China Derangement Syndrome

China is not going to invade and topple the United States

Often I see people claim it’s essential for America to win the AI race against China (in whatever sense) for reasons like these:

• “What is the reason we want America to win the AI race? It’s because we want to make sure free open societies can defend themselves” (Alec Stapp)

• “We should seek to win the race to global AI technological superiority and ensure that China does not… to ensure that our way of life is not displaced by the much darker Chinese vision“ (Marc Andreessen)

• “Will it be one in which the United States and allied nations advance a global AI that spreads the technology’s benefits and opens access to it, or an authoritarian one, in which nations or movements that don’t share our values use AI to cement and expand their power?” (Sam Altman)

• “In Machines of Loving Grace, I discussed the possibility that authoritarian governments might use powerful AI to surveil or repress their citizens in ways that would be extremely difficult to reform or overthrow. Current autocracies are limited in how repressive they can be by the need to have humans carry out their orders, and humans often have limits in how inhumane they are willing to be. But AI-enabled autocracies would not have such limits.” (Dario Amodei)

• “The torch of liberty will not survive Xi getting AGI first. (And, realistically, American leadership is the only path to safe AGI, too.)” (Leopold Ashenbrenner)

• “whoever wins the race for AI, that nation’s values are going to be reflected in AI. If China wins the race for AI, AI will be a tool for global surveillance and control as carried out by a communist nation” (Ted Cruz)

Those claims slide between a few different actual threat models:

1. Government Capture by China: China will overthrow and control the US government, maybe as part of general domination of the whole world.

2. Defeat in Cold War: China will have greater wealth and prestige, so just as our prestige inspires many parts of the world to adopt our way of life today, much of the world will adopt the Chinese governance and cultural models instead.

3. Protection From Our Conquest: China will fortify its own regime, so that it can’t be overthrown, whereas if we win the AI race, we can promptly overthrow the Chinese government and replace it with a new regime aligned with our values.

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:

• The Chinese haven’t built a network of military bases abroad or binding military alliances; they have a single foreign base in Djibouti and a single mutual-defense treaty with North Korea. In contrast, America maintains over 700 bases and a huge alliance network with NATO and the Asian military allies Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines.

• Chinese military spending is 1.7% of GDP, versus 2.1% for France and 3.4% for America. Chinese foreign-aid spending is 0.07% of GDP versus the much larger 0.8% for France and 1.2% for America.

• China has almost no history of covertly backing palace coups abroad, in contrast to America, Russia, and France.

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.

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

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.