AGI Has Quietly Become Central to Beijing’s AI Strategy

Matthew Johnson

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Pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a top-priority project within the Party’s increasingly centralized technology planning apparatus. Its success would both close the gap with U.S. firms and bind AGI models to Party-state governance, shaping how intelligent systems are aligned, deployed, and exported.

Xi Jinping’s 2018 Politburo session operationalized the New Generation AI Development Plan, defining frontier breakthroughs as a lever of national power. Starting in 2020, Beijing and other provinces had institutionalized AGI in local initiatives, and by August 2025 the State Council’s AI+ Action plan codified AGI-linked targets into national modernization benchmarks.

The Party-state’s approach rests on two inseparable pillars: frontier breakthroughs to secure sovereign control of general intelligence, and diffusion across the real economy to sustain political legitimacy and commercial value. The two are treated as mutually reinforcing, not competing.

AGI is now written into China’s operating system for modernization. The MIIT meeting in June and the AI+ Actionplan in August 2025 tied frontier models to industrial upgrading, governance standards, and long-term milestones to 2027, 2030, and 2035.

Under the “new national system,” state institutions, elite labs, and firms are mobilized in concert, while outward-facing efforts such as Alibaba’s global intelligent network strategy show that Beijing views AGI not only as a domestic modernization tool but also as a lever of international power.

The State Council’s August release of the Opinions on Deeply Implementing the ‘AI+’ Action reignited debate over whether Beijing is serious about artificial general intelligence (AGI) or focused only on embedding applied AI across the economy (State Council, August 26). Commentary has often leaned toward the latter, but Party sources and policy documents show a clear throughline: since the 2017 New Generation AI Development Plan first defined “generalizable” intelligence as a research horizon, AGI has steadily moved from implicit objective to explicit policy goal. By 2025, that goal was tied to modernization benchmarks and reinforced through Party-state planning at every level.