China’s State Council issues a national AI plan to 2030
China’s State Council issued the New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan, a three-stage roadmap to 2030 covering theory, technology, industry and military-civil integration, with the stated aim of making China the world’s leading center of AI innovation.
Why it mattered The clearest statement by a national government that AI leadership was a strategic priority, and the document most often cited as hardening the competitive framing between China and the United States.
Chinese companies and universities already had large machine-learning groups in 2017, and the country’s share of published AI research had been climbing for a decade. What the government had not yet issued was a plan of its own.
The State Council’s notice, numbered Guofa (2017) No. 35, set three stages. By 2020 China’s AI technology and applications were to keep pace with the leading international level, with a core AI industry worth more than 150 billion yuan. By 2025 the plan called for breakthroughs in basic theory and for AI to become a main driver of industrial upgrading, with the core industry above 400 billion yuan. By 2030 China was to be the world’s leading center of AI innovation, its core AI industry worth more than one trillion yuan and the industries drawn along behind it ten times that.
The document ranged well beyond research funding. It covered standards and testing, data and computing infrastructure, the training and recruitment of researchers, law and ethics, and what it called military-civil integration: the deliberate movement of AI work between civilian and defense programs. The application areas it named included manufacturing, agriculture, medicine, city management and public security.
Readers outside China mostly worked from the full English translation published by DigiChina at Stanford University. Nine months earlier the Obama administration had published its own survey of the field, Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, which set out recommendations to federal agencies. The Chinese plan assigned dates, sums and responsibilities instead. That difference is the reason the document is quoted so often in the argument about competition between the two countries that followed it.