Zheng made the remarks last Friday in Beijing on the sidelines of the Confucius and Aristotle Symposium on Ancient Wisdom for Modern Challenges, which was jointly hosted by the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, and the Mencius Foundation.
China has been drawing up its own AI legislation and a draft of a unified law was submitted for review to the country’s top legislative body, the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee, according to its annual legislative work plan made public in May.
But Zheng said the submission was only at a very early stage and there was no timetable for the draft, which suggested a lack of progress.
Zheng said that instead, the regulations to be rolled out would be sector or industry-specific, since AI technologies were constantly and quickly evolving.
During the annual “two sessions” gathering in March, business and political elites tabled divergent proposals on how to establish AI regulations and laws.
Lou Xiangping, an NPC representative and chairman of the Henan branch of China Mobile, called for building a “systematic legal and regulatory framework” for AI. However, Zhang Yi, a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and senior partner at the Beijing office of law firm King & Wood Mallesons, cautioned that “overbearing legal interventions could inhibit the healthy and orderly development of AI”, according to reports from Chinese media outlets.
Zheng, with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said China may strike a more balanced approach to AI lawmaking compared to the EU and the United States, considering AI’s rapid advances and the potential risks it entails.
“On one hand, we want to promote the development of artificial intelligence, as development is a key theme for China. On the other hand, we do not want this technology to bring about large-scale negative impacts,” he said.
The EU’s AI act has classified AI systems into unacceptable, high, limited and minimal risk levels and offered different regulations and requirements for organisations to develop AI. It has also banned technology considered “cognitive behavioural manipulation of people” that is “considered a threat to people”.
Zheng said such a ban would be “very unrealistic” for China’s tech industries as “AI manipulates human behaviours more or less, including the simplest recommendation algorithms”.
Zheng added that the US does not have, nor does it intend to have, such a law as its society encourages innovation and market growth, while the EU enforces stricter regulations not only to protect individual rights but also to restrict dominant American companies due to the EU’s relative weakness in the tech sector.
The opportunities and risks of AI have quickly pushed the technology onto diplomatic agendas in meetings between the major powers as the EU has taken the lead in AI regulation.
