How China Is Using AI — And Why It Should Have Your Attention

China's AI surveillance apparatus is the most advanced ever built. Hundreds of millions of cameras feed into centralized systems that can identify faces, track movements, and flag behavior in real time. In Xinjiang, this infrastructure has been used to monitor the Uyghur Muslim population at a level that human rights organizations describe as a digital police state.

But the next phase goes further. A Chinese company called Geedge Networks— which sells a commercial version of China's Great Firewall — has been developing AI tools designed to predict political dissent before it happens. Using location data, social media activity, internet history, and even what books and movies citizens consume, the system builds behavioral profiles to flag people before they've done anything wrong. Researchers at Vanderbilt University uncovered the program from 100,000 leaked internal documents.

Meeting minutes from February 2024 show Geedge researchers discussing how to build profiles to “identify intent” and “achieve discovery of harmful information” — language the Chinese Communist Party routinely uses as a euphemism for political dissent. Geedge has already exported its surveillance software to Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Myanmar, and Pakistan. The predictive profiling technology represents the next generation of what it is already selling abroad.

This technology is slowed — but not stopped — by U.S. export controls on the advanced Nvidia chips needed to run it at full scale. That restraint is currently being renegotiated.

If surveillance is where China's AI ambitions are most alarming, electric vehicles are where they are most impressive — and most threatening to American industry. China now manufactures more electric vehicles than the rest of the world combined, and it is winning markets the United States is not even competing in.

How China won the EV market

The reason China dominates is not just subsidies, though those are massive and effectively unlimited. It is vertical integration powered by AIat every layer of the stack. Chinese companies control the full supply chain — from lithium mining in South America, to battery manufacturing, to the AI-powered software running the car itself. Onboard AI handles navigation, driver assistance, predictive maintenance, and over-the-air software updates that improve the vehicle after purchase. XPeng began production of China's first robotaxi-specific car in May 2025. Li Auto is preparing to unveil in-house AI chips and autonomous driving foundational models.

What happened to Tesla in China is a warning

China ran a precise playbook on Tesla. Using tariffs on foreign-manufactured cars and subsidies for domestic production, China lured Elon Musk to open a Shanghai factory in 2017. Tesla received generous subsidies, discounted industrial land, and fast regulatory approvals — just long enough for Chinese engineers to study the company's innovations. Then the subsidies vanished. By 2025, Tesla's market share in China had fallen below 5%.

China is winning markets America isn't watching

Costa Rica now has the second-highest EV adoption rate in Latin America — 18% of all new car sales in Q1 2025, three times the U.S. rate. The cars filling those roads are not Teslas or Fords. They are BYDs, Geelygeelys, MGs, Aions, and Dongfengs — many selling for under $20,000. When Costa Rica's largest EV association polled its members, 70% said they switched to electric to save money, not for environmental reasons. Across Latin America, Africa, and much of Asia, EV sales surged 79% in March 2025 compared to a year earlier, according to Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. Chinese brands dominate every one of those markets on price points no American manufacturer can match.

The $1 trillion question

The Trump administration is reportedly considering a deal to allow China to invest $1 trillion in the United States, largely to build factories on American soil. The political logic is jobs. The strategic risk is everything else.

When American companies like General Electric, Intel, and Tesla opened factories in China in exchange for market access, Chinese engineers absorbed the technology, built competitors, and pushed the Americans out. China's 2017 National Intelligence Law requires every Chinese company to share data with the state on demand. An American factory built by a Chinese company is not a jobs program. It is an intelligence operation with a parking lot.

“If they want to come in and build the plant and hire you and hire your friends and your neighbors, that's great. I love that. Let China come in,” President Trump said in Detroit in January 2025. His own AI Action Plan states that denying foreign adversaries access to advanced AI chips is “a matter of both geostrategic competition and national security.” Both cannot be true at the same time.

China's People's Liberation Army has made AI-enabled warfare an explicit national priority. The PLA is developing autonomous drones, AI-assisted targeting systems, and information warfare tools — including AI-generated propaganda tailored to specific foreign audiences. A separate Chinese company, GoLaxy, was documented by Vanderbilt researchers and The New York Times developing AI software designed to push targeted propaganda aligned with Chinese government positions into foreign social media feeds. China's Public Security Bureaus are racing to deploy DeepSeek, China's leading AI model, for predictive policing technology.

The single biggest constraint on China's AI ambitions is compute. Nvidia's most advanced chips are the engines behind the world's most powerful AI models. U.S. export controls have blocked China from purchasing them since 2022, and internal Geedge documents from 2024 show the company struggling with GPU shortages as a direct result — falling back on older, less capable models.

The controls have worked, but imperfectly. The Trump administration has relaxed some Biden-era restrictions, and during President Trump's 2026 trip to Beijing, officials confirmed China would gain access to a more advanced Nvidia chip variant. China is simultaneously funding domestic alternatives through Huawei and others, with a stated goal of chip independence by 2030.

China's AI story is not abstract. It is reshaping the car you might buy next, the price of electronics, the social media content reaching your feed, and the balance of power between democratic and authoritarian governments. The United States still leads on foundational AI research and the most powerful models. That lead rests heavily on export controls that are currently being renegotiated, and on a domestic manufacturing base being targeted for Chinese investment.