PLA Daily Translation: Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI

Source“Reflections on Warfare Brought by AGI” (AGI带来的战争思考)Source: PLA Daily (解放军报)Date: January 21, 2025Authors: Rong Ming (荣明), Hu Xiaofeng (胡晓峰)Introduction Please feel free to skip to the translation, about halfway down, though I would recommend reading the sections “On the source” and "On the Authors" just above it too.In November 2024, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission recommended that “Congress establish and fund a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.” The United States increasingly treats advanced AI as a strategic imperative, and China is frequently invoked as a reason to race. The broader framing of AI competition as a race between great powers reflects an assumption that China is a peer competitor in pursuing AGI.But is China pursuing AGI? The prevailing expert view says no. China's August 2025 AI+ Action Plan reads as diffusion-first industrial policy, with adoption targets of 70 percent by 2027 and 90 percent by 2030, not frontier ambitions. In a June 2025 paper, "The Most Dangerous Fiction: The Rhetoric and Reality of the AI Race," Cambridge researcher Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh argued that there was little evidence of a top-down Chinese AGI effort, and that the narrative served Western corporate interests. He also noted the translation ambiguity of 通用人工智能, which can mean either "artificial general intelligence" or "general-purpose AI." But Ó hÉigeartaigh acknowledged a significant limitation to his analysis, namely that he had no visibility into China's defense sector. RAND researcher Kyle Chan reached similar conclusions in a February 2026 analysis, "Does China Care About AGI?", reinforcing that Chinese policy documents rarely referenced AGI and noting that President Xi's April 2025 Politburo study session did not mention the term.The most prominent challenge to this consensus gets the correction wrong. In October 2025, researcher Matthew Johnson at Jamest