Where does China stand in this utopia?

In last week's article titled “An essay on artificial intelligence, digital fascism, and utopian communism,” I tried to explain that humanity is just at the beginning of a new and massive technological revolution.

Artificial intelligence and robotics have the capacity to change modes of production, social classes, the distribution of income and wealth, social structures, states, and capitalism itself, much like the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, all of this is happening at a time when the world order established after the Second World War is being shaken.

We are facing two diametrically opposed possibilities.

If the immense economic power created by artificial intelligence and robots is concentrated in the hands of a few companies or a small minority, it could open the door to a world leading to digital feudalism, and from there, to digital fascism.

But the same technological revolution could also open the door to another world where people's basic needs are met, work ceases to be a survival necessity, and the abundance created by artificial intelligence and robots is shared with the entire society.

I called this, perhaps stretching the concept a bit, “utopian communism.”

Since we are writing essays on artificial intelligence... My question now is:

Where does China stand in this utopia?

UNDERSTANDING CHINA

A friend who knows China very well wrote years ago: “Someone who goes to China for a week thinks they can write a book about China upon returning. Someone who stays in China for three or four months realizes they can only write an article about it. To truly describe China, one must live there for a long time and understand Chinese culture and the Chinese people.”

I have never been to China. Therefore, I do not intend to make definitive judgments saying “China is this.” But economists also write, draw, and speak by looking at statistics. When we look at the numbers, we are faced with one of the greatest economic and social transformations of the last forty years.

According to the World Bank, approximately 800 million people in China have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the last forty years. This corresponds to about 60 percent of today's Chinese population. Moreover, about three-quarters of the people who have been lifted out of extreme poverty in the world during the same period were in China.

In 1980, China produced about 3 percent of the world's output. Today, it produces about 17 percent and is the second-largest economy after the USA.

The effects of China's massive production increase did not remain within its own borders. Its supply of goods to the world in large quantities and at low costs has also exerted significant pressure on inflation in Western countries, especially since the 2000s. I discussed this topic previously in my article titled “Trump is blustering, but what if China didn't exist…”(1)

What is interesting for our discussion is what comes next.

COMMUNISM OR CAPITALISM?

When you look at the political system, you see a one-party socialist state where the Communist Party of China holds a monopoly on power. But when you look at the economy?

There is private property. There are millions of private companies. There is a stock market. There are dollar billionaires. There is foreign capital. There is profit; in Marx's terms, there is surplus value and capital accumulation.

According to China's official data, the private sector today provides more than 60 percent of the country's GDP, more than 70 percent of technological innovations, and more than 80 percent of urban employment. (2)

So, can we still call this a communist economy in the classical sense?

The private sector accounts for more than 60 percent of GDP, but the state is not just sitting back and watching the market. It is very powerful in banking, energy, infrastructure, defense, and strategic sectors. It determines the direction of investments and technological development. I must also emphasize this: The structure of the private sector in China is slightly different from that in the West. Many large private companies have representatives of the Communist Party of China within them, and they must act in harmony with the state strategically.

What emerges is a structure that does not exactly resemble classical capitalism or the central planning of the Soviet Union. This model is defined by many economists as “state capitalism.”

A DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT WITHOUT A PROLETARIAT?

In Marxist theory, the political mechanism for the transition to socialism was the dictatorship of the proletariat. The People's Republic of China was also founded in 1949 as a result of a revolution carried out in the name of workers and peasants. With the development of artificial intelligence and robot technologies, a contradiction emerging in China began to interest me.

In 2024, approximately 542 thousand new industrial robots were installed in factories worldwide. 295 thousand of these were in China. 54 out of every 100 new robots installed in factories globally went to China. The total number of industrial robots working in Chinese factories has also exceeded two million.

A pleasant irony of history emerges:

The People's Republic of China, founded in the name of the proletariat, is today the country making the largest investment in the world in a production system that will increasingly have less need for the proletariat.

Add artificial intelligence to this. China, along with the USA, is one of the two major actors in the artificial intelligence race.

We no longer have the old China that was just the world's factory. There is another China that makes robots, develops artificial intelligence, and is increasingly building the technological infrastructure that can remove human labor from its factories. This is where the center of our utopia discussion lies…

IS CHINA HEADING TOWARD OUR UTOPIA?

In the first essay, I had established a simple production equation. The old world:

Natural resources + capital + labor = production.

The new world, however, is increasingly moving toward an equation like this:

Natural resources + capital + energy + artificial intelligence + robots = production.

In the second equation, the share of human labor is gradually shrinking.

Where is the human?

This is where China might be one of the world's largest laboratories for this question, or for the utopia I am trying to write essays about.

Could China be the country in the world that can come closest to the system I am trying to describe as “utopian communism”?

Of course, everything is not as simple as it seems. The reduction of poverty does not mean that equality or a fair distribution of income has been achieved.

According to China's own official data, in 2025, the per capita disposable income of the top 20 percent income group is about 10 times that of the bottom 20 percent. China has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, but it has not eliminated income inequality.

Besides, our utopia was not just about people having enough to eat.

IS A WELL-FED PERSON FREE?

I am assuming that the income distribution and welfare problem will be solved. After this stage, freedom enters the picture. It is said that there is freedom in Western democracies, but no matter how much freedom there is on paper, a poor and hungry person is not free. Well, as the opposite of this, is a well-fed person free?  

In China, there is no pluralistic democracy where political power changes hands through free elections. The state's control over the internet, data, and digital technologies is much stronger compared to Western democracies. Facial recognition technologies are widespread. Big data is an important management and control tool in the hands of the state.

There are various blacklists, legal and commercial records, local credit assessments, and digital monitoring mechanisms in China. This central monitoring system does not yet cover all Chinese people, but this does not mean that the danger of digital surveillance does not exist.

George Orwell, in his novel 1984 published in 1949, described the totalitarian state's constant surveillance of its citizens with a sentence that is etched in memory:

“Big Brother is watching you.”

In the world Orwell imagined, Big Brother did not have artificial intelligence, facial recognition systems, mobile phones, the internet, widespread digital camera networks, and massive databases.

Today, they exist. Therefore, the fundamental question does not change:

Will technology be used to liberate humans, or to control them?

This was one of the dangers I meant when I said “digital fascism” in the first essay. Artificial intelligence is not just a technology that can replace humans in production.

It is also a technology that can predict what a person thinks, what they buy, where they go, who they meet, and increasingly what they will do; it can influence, and even manipulate, people's decisions and behaviors.

It is dangerous for such power to be in the hands of a few large companies. But isn't it dangerous for it to be in the hands of the state?

Our first question was:

Has humanity been saved from hunger?

In the case of China, for hundreds of millions of people, largely yes. But the second question is at least as important as the first:

Is the human free?

Because a person being well-fed is not freedom in itself. But a person who is hungry is not free either.

Being saved from hunger is becoming free. Being saved from fear is also becoming free. One does not replace the other.

But saving a person from working is not enough either. One must leave them time to think, to express their thoughts freely, to travel, to dream, to create, and to look at a beautiful view without doing anything. Because freedom is also, in a way, a person being the owner of their own time.

The utopia we are looking for needs to provide both.

AND THEN THERE IS THE REST OF THE WORLD

So far, we have only talked about the Chinese. Yet China is no longer just a country of 1.4 billion people living within its own borders; it is the world's second-largest economic power. It is building a massive economic and geopolitical network extending from the Belt and Road Initiative to the international payment system CIPS, from BRICS to energy and critical mineral investments. I discussed this global power quest of China previously in my article titled “The obstacle before the Yuan is not Washington, but Beijing.”(3)

Here, our utopia discussion faces a more difficult question.

Let's say China achieved an extraordinary increase in production thanks to artificial intelligence and robots and distributed the welfare created by this to its own people. Working hours decreased, people's basic needs were met. A system even quite close to the utopian communism we described was established.

Well, where will the raw material for this come from?

Will the critical minerals needed by robots, chips, batteries, data centers, and energy systems come from Africa, Latin America, or the poor countries of the world? And how will the people who extract those minerals live?

If the welfare of a Chinese citizen rests on the poverty of an African mine worker, this cannot be the system we are looking for. If a utopia is not universal, it is not a utopia.

A completely different question arises from this:

While China approaches our utopia within itself, could it turn into a new imperial power in its relations with the rest of the world?

If we try to squeeze the answer to this question into this article, the article will become very complicated. Let's leave this topic for another article; let's suffice with giving a few clues here.

Old imperialism controlled land, minerals, labor, and markets. Perhaps the new imperialism will not even need to occupy land. Controlling the chip, the algorithm, the data, the critical minerals, the energy, and the artificial intelligence will be enough. Even beyond that:

In the age of artificial intelligence, while developed countries continue to need the minerals of poor countries, they may no longer need their people's labor.

Then the form of exploitation also changes. This topic concerns not only China; but also America, Europe, Turkey, Africa, and all countries that could be targets of imperialism.

THE ESSAY IS NOT OVER

It seems that the essays on artificial intelligence and its future will not end. I still do not know the answer to the question I asked in the first article.

Will artificial intelligence lead us to digital fascism? As a result of artificial intelligence and robotization, capitalism, which tries to maintain its existence in an environment of digital fascism, will lose the consumer it needs. This would be the greatest contradiction of capitalism. The end of this could go as far as mass extermination acts for humanity. Or will it open the door to a utopian communism where, for the first time in human history, we will discuss how to share abundance, not scarcity?

When I look at China, I see traces of two opposing theses.

The massive production capacity, the lifting of hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty, and investments in artificial intelligence and robots show me one of the possibilities: Utopian communism…

One-party rule, the state's digital monitoring capacity, and the possibility that technology can be used to control humans; if we add the possibility of China turning into a hegemonic power on top of that, a dark possibility also emerges on the other side: Digital state dictatorship and a new imperialism...

The questions come one after another:

Who will own artificial intelligence?

Who will control it?

And who will control those who control it?

In recent days, the executives of companies developing artificial intelligence are also issuing warnings with increasingly louder voices regarding the speed of development, safety, and oversight. Dario Amodei is one of them. Safety standards, independent evaluation, and oversight are also being discussed at OpenAI and other artificial intelligence companies.

In contrast, US President Donald Trump's approach is different: He argues that the US slowing down the artificial intelligence race would benefit China. Thus, a geopolitical race is added on top of the safety debate.

Are we creating an artificial intelligence that is too powerful to be controlled?

Or, in the name of controlling artificial intelligence, are we concentrating the ownership and power of this new means of production in the hands of a few giant companies and a few states?

And perhaps most importantly of all:

Who do we need to protect artificial intelligence from: From artificial intelligence itself, or from its owners?

Let's ponder this a bit in the next essay.

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(1) Meriç Köyatası, “Trump is blustering, but what if China didn't exist…”, 12Punto, April 27, 2025. https://12punto.com.tr/yazarlar/meric-koyatasi/trump-atip-tutuyor-ama-ya-cin-olmasaydi-83474

(2) National Bureau of Statistics of China (NBS): Provides basic data on GDP share, employment, and the number of registered businesses. State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC / SAMR): Regularly publishes data on the registration, capital structures, and weight in the economy of privately owned companies. Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT): Reports data on technological innovations, R&D activities, and how much of the patents come from the private sector.

(3) Meriç Köyatası, “The obstacle before the Yuan is not Washington, but Beijing”, 12Punto, May 3, 2026.https://12punto.com.tr/yazarlar/meric-koyatasi/yuanin-onundeki-engel-washington-degil-pekin-137827