The epistemics at work here...
China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history
The "non-bordering" part is doing an enormous amount of work here. Choosing only to attack bordering countries is perfectly compatible with conquering much of the world. Arguably, if conquering the world were a country's sole goal, then going after immediate neighbors one at a time is usually the best strategy.
nor have they ever tried to overthrow a foreign government by covert or manipulative means
Hong Kong? Taiwan? (In both cases, the "foreign" part is kind of in dispute, Hong Kong more so.) The fact that the post doesn't mention Taiwan at all raises my eyebrow.
China is a very inward-looking country compared to other major powers. Only 0.1% of Chinese residents were born abroad, much fewer than the 15% in America and 14% in France
The fact that China lets in very few immigrants does not provide evidence against the hypothesis that they think they're better than everyone else and that the world should belong to them. If they also had near-zero emigration and trade with the outside world, then the term "in...
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2Choosing only to attack bordering countries is perfectly compatible with conquering much of the world
While that is true, even in that case I don't think China would be a threat to the United States based on an analysis of the world map.
The fact that the post doesn't mention Taiwan at all raises my eyebrow.
The Chinese disputes with Taiwan, or on the Indian border, aren't a threat to the West. Likewise, the Chinese conflicts involving Uyghurs, Tibetans, and to a lesser degree their maritime borders don't reflect the kind of foreign meddling that I'm talking about, which is ideologically motivated overseas intervention or conspiracy of the kind practiced by America, the Soviet Union, and the British and French Empires.
But this is about as far from "inward-looking" as you can get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belt_and_Road_Initiative
This is also not the kind of "universalist missionary ideology" behavior I'm referring to. My understanding is that Belt and Road is a bunch of construction ($800B) and investment ($600B) contracts and that the largest recipients are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, and then other recipients include Indonesia, Iraq, and the Congo.
Random details:
...The fac
China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history
Without commenting on the evidence or the conclusion, I just want to say that the link between evidence and conclusion seems extremely weak - I'm pretty sure the Mongol hordes also never attacked a non-bordering country yet it would be laughable to call them non-aggressive.
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Good post, thank you for opening this discussion.
I've long been waiting for the rationalist community to have a "Sword of Good" kind of reckoning about the US vs China, as in "choosing between good and bad is about deciding which is which". To lay out some rails, I think there are two general approaches to this question.
1) The objective approach. Here you find some numbers, like percent of healthcare coverage and so on, and compare the two countries on these numbers. I've given this a lot of thought and believe that it comes down to two "topline metrics", which ought to weigh more than any other metric when deciding a country's moral worth. They are: how many people the country represses internally, and how many people the country kills in foreign wars. These are the topline metrics for a government being good domestically and being good internationally. For example, Nazi Germany had horrible repression internally and started horrible aggressive wars, and that's the entire reason we think it was bad. Well, today's US has much higher incarceration rate than today's China and also kills much more people in foreign wars, so there's that.
2) The aspirational approach. Here one can say t...
3Have you looked into:
- Financial repression (disposable income as % of GDP, limits on currency conversion)
- Censorship level (% of movies shown in theaters that are pre-approved by government censors, % of foreign websites that are accessible)
- Population/movement controls (not sure how to measure these, but e.g. "one-child policy" and hukou household registration system, which have no counterparts in the US)
This reminds me of the Tucker Carlson interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin's discussion of Russian and Ukrainian history seemed bizarre and unmotivated to some of my friends, but it seemed to me like the obvious intent was to explain how he understands Russia and Russia's legitimate interests, in order to draw an intelligible distinction between aggressive and defensive acts along lines that might not otherwise make sense to foreigners with different assumptions, so that we wouldn't be forced to construe Russia's campaign in Ukraine as aggressive.
He was trying to explain how not to have a domino theory about Russia in Ukraine.
Other commenters have complained about your "only ever attacked people sharing a border" threshold. The map of the world doesn't really help the US. Not only would we be pretty disturbed if China conquered all of Eurasia going border-by-border, but a small country in the Americas participating in the Belt and Road initiative could invite China to establish some sort of protectorate, after which China would only have to traverse a series of borders to get to the US. Likewise, saying that the Uighurs in Xinjiang are within China's borders doesn...
My threat model is actually
- More of the lightcone will be controlled by the Chinese government (or its successor).
My current guess is that the long-term future looks better if American actors have more bargaining power over the long-term future than Chinese actors. If space is subdivided amongst the key actors (including the Chinese government, the U.S. government, and possibly others), I worry that the parts controlled by the Chinese government would be illiberal, in the same kinds of ways that China is now. One particularly bad version of this is an AI-enabled surveillance state that locks in something like current Chinese ideology, curtailing the potential for moral improvement. I think this is less likely in the parts of space controlled by the U.S. government, because I think those are reasonably likely to be founded on fairly liberal values, perhaps similar in spirit to the U.S. constitution.
1I didn't disagree-vote and I'm not sure what those people are disagreeing about.
I think your point is reasonable and novel among the comments or Twitter replies. I don't have a strong take on "lock-in," though; I guess it's definitely possible to imagine some technology that creates lock-in but in general I think it's overrated. For example, I don't think mass surveillance per se creates lock-in for governance, and I don't think the American Constitution has "locked us in" to its words as much as others say.
I do think that governance in general changes over time as technology changes in somewhat deterministic ways, e.g. I think that it intuitively seems correct that over the last 100 years democracy and parliamentarianism has gradually been replaced by administrative rule because the balance of military power has changed: masses can't be used by counter-elites to threaten the state the way they could during the age where amateur riflemen were an important military power, roughly between the American Revolution and Spanish Civil War.
I just want to mention that I think the question to ask here is something like what predicts best the future of a country and what are the things that generalise, how do you predict a country well?
I would like to recommend that people read a longer history of China so that they can understand the underlying cultural forces at play since that shapes identity quite a lot. Identity is often carried forth and is a key underlying factor that should be taken into account together with game theory among other things.
You do not predict other human beings as fully rational, you understand that their wants and needs are shaped by their history and generally a good predictive system is to find what things the country identifies with.
What are the historical driving forces of China? How did they transform and how do they show up across the political spectrum in China today? What is the Chinese cultural identity? What are the economical and cultural forces shaping its future?
I've spent 50 hours or so on Chinese history which whilst not a lot in the larger scheme is probably more than most here. Whilst I'm sorry for the ethos argument, I mainly want to point out that you should go do it yourself ...
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion. In China there’s no private ownership of land and no independent judiciary.
Yes, this is all true and really important, regardless of what you think about China re: AI policy.
I think a missing mood in a lot of discourse is that the US has historically been an imperfect standard bearer for these principles, and today is straying further from them in alarming ways. But that doesn't make it less important that the CCP explicitly rejects them. Conversely, there are some things the CCP can be admired for in terms of state capacity and effectiveness. "Communism with Chinese characteristics" is actually pretty good in some ways; they just need to drop the "communism" part! This is of course extremely unlikely / unrealistic, but if they could just pick some better 19th and 20th century European intellectuals to base their political philosophy around, the whole world would be better off...
Implicitly I read you as most notably as (and please permit simplification and glossing over many additional points an subtleties, in order for me to later get to my biggest concern): "Look, China has been rather benign on a world stage, suggesting this may rather likely well stay so."
But: To strictly derive, benign, kind intents, you'd have to claim that Chinese policy would have been unsmart for an ultimately self-serving regime or elite or population. Else your observation has very little epistemic content other than maybe to confirm: they were smart.
So: Would China, or, say, Xi Jinping or its ruling elite, or whaterver the relevant entity, really have had much to gain from aggressing countries in the meantime? Or, say, from aggressing them more than they did[1] in the past?
My "concern": MAYBE RATHER NOT!?
Thinking about how much China was able to cumulatively grow, amass power and influence over the past decades, it seems to me rather really difficult to claim they did 'much wrong' in terms of pursuing an aim of becoming wealthy, powerful, important on the world scene.
Suggests: Non-aggression[2] fully paid off. That is of course an interesting lesson you could say. That it'll al...
The American sphere of care does not limit itself to a specific ethnic core. Despite recent anti-immigrant backlash, what it means to be an "American" is not tied up with your genetic makeup.
This is not true of China. You can't "become" Chinese any more than you can change your ethnicity.
The Chinese government cares for the Chinese almost exclusively, with little concern given to anyone else, and certainly no one else can join the group of people they are concerned for. This is the sort of government that uses AI for the betterment of China, with everyon...
Under this reasoning, China has had limited imperial ambitions in the past only because it e.g. lacked naval superiority.
China destroyed its navy in the Ming period and eschewed colonial expansion because they thought the rest of the world was low in quality, compared to China, and therefore not worth colonizing. By all accounts, they still think that.
I tend to view the people saying this as invoking a magic spell, as though geography will allow them to summon an AI based on America's highest ideals instead of its practical realities (while denying the same magic spell to China). Like how, if "humane" means "That which, being human, we wish we were," then "humane values" is what many people really mean when they say "human values."
Even so, if I try to ask myself what each country's actual highest ideals are, I have a harder time doing this for China than the US. Mostly because I'm American, yes, but als...
American exceptionalism is missionary. It holds that the United States has an obligation to spread its values to every part of the world. China’s exceptionalism is cultural. China does not proselytize; it does not claim that its contemporary institutions are relevant outside China.
— Kissinger’s On China
America has a concept of universal human rights and equality coming out of Christian belief. If you believe in those things, the important of spreading universal human rights and equality has some importance even when bringing democracy to Iran is not the pr...
I remember one of the reasons the DoD had developed such an anti-China view was because back in the 2010s, China had tended to break trade agreements constantly, showing that it wasn't a credible dealmaker and further cooperation was not worth it.
I wish I knew which lesswrong comment said this before.
Is China Expansionist? Maybe.
I think this is a good post, much needed in this community given the dominating perspective I see when approaching China which seems to me to mostly see them as a similar entity to the USSR as an adversary, when from my reading on China, this model seems to fit incredibly poorly.
However, I do think it is worth noting that expansionism does often beget expansionism, and to say that China is not expansionist is somewhat misleading. The Taiwan situation is relatively unique, but it is difficult for me to model what happens after C...
I would agree with many points here. China in recent history suffered years of colonizations and war here and there by at least 8 western countries, which made them miserable and resentful towards those who exploited others. It was eager to gain more power after WW2 because it realized that some countries can take advantage of the less powerful ones very easily. AFAIK gaining more power is intended to protect/defend the country itself and maintain stability, not offense. Even throughout the education system, taking advantage of the weak is never celebrated...
To pick up some repeating arguments.
Re Taiwan: I don't think this serves as a counterargument. The remnants of the non-communist Kuomintang forces retreated to Taiwan as a last base. For mainland China to consider this a "left over territory to conquer which we didn't complete in 1949" is historically and culturally more justifiable than what international foreign intervention usually means.
Re China's internal despotism: China being not militaristically expansionist does not equal China being a humanistic society or desirable system of state or societal or...
1likewise should be compared to the market system, where lots of people I talk to today feel like they can't afford a child at all. I think when markets cause such bad outcomes, the market system should be held to the same standard as an autocratic system if it'd caused such outcomes; the market is not a magical blame-washing device to me.
I think this makes sense, but if you apply it to "affording a child" China is doing way worse in this regard (1.02 TFR vs 1.62 for the US).
..."How many people the state imprisons or kills" summarizes many objective things an
I don't think it's been mentioned by other comments, but imo China doesn't have any AI labs that care about alignment as a real issue as much as even OpenAI in the US, let alone Anthropic.
1"The Dario quote points to (3) with unusual directness"
This feels like a misreading of the Dario quote.
Anyway, I appreciate you differentiating different models of harm.
1It seems that much of the controversy surrounding this article stems from the claim that “China only attacks its neighbors,” but this claim is inaccurate. The fact is that “since 1949, the People’s Republic of China has never invaded another sovereign state with the aim of annexing it, ceding undisputed territory, or establishing a puppet regime.”
To me, I think the "likelihood to dominate others" factor is less salient than the "likelihood to produce safe AGI" factor. Are there good arguments that China is better on AGI safety?
They seem to have any central policy at all, which is good if you think the AI technologies currently under development will produce unsafe AGI unless they are intelligently centrally managed.
I am glad this article exists, particularly because those of us who live in the U.S. should always be scrutinizing our own biases and patriotic framings.
That said, I think a fulsome discussion of whether China would use AGI to control other nations should at least include the following topics: 1) Uyghurs, 2) Tibet, 3) Taiwan, and 4) Chinese investment and contracting in Africa. I'm not an expert here—someone else can probably think of additional case studies.
I also think that, granted that the U.S. is a much more bellicose country on the international stag...
That said, I think a fulsome discussion of whether China would use AGI to control other nations should at least include the following topics: 1) Uyghurs, 2) Tibet, 3) Taiwan, and 4) Chinese investment and contracting in Africa.
I don't understand the relevance of Uyghurs or Tibetans, who are within China's own borders. The Taiwan conflict is in close to the same category. Chinese investment and contracting isn't imperial or manipulative in the CIA-style sense I was talking about. My understanding is that Belt and Road is a bunch of construction ($800B) and investment ($600B) contracts and that the largest recipients are Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Nigeria, and then other recipients include Indonesia, Iraq, and the Congo.
I'm not sure if a non-intrusive country is likely to stay that way if given a total and complete advantage over other countries.
That makes sense. I added the following addendum:
...Addendum: It would have been mistaken for a European to say, in 1895, "Who cares about American industrialization? They have almost no army and have barely left their far-away continent." Soon afterward that European might find the Americans replacing his regime or dismantling his empire. So a
I'm generally against "race with China" frame, because whatever is going to happen after AGI is going to be much weirder even in non-extinction scenarios, but if we consider unusually-non-weird scenarios, I think you miss multiple unpleasant ways to project power, which are not "conquest", but functionally are hard to distinguish from conquest in negative consequences. For example, if all China-friendly dictatorships get AGI-derived tech first ("deploy total mass surveillance with this one trick, first ten countries get discount"), it's going to be very unpleasant, even if China inself won't anything bad directly.
Often I see people claim it’s essential for America to win the AI race against China (in whatever sense) for reasons like these:
Those claims slide between a few different actual threat models:
The Dario quote points to (3) with unusual directness. The “race rather than slowdown” ending of AGI 2027 also supposes that our AI lead will create interest in overthrowing the Chinese government. But most of the quotes I gave as examples above are interpreted as (1): that an AI-enabled Chinese government would overthrow Western governments.
My main point here is that (1) seems unfounded to me. China is not an aggressive nation at all. As far as I can tell, China has literally never attacked a non-bordering country in its entire history, nor have they ever tried to overthrow a foreign government by covert or manipulative means. China is also unique among nuclear powers for its unconditional no-first-use policy, which at face value implies they would withhold a nuclear response to even an overwhelming conventional invasion. Further:
More broadly, China is a very inward-looking country compared to other major powers. Only 0.1% of Chinese residents were born abroad, much fewer than the 15% in America and 14% in France, fewer even than the 0.3% and 3% in India and Japan respectively. The Chinese government has peacefully compromised on almost all border disputes in central and southeast Asia, often taking a minority of the contested territory. (The Indian border is the exception.)
In particular, there's less history of Chinese overseas expeditions that are motivated by ideology alone. The British Empire famously destroyed overseas slavery at great cost to themselves, and the Americans and Soviets interfered in foreign regimes and civil wars, all for basically ideological rather than self-interested motives. The use of power for this kind of crusading is much less precedented in China.
To many American voters and elites, tracing back to Woodrow Wilson more than 100 years ago, “the justification of America’s international role was messianic: America had an obligation, not to the balance of power, but to spread its principles throughout the world” (Kissinger). That isn’t the historical attitude of the Chinese government, whose leaders perceive foreign intervention or expansion as threatening to Chinese identity and culture.
It’s true that China doesn’t practice liberal governance. The core of liberalism is freedom of contract, limitations on government interference, and equal access to independent courts. In China, the CCP explicitly rejects limited government and exercises highly invasive control over business, speech, association, and religion. In China there’s no private ownership of land and no independent judiciary.
If you think it’s prudent to disable and overthrow the Chinese government when it becomes achievable militarily, then that’s certainly one (bellicose) position you could hold. Then you could say that a downside of losing the AI race is that the CCP may defend itself. But it’s unwise to project this ideological aggression onto the CCP itself without evidence.
Addendum: It would have been mistaken for a European to say, in 1895, "Who cares about American industrialization? They have almost no army and have barely left their far-away continent." Soon afterward that European might find the Americans replacing his regime or dismantling his empire. So a counterargument here is that in general, countries that become wealthy and militarily powerful become aggressive regardless of how passive they seemed before. Under this reasoning, China has had limited imperial ambitions in the past only because it e.g. lacked naval superiority. This has to be an argument based on a general view of human nature and government.