China bets on AI to promote President Xi Jinping’s thinking

BEIJING, China – Xinhuanet, owned by China’s official Xinhua news agency, plans to invest over 1.1 billion yuan ($162.38 million) on an “authoritative” AI agent to help promote President Xi Jinping’s thinking, Shanghai Stock Exchange filings showed.

The project, known as “Xinhua Yudian,” meaning Xinhua lexicon, is “an intelligent agent for learning, researching, and disseminating Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” the company said.

Driven by mainstream values and dedicated to “spreading the positive voice,” the agentic AI will also provide users with current affairs and political news content to help them deal with information overload and “a dilemma of trust in distinguishing truth from falsehood”.

China in March launched a sweeping “AI+” blueprint to encourage the adoption of artificial intelligence across all sectors of the economy. It also follows previous tech-driven efforts to broaden the reach of official state ideology among an online-savvy younger generation.

In 2019, China rolled out a hit propaganda app known as “Xuexi Qiangguo,” which literally translates as “Study to make China strong.” At one point after its launch, it overtook WeChat and the Chinese version of TikTok to become the most popular app on Apple’s China app store.

Xinhua’s proposed agentic AI will present the essence of Xi’s discourses to its users, who can rely on the tool as a politically sensitive citation checker, ensuring references to Xi’s words “in official document writing and policy interpretation are accurate and error-free.”

To be built on the state-run news agency’s “pure and clean” corpus library, the AI will help deliver the party’s voice to all sectors of Chinese society, lending further support to “consolidating the ideological and public opinion foundation,” the company said. – Rappler.com