On May 13, China’s Ministry of Education released guidelines for integrating AI into the earliest stages of child education. According to the guide, schoolchildren will be introduced to the key concepts driving AI, as well as its basic uses and best practices. By the time students reach high school, they will learn to build simple algorithms of their own. But despite allowing schoolchildren to use AI as a learning aid, the guide prohibits them from using generative AI alone for their work.

It remains unclear how strictly the contents of this “guide” (指南) will be enforced from school to school, as a guide is neither a legally-binding law (法律) nor a set of regulations (规定). In this case, the document more likely represents a statement of intent by the ministry, providing clarity on best practices when introducing the new technology into the education system. The MOE says the guide aims to cultivate AI literacy and adapt students to the emerging “smart society” (智能社会).

This latest release comes amid a comprehensive overhaul of China’s education system as part of the government’s broader “AI+ initiative.” The ministry launched a reform plan for higher education in 2023, urging the gradual elimination of courses “not suited for social and economic development.”

Since then, AI has developed at breakneck speed globally, and the Chinese government now frames AI as a key source of the “new productive forces” (新质生产力) meant to propel development. Young people are understandably seen by the leadership as key drivers of this technology. During an inspection of AI projects in Shanghai on April 29, Xi Jinping called AI “a cause for young people” and urged them to boost their skills in this area.

What does this use look like in practice?

The Ministry of Education’s guide is accompanied by a series of scenarios outlining acceptable AI use by students and teachers. These scenarios attempt to balance using AI to improve the education system and personal development, while remaining mindful of the risks of over-dependence. For example, while students may use generative AI to create “diagnostic reports” (诊断报告) assessing their work progress, they must avoid letting AI do that work for them — a concern shared by teachers worldwide.

________________

________________

Missing the Forest for the LLM

A more challenging question surrounds how China views AI’s impact on critical thinking. The MOE guide cautions that allowing students or teachers to rely too heavily on AI risks a decline in thinking skills and personal perspectives. But the biggest obstacles to critical thinking in the Chinese education system predate AI and are far more difficult to dispel.

First and foremost is the intrusion of politics. While education policy promotes critical thinking and student-centered learning, the system simultaneously prioritizes political conformity and loyalty to the CCP. In a recent academic study, scholars of China’s education system noted “a disconnect between the critical thinking components of the national education policies and the curriculum documents.”

Within these prescribed boundaries of obedience, Chinese students are pressed to demonstrate technical competence and analytical skills. While the system can clearly produce competent students — and, as China’s strength in science and technology attests, does not necessarily stifle innovation — it is not geared toward creativity. Some critics, particularly of the “patriotic education” so prevalent in recent years, have said the system risks producing students who are “unable to think independently.” The Patriotic Education Law, implemented in 2023, established a strict program of ideological indoctrination, including ensuring the country’s youth “inherit red genes” (传承红色基因) [More in the CMP Dictionary.]

Against this backdrop, fretting about AI’s potential risks to critical thinking misses the point entirely. In some cases, it appears as shallow, performative repetition of concerns raised about AI worldwide. It is not unlike how China’s media have raised concerns that AI might replace journalists — when in fact the profession, after a brief heyday in the early 2000s, has been almost entirely hollowed out by political controls.

The MOE announcement earned positive coverage from China’s state media, mostly relaying the news and highlighting the cautions against students copying AI-generated answers. But The Paper (澎湃新闻), a Shanghai-based outlet under the state-run Shanghai United Media Group, went further on May 14 in a commentary endorsing the guidelines, suggesting that the integration of AI might help cultivate “wisdom” along with “independent thinking.” The piece argued for a “human-centered” perspective that balances technological adoption with critical thinking, explicitly rejecting fears of AI. “It is not necessary to view artificial intelligence as a menacing flood,” the editorial said.

The commentary argued that AI will actually improve the education system by pushing it to “focus more on cultivating children’s independent thinking and innovation abilities, applying knowledge to practical life, and transforming knowledge into true wisdom.”

Such technological optimism reflects a broader pattern in Chinese discourse: the belief that new technologies can somehow transcend the fundamental constraints of the political system. Yet no amount of AI sophistication can address the core tension at the heart of Chinese education — the impossibility of fostering genuine critical thinking while demanding ideological conformity.

Last week marked the 17th anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake, a 7.9 magnitude tremor that devastated Sichuan province and tragically took the lives of nearly 100,000 people. On the May 12 anniversary this year, one particular Wenchuan-related item surged to the top of search engine Baidu and hot search lists on the social media forum Weibo. It involved an impromptu interview given on location one week after the 2008 quake by Li Xiaomeng (李小萌), a reporter from state broadcaster CCTV.

That old interview — and the selective way it was handled this year — illustrates how even decades-old disasters remain politically sensitive in China. While breaking disaster stories routinely face strict media controls, past tragedies are subject to equally careful narrative management, with inconvenient truths often airbrushed from official memory.

In the old broadcast shared on social media on May 12, Li comes across a farmer known simply as “Uncle Zhu” (朱大爷) as she strolls along a collapsed mountain road. Speaking in local dialect, Zhu stoically tells the journalist about the appalling conditions in the area. Through an interpreter, he explains to the reporter that he is returning home to harvest his rapeseed crops to “reduce the burden on the government” — meaning he will have income and not need to rely entirely on aid. By the end of the interview, Uncle Zhu is convulsed with sobs, the tragedy of the situation coming through.

Li posted last week on Weibo to commemorate the moment, revealing that Uncle Zhu had passed away in 2011. She said: “That conversation, with its unexpected, banal but heartbreaking details, showed all of us in China that people like Uncle Zhu, with their calm acceptance in the face of catastrophe, have the backbone to do what is right.” Other media, including China Youth Daily, an outlet under the Communist Youth League, have drawn on Li’s exchanges with Uncle Zhu in the years after the quake to commemorate the anniversary.

But a key portion of the television exchange was edited out of this year’s commemorative coverage. Near the midpoint of the original video, Li turns from her conversation with Zhu to interview several other farmers. One farmer explains that his child was killed in the earthquake, “buried in Beichuan First Middle School.” This exchange references the widespread collapse of shoddily constructed school buildings throughout the quake zone, resulting in the death of thousands of children. Revelations of school collapses initially drove a wave of public anger and a burst of Chinese media coverage — before the authorities came down hard.

These state-enforced patterns of amnesia when it comes to disasters, whether natural or human, tend to reinforce patterns of conduct that place real people at risk. This could be seen earlier this month as several tour boats capsized in Guizhou amid ignored weather warnings and inadequate safety measures. While there were hints in a handful of media reports at the deeper causes of the tragedy, which claimed 10 lives, most media followed the scripted reports of state media under a policy of media manipulation laid down by Hu Jintao in the aftermath of the Sichuan quake.

The amnesia extends to older historical traumas, bringing risks in the present. As author Tania Branigan warns in a recent interview with CMP about China’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s, when societies try to move on from collective trauma without confronting it, they “can’t understand themselves, and are much more vulnerable.”

With 12 million fresh graduates soon rushing into China’s already competitive job market, help is on the way, according to the People’s Daily. On April 7, the newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the country’s leadership, ran an article listing how AI was turbo-charging supply and demand in the job market, pointing to over 10,000 AI-related jobs on offer at a spring recruitment center in the city of Hangzhou. The piece was accompanied by a graphic from Xinhua, showing a smiling recruiter handing out jobs (岗位) to incoming students, with an AI bot ready and waiting to embrace them with open arms. The message is clear: graduates can literally walk into AI-related positions.

But according to the Qianjiang Evening News (钱江晚报), a commercial metro newspaper published in Hangzhou under the state-owned Zhejiang Daily Newspaper Group, the reality is a lot tougher for new graduates. “It’s hard to find a job with a bachelor’s degree in this major,” said one of their interviewees, a recent graduate majoring in AI who was quoted under the pseudonym “Zhang Zixuan.” The graduate said they had gone to multiple job fairs without securinig a job. “I don’t know the way forward,” they told the paper.

China’s biggest tech companies are indeed angling for the leading edge in AI, battling it out to hire “young geniuses” (天才少年) graduating from AI programs at China’s top universities. But while these rarefied talents — whoever they are — may have their choice of elite positions, the picture is less rosy for the vast majority. “Despite the booming industry,” Qianjiang Evening News concludes, “many recent graduates of artificial intelligence majors from ordinary universities are still struggling in the job market.”   

Hangzhou is now billed by Chinese media as a major hub for AI innovation and enterprise, home to China’s foremost large language model (LLM), DeepSeek. But if the city’s media are saying there are significant problems with AI recruitment, the rest of the country is likely experiencing similar complications. State-run media and universities in China are presenting the government’s AI policies as a gift for the nation’s entry-level job market. But these messages paper over a more complex reality.  

The Hunt for AI Talent

The government has made it a priority to boost national AI development. In the government work report last year at the Two Sessions, China’s major legislative meeting, Premier Li Qiang launched the “AI+” initiative (人工智能+行动). The initiative aims to augment AI for every industry in the country, considering it a way to unlock “new productive forces” (新质生产力) — a signature phrase of Chinese leader Xi Jinping — that will bolster China’s economy and job market.

The latter needs it. Youth unemployment in China stands at 16.9 percent as of February this year, and comes at a time when graduate supply has never been higher. There are nearly four million extra graduates in the class of 2025 than there were even five years ago.   

The stiff competition for jobs is a source of frustration for young Chinese. Earlier this month, Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) reported that the state-owned nuclear power company CNNC had publicly apologized after boasting online that it had received 1.2 million resumes to fill roughly 8,000 positions. The company was accused by netizens of “arrogance.”

Aligning university education to accommodate AI training is considered by the leadership as key to harnessing this technology of the future. In 2017, a document from the State Council noted the country lacked the “high-level AI talents” needed to make China a global leader in AI technology. In 2023, the Ministry of Education issued a reform plan ordering that by this year 20 percent of university courses must be adjusted, with an emphasis on emerging technologies and a gradual elimination of courses “not suited for social and economic development.”  

Universities across the country have responded with dramatic overhauls of their curricula. Ta Kung Pao (大公报), the Party’s mouthpiece in Hong Kong, reports universities in neighboring Guangdong province have already established 27 AI colleges, which are supposedly training 20,000 students a year. Meanwhile, universities like Shanghai’s Fudan University announced they will be cutting places in their humanities courses by 20 per cent as ordered, focusing instead on AI training. For Jin Li (金力), Fudan’s president, university courses must now explicitly serve China’s state-directed technological development goals. “How many liberal arts undergraduates will be needed in the current era?” he questioned rhetorically.

Technical Problems

State media says AI+ is already successfully reinvigorating the job market. Attending one job fair in Beijing this month, a reporter for the China Times (华夏时报), a media outlet under the State Council, noted a “surge in demand” among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for AI talent, quoting one graduate trained in AI as saying he had seen “many work units that meet my job expectations.” Visiting job fairs in Shanghai and Guangdong, a reporter for Shanghai Securities News (上海证券报), a subsidiary of state news agency Xinhua, observed long queues in front of booths for jobs on algorithm engineering and data labeling. On that basis, he wrote “AI fever” had gripped the gatherings.

AI itself is also spreading positive messages about the jobs it can bring. Ahead of the Two Sessions this year, People’s Daily Online (人民网) pitched DeepSeek as helping citizens understand the “happiness code” (幸福密码) embedded in the Two Sessions. It does this by describing state-imposed solutions to current social problems, to ease the concerns of netizens.

One question the outlet asked was on what AI jobs were available to recent graduates. When we at the China Media Project asked DeepSeek the same question, it told us AI “offers abundant employment opportunities for recent graduates,” listing several well-salaried ones. One of these was “data labeling” (数据标注) with DeepSeek saying these positions are increasing by 50 percent year-on-year. The source for this claim was an article from the Worker’s Daily (工人日报), a newspaper under the CCP-led All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the country’s official trade union. 

It should go without saying that the role of the ACFTU’s newspaper is to promote the leadership’s economic agenda rather than to accurately report the challenges for the nation’s workforce posed by technological change. This role can mean, once again, that hype takes precedence over fact. In this case, the Worker’s Daily cited the case of a data-annotation college in Shenzhen, suggesting that graduates from the college receive 10 job offers on average within an hour of uploading their resumes online. 

Even if such data annotation roles are available right now, this does not point the way to a rosy future for aspiring young data annotators more broadly. Some data annotation roles, in fact, require few qualifications, and fresh trainees may be trusted by tech companies to do this work after just three weeks of training. Relatively unskilled jobs like this may be created by AI, but they are also vulnerable to replacement by AI itself. China’s state broadcaster CCTV reports that 60 percent of data annotation is now being done by AI, doubling in just three years. 

The CCTV report points to a trend that few state media seem to be openly acknowledging amid the hype over AI jobs — that the field is already shifting towards more specialized employees. That will mean raising the bar for data annotator qualifications, and fewer people ultimately required to do this work. In its report, the Qianjiang Evening News quotes an anonymous application engineer as saying the number of data labellers at his company is decreasing already. “Big models can label themselves,” he told the newspaper.  

The same report suggested that the demand for AI skills varies widely between companies. Zhang, the pseudonymous recent graduate, said that most of the companies at the university job fairs in which they participated did not have AI-related jobs on offer. The ones that did have such jobs demanded a higher degree of education, generally as the master’s level. The concerning lesson drawn from Zhang’s experience is that the training provided by these new AI education centers does not suit current demand from tech companies — to say nothing of future demand. While companies often require in-depth expertise within specialized areas like fine-tuning AI models, AI courses often sacrifice depth by giving their students shorter periods of training in a wide variety of AI skills. 

Another concern emerges: who will teach the next generation of AI specialists? The sudden expansion of colleges to accommodate the needs of the AI+ initiative is no doubt creating a talent dearth of its own. In a speech earlier this month, a senior scientist from Peking University claimed many AI centers employed inexperienced professors in order to fill teaching positions. He added that certain AI centers were moving members of their mathematics and art colleges to serve as “part-time” deans of these centers. 

Vocational schools could struggle even more. These colleges are usually stigmatized in Chinese society, stereotyped as only attended by students who failed their university entrance exams. This would put them at the bottom of the pile for aspirational AI talent. For example, one vocational college in Hubei says it created an AI major in response to the Ministry of Education’s push to cultivate high-quality AI talent. But it is advertising AI teaching positions where prior experience in this complex field is merely “preferred” rather than required.

It should come as no surprise that state media narratives of jam-packed job fairs handing out AI positions are overly optimistic. The disconnect is stark. While the handful of elite graduates at the pinnacle of China’s AI sector may enjoy rich opportunities, it is misleading to suggest that their exceptional success stories are evidence that AI has promised employment for the broader masses. The larger context matters: as Xi Jinping’s government pushes AI as a cornerstone of China’s economic future, a widening gap has formed between top-down ambitions and on-the-ground realities for millions of graduates. Instead of excitedly focusing on the long queues at AI stalls in job fairs, Chinese media should also be asking deeper questions about the issues that create them.

As luminaries, including several Nobel laureates, mingled last month at the Zhongguancun Forum, an exchange in Beijing on high-tech innovation, a soaring report from China’s official Xinhua News Agency celebrated the spectacle of robots serving freshly ground coffee and performing backflips — concluding that the forum’s participants had “given aspirations wings to soar.” 

Judging from the reports filed by the four Xinhua journalists covering the forum, an annual showcase for China’s tech achievements, it’s not clear that they came down to earth long enough to attend a speech on March 29 by one of the country’s top AI scientists, who warned that the nation’s AI sector, now the crown jewel of China’s technological ambitions, is perpetuating a lofty and unrealistic self-image. “Things are exciting on the surface,” he said, “but when it comes to substance they are chaotic.” 

Currently dean of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, a research and development non-profit tied to the elite Peking University, Zhu Songchun (朱松纯) is one of the most influential figures in the sector. His message, that to remain globally competitive China needs fewer celebratory headlines and more substantive analysis, runs counter to the spellbound view of AI development that seems to have overtaken the government and official media like Xinhua.

But will Zhu’s message, as the lack of state media coverage suggests, fall on deaf ears?

Journalists or Cheerleaders? 

According to a detailed summary of his speech by Tencent Technology (腾讯科技), a tech news outlet published by the Chinese tech giant, Zhu did not mince words about how AI hype and AI reality have become detached in China. The current AI landscape, he said, is one in which media narratives, investment patterns, and government initiatives present a distorted picture of progress. “What’s truly blocking our progress is not foreign technology restrictions,” Zhu told the audience, “but our own limited understanding.”

The reasons for this problem? Zhu says both Chinese media and officials tasked with promoting AI have little understanding of how it works. For their part, the media have fed the public “exaggerated” stories about AI. While Zhu notes this as a key problem, he tactfully steps around an important impetus behind this coverage — the fact that the leadership’s appetite for promoting AI as the next driver of development is also exerting pressure on state media to signal positivity and success. 

Officials, meanwhile, again feeding into a vicious cycle of positive thinking, are under pressure from the public to implement policies based on the distorted narratives of the media, said Zhu. 

AI technology is complex and relatively new to news organizations globally, meaning cutting through marketing hype from tech companies is a problem for journalists around the world. But as global AI competition heats up, Chinese media face additional pressure to exaggerate the capabilities of Chinese AI. 

In March last year, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top regulator and controller of the internet and information, emphasized that online media must create “positive propaganda” (正面宣传) about Chinese achievements. At the same time, the “AI+ initiative” (人工智能+ 行动), which aims to augment AI for every industry in China and thereby turbo-charge the “new productive forces” (新质生产力) that will lift the Chinese economy out of malaise, has become a central policy of the Party-state. 

That is a lot for AI to live up to, and this approach naturally demands cheerleaders over critical reporters. This is a typical approach for the Chinese Communist Party, for which hype and propaganda are often treated as rocket fuel, necessary to send the latest policy soaring to success. But such directives inevitably lead to unrealistic reports from China’s media outlets — which, as Zhu warns, can lead to magical thinking that is counterproductive. 

On March 28, the Shenzhen-based Securities Times (证券时报), a newspaper published under a subsidiary of the CCP’s People’s Daily, ran a report for which multiple data center entrepreneurs were interviewed. All of these insiders claimed that there is high demand in China for data centers, which have been hyped by Party policy-makers and advisors as critical to the success of the AI+ initiative. However, a recent report from MIT Tech Review revealed that supply now far outstrips demand, and many of these data centers are in fact standing empty — an investor-driven bubble that is strikingly familiar to that seen over the decades in the property market. 

Read more carefully between the lines in Chinese media reports, and the red flags start to reveal themselves. At one point in the Securities Times article, an interviewee remarks that one driver of data storage demand is “AI glasses.” But smart eyewear — a notion kicked around in the West since the 1960s as the technology of the future — has been a fallback focus of technology coverage in the Chinese state media for more than a decade. In fact, the market for AI glasses is not taking off. Smart glasses remain a gimmick trotted out every year by Chinese state media during political  meetings, when outlets can demonstrate their embrace of the government’s high-tech goals. 

 Talk of AI glasses as a driver behind data centers exposes the level of unreality that often takes hold, even among those cited as expert insiders. And the hype extends from foundational technologies and trends in China to self-assessments of the state of the industry. 

In his speech, Zhu also took aim at another favorite meme among Chinese journalists, what has become known as the “six little large language model dragons” (大模型小六龙). This is a group of highly-valued AI start-ups specializing in LLMs, the artificial intelligence systems trained on massive text datasets to generate human-like responses across various tasks. Chinese media outlets are awash with coverage of these six companies and their newest releases of AI models, but they often omit key facts and context — such as more in-depth exploration of their products or business models.

Contrary to their stellar images as exemplars of Chinese AI strength, Zhu described these six companies as high-risk, overvalued and — at least so far — unprofitable. One of the six, Zhipu AI (智普AI), released its latest model at the Zhongguancun Forum, and this was billed by the Xinhua reporters as enabling AI “to leap out of the dialog box and perform real work for humans.” Once again, the language was all about leaps and bounds, even though none of the reporters actually tested the model. 

The fact that Zhipu released this latest model for free and allowing unlimited use would seem to support Zhu Songchun’s view that sustainable revenue models remain grounded. In a freer and more vibrant media environment, that might be the real story. But the point of AI coverage in China’s media is to promote, promote, promote. And this lack of scrutiny extends to AI stories fired into the air for international audiences. The priority is to emphasize the successes of China under the current CCP leadership, which Xi Jinping has called “telling China’s story well” (讲好中国故事). The story of China as a high-tech hub and innovator has become one of the CCP’s central narratives, for audiences at home and abroad. 

If you want to know whether you are being sold a rocket or a firecracker, one approach is to simply look closer at news reporting basics. In November last year, Xinhua published an English-language article touting the innovations of an image diffusion model from Chinese-owned AI platform Vidu. The article claimed that the model had made ground-breaking improvements to “consistency,” a problem plaguing image diffusion models. But the piece quoted only the company’s CEO and one Western netizen on X to back up these claims. If Xinhua journalists had tested the software, as we did, or had spoken to other experts, they would have found the model highly inconsistent — and the claims dubious.

Reports like the above are a reminder of the obvious — that Chinese state media are not just duty-bound to promote the positives of national development over the challenges, but that they often have a too-cozy relationship with the companies on which they report. 

Clipping the Wings of Criticism

For Zhu, the fundamental contradiction is clear: China’s AI sector cannot advance by chasing headlines rather than breakthroughs. He argued that when officials, media outlets and the public operate with a distorted understanding of AI capabilities, China’s entire innovation ecosystem suffers. This superficial approach, he suggested, has trapped China in a cycle of imitation rather than invention — simply scaling up language models and finding incremental applications that mirror Silicon Valley’s path. “If we just repeat the old path of the United States – computing power, algorithms, and deployment, we will always be followers,” he concluded.

Instead, Zhu called for a fundamental shift toward researching the nature of intelligence itself — a strategy that could potentially leapfrog current AI paradigms entirely. By focusing on these foundational questions rather than chasing quarterly breakthroughs trumpeted in promotional press releases, China might discover entirely new frameworks for artificial intelligence that competitors would scramble to replicate.

Yet Zhu’s critique of the propaganda-driven approach appears to have fallen victim to precisely the dynamic of hype he described. While his remarks found outlets in more market-oriented publications like Tencent Technology, Caixin and The Paper, flagship state media organizations like Xinhua and the People’s Daily conspicuously omitted his warnings from their coverage. Instead, these Party organs continued to showcase a parade of applications and robots — the very surface-level achievements that Zhu suggested are distracting China from the deeper scientific work needed to truly lead in artificial intelligence. In a system where positive messaging trumps critical analysis, even warnings from one of the nation’s top AI scientists can be edited out of the narrative.

Since the event, there are signs that Zhu’s wings may have been clipped even more decisively. On April 15, an institute from Peking University responsible for international cultural exchanges (中外人文交流) issued a “clarification” on his behalf, claiming that some media outlets had misrepresented his words in what the institute claimed had in fact been a “closed-door media communication meeting.” The timing suggests Zhu’s candid assessment of the industry may have drawn unwelcome attention from authorities eager to maintain the narrative of Chinese AI supremacy. The message is that everyone, including the media, must train their eyes upward on the future — even if it means ignoring the ground beneath their feet. 

This disconnect was illustrated once again over the weekend, as Beijing hosted a half marathon where Chinese-built robots raced alongside human competitors. The CCP’s official People’s Daily described the event as a “fierce competition” that had pushed the robots to their limits. Xinhua sang about “infinite possibilities,” and proclaimed in its headline that the racing event had “closed the distance between us and the future.” The less stellar reality, alluded to in a report by Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily that noted the “many problems” holding the race down, was that the robots had suffered constant failures and necessitated nearly constant repairs by the exhausted human crews running alongside them. In the end, only six of the 21 robot entries completed the race, and one quite literally lost its head.

But in another sense, the race pointed the way toward the possibility of a healthier, more open and more self-critical attitude toward technology and progress — an alternative to the propaganda of constant rise. The Global Times, though in English-language coverage only, remarked somewhat disingenuously that “[behind] this ‘imperfect’ robot half-marathon is the mature atmosphere of tolerance, understanding and acceptance of failure that has developed in Chinese society from top to bottom toward the high-tech industry.” If that were true, of course, no public moderation of Zhu Songchun’s remarks behind closed doors would have been necessary. It would be perfectly acceptable to say: We are getting this wrong. But the Global Times was on to something. 

In its coverage of the Beijing half marathon, Caixin, an outlet tending more than most others in China to tell it like it is, reported that the robots had “walked with a staggering gait” (步履蹒跚). This might be the best image to capture a truth applicable to all innovation — that progress is made and measured by confronting limitations, not by promoting past them. As Zhu Songchun made clear in an address that perhaps now he has been made to regret, China will need to learn to stumble honestly — and openly — if it is to reach its grand AI ambitions.

The most important step forward is coming back down to earth. 

As a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand last Friday, the temblor rattled buildings across the sprawling Thai capital of Bangkok, home to an incredible 142 skyscrapers. When the shaking ceased all were standing strong — with one very notable exception. The State Audit Office (SAO) building in Chatuchak district, a 30-story skyscraper still under construction by a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, collapsed into a heap of rubble, trapping nearly 100 people inside. 

As of this week, 15 have been confirmed dead in the collapse, and a further 72 remain missing. Thailand announced over the weekend that it was launching an investigation to determine the cause of the collapse, and the prime minister said the tragedy had seriously damaged the country’s image. 

As emergency teams sifted through the wreckage in the immediate aftermath, the building’s primary contractor, China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group, came under intense public anger and scrutiny. Anger was further fueled by clear efforts by the company, and by Chinese authorities, to sweep the project and the tragedy under the rug. 

Shortly after the collapse, the China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group removed a post from its WeChat account that had celebrated the recent capping of the building, praising the project as the company’s first “super high-rise building overseas,” and “a calling card for CR No. 10’s development in Thailand.” Archived versions of this and other posts were shared by Thais on social media, including one academic who re-posted a deleted promo video to his Facebook account — noting with bitter irony that it boasted of the building’s tensile strength and earthquake resistance. 

Trying to access news of the building collapse inside China, Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) reported that queries on domestic search engines returned only deleted articles from Shanghai-based outlets such as The Paper (澎湃新闻) and Guancha (观察网). In a post to Weibo, former Global Times editor Hu Xijin (胡锡进) confessed that the building “probably had quality issues.” Even this post was rapidly deleted, making clear that the authorities were coming down hard on the story.

Searches on Weibo today for “Bangkok” and “tofu-dreg projects” (豆腐渣工程), a term often used in Chinese to describe shoddy and dangerous construction, return almost entirely results prior to March 18, ten days before the collapse in Bangkok. One rare post from March 28, however, shares the screenshot of a social media post that day by Beijing Youth Daily (北京青年報), an outlet under the capital’s local chapter of the Communist Youth League, that apparently included street-view video of building collapse in Bangkok. A hashtag on the post reads: “#A building under construction in Bangkok collapses during earthquake#” (曼谷一在建高樓地震中坍塌).

The still image appears to capture an early moment in the building’s collapse, which was recorded at the same moment from another angle by a dashcam — footage shared in a report by the BBC. The Weibo user reposting the image from the Beijing Youth Daily account takes care not to directly mention the Chinese construction company, commenting only: “The earthquake was strong, but this was clearly a ‘tofu-dreg project,’ no? The relevant construction parties should be held to account!”

Several news outlets in the region have also reported, citing the commissioner of Bangkok’s Metropolitan Police Bureau, that an investigation has been launched into the alleged removal of 37 files from the building site, now a restricted zone, by four Chinese nationals. Bernama, Malaysia’s national news agency, reported Monday that one Chinese national, identifying himself as project director at the site, had been apprehended.

Meanwhile, the machinery of propaganda continued to turn out feel-good news on China’s response to the quake. The Global Times reported that emergency assistance for Myanmar embodied Xi Jinping’s foreign policy vision of a “community of shared future for mankind.” In Hong Kong, the Ta Kung Pao (大公報) newspaper, run by the Liaison Office of China’s central government, twisted the knife into the United States as it reported on the earthquake response, noting the absence of USAID, recently dismantled by the Trump administration. Behind the news, the paper declared, “China’s selfless response demonstrates the responsibility of a great power.”

Shanghai’s Fudan University (复旦大学) is one of China’s most prestigious universities, with a raison d’etre unchanged, it claims, since the institution was founded in 1905: improving China’s position in the world through education. As artificial intelligence takes the world by storm — and becomes a crucial priority from top to bottom in China — the means of achieving that mission is changing, according to the university’s president, Jin Li (金力). 

On February 25, Jin announced that Fudan would drastically reduce its course offerings in the humanities, instead focusing on AI training. In an interview with Guangzhou’s Southern Weekly (南方周末) on March 6, Jin said the university wanted to cultivate students that “can cope with the uncertainty of the future.” For Li, cutting the liberal arts cohort by as much as 20 percent is a social necessity. As he asked rhetorically in the interview: “How many liberal arts undergraduates will be needed in the current era?” (当前时代需要多少文科本科生?). 

At present, courses related to artificial intelligence at Fudan are at 116 — and counting. And the university isn’t alone in downsizing the arts. Combing through Ministry of Education statistics on university courses cancelled in 2024, the commercial newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) noted that the majority were for liberal arts degrees, with some universities even abolishing their humanities colleges altogether.   

Limiting the humanities comes at a time of broader upheaval in higher education within China. In 2023, the Ministry of Education issued a reform plan ordering that by this year, 20 percent of university courses must be adjusted,with new course offerings introduced to “adapt to new technologies.” According to the plan, majors “not suitable for social and economic development” should be eliminated altogether. 

AI is almost certainly foremost in the ministry’s mind as it considers plans for the overhaul of education. The country’s “AI+” campaign, introduced during last year’s National People’s Congress, pegs the new technology as key to China’s future development — the source of “new productive forces” (新质生产力) that will rejuvenate the economy. As such, some universities are expanding their offerings in AI courses, making AI literacy classes compulsory for students, and allowing a lax approach to using AI in research. Tianjin University, for example, has decreed students can use AI-generated content for up to 40 percent of a graduation thesis. But that raises the obvious question: if a machine writes 40 percent of your paper, have you really only learned 60 percent of the content?

Since 2023, there have been increasingly lively debates — and much hand-wringing — about the ethics and limitations of AI use in higher education. In China, it seems, it is full steam ahead.