China as Evil Empire · ↗ www.richardhanania.com

Just before the pandemic started, I attended a talk on the ethics of genome editing using CRISPR. At the time, the main question on my mind was: What about China? What’s stopping them from using CRISPR to create an army of genetically modified super soldiers and taking over the world? And how should that threat change what we in the West were willing to do?

China was a convenient foil: infinitely ambitious, maximally ruthless, totally amoral. But now I am not so sure. This Richard Hanania post from 2024 pretty directly confronted the fears I had had a few years earlier:

Supporters of genetic engineering and embryo selection have sometimes argued that China is soon going to be creating super babies and so will eventually take over the world. Supposedly, it is our Christian morality and woke ethics that prevent us from realizing all the benefits of such practices, but a smart and pragmatic people like the Chinese can’t be expected to make the same mistake.

He goes on to point out that China is more restrictive than the US on biotech policy. Research connecting genetics to IQ is restricted. The first Chinese scientist to use CRISPR to create a genetically edited baby was thrown in prison, while his foreign collaborators went unpunished. Surrogacy is de facto illegal. The United States, and even Europe, are generally more permissive on genetic technologies than China. The fears about Chinese super soldiers have not come to pass.

This argument is familiar to anyone following the AI debate. We constantly hear that any restraint on our part will simply be exploited by China. A pause on AI? China will overtake us. Safety guardrails? China will ignore them. Job loss? China will not care as long as they get the robots first.

Maybe! But China is not a paperclip maximizer in the guise of a nation-state.

Obviously, China wants powerful AI. But it doesn’t want that AI to talk about Tiananmen Square. It wants labour productivity, but it doesn’t want to throw its surplus males into mass unemployment. It wants ordered transition, not chaotic change. China is a real country, not a shorthand for runaway accelerationism.

China is dangerous, but it is not simple. “China will do it anyway” is an argument, but we should not let it become a thought-terminating cliché. Before we raise the spectre of China to justify abandoning our own principles, we should ask whether China actually wants and is pursuing the things we are worried about (and whether our own panicked actions may put them on the very path we fear).

China is dangerous enough without being turned into a rhetorical cheat code.