Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of China.
Highlights this week: China’s new governing laws companions of artificial intelligence work, a shoe factory fire destroys the southeastern city of Jinjiang, and China braces itself for active operations hurricane season.
AI Companion Rules Make an Impact
of China new law artificial intelligence management partners will go into effect on Wednesday, prompting many industry players to cancel or suspend services until the impact of the regulation is determined.
AI companions are large language constructs wrapped in a fictional person, creating the illusion of a person with whom users can form a relationship. One can approximate this with standard AI models through careful notation, but programs such as Xingye (“Field of Stars”) or Zhumengdao (“Dream Island”) are specifically designed for this use. Comparable Western apps exist, but most are blocked in China.
The app allows users to create their so-called dream partners and provides a platform to play out romantic scenes, complete with photo editing. Obviously, part of the appeal is the sexual fantasy. China’s AI services are already banned from providing sexually explicit content, but users are banned found way around those obstacles.
However, the biggest appeal of such products seems to be emotional or romantic rather than exciting.
AI dating is already a huge industry in China that has seen rapid growth in recent years. As of last December, the country’s most popular volunteer service, Talkie, was 23.5 million monthly users; several competitors counted users in the low millions.
New rules, to some extent weak from a draft released last year, it requires AI partners to regularly remind users that they are communicating with a bot, order intervention when users appear to be in an overly emotional state, prevent children under 14 from using the service, and require an easy way to exit the service.
These are all reasonable steps that are also included in the regulations in Western countries. But as is often the case in China, it’s not just the laws that matter but what the signs signify. Some companies are it’s already crippling AI corporate features to demonstrate government compliance, though principle don’t need it. (They may re-enable them after the implementation of the regulations becomes clearer.)
AI dating has flourished in China in part because dating life there is more complicated than in much of the West. Women report being sexually harassed or coerced into having sex, and feminists trying to raise awareness about these issues they are facing government payments. For advanced users, AI partners can provide a way to explore romantic feelings that cannot be achieved in the real world, as the government does. strict restrictions space for fun.
Unlike the global corporate market, which largely focuses on so-called AI girlfriends, the Chinese market skews towards female users looking for AI boyfriends. That might be because it grew out of China passion to”2D culture”—the mostly Japanese universe of anime characters and other fan comics to move from most men to most women in the last ten years.
Meanwhile, some men are the one with a grudge as they are considered financially or socially to be separated from the dating market. A visiting Western scholar told me that he recently met a male university student who said that because he knew he lacked the money and status to get a date, he had three AI girlfriends instead.
A big part of AI friendship is harmless playfulness, but building an emotional connection with the chatbot it is not healthyespecially for small users. China has been quicker to regulate these services than most Western countries, and it tries to attribute this speed to demographic concerns.
With China’s birth rate at historic lows, authority may have less enthusiasm for technologies that encourage people to invest emotionally in machines rather than human relationships. The popularity of AI’s sensitive, female friends is also weighed against male vision which Beijing wants to implement.
The biggest reason, however, is that China already has the infrastructure to regulate the industry. In a country where online life is controlled and technology companies are controlled responsive with formal preferences, it is easy to change and enforce online rules.
Not so with China’s offline economy. Self-interest, corruption, and the size of the country often create a large gap between principles and reality. Contrary to expectations that the Internet would liberate China, the digital world has been one of the easiest domains for the Chinese nation. control.
What we’re after
Jinjiang factory fire. After a shoe factory fire in Jinjiang, a city in southeastern China, killing at least 28 people, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for stricter enforcement of workplace safety laws. China has a large body of safety regulations on paper, but implementation often loose, like recently mining disasters have shown.
of China 300 million Migrant workers, many of whom are employed without books, are particularly vulnerable to poor working conditions. I would expect a slight decline in manufacturing over the next two to three months as regulators increase inspections and companies reduce illegal activities.
As always, however, the structural incentives for corruption make it unlikely that this crackdown will bring about long-term change.
Hurricane season. China appears to have avoided the worst of Typhoon Bavi, which hit the country’s east coast over the weekend. Although more than 2 million people were evacuated, the storm weak and the flood was not as severe as many feared. But the respite may be short-lived: Forecasters expect dire conditions hurricane season ahead, with six more storms on the horizon.
China has an extensive hydraulic system, but heavy rains can overwhelm them and, in rare cases, cause dams to collapse. In 1975, for example, Typhoon Nina caused many dams to collapse across China, in particular Banqiao Dam. The resulting floods—and the famine and disease that followed—cost an estimated 230,000 lives.
Most Read FP This Week
Technology and Business
Unemployment rates. There has long been skepticism about China’s official unemployment numbers, which currently stand still concerning but still not important 5.1 percent. The suspicions grew in 2023, when the government suddenly stopped publishing youth unemployment statistics for several months before resuming under a revised approach.
Li Daokui, a professor at Tsinghua University, has he concluded that the actual long-term unemployment rate is currently 10.2 percent, according to data from the Office for National Statistics. If the estimate is correct, it will raise authorities’ concerns about AI’s impact on employment and could strengthen the case for public works initiatives.
Russian military support. A joint investigation and Inside, Glassand The world highlights the deepening of China-Russia military cooperation since Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine. The investigation found extensive coordination between Moscow and Beijing, particularly regarding the Starlink satellite system and the sharing of technical information about weapons.
Although China continues to avoid supplying Russia with arms directly, it has a strong interest in a Russian victory in Ukraine that could weaken the West.
