AI governance was front and center at the 2026 World AI Conference and High-Level Meeting on Global AI Governance, which opened in Shanghai on July 17, where Chinese President Xi Jinping attended the opening ceremony and delivered a keynote presenting China’s responses to the challenges of AI development and governance.
Since 2023, when Xi put forward the Global AI Governance Initiative, China says it has advanced its AI Plus initiative to deepen integration between AI-driven innovation and industrial upgrading, aiming to support high-quality economic development and improve living standards.
Practical deployments are cited as examples of that approach. In healthcare, AI systems based on traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are reported to replicate the diagnostic reasoning of veteran practitioners; solutions combining knowledge graphs with large language models are serving more than 60 provincial-level top-tier TCM hospitals and thousands of primary healthcare institutions. On Inner Mongolia grasslands, facial recognition is used to identify individual cattle continuously, increasing feed efficiency by 25 percent and reducing disease rates by 20 percent.
Following a devastating earthquake in Myanmar, a Chinese team developed a multilingual AI translation system within seven hours to assist international rescue teams. The Institute of Automation under the Chinese Academy of Sciences has deployed its Yugong parallel mining operating system in Thailand, enabling fully autonomous mining operations that have achieved zero safety accidents while improving productivity and reducing emissions.
China’s approach to AI governance
China emphasizes that technological progress should serve human needs and align with shared human values. It has incorporated AI into its national cybersecurity regulatory framework and continues to refine regulations, governance mechanisms and ethical guidelines to ensure AI safety, reliability and controllability. As a responsible major country, China released the Shanghai Declaration on Global AI Governance, calling for AI systems that are auditable, monitorable, traceable and trustworthy.
China has also engaged in multilateral discussions on AI governance, including at the United Nations, on issues such as ethical review and safety evaluation. It says it is promoting broader consensus on AI governance and stronger safeguards for AI security.
International cooperation and capacity-building
China presents greater openness, connectivity and cooperation as essential to addressing uneven development and supporting digital transformation in Global South countries. It says it has promoted AI for good and for all through proposals and actions, helping developing countries strengthen AI capabilities and narrow digital and AI divides — efforts it says have won broad recognition from the international community.
China played a role in facilitating adoption of a United Nations General Assembly resolution on enhancing international cooperation on AI capacity-building. It has proposed establishing a World AI Cooperation Organization and released the AI Capacity-Building Action Plan for Good and for All and the AI + International Cooperation Initiative. China has organized numerous AI capacity-building workshops welcomed by Global South countries and, drawing on the Belt and Road Initiative, established digital cooperation platforms that provide affordable smart infrastructure, localized native-language AI models and digital talent training across Southeast Asia and Africa.
Guided by its stated vision and practical achievements, China says it will continue to contribute ideas, seek broader consensus and offer practical solutions for global AI development and governance while working with other countries to steer AI toward what it describes as a brighter future for humanity.
