China as an analytical lens for AI and society

How can “China” serve as a productive analytical tool for understanding the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and society? This commentary proposes a conceptual typology to answer that question. We offer four ways to use China as an analytical lens—China as Mirror, China as Prototype, China as Counterpoint, and China as Global Actor. Each concept illustrates how China’s particularities and global entanglements can help reframe core sociotechnical questions about AI’s political economy, labor, subject formation, ideology, and global circulation. This typology contributes to the decolonization of knowledge production in critical AI studies, ensuring that insights are co-generated globally and avoiding essentialized boundaries that hinder this effort.