Nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America are increasingly integrating Chinese AI technologies, driven by a profound philosophical alignment between China's material pragmatism and indigenous values, contrasting with Western characterizations of bargain prices or privacy disregard.
The US champions AI as an autonomous agent and content creator, while China exports a vision of AI as a digital nervous system for the real economy. For the Global South, the critical question is whether that reasoning capability can optimize fertilizer distribution in a drought or balance a fragile power grid.
As nations in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America increasingly integrate Chinese AI into their technology stacks, Western observers often characterize this trend as a simple search for bargain-bin prices or a disregard for data privacy. This view is reductive. The Global South’s embrace of Chinese AI is not merely economic; it is civilizational. It stems from a profound philosophical alignment between China’s “material pragmatism”—a focus on tangible utility—and the indigenous values of developing nations.
At the heart of China’s technological approach lies the ancient concept of dao-qi unity. In this philosophical tradition, the dao or the Way—abstract principles, logic, or wisdom—cannot be separated from the qi, or vessel: the physical world and the tangible instruments in it. Technology is not viewed as a mere tool severed from high truth, but as the necessary embodiment of it.
This stands in contrast to the Silicon Valley ethos, which often prioritizes AI as a “brain in a jar”—a disembodied superintelligence designed to generate text or video. The Chinese approach, forged in the fires of domestic industrial competition, views AI as “relational infrastructure”: a connective tissue for physical systems. It is designed to get its hands dirty.
Keywords include Alibaba Group Holding, California, China, Malaysia, Africa, Brazil, Chinese AI, Nairobi, Jakarta, Global South, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, International Mathematical Olympiad, Latin America, Indonesia.