China won’t win the AI race but would it be much worse if it did?

It seems to me accepted wisdom in the West that the US owned labs must “beat” the Chinese labs in the race for AGI/ASI. Even those who don’t think there will be a winner, that essentially the race is to see which country’s AI will kill/disempower us first, seem to believe that if there has to be a winner then better it be the US labs. (I haven't seen a survey, so I could be way off here.)For those in power and those heavily financially invested in the labs this of course makes sense. But what about for the rest of us?I had myself accepted the wisdom, in the nebulous way you consider propositions in domains where you don’t have any expertise. The CCP is repressive, I thought. They are an authoritarian country and therefore fundamentally a malign actor. Of course they mustn’t win.Then I heard Victor Shih, Chinese political system expert, talk on Dwarkesh’s podcast:“For the Chinese government, they’re very afraid that some actor—outside, but even inside the Party—is going to use it [AI] as a tool to usurp the Party’s power. So they want to know that they have a way of stopping everything if it comes to it. For them, developing the brakes is just as important as developing the AI itself.”He talks a little about how that might look:“So what we’re going to see in terms of institutional development is not at the top end, but at the lower end. They will want to designate human beings in all the government agencies, in all the commercial entities that are using AI or AGI, to put their foot on the brake if it comes to it.”For me, this flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. When it comes to a rogue ASI, perversely, the less you think of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its preoccupation with holding onto power the more you can trust it in this domain.It seems natural for a regime like the CCP to conclude the creation of ‘a country of geniuses in a datacentre’ is a threat, specifically the threat of an invasion.So, if the world we’re in is one where rogue ASI is far