LW - China-AI forecasts by NathanBarnard

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: China-AI forecasts, published by NathanBarnard on February 26, 2024 on LessWrong.
The rate at which China is able to advance towards TAI is a crucial consideration in for many policy questions. My current take is that, without significant political reforms which seem very unlikely while Xi is alive (although considerably more likely after his death,) it's very unlikely that China will be able to mount a meaningful challenge to AI firms in US and allies in the race for TAI.
I don't think it requires democratic reforms are required to China to be competitive with the US and allies, but I do think rule of law reforms are likely to be required.
The first post is going to be me forecasting Chinese growth on the theory that, if China reaches rich country status, it's likely that it will be able to compete with the US and allies for leadership in AI. I'll write a second post looking at Chinese AI efforts in particular.
The outside view
Most countries that become middle income countries, have, thus far, stayed at middle income level. Chinese per capita income is currently at almost exactly the world average level.
The only countries (and territories) in the last 70 years that have gone low income to high income countries in the last 70 years (without oil wealth) are South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore (which does have substantial oil wealth,) and Hong Kong, although it seems very likely that Malaysia will join that club in the near future.
The majority of countries have managed to emerge from low-income status to middle income status because you only need to get a few things right. If you can get your population to urbanize, have basic rule by law so that firms have basic protection from violence, and get a high enough savings rate to accumulate physical capital you can get to middle income status just using catch up growth.
Catch up growth is the reason conceptually why middle-income status - rather than getting to a given level of GDP per capita - is the correct misuse. When growing with catch up growth you can just growth by accumulating physical capital using standard technologies that have been already been developed, like the technology for light manufacturing or civil engineering. Past this point though countries get rich by being able to develop and use technologies close to or at the frontier.
China has successfully managed to accumulate capital to utilize catch-up technologies, like steelmaking and light manufacturing. It's quite successfully managed to urbanize it's population and now seems to have reached the Lewis turning point where young people who try to leave their villages to find work cities often don't find it and have to stay in their villages, in the much lower productivity jobs.
Democracy and rule of law rates give another outside view on Chinese growth prospects. Of the 53 rich countries and territories that aren't oil states or microstates, only 2 aren't democracies - Singapore and Hong Kong - and none lack rule by law and all have low levels of corruption.
China currently lacks democracy, has high levels of corruption (although roughly normal levels for a middle income country is my perception,) and sort of middling levels of rule by law.
An important part of countries getting to high income status is new firms forming and competing to deploy and create ~frontier technologies and process. This is harder to do than accumulating enough capital and having low enough levels of violence and corruption to be able to build decent housing, supply reliable electricity and water, and have large numbers of workers do semi-skilled manual labour at scale.
Specifically this can all be done while elites earn large rents by establishing monopolies (or more generally accruing market power) that they exclude non-elites from.
The role that democracy plays in this story is ...