Description
This article investigates how China’s participation in global artificial intelligence (AI) governance was impacted by multiple domestic non-governmental stakeholders, including large technology companies and civic groups. Employing the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), this article analyses how multiple stakeholders in China’s nascent AI policy subsystem expressed their policy beliefs, built advocacy coalitions, and shaped China’s AI policy agenda, especially its engagement in global AI governance. Employing the discourse network analysis (DNA), systematic discourse data was extracted from China’s news media between 2013 and 2023. The main findings show that non-governmental stakeholders played an important role in the formation of China’s national AI plan before 2017, which mainly focused on domestic economic development. However, after the central and local governments became more actively involved in the subsystem, China’s AI policy agenda moved towards a more internationalised direction. The change was because the dominant coalition’s policy core beliefs had turned from “using AI to benefit domestic industrial upgrading” to “using AI to lead global AI governance for the competition with US in the future”. This article contributes to current research on China’s policy process in nascent systems regarding emerging technologies, shedding light on the dynamics behind Beijing’s more proactive approach to global AI governance.
