China Rolls Out 2030 Tech Plan and a Rival AI Alliance Without the U.S.

China's state planners published a national action plan this week aimed at dominating AI, blockchain, quantum computing, and other "frontier" technologies by 2030, according to China's state-run Xinhua News Agency. The plan sorts companies into three tiers, from "ecosystem leaders" that set global standards down to smaller high-growth firms, and directs bigger players to fund and support the smaller ones.

The priorities read like a checklist of everything Washington has tried to choke off with export controls: advanced chips, high-end AI chips, large-scale training infrastructure, quantum computing, and industrial software. Xinhua reported the plan also pushes AI into manufacturing, farming, healthcare, and smart factories, plus a formal push to help Chinese AI and cloud firms expand overseas with government help on legal disputes and trade restrictions.

Shanghai isn't waiting on Beijing to hand down a national blueprint. The city released its own five-year "digital Shanghai" plan on Wednesday, August 19, with a mandatory target: 100% blockchain adoption across key industries by 2030, up from 60% today, according to the South China Morning Post. Peng Peng, executive chairman of the government-affiliated think tank Guangdong Society of Reform, told the outlet Shanghai has the scale and data volume to become a hub node in a national blockchain network. Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong have all named "global AI competitiveness" a formal goal in their 2026-2030 plans, according to TBS News, citing Xiao Hongwei, a researcher at China's National Development and Reform Commission.

The numbers behind that ambition are real. China's intelligent computing capacity hit 2,185 EFLOPS by the end of June, up 177% year over year, with a 71.4% utilization rate, according to China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as cited by TBS News. Shanghai's AI enterprises generated more than 637 billion yuan, about $93.85 billion, in industrial output in 2025. Guangdong's core AI industry topped 300 billion yuan last year.

The diplomatic play: WAICO

None of this happens in a vacuum. On July 16, representatives from 29 countries signed a founding treaty in Shanghai creating the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization, or WAICO, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres in attendance, according to the Astana Times. Founding members include Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Cuba, and Venezuela. The United States, European Union member states, and India did not join.

Beijing frames WAICO as a response to the Global South's demand for a seat at the AI table, built on four principles: openness, risk awareness, inclusivity, and shared governance, the Astana Times reported. One of those principles is a direct shot at U.S. policy. China explicitly rejects what it calls the "overextension of national security," a clear reference to American export controls on advanced chips and AI hardware.

State-run outlet ANTARA, citing a report from People's Daily, framed the choice bluntly: is AI a weapon to be monopolized, or a public good to be shared? Chinese President Xi Jinping pushed the "public good" framing at the 2026 World AI Conference in Shanghai, and pointed to Kimi K3, a Chinese open-source model with 2.8 trillion parameters that People's Daily called the largest open-source model in the world by parameter count. Chinese large models have been downloaded more than 10 billion times cumulatively, according to the same report.

Open-source standards as leverage

Asia Times, in an analysis, noted that open source matters more than any single model release. Linux, Android, and RISC-V chip designs all trace back to open-source foundations, and whoever sets the technical and legal standards for the next generation of open-source AI gains leverage for decades. Huawei already proved the strategy works: after Google cut off its Android license following U.S. blacklisting, Huawei kept shipping phones using Android's open-source code, then built its own OpenHarmony system.

Asia Times also flagged the elephant in the room that China's own state media does not mention. Chinese companies, backed by their government, have a documented history of acquiring foreign technology through intellectual property theft and coercive joint-venture terms. That track record is the core reason Washington, Brussels, and New Delhi stayed out of WAICO. Whether "open and win-win," as Beijing calls it, means shared innovation or a one-way transfer of Western technology into a state-directed industrial machine remains the unresolved question at the center of this entire push.

No U.S. or EU government body has issued a formal response to WAICO's founding as of this week. The next marker to watch: whether WAICO's member states adopt Chinese technical standards for AI systems, a move that would give Beijing the rule-setting power Xi is openly seeking outside the frameworks Washington still controls.