CHINA-MILITARY-CIVIL FUSION: PLA AND BAIDU JOIN UP FOR AI

The Financial Times published a photograph of Mao Yongqing, Head of the 28th Research Institute of China Electronics Technology Group, which develops electronic warfare technology for the People’s Liberation Army and Yin Shiming, Vice President of Cloud Computing at Baidu, one of China’s privately owned internet groups at a conference in Nanjing. Mao Yongqing is one of a small group of state cadres entrusted by China’s leader Xi Jinping with pushing the military into the era of Artificial Intelligence. Yin Shiming is an engineer who built his expertise at some of the most important western tech companies, including Apple. But at the ceremony this year, they smiled and unveiled a bronze plaque that declared CETC and Baidu to be partners in a “joint lab for intelligent command and control technology” — the facilities that are used to direct military operations. Mao Yongqing lauded the deal as an implementation of “military-civil fusion”, an instruction by the Chinese Communist party that new technologies developed by the private sector must be shared with the military, which was written into the constitution last year. Yin Shiming said CETC and Baidu should “work hand in hand to link up computing, data and logic resources to further advance the application of new generation AI technologies in the area of defence.” 

(Comment: Baidu is a privately owned Chinese internet group, and CETC is the China Electronics Technology Group of the PLA.)







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