Engineering Compliance: China’s Authoritarian Approach to AI Governance

China’s approach to AI governance employs multiple strategies to align this technology with its normative order and value system. The most prominent features of this regulatory framework are sectoral laws, safety standards, and ad hoc enforcement campaigns, which the party-state uses to maintain at least some control over AI tools and applications. This endeavor seems vitally important for the party-state, as absolute control seems elusive in this realm of technological regulation. This talk examines two case studies that illuminate China’s AI governance from different perspectives: judicial AI within the Smart Court agenda, and recommendation algorithms deployed by social media platforms.

In the judiciary, generative AI tools are trained to align with the CPC’s canonized Socialist Core Values, transforming what might appear as technical implementation into a mechanism for political entrenchment in legal interpretation and application. Recommendation systems, by contrast, have drawn regulatory scrutiny from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) for creating “information cocoons” that prevent mainstream opinions—as defined by the party-state—from reaching users. These seemingly unconnected regulatory interventions reveal a however coherent underlying logic: both address the CPC’s concern that unregulated AI could create autonomous knowledge spaces beyond state oversight, potentially fostering ideological divergence from official narratives. Be that by judges or netizens. 

By analyzing these parallel governance strategies, this talk offers new insights into how China's rule-of-law rhetoric and centralized political control interact in the emerging domain of AI regulation, with implications for understanding both Chinese governance innovation and global debates over AI trustworthiness.

Speaker’s Biography

Daniel Sprick is a Research Associate at the Chair of Chinese Legal Culture at the University of Cologne. He teaches courses on Chinese legal history, economic and commercial law, and criminal law. He was awarded the Hanenburg-Yntema Prize for the best European thesis on Chinese law for his study of Chinese competition law, and he received his PhD from the East Asian Institute at the University of Cologne for his research on the limits of self-defence in Chinese criminal law. He has advised the European Parliament on China’s International Commercial Courts and approaches to Investor-State Dispute Resolution, and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs on a human rights project. His recent publications have discussed topics such as the impact of Chinese media on criminal proceedings, predictive policing in China, the Chinese catch-all crime of illegal fundraising, China’s state immunity law, and the value alignment of China’s judicial AI. Recently, he received funding for projects on smart courts in China, the legal dimension of China’s presence in Latin America, the application of socialist core values in Chinese courts and China’s foreign related rule of law.

This event is part of the Perspective Asia Lecture Series.

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