanghai, on the occasion of the founding of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). It proceeds in seven parts: (I) a comparison of the Chinese source text against the official English rendering; (II) a summary of the speech; (III) a reading of the speech through the analytical apparatus developed in Larry Catá Backer's scholarship on Chinese governance, constitutionalism, and data-driven global order; (IV) the speech's grounding in New Era Marxist-Leninist doctrine and the Third and Fourth Plenums; (V) a systems-theoretic reading, using and testing the limits of Luhmann's functional differentiation and structural coupling; (VI) a semiotic reading of the speech as a closed, self-legitimating system of signification; and (VII) a survey of how the speech and the founding of WAICO were received internationally, with citations.
One point worth noting about my reflections; its focus on analysis through a semiotic lens is meant to escape the inevitable flattening of conventional analysis that tends to elaborate some sort of "geopolitics with Chinese characteristics." That is useful for political discourse and makes it easier for public intellectuals to reach the masses in ways that sound exciting--like another episode in the "Housewives of X" series with Chinese characteristics. I focus more specifically on three analytical spaces: (1) a Chinese New Era Marxist Leninist substrate, (2) a systems theory substrate, and (3) a more traditionally semiotic substrate.
These three--the Marxist-Leninist analytical substrate, the question of the speech as a systems-theory question, and the semiotic reading of the performance of the announcement and its object (WAICO)--aren't three separate lenses — they're the same claim at three levels. Chinese New Era Marxist-Leninist doctrine (Part IV) is meant to supply the content of the code that would have to be built into the machine's recursive parameters (Part V), and the speech's own rhetorical form (Part VI) is already rehearsing, at the level of text, the closure that the institution and the architecture are enacting at the level of governance and code. Once one is open to "seeing" that, the "rival bloc" reading that dominates the press coverage looks less like a competing interpretation and more like a category error — it's describing a contest between two chess players when the actual proposal may be that one side wants to change what counts as a legal move; or perhaps better puit the Chinese want to play Go while the Americans insist on Chess; and they m,ean to use the same board, repainted and repurposed for their respective objectives.
 |
| Pix credit here |
Part I. Comparing the Chinese and English Texts
Both texts were released together by Chinese state media as a single bilingual document, and the English is best understood not as an independent translation but as an official rendering produced by China's own translation apparatus (Xinhua/State Council Information Office) for an international audience. Overall, the English tracks the Chinese closely at the level of argument, structure, and sequencing — the four numbered principles, the enumerated announcements, and the rhetorical questions all appear in the same order with the same weight. The differences that do appear are consistent and telling: they cluster around (1) classical and literary allusions, which are translated for sense but stripped of their cultural or scholarly lineage; (2) ideologically loaded domestic-policy terms, which are softened into blander English equivalents; (3) wordplay, which is simply casualties of translation; and (4) diplomatic protocol markers, which are added in English but absent from the Chinese original, since Chinese state protocol does not apply honorifics to its own head of state.
The Overall assessment. The translation is faithful at the propositional level — a policy analyst relying solely on the English would not be misled about what China is proposing. What is lost is texture: the Confucian and Legalist allusions, the Fei Xiaotong reference, and the Chinese-manufacturing wordplay all root the speech in a specifically Chinese intellectual and political vocabulary that signals continuity with decades of domestic ideological formulas (“activist government,” “thousand-li horse,” “garden of civilizations”). These allusions do real work for the Chinese-language audience — they naturalize a state-centric, harmony-oriented vision of technology governance as the organic expression of Chinese civilizational values — work that the plainer English cannot do for an international audience unfamiliar with the references.
Part II. Summary of the Speech
Xi opens by tracing seventy years of AI research from the 1956 Dartmouth workshop to the present “wave” of AI development, framing the Shanghai gathering as a historic inflection point comparable to the steam engine, electrification, and the internet. He poses four questions he says the world must answer together: how humanity should coexist with thinking machines, how to secure algorithmic decision-making, how governance can keep pace with technology's ethical challenges, and how to prevent AI from widening global inequality.
He then offers what China frames as its answer: a four-point program for global AI governance — (1) open, win-win innovation, with AI moving from the “digital world” into the “physical world” and benefiting “all sectors and businesses”; (2) risk-awareness and controllability, keeping AI “always under human control” while rejecting the “overstretching” of national-security concepts by any one country over another — a direct reference to U.S. export controls on advanced chips; (3) inclusiveness and cross-civilizational learning, so that AI's development does not erode cultural diversity; and (4) solidarity through multilateral governance centered on the United Nations, aimed particularly at helping the Global South close the AI and digital divide.
The speech then turns to domestic achievement and diplomacy. Xi cites China's 15th Five-Year Plan, its combination of “efficient market” and “well-functioning government,” a smart-economy sector he says now exceeds RMB 1 trillion, and a parallel commitment to safety regulation (“safe, reliable, and controllable” AI). He recounts a sequence of Chinese-led initiatives — the Global AI Governance Initiative, the U.N. resolution on AI capacity-building, the AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All, the AI Plus International Cooperation Initiative — that culminate in the centerpiece announcement: the founding, in Shanghai, of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), which he calls a milestone answering the Global South's call for a greater voice in AI governance.
He closes with concrete pledges — 5,000 AI training and seminar slots for developing countries over five years; new AI application-cooperation centers with ASEAN, the Arab League, the African Union, CELAC, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS; and deployment of China's “Mazu” AI-powered meteorological warning system in 30 countries — and with a call, framed through classical Chinese proverbs, for AI development to be a “symphony,” not a “solo performance,” guided by human wisdom and international consensus.
 |
| Pix credit here (Sange Daibiao; The CPC represents the development demands of Choina's advanced productive forces |
Part III. Reading the Speech
Reading the General Secretary's remarks through a conventional political lens is interesting, and necessary, especially for those whose world is shaped by and in and around political constraints and ways of engaging with the world. But it is hardly the stuff of understanding what may be going on at a conceptual level, at a level that drives and shapes politics without centering it in the discourse. It is this understanding that drives the suggestion that the key to the General Secretary's remarks on 16 July cannot be fully grasped without a deeper appreciation of the trust of the Secretary General's 1 July 2026 remarks.
Where does all this point? The speech's forward horizon is easy enough to read as generic exhortation — inevitably bound up and reaffirming the notion that the Socialist Path is not merely a road but perhaps also a conveyor belt on which the masses under the leadership of the CPC must move in the inevitable direction through the vicissitudes of each stage of its historical development until it reaches its goal. In the middle of the 21st century, that requires engagement with what the CPC has named the "Second Centenary Goal." At the same time it appears tied more precisely to two things held in view simultaneously: resolving the currently codified principal contradiction, and continuing to operationalize the developmental half of the Basic Line into an ever more elaborate policy stack. That is, as I have emphasized before--socialist modernization is the framework as well as the object and the action that animates appropriate movement along the Socialist Path. The Five-Sphere Integrated Plan, the Four-Pronged Comprehensive Strategy, the "new development philosophy," the "new development pattern," "high-quality development," "Chinese-style modernization" — these are not free-standing slogans but successive, increasingly specific operationalizations of the same developmental mandate the Basic Line first fixed as "one central task." Their cumulative job is to translate an abstract contradiction-formula into a stack of executable programs whose success is explicitly bound, at mid-century, to "building in all respects a great modern socialist country." The closing urgency is therefore not merely rhetorical: it asserts that the window for resolving the current iteration of the contradiction through the current operational stack is itself finite, and that missing it would be a failure of the Basic Line's operationalization, not just of policy execution. (Reflections on 习近平：在庆祝中国共产党成立105周年大会上的讲话 [Xi Jinping: Speech at the Gathering Celebrating the 105th Anniversary of the Founding of the Communist Party of China].)
1. The “Official” (士) versus the “Merchant” (商)
In my commentary on China's 2025 Global AI Governance Action Plan, I attempted to distinguish the ethos of the U.S. AI Action Plan — which he characterized as that of the “Merchant” (商), oriented toward markets, deregulation, and national commercial advantage — from the ethos of the Chinese plan, which he characterized as that of the “Official” (士): a mandarin-bureaucratic sensibility in which the state defines the proper, virtuous use of a technology and channels private activity toward publicly-set ends. (See more fully developed version in The Conceptual Architecture of America First—Ideological Transactionalism and the Case of Cuba) This 2026 keynote reproduces that ethos in concentrated form: AI is repeatedly described as something to be kept “always under human control,” anchored to the “right direction,” and “oversight and governance” that must be made “precise” — the vocabulary of stewardship and correct guidance rather than of market competition.
2. Institutionalizing an operating system for global order
My broader argument — developed with respect to social credit and data governance — is that China is not merely proposing rules but building an institutional “operating system” that other governance orders (public and private, domestic and international) can be plugged into, with China occupying the position of systems architect. Read this way, WAICO is the institutional payload toward which the entire lineage of prior instruments (the 2023 Global AI Governance Initiative, the 2024 AI Capacity-Building Action Plan, the 2025 Global AI Governance Action Plan) was always building. Each prior document, in Backer's reading of the 2025 Action Plan, rationalized a baseline of principles — “sovereign equality,” “people-centered,” “shared benefits” — that could then be embedded in an international institutional organ; WAICO is that organ now realized, with Shanghai, rather than Geneva or San Francisco, as its seat.
3. The North-South axis, and the conspicuous absence of North-North
I have earlier noted noted of the 2024 Action Plan that its cooperation architecture is organized around a North-South and a South-South axis, with a North-North axis excluded “by silence” — a structure he read as treating Western coordination among developed states as the illegitimate object against which the whole project is constructed. The founding membership of WAICO — reported to include Russia, Brazil, Pakistan, Indonesia, and roughly twenty other developing and non-Western states, with no G7 economy among them — fits this structure exactly, and the speech's pledges (training slots, cooperation centers with ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League, CELAC, the SCO, and BRICS) are all South-oriented capacity-building instruments, never North-North ones. Part IV below asks whether this exclusion is merely tactical, or structural.
Part IV. The Marxist-Leninist Normative Substrate: New Era Theory, the Fundamental Political Line, and the Third and Fourth Plenums
Much commentary on this speech — including the press coverage surveyed in Part VII — reads it as geopolitics: China versus the United States, a rival bloc against “Pax Silica.” That reading is accurate but incomplete, because it treats the speech's vocabulary (“people-centered,” “shared prosperity,” “openness,” “high-quality development”) as generic developmentalist language, freely interchangeable with liberal-democratic usage. Within CPC doctrine, however, each of these terms is technical, load-bearing, and non-negotiable, and the speech's international vocabulary is best read as the outward-facing dialect of a domestic ideological system that has just been formally reaffirmed and operationalized.
The Fourth Plenum backdrop
The speech was delivered nine months after the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee (October 20–23, 2025), which adopted the Recommendations for the 15th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030) — the very plan the speech invokes when it announces that “this year marks the start of China's ‘15th Five-Year Plan.’” The Fourth Plenum communiqué reaffirmed Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the Party's guiding ideology, restated the “Two Upholds” (upholding Xi's core position and the Central Committee's authority), and organized its program around the paired formulas “progress amid stability” and “security amid reform,” with technological self-reliance and the convergence of mechanization, informatization, and “intelligentization” (AI, in Party parlance) named as central tasks. WAICO and the keynote are not adjacent to this domestic program; they are its international-facing continuation, delivered by the same “core” leadership, under the same ideological banner, within the same five-year planning cycle.
“New quality productive forces” (新质生产力)
Since 2023, Xi has advanced “new quality productive forces” as the theoretical frame for technology-led growth, elevated further in the Third Plenum's 2024 reform decision. The doctrine is explicitly Marxist in structure: it identifies advanced technology — AI foremost among current examples — as the decisive contemporary productive force whose development determines the pace of the transition to “socialist modernization,” and which therefore falls, as productive forces always have in Marxist theory, within the province of Party direction over the relations of production built around it. Read against this doctrine, the speech's claim that AI is “moving from the digital world into the physical world,” and its recitation of a smart-economy sector exceeding RMB 1 trillion, is not neutral economic reporting; it is a claim that AI has arrived as a new-quality productive force, and the passage that follows immediately — China's insistence on holding development and security “equal in emphasis” — is the corollary that Marxist productive-forces theory requires: a productive force this consequential cannot be left to develop outside of Party-directed relations of production.
“Coordinating development and security” (统筹发展和安全) as the fundamental political line, exported
China's “fundamental political line” — economic construction as the center, flanked by the Four Cardinal Principles (Party leadership, the socialist road, Marxism-Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought, and people's democratic dictatorship) on one side and reform-and-opening on the other — has since the 19th Party Congress been operationalized through the formula “coordinate development and security” (统筹发展和安全), a phrase the Fourth Plenum communiqué restated as “progress amid stability, security amid reform.” This is the domestic doctrine the speech projects outward almost verbatim: its second principle pairs a call for “risk-awareness” and keeping AI “always under human control” with an insistence that no state “overstretch” the national-security concept against another. Domestically, “security” functions as a precondition of legitimate development, not its opposite — which is why the speech can, without contradiction in Party terms, call simultaneously for maximal openness (principle one) and maximal control (principle two). Understood this way, WAICO is not asking states to balance two independent values that a liberal framework would also recognize (innovation and safety); it is asking them to adopt a specific, doctrinally fused unit — development-as-inseparable-from-security — whose content and priority ordering are set by the same “core” authority that sets it domestically.
Why this matters for reading WAICO
The practical upshot is that WAICO's founding vocabulary cannot be fully understood as an alternative technical standards body sitting beside the U.N. Independent International Scientific Panel on AI or a Western-led equivalent. Its constitutive language — “people-centered,” “safe, reliable, controllable,” “development and security” — is drawn from, and remains answerable to, the ideological formulas the Fourth Plenum just re-anchored as China's guiding doctrine for 2026–2030. This is the sense in which the Marxist-Leninist normative lens ought to be foregrounded rather than treated as background color: the speech is not merely advancing Chinese national interest in a contest with the United States, it is proposing that the specific doctrinal architecture of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” — productive-forces theory, the fused development-security formula, Party-centered direction of technology — supply the normative operating system for a portion of the world's AI governance. Part V asks what that means once one stops treating “governance” as a layer of rules applied to an otherwise neutral technology, and starts asking whether the doctrine is meant to be built into the recursive architecture of the machines themselves.
Part V. Functional Differentiation, Structural Coupling, and the Limits of Systems Theory
Niklas Luhmann's account of world society describes modern social order as functionally differentiated into operationally closed subsystems — law, coded legal/illegal; science, coded true/false; the economy, coded payment/non-payment; politics, coded government/opposition — each autopoietically reproducing itself from its own elements, each “structurally coupled” to the others, and each capable of being “irritated” (perturbed, given occasion to reconstruct its own internal states) by events in neighboring systems without those events directly determining what happens inside it. Applied naively to global AI governance, this model would predict something like a multipolar order of differentiated-but-coupled regulatory regimes: a Chinese AI system, a European one, an American one, each pursuing its own internal logic, each irritated by and adaptively responsive to the others' moves, without any one absorbing the others.
That is broadly how most press coverage described the emerging landscape (Part VII): WAICO versus “Pax Silica,” two blocs, two standards regimes, presumably capable of eventual coupling through diplomacy, trade, or technical interoperability agreements, the way differentiated nation-states have long coexisted. The question worth foregrounding is whether that coupling model is adequate to what the speech, read against Parts III and IV, is actually proposing.
Machine systems as a new kind of function system
AI systems are not merely another node within the political or economic function systems; they are increasingly recursive cognitive infrastructures — systems that train on their own and each other's outputs, that mediate the communications by which other function systems (politics, law, science, the economy) observe their environments, and that are consequently becoming a condition for the operation of those other systems rather than simply one more actor within them. If a function system's code is the binary distinction that organizes its every operation, the relevant question for an AI system is: what binary distinction is built into its recursive architecture as the condition of a “valid” or “safe” output? This is precisely what is contested here, and it is not a question international-relations analysis, focused on states and blocs, is well equipped to see.
Two incommensurable baseline parameters, not two differentiated systems
A liberal-democratic AI governance baseline — whatever the real variation between the U.S. and EU approaches — presupposes as a structural parameter that no single political authority gets to define the true or legitimate output; correction runs instead through contestation, markets, courts, and elections external to the system. The Chinese model that this speech projects outward, consistent with Part IV, builds a different parameter into the recursive loop itself: outputs must remain compatible with Party-state authority to define what counts as correct, safe, and stable — not as an external regulatory constraint bolted onto an otherwise neutral technology, but (per the “new quality productive forces” doctrine) as a constitutive feature of what the technology is for. If that is right, the two are not differentiated subsystems of one world society, mutually legible and structurally coupled the way two adjacent legal systems or two competing currencies are; they are two candidate recursive architectures whose foundational codes cannot be translated into one another without one ceasing to be itself. A system built to bracket any single political authority's claim to define truth cannot be structurally coupled, at the level of its own operating code, to a system built to make Party authority over that same question a constitutive parameter — the two are, in that specific sense, playing different games rather than differentiated positions within the same one.
Why the Western exclusion may be structural, not tactical
On this reading, the absence of any G7 economy from WAICO's founding membership (Part VII) is not simply the residue of tactical bloc politics or of the U.S.–China trade and export-control dispute; it may be closer to a structural necessity. If WAICO's governance vocabulary is meant to travel all the way down into the recursive constitution of the systems it certifies as “safe, reliable, and controllable,” then a liberal-democratic state whose own constitutional baseline forbids assigning any single political authority that certifying role could not join without either contradiction or an unacknowledged change of its own baseline parameters. This would make the proposal considerably more ambitious than the “rival regulatory bloc” framing that dominates the press coverage in Part VII: not an alternative institution alongside existing ones, competing for members, but a bid to fix, at the level of a machine's own constitutive code, which political ontology counts as the default — and to recruit enough of the world's states, infrastructure, and training data into that architecture that it becomes, for a large share of the planet, not one pole among several but the only operative system.
Where Luhmann's own theory pushes back
A caution is in order, and it comes from within Luhmann's own theory rather than against it. Luhmann was consistently skeptical that any single social power — including an authoritarian state — can fully colonize another function system's code without degrading that system's own performance: science that is made to answer to political correctness rather than to true/false stops reproducing itself as science; an economy micromanaged by political command rather than organized around payment/non-payment loses the efficiencies that differentiation produces. If AI systems are already partially autopoietic — reproducing technical competence according to something like their own internal code (does the model perform, is the output coherent, does the system generalize) — then building Party-authority into their constitutive parameters risks the same de-differentiation costs that centralized command has historically imposed on science and markets: a system whose recursive core is politically overwritten may prove less capable, not merely differently governed. Whether WAICO's member systems will in fact display this degradation, or whether AI is different enough from earlier function systems that the constitutive fusion of politics and code can be sustained without the classical costs, is an empirical question the speech does not — and structurally cannot — settle for itself; it is asserted, not demonstrated, and the assertion is precisely the kind of claim a purely political or geopolitical reading of the speech has no vocabulary to even notice as a claim.
Part VI. The Semiotics of the Speech: Closed Recursive Signification and the Construction of Political Subjectivity
The press coverage in Part VII treats the speech as an instrument: a tool a pre-existing political actor (“China,” “Xi”) uses to accomplish external ends (recruit the Global South, needle Washington). A semiotic reading asks the reverse question — not what the speech is used to do, but how its own textual operations produce the speaking subject and its audience as they go, i.e., how enunciation constitutes an enunciator rather than merely expressing one that already existed.
The catechetical structure of the four questions
The speech's four rhetorical questions — how to coexist with thinking machines, how to secure algorithmic decision-making, how governance keeps pace with technology's ethical challenges, how to realize AI for all — are not posed as open questions awaiting contest; they are posed so that an already-prepared, four-point answer can be delivered immediately afterward. This call-and-authoritative-response form is a recognizable genre in Party pedagogical practice (document study sessions, “two studies, one action” campaigns), in which a problem is raised only so that the correct, pre-existing resolution can be pronounced by the party best positioned to pronounce it. At the level of form, the text therefore performs the very thing Parts IV and V describe at the level of doctrine and system architecture: development-and-security, problem-and-directed-solution, are not just the content of the speech but its rhetorical procedure. The voice that answers is, by the act of answering, constituted as the position from which correct answers issue — prior to, and unconditioned by, the international deliberation the speech is ostensibly convening.
Classical allusion as self-referential closure
The classical allusions — the thousand-li horse, the proverb that a single string cannot make music, the Legalist maxim on the wise adapting to the times, the Fei Xiaotong-derived garden-of-civilizations image — do more than decorate an argument aimed at outsiders. Each certifies its own validity purely by reference to an internal Chinese textual tradition (“we often say in China,” “as ancient Chinese observed”), asking no external confirmation and offering none. This is a closed loop of signification: authority is generated recursively from within the same civilizational archive the speech is, in the same gesture, constructing as authoritative for a global audience. Nothing in the text's own semiotic economy allows that archive's authority to be adjudicated from outside it — which is exactly the property the speech needs if it is to function, per Part V, as a system whose own code supplies its criteria of legitimacy rather than submitting to an external one.
The Global South as a sign under construction
“The Global South” functions in the speech not as a pre-existing empirical bloc the text merely describes, but as a subject-position the text calls into being by simultaneously supplying its grievance (widening divides, the risk of “new historical injustice”) and its remedy (training slots, cooperation centers, WAICO membership). To accept the remedy is, semiotically, to accept the subject-position on offer — grateful capacity-recipient inside a system whose foundational rules (Parts IV–V) are authored elsewhere. Signing the WAICO founding charter is, on this reading, not merely joining an institution; it is agreeing to occupy the position of enunciation the speech has prepared for its addressee.
The triangular structure of intersubjectivity
The speech stages an “I” (Xi, speaking “on behalf of the Chinese government and people”) addressing a “we” (the assembled international community) about a “they/it” (thinking machines, the widening divide, the unnamed state “overstretching” security concepts). The international “we” is only constituted as a coherent audience by accepting the four-question, four-point structure on its own terms; the text leaves no position from which an addressee could reject the initial diagnosis altogether — for instance, by insisting that “the digital divide” or the development-security fusion is itself the wrong description of what is at stake, or by refusing the premise that any single authority (Chinese or otherwise) should supply the answer. The speech's coherence, in other words, depends on bracketing precisely the alternative descriptions — liberal-pluralist, rights-based, market-based — that would dissolve its four-part architecture. Read together with Part V, the rhetoric is doing at the level of the text exactly what the institution-building is doing at the level of governance and what the doctrine is doing at the level of the machine's constitutive parameters: constructing a closed, self-referential system that generates its own conditions of intelligibility rather than submitting one proposal among several to an open, external contest of terms.
Part VII. Global Commentary and Reception
Coverage of the speech divided along fairly predictable geopolitical lines, though with some convergence on the basic facts: that WAICO's founding, one day before the speech, gave the address institutional weight it would not otherwise have had, and that the speech was widely read as a direct, if diplomatically worded, challenge to U.S. leadership of AI governance.
Chinese state media
Xinhua's own coverage led with Xi's call for a people-centered approach to AI development for the positive and for good, and framed WAICO's founding as the culmination of a sequence of Chinese-led initiatives, quoting the “single string… single tree” proverb as the summary message that AI governance should be a shared, not a solo, undertaking.
Mainstream international press
Al Jazeera characterized the speech as urging cooperation while ensuring no single country dominates the technology, describing it as an apparent jab at the United States, and noted that WAICO's 29 founding members were unveiled the day before, with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres among the attendees. CNN's analysis placed the speech in the same news cycle as U.S. President Trump's own remarks accusing Beijing of exploiting American data, framing Xi's address as a calculated contrast: Beijing positioning itself as the responsible, stability-minded actor in AI governance. Reuters' account (via Business Standard) described Xi as casting Beijing as the champion of a new global AI order and linked the speech's institutional push directly to Beijing's wish to avoid being a “rule-taker” in a field otherwise shaped by U.S. companies and export controls.
Framing around a rival bloc structure
Several outlets read the speech primarily through the lens of a forming two-bloc structure. The Irish Times and a technology newsletter (ResultSense) both set WAICO against “Pax Silica,” a U.S.-led AI supply-chain cooperation framework involving the EU, UK, Japan, India, and others, describing the contest as one that is “breaking down along geopolitical lines,” with the G7 economies absent from WAICO and the BRICS-aligned developing world absent from Pax Silica. Reporting on India specifically (WION) highlighted that India — alone among BRICS founders — declined to join WAICO, reading this as New Delhi's attempt to avoid Chinese-led rule-making at the cost of not having a voice in the body's design.
Global South framing
The China-Global South Project's analysis argued that developing countries occupy the central place in Xi's bid for “the commanding heights of global governance,” and that his core claim — that no single country should dominate or write AI's rules — functions as a pointed, if indirect, critique of the United States aimed at winning developing-country support.
AI-policy community framing
Independent AI-policy commentary (Matt Sheehan's newsletter) read the speech as restating, rather than escalating, a three-year-old pitch, and noted that observers watching for a signal on whether China might scale back its support for open-weight model releases did not get one — the speech, on this reading, confirmed the policy status quo rather than announcing a new direction.
Skeptical and adversarial commentary
U.S. conservative outlet Breitbart's coverage led with an adversarial framing, describing Xi in personal, critical terms and characterizing WAICO's founding members — including Russia, Cuba, and Venezuela — as evidence of the body's authoritarian tilt. A cryptocurrency and technology newsletter (CryptoBriefing) took a more technical angle, arguing that a governance philosophy built around state control and “controllability” sits uneasily with decentralized and permissionless systems, and could, if WAICO's framework gains traction, favor centralized digital infrastructure over decentralized alternatives in the countries that adopt it.
Institutional detail and open questions
The Diplomat's analysis focused on WAICO's design, noting that its founding agreement stresses open participation without conditions tied to political system or values, and observed that the organization went from proposal to founding in roughly a single year — unusually fast by the standards of intergovernmental organizations — while flagging that questions about its practical operation, membership criteria, and enforcement mechanisms remain open.
Sources Consulted
--Full text: Keynote speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the opening ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference — Xinhua, July 17, 2026
--President Xi Jinping Attends the Opening Ceremony ... and Delivers Keynote Address — Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC
--Xinhua Headlines: Xi calls for equitable global AI governance, unveils new cooperation body — Xinhua
--China sends fresh signal on global AI cooperation at WAIC — Global Times
--China's Xi Jinping launches new AI alliance: What is it? — Al Jazeera
--Analysis: As Trump accuses China of stealing voter data, Xi pitches Beijing as a responsible tech leader — CNN
--Xi pitches China as leader of a new global artificial intelligence order — Business Standard (Reuters)
--Amid a wall of blue tote bags, China's vaulting AI ambitions come into view — Irish Times
--Xi pitches China as leader of new global AI order — ResultSense
--Xi Jinping's new AI bloc: China launches 'World AI Body' with Pakistan and Russia in, India out — WION
--Xi Jinping's Global South AI Strategy for Governance — China-Global South Project
--Xi Jinping's Big AI Speech, Annotated — Matt Sheehan (Substack)
--Dictator Xi Jinping Touts China as Global Leader of Artificial Intelligence — Breitbart
--China launches global AI governance organization as Xi Jinping positions Beijing against US tech dominance — CryptoBriefing
--China's New AI Club: The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization — The Diplomat
--AI Within the Cognitive Cage of the “Official” (士): China Proposes “Global AI Governance Action Plan” — Larry Catá Backer, Law at the End of the Day (Aug. 13, 2025) And an Algorithm to Bind Them All? Social Credit, Data Driven Governance, and the Emergence of an Operating System for Global Normative Orders — Larry Catá Backer, SSRN
 |
| Pix credit here (We love science, 1994) |
习近平在2026世界人工智能大会暨人工智能全球治理高级别会议开幕式上的主旨讲话（全文）
2026-07-17 12:56
【中大小】
携手构建公正合理的全球人工智能治理体系
——在2026世界人工智能大会暨人工智能全球治理高级别会议开幕式上的主旨讲话
（2026年7月17日，上海）
中华人民共和国主席 习近平
尊敬的各位同事、各位来宾，
女士们，先生们，朋友们：
70年前，一群年轻学者在美国新罕布什尔州达特茅斯会议上首次提出人工智能概念。70年间，世界各国人工智能科学家和研发者不断在未知中求索、在曲折中前行、在坚守中突破。70年后，面对新一轮蓬勃发展的人工智能浪潮，我们相聚在浦江之畔，共同探讨促进全球人工智能朝着向上向善、造福人类的方向发展，具有重要意义。我谨代表中国政府和中国人民，对大家的到来表示热烈欢迎。
回望历史，蒸汽机的发明开启工业文明，电力的普及点亮现代社会，互联网的诞生连接整个世界。每一次科技革命都深刻重构人类生产生活方式，推动经济社会发展大幅跃升。
当前，世界百年变局加速演进，新一轮科技革命和产业变革加速突破，全球人工智能技术创新进入前所未有的活跃期，万物智联、人机协同、跨界融合、共创分享的智能技术，叠加释放巨大能量，既蕴含巨大机遇，也面临治理挑战。人类不得不直面时代之问：当机器开始思考，人类如何与之相处？当算法参与决策，安全如何保障？当技术挑战伦理，治理如何跟上？当鸿沟不断拉大，普惠如何实现？这些问题需要国际社会深入思考、共同作答。
中方认为，各国应当秉持以人为本、向上向善理念，让人工智能成为促进共同繁荣、维护共同安全的一个重要动力源，携手构建公正合理的全球人工智能治理体系。在此，我提4点意见。
第一，坚持开放共赢，驱动创新发展。人工智能是世界经济增长的新引擎和新旧动能转换的加速器，正从“数字世界”走向“物理世界”。要抓住难得的历史性机遇，鼓励开源开放、合作共享，全面促进人工智能科技创新、产业发展、场景应用，协同推进传统产业改造升级、新兴产业培育壮大、未来产业前瞻布局，让人工智能赋能千行百业。
第二，强化风险意识，确保安全可控。人工智能应当成为人类的可信工具。要高度重视人工智能引发的各类内生和衍生风险，推动构建法律法规、技术监测、风险预警、应急响应体系，筑牢安全底线，防范滥用恶用，确保人工智能始终处于人类控制之下。同时，应当共同反对在人工智能领域泛化国家安全概念、把本国安全凌驾于他国安全之上的做法。
第三，鼓励包容并蓄，促进文明互鉴。人工智能发展和应用不应该侵蚀和损害世界文明多样性和各国文化独特性。要用全人类共同价值塑造人工智能的价值观，善用人工智能技术增进不同文明的理解和包容，促进不同文明交流互鉴，精心培育各美其美、美美与共的文明百花园。
第四，倡导和衷共济，完善全球治理。人工智能是全人类共同的智慧结晶和宝贵财富。要践行真正的多边主义，切实发挥联合国的重要作用，加强人工智能发展战略、治理规则、技术标准的对接协调，早日形成具有广泛共识的全球治理框架，让这一前沿技术更好造福人类社会。要广泛开展国际合作，帮助全球南方国家加强能力建设，弥合数智鸿沟，促进可持续发展，避免在人工智能领域造成新的历史不公。
女士们、先生们、朋友们！
今年是中国“十五五”开局之年。“十五五”规划为未来5年中国经济社会发展擘画蓝图，也为国际社会提供机遇清单。近年来，中国积极拥抱人工智能发展，坚持有效市场和有为政府相结合，加强人工智能科技创新，积极推进“人工智能+”行动，培育各类主体共生共荣的健康生态，智能经济核心产业规模已经超过万亿元人民币。各类智能终端走进千家万户，切实惠及民生，“中国智造”已成为中国式现代化的又一亮丽名片。
同时，中国始终坚持发展和安全并重，把握人工智能发展趋势和规律，不断完善相关法律法规、政策制度、应用规范、伦理准则，确保人工智能安全、可靠、可控，让人工智能这匹千里马既跑得快又跑得稳。
作为负责任大国，中国在人工智能领域始终致力于做国际公共产品的提供者。我提出《全球人工智能治理倡议》以来，中方先后推动联合国大会协商一致通过人工智能能力建设国际合作决议，发布《人工智能能力建设普惠计划》和《“人工智能+”国际合作倡议》，倡议成立世界人工智能合作组织，源源不断贡献中国方案。
中国人常讲，单弦不成音，独木不成林。人工智能发展不应该是某个国家的独奏，而应当是全球合作的交响。在各方共同努力下，世界人工智能合作组织在上海应运而生，一年前的构想已经转化为实际成果。这是中方响应全球南方呼声、团结国际社会积极推动人工智能发展和治理的重大举措，将成为人工智能发展史上的一个重要里程碑。
为进一步支持全球人工智能发展、推进全球人工智能能力建设，我宣布，未来5年，中国将面向发展中国家提供5000个人工智能专题研修培训名额；面向东盟、阿盟、非盟、拉共体、上合组织、金砖国家建设国际人工智能应用合作中心；推动气象智能预警方案“妈祖”在30个国家落地应用，守望万家灯火，护佑四海安澜。
女士们、先生们、朋友们！
“明者因时而变，知者随事而制。”人工智能技术发展越是一日千里，向上向善、造福人类的方向越要正确锚定，监管治理的尺度越要精准把握，防范失控的措施越要及时完善。要始终用人类智慧和国际共识引领人工智能发展，使其真正成为增进全人类福祉、推动人类文明进步的强大正能量。
中国愿以更加开放的姿态、更加务实的行动、更加长远的目光，同各方一道把握和应对人工智能发展的机遇和挑战，携手共创人类社会更加美好的未来！
谢谢大家！
* * *
JoiningHands to Build a Just and Equitable System For Global AI Governance
Keynote Address by H.E. Xi Jinping
President of the People's Republic of China
At the Opening Ceremony of the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance
Shanghai, July 17, 2026
Distinguished Colleagues and Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Friends,
Seventy years ago, a group of young scholars proposed the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) for the first time at the Dartmouth Workshop in New Hampshire of the United States. In the subsequent 70 years, AI scientists and researchers from around the world ventured into this unknown territory, forged ahead through twists and turns, and made breakthroughs with persistent hard work. Seven decades later today, amid the new wave of AI development, we are gathering by the Huangpu River to discuss how to promote AI globally for the positive, for good and for humanity. All this makes our meeting highly important. On behalf of the Chinese government and people, I would like to extend a warm welcome to you all.
In the course of history, the invention of the steam engine heralded the industrial civilization, the widespread access to electricity brightened up modern society, and the birth of the Internet brought the entire world together. Each of these technological revolutions has profoundly reshaped our way of work and life, and enabled a giant leap in economic and social development.
Today, major changes unseen in a century are accelerating across the world. The new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation is advancing at a faster pace, and the world has entered an unprecedented period of active innovation on AI technologies. Intelligent connectivity, human-machine collaboration, cross-sector integration, joint creation and sharing, and other intelligent technologies are unleashing enormous power. All this carries within it great opportunities as well as challenges to governance. We human beings must answer the questions posed by our times: How to get along with thinking machines? How to ensure security when algorithm is part of decision making? How to tackle ethical challenges by technologies through adaptive governance? How to realize AI for all when the divide keeps widening? These questions demand serious consideration and real answers from the whole international community.
In China's view, all countries should take a people-centered approach and develop AI for the positive and for good. We should ensure that AI is an important driver for shared prosperity and common security. We should join hands to build a just and equitable system for global AI governance. To this end, I wish to share four observations.
First, we should adhere to the principle of openness and win-win and boost innovation-driven development. As a new engine of world economic growth and an accelerator for the shift of growth drivers, AI is moving from the digital world into the physical world. We should seize this rare, historic opportunity to encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing. We should facilitate technological innovation, industrial development and scenario-based application of AI. We should make coordinated advances in the transformation and upgrade of traditional industries, the cultivation and growth of emerging industries and forward-looking planning for future industries, so that all sectors and businesses can benefit from AI.
Second, we should strengthen risk-awareness and ensure that AI is secure and controllable. AI should be a trusted tool for humanity. We should take seriously the various types of inherent and secondary risks that AI may trigger. We should put in place laws and regulations, technological monitoring, early warning and emergency response systems in order to strengthen the line of security, prevent abuses and malicious use, and ensure that AI is always under human control. In the meantime, we should jointly oppose overstretching the national security concept in the field of AI and placing one country's security over that of others.
Third, we should encourage inclusiveness and promote mutual learning between civilizations. AI development and its application should not erode or undermine the diversity of world civilizations or the uniqueness of cultures of different countries. We must shape the values of AI with humanity's common values, and make good use of AI technologies to increase understanding, tolerance, exchanges, and sharing among all civilizations. We should tend to the garden of civilizations with great care to ensure that the beauty of each civilization is appreciated and shared.
Fourth, we should advocate solidarity and improve global governance. AI is an invaluable asset that encapsulates humanity's collective wisdom. We should practice true multilateralism and recognize the important role of the United Nations. We should enhance alignment and coordination on AI development strategies, governance rules and technical standards, so as to form a consensus-based global governance framework at an early date to make this frontier technology better benefit humanity. We must carry out extensive international cooperation and help Global South countries with capacity building to bridge the AI and digital divides, promote sustainable development, and prevent creating new historical injustice in AI.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Friends,
This year marks the start of China's 15th Five-Year Plan. It maps out China's economic and social development for the next five years and provides immense opportunities for the international community. In recent years, China has embraced AI with open arms. We have promoted interplay between an efficient market and a well-functioning government, strengthened AI innovation, actively advanced the AI Plus Initiative, and built a healthy ecosystem for all entities to thrive in together. The core smart economy industries are worth at least RMB 1 trillion yuan. Smart devices in countless homes truly improve people's livelihood. Intelligent Manufacturing in China has become another shining hallmark of Chinese modernization.
At the same time, China lays great emphasis on safety and security in AI development. With a deep understanding of the trends and logic of AI development, we are continuously improving laws, regulations, policies, mechanisms, application norms, as well as ethical principles to make sure that AI is safe, secure and controllable, and that this fine steed of AI gallops with both speed and stability.
As a responsible major country, China is always committed to providing international public goods relating to AI. Since I proposed the Global AI Governance Initiative, China has promoted the adoption of the U.N. General Assembly Resolution on Enhancing International Cooperation on Capacity-Building of Artificial Intelligence by consensus, published the AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All, announced the AI Plus International Cooperation Initiative, and advocated for establishing the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO). China has been contributing steadily to the global AI governance.
We often say in China, "A single string cannot make music, and a single tree does not make a forest." AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation. Thanks to our joint efforts, WAICO has come into being in Shanghai. Our vision from one year ago is now a reality. This is a major move by China to answer the call of the Global South and unite the international community together to promote vigorously AI development and governance. It will be an important milestone in the history of AI development.
To further support global AI development and advance global AI capacity building, I hereby announce that in the next five years, China will provide developing countries with 5,000 opportunities in AI training and seminar programs; develop international AI application cooperation centers with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the League of Arab States, the African Union, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and BRICS; and enable 30 countries to use the AI-powered meteorological warning system, or MAZU, to safeguard homes around the world.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Friends,
As ancient Chinese observed, "A man of wisdom adapts to changes; a man of knowledge acts by circumstances." With AI advancing at a staggering speed, we must ensure its development is for the positive, for good and for humanity. We must make its oversight and governance precise and effective, and constantly refine measures to forestall loss of control. We should always guide AI development with human wisdom and international consensus, so that AI can truly become a mighty force that increases the well-being of humanity and advances human civilization.
China is ready to be more open, take more practical actions, and assume a more visionary perspective. We are ready to work with all parties to seize the opportunities of AI development and meet the challenges, and join hands to create a brighter future for humanity.
Thank you! ■
No comments:
Post a Comment