Qamar Bashir
Artificial intelligence and robotics are becoming the defining instruments of economic, scientific and strategic power. Nations leading these fields will shape manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, education, transportation, defence and scientific discovery. China has emerged as an extraordinarily powerful force in this new age, competing directly with the United States and moving ahead in several areas. This achievement is not the result of one company or an isolated breakthrough. It reflects an entire national ecosystem built around education, research, manufacturing, energy, infrastructure and technological innovation.
Behind this transformation stands a political and philosophical approach that places national development, collective advancement and long-term planning above short-lived political considerations. Under President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China, scientific and technological self-reliance has become a central national objective. The continuity of Chinese leadership—frequently presented in Western political discourse as a weakness or democratic deficiency—has enabled China to pursue strategic goals over decades.
The results are visible in China’s extraordinary development of human resources. By 2025, China had established 3,167 higher-education institutions enrolling approximately 48.7 million students, while its gross higher-education enrolment rate had reached 60.8 percent—more than twice its 2012 level. Chinese universities produced more than 55 million graduates between 2021 and 2025, while the country’s research-and-development workforce reached approximately 7.95 million full-time-equivalent person-years, the world’s largest. Vocational colleges also supplied more than 70 percent of the newly added skilled workers required by modern industries. China has therefore converted the numerical advantage of a vast population into a formidable scientific, technical and industrial asset.
China recognized the strategic significance of artificial intelligence comparatively early. Its 2017 New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan established objectives extending to 2030 and connected fundamental research, infrastructure, education, industrial applications and regulation. Artificial intelligence was treated not as a fashionable consumer service but as a general-purpose technology capable of transforming the entire economy.
The scale of the resulting achievement is demonstrated by China’s patent output. Updated figures published by the World Intellectual Property Organization in July 2026 show that more than 56,000 new generative-AI patent families were published worldwide during 2024 and 2025—exceeding the entire global output of the preceding decade.
China-based inventors accounted for more than 43,000 of those new patent families. When added to approximately 38,000 published between 2014 and 2023, China’s cumulative output since 2014 exceeds 81,000. Chinese generative-AI patent publications recorded a compound annual growth rate of 64 percent between 2023 and 2025, while six of the world’s ten largest applicants are based in China.
China’s open-weight models represent another remarkable achievement. DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI have challenged Silicon Valley’s traditionally proprietary approach by releasing powerful systems whose mathematical weights can be downloaded and adapted. These companies have demonstrated that Chinese laboratories can produce frontier-class AI, optimize it under hardware constraints and distribute it globally at highly competitive prices.
Alibaba’s Qwen has become one of the world’s most influential open-model families. It ranges from compact systems to the 2.4-trillion-parameter Qwen3.8 model. According to Hugging Face, Qwen repositories recorded approximately 2.06 billion downloads during the first seven months of 2026, while developers had created more than 151,000 derivative repositories based upon the family. Download totals do not establish overall market share or prove that Qwen is superior to every competitor, but they demonstrate extraordinary global adoption.
DeepSeek has similarly advanced the open-weight paradigm. Its R1 reasoning system was released under the permissive MIT licence. In 2026, DeepSeek introduced the V4 family, including V4-Pro and the smaller V4-Flash. These models employ mixture-of-experts architectures, activating only part of their total parameters during each operation. This improves efficiency while supporting reasoning, coding and autonomous agent functions. Both versions offer context windows of up to one million tokens.
Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 provides another example. Released in July 2026, it is a 2.8-trillion-parameter, natively multimodal model designed for complex reasoning, extended coding and knowledge work. Its release further strengthened China’s position in the frontier open-weight ecosystem. Although benchmark comparisons should always be treated carefully, the broader direction is unmistakable: competitive AI no longer originates exclusively from closed American laboratories.
These developments are particularly significant because American export controls have restricted Chinese access to certain advanced semiconductors. Rather than ending Chinese progress, the restrictions have encouraged greater attention to software efficiency, sparse attention, mixture-of-experts architectures, inference optimization and domestic hardware. Export controls remain a genuine obstacle, but they have neither removed China from the competition nor prevented its developers from producing advanced models.
Open-weight technology also provides a degree of sovereignty. Governments, universities and companies can deploy suitable models on infrastructure within their own jurisdictions. Proper local deployment can prevent sensitive information from being transmitted to an external provider.
China’s achievements extend from software into the physical economy. Companies such as Unitree and AgiBot are developing humanoid robots capable of walking across difficult terrain, recovering from falls, carrying loads and performing complex movements balancing machine vision, dexterity, durability and affordability.
China possesses a decisive advantage in converting such inventions into manufactured products. It has dense supply chains for batteries, motors, sensors, cameras, electronics and precision components, together with enormous factories and a large domestic market. The same industrial ecosystem supported China’s rise in electric vehicles, commercial drones, telecommunications equipment and solar technology. China has become exceptionally capable of carrying innovation from the laboratory through engineering and into mass production.
NVIDIA chief executive Jensen Huang has repeatedly emphasized China’s universities, engineering culture and technical workforce. His widely reported observation that approximately half of the world’s AI researchers are Chinese illustrates the immense contribution Chinese scientists make to global artificial-intelligence research.
China has demonstrated that political continuity, when combined with capable leadership, education and measurable national objectives, can become an instrument of rapid advancement.
Only after recognizing the foundations and magnitude of China’s achievement does the larger lesson become clear. This is not a warning solely for Pakistan, Africa, Latin America or the Muslim world. It is a lesson for every developed or developing nation that has failed to prioritize artificial intelligence and robotics as seriously as China and the United States.
Countries neglecting scientific education, reliable energy, computing facilities and advanced manufacturing may gradually lose their economic independence. They may continue importing intelligent machines and foreign software, but they will not control the technologies determining productivity, employment and national security.
Pakistan and other developing nations face an especially serious danger because many still depend upon inexpensive labour and inadequately educated populations. In an age of automation, a young population without scientific and technical competence may produce unemployment, inequality and instability rather than a demographic dividend.
These nations need measurable programmes in mathematics, science, AI, robotics, semiconductors and advanced manufacturing. They require modern universities, research funding, computing facilities and dependable electricity. International partnerships must transfer knowledge and create local capability rather than permanent dependence.
China’s rise demonstrates that lasting national power grows from educated people, scientific institutions, productive industries, infrastructure and leadership capable of sustaining a vision. Other countries need not copy China’s political system mechanically, but its discipline, continuity and investment in human capability deserve serious study. Every nation that has not entered the AI and robotics race must begin immediately. The opportunity to participate in the emerging technological order still exists, but it will not remain open forever.
The writer is Press Secretary to the President (Rtd),Former Press Minister, Embassy of Pakistan to France,Former Press Attaché to Malaysia and Former MD, SRBC, He is living in Michigan, USA.
