Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: The United States blames China for local data center opposition, details emerge about a California killing involving three Chinese immigrants, and Beijing issues new rules on exit bans and offshore trusts.

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: The United States blames China for local data center opposition, details emerge about a California killing involving three Chinese immigrants, and Beijing issues new rules on exit bans and offshore trusts.

Explaining AI’s Popularity

As public opposition to artificial intelligence data centers rises across the United States, Silicon Valley elites and Republican politicians are accusing China of interference, including by paying local activists, based on scant evidence. Though Chinese propaganda might inflame these tensions, the unpopularity of data centers in the United States is entirely genuine.

The issue reflects how ideological and socially divisive AI debates have become in the United States. In China, however, the technology is popular, and both the government and the public are considerably cooler-headed about it. A poll published last November found that 87 percent of people in China say they trust AI, compared with 32 percent in the United States.

This divergence was hardly inevitable. Plenty of technologies are unpopular in China even when promoted by the government, such as genetically modified crops. So why is AI such an uncontroversial issue in China and such a divisive one in the United States?

China’s approach to AI situates the technology within a long tradition of cybernetics, the transdisciplinary study of circular flows and self-adjustment within systems. When the “Cambrian explosion” of large language models began in 2024, China integrated them into this existing framework, treating AI as a vital future technology requiring careful management and public education.

There are dark corners to........

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