Narrating Chinese AI Geopolitical Tradition

ABSTRACT The emergence of China's DeepSeek—a powerful and cost‐efficient open‐source language model—has stirred considerable discourse among scholars and industry researchers. In particular, there is no lack of “external” claims that DeepSeek is representative of China's ambition to expand its influence in the international AI governance framework and counteract what it sees as America's technological hegemony, thereby allowing the country's elites to accumulate significant geopolitical power and mileage. This paper, however, focuses on the under‐researched dimension of how AI and its geopolitical potential and implications is being narrated and debated by the Chinese scholarly community. Specifically, in highlighting the representational themes and tropes that are explicated in/through these scholarly narratives, I argue that they leverage a diversity of framings (security, governance and inter‐state relations and diplomacy) to signal China's positive presence in the global AI ecosystem and underscore its broader diplomatic goal of becoming a proactive albeit responsible AI power. Given that the academic and foreign policy realms in China are often intertwined in intimate and complex ways, this paper posits that Chinese scholars, in narrating AI, help to shape the parameters/boundaries of what I call “Chinese AI geopolitical tradition”—a canon of thought on AI that undergirds the national interest and identity and normative foreign policy priorities of China. Interrogating Chinese AI geopolitical tradition is thus not only instrumental in the critical appreciation of the possible future developmental trajectories of China's AI policy forays and approaches. It also embodies a desire to spark research impetuses into excavating other AI geopolitical traditions and knowledges and putting them into productive dialogues with one another in order to foster more “accurate” and holistic understandings of the geopolitical landscape of AI.