China issues new productivity plan and orders full rollout of AI plus initiative

Beijing’s new ‘Opinions on Developing New Quality Productive Forces’ is a dense policy document, but one line stands out for AI: a directive to ‘fully implement the artificial intelligence plus action.’ In practice, that knits together earlier slogans about a 10‑trillion‑yuan AI economy with a concrete industrial program. The opinion pairs AI with data centers, industrial internet and a nationwide compute network, and explicitly calls out smart vehicles, AI phones and computers, and humanoid robots as priority terminals. It also frames AI as a tool to transform traditional sectors from mining and textiles to agriculture, which is where China’s scale advantage can really show up.

For the AGI race, the significance is twofold. First, this locks AI even more tightly into China’s long‑term development strategy: companies that align with the AI+ narrative can expect preferential access to subsidies, data and local government projects. Second, the document spends real language on risk monitoring, safety and cross‑sector regulation, signaling that Chinese regulators are preparing to manage autonomous systems, not just statistical models. While this is not a lab‑specific mandate like export controls or licensing, it will shape the environment in which DeepSeek, Moonshot, Baidu, Alibaba and others operate for the rest of the decade.