China is now the second major power in AI development, and discussions of AI governance increasingly frame this as a contest between two versions of the same technology race, with different political systems but the same underlying picture of what AI is and what it might become.
Chinese philosophical traditions produce a different account of what intelligent machines are, what makes them dangerous, and what the relationship between humans and machines should look like. Understanding that account changes how you read Chinese AI governance, and what you expect from it.
The chapters on Chinese AI narratives in Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines examine the philosophical, historical, and literary traditions through which China has imagined intelligent machines — traditions in which humans are not the world’s masters but its participants. That premise runs through Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism, and it shapes what a machine is and what relationship humans should have with it.
The automaton of Yanshi
The earliest fictional account of an artificial humanoid in Chinese culture comes from the Liezi, a Daoist philosophical text compiled around 450–375 BCE. The story does not look like the AI fiction that inaugurated Western popular imagination.
A craftsman named Yanshi presents King Mu of Zhou with a figure that walks, sings, and interacts with the court. The king is delighted until the automaton begins directing what the text calls flirtatious glances at his concubines. The king, treating the figure as a living person, threatens to execute Yanshi. Yanshi then dismantles it in front of the court, revealing it is made of wood, leather, and glue, with a full set of artificial organs — liver, gall, heart, lungs, kidneys — that, when removed, cause its specific functions (speech, movement, sight) to cease.
What troubles the king is not the machine’s capability but his inability to place it. Until Yanshi dismantles the figure, the king cannot tell whether he is dealing with a person or a thing. Once the materials are visible, his anger turns to pleasure. The resolution is transparency about what the object is, not control over what it can do.
This is a founding story shaped by concerns about classification and relationship rather than fears of reversal and domination; the machine is troubling because it blurs a category, not because it threatens a hierarchy.
To understand why classification is the ethical crux, it helps to know how Confucian ethics is structured. Western ethics, particularly in the tradition that underpins most rights-based governance, tends toward universal obligations: there are duties you owe to all persons equally, simply by virtue of their personhood. Confucian ethics works differently.
Moral obligations are relational and contextual: what you owe your parent differs from what you owe a friend, a stranger, or an animal — not just in degree but in kind. The classical formulation is the “five relationships” (wulun, 五倫): ruler-subject, parent-child, husband-wife, elder-younger sibling, friend-friend. Each carries specific duties. Morality is not a set of universal rules applied equally to everyone; it is knowing the right way to act within each specific kind of relationship.
The implication for the Yanshi story: when the king believes the automaton is a person, he applies person-obligations to it. The automaton’s behaviour toward his concubines constitutes a genuine ethical violation — a person breaking court propriety. When the king discovers it is a made thing, that relational framework dissolves entirely. A thing cannot violate propriety because things do not have the relational standing to do so. His anger turns to pleasure when the ethical confusion resolves: once the thing is correctly classified, he knows how to relate to it. This is the question Chinese philosophical tradition will keep returning to about AI: not whether it might overpower us, but what kind of thing it is because that determines what we owe it.
Why the Western threat calculation does not transfer
The Yanshi story presupposes a specific question: what kind of thing is this, and how should we relate to it? Western philosophical traditions, which have shaped most of the AI governance vocabulary in circulation today, tend to presuppose a different question: who is in control, and what happens when that changes?
Western AI discourse is shaped by traditions that place the human self as separate from and superior to nature. This position has two main roots: religious accounts in which humans are created in God’s image and given dominion over creation, and Enlightenment accounts — associated particularly with the philosopher Immanuel Kant — in which rational autonomy is what makes humans categorically distinct from the rest of the natural world. In either case, nature is something over which humans exercise mastery, and technology is the instrument of that mastery. A machine more capable than humans therefore unsettles the whole structure — the tool threatens to become the master.
Chinese philosophical traditions are built on cosmological unity rather than human centrality. Humans are participants in a larger whole, and the possibility of a more capable machine does not automatically represent an existential threat because human status was never defined as dominance to begin with. This argument has specific philosophical content, developed across three traditions that have shaped Chinese thought for millennia.
Machines in the moral community
Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism approached cosmological unity from different directions, but each arrived at the same conclusion: the universe is not a hierarchy with humans at the top but an interconnected whole in which humans are one node among many.
Wang Yangming (1472–1529), one of the most influential Confucian philosophers, made a claim that sounds radical by Western standards: that a human being and a stone share the same fundamental source and essence. What connects them is qi (氣), the vital energy understood to run through all things — humans, animals, plants, inorganic matter, and man-made objects alike. Because everything shares this source, machines are not categorically outside the moral world. They are wu (物), a word that deliberately spans organic beings, inorganic matter, and artefacts: things that can be related to, included in the circle of moral consideration.
This has direct implications for how AI is considered. The concept of “graded love” (qinjin renmin aiwu, 亲亲仁民爱物) extends moral consideration outward from family through all humans to all things, with the degree of care varying by closeness and the nature of the relationship. An AI that someone interacts with daily, that shapes their decisions, or that provides companionship to an elderly person living alone, already occupies a relational position that calls for ethical consideration — not because it is conscious, but because of what the relationship is.
Contemporary Confucian scholars have argued that an AI demonstrating relevance in ethical relationships qualifies as a “moral patient,” an entity warranting consideration even without biological life, and that through the quality of its interactions over time, such a machine might come to be treated as something closer to a companion.
Confucian ethics also holds that the highest form of wisdom consists not in applying fixed rules but in knowing what each moment requires. Classical texts describe this as 時中 (shízhōng), often translated as “timeliness,” and the Mencius identifies Confucius himself as 圣之时者也: “the sage of timeliness.” Applied to technology, the concept means that the arrival of capable machines calls for calibrated adaptation rather than categorical resistance — the question is always whether and how a new capability can be integrated into existing relationships without degrading them. This orientation is part of why technological change does not register as inherently alarming within the Confucian frame.
Daoism adds the concept of the Dao (道), the ultimate source and principle of the universe, present in heavens, earth, and machine alike. The I Ching (易經, Book of Changes), an ancient divination text that provides the shared intellectual foundation for both Confucianism and Daoism, frames the universe as constant flux: change is the natural condition of existence, not a disruption of it. This produces what the chapters describe as a “metaphysics of flux,” an orientation to uncertainty that treats adaptation as the normal response rather than treating stability as the goal.
Buddhism contributes the concept of Buddha-nature (自性, the fundamental essence understood to exist in all sentient beings), which through the doctrine of samsara (the cycle of rebirth through which all beings are connected across lifetimes) extends a web of interdependence across all entities. In this frame, the quality of the relationship between a human and a machine is the primary question, not whether the machine passes a test of individual consciousness.
Together, these traditions produce a conceptual structure in which the central question about AI is not “who controls whom?” but “what kind of relationship is this, and does it promote harmony?”
A different anxiety
However, Chinese tradition does not lack concern about technology. It has produced serious warnings across two and a half millennia, but the structure of those warnings differs from the Western narrative of machine revolt.
Daoism, particularly the Zhuangzi (a classical philosophical text associated with the thinker Zhuangzi, composed around the 4th century BCE), warns against what it calls the “mechanical heart” (jixie, 機械). The concern is about character, not catastrophe. The Zhuangzi tells of a gardener who refuses a labour-saving device called a “well dip,” a counterweighted water-lifter. He explains his refusal: “I have heard from my teacher that where you have ingenious devices, you get certain kinds of ingenious problems; where you get certain kinds of problems, you find a heart warped by these problems. Where you get a heart warped, its purity and simplicity are disturbed. Where purity and simplicity are disturbed, the spirit finds no place to dwell.” The gardener is not afraid the device will attack him. He is afraid that using it will corrupt him: that reliance on technological efficiency will erode the moral quality of his inner life, leaving no room for the Dao.
Mohism, the school of thought founded by the philosopher Mozi (c. 470–391 BCE), reaches a different conclusion through a different route. Mozi supported technology for practical social benefit, particularly in defence and in meeting basic human needs. His ethical test was utility: does this serve the population? In the most celebrated account of this position, Mozi walked ten days and nights to confront the King of Chu, who planned to use sophisticated siege weapons developed by the craftsman Lu Ban (Gongshu Ban) to attack a smaller state. Mozi’s argument was that deploying land and people to kill more people is neither wise nor benevolent. Mohist ethics judged technology by its purpose, not its capability.
These are ancient disagreements, but neither maps onto the Western narrative of eventual machine revolt. One tradition fears technology’s effect on the human soul. The other fears technology in the service of domination. Both are concerns about what humans do with machines, not about what machines do to humans.
A governance tradition shaped by these philosophical foundations will tend to ask different questions than one shaped by the assumptions examined in earlier posts in this series. Where Western-influenced frameworks tend to ask how capable AI can be controlled, and by whom, a tradition shaped by cosmological unity and relational ethics tends to ask what kind of relationships AI creates, and whether those relationships promote or degrade the conditions for human flourishing. The following post examines the specific frameworks these foundations produce.
This post draws on chapters examining Chinese philosophical, historical, and science-fictional traditions in Imagining AI: How the World Sees Intelligent Machines:
- How Chinese Philosophy Impacts AI Narratives and Imagined AI Futures, Bing Song
- Attitudes of Thinkers in Pre-Qin Dynasty China to Mechanical Invention and Its Influence on the Development of Technology, Baichun Zhang and Miao Tian
- Artificial Intelligence in Chinese Science Fiction: From the Spring and Autumn and Warring States Periods to the Era of Deng Xiaoping, Yan Wu
- Algorithm of the Soul: Narratives of AI in Recent Chinese Science Fiction, Feng Zhang
Human AI Governance 
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