I’m not a China expert, but I have some experience running classes and discussion forums in a Chinese university. In my experience, people in China feel considerably more freedom to express their views on a wide variety of issues than Westerners typically think they do. There is a short list of censored topics, centered around criticism of the CCP itself, Xi Jinping, Uyghurs, Tibet, and Taiwan. But I would bet that they have plenty of freedom to discuss AI X risks, alignment, and geopolitical issues around AI, as exemplified by the fact that Kai-Fu Lee, author of ‘AI Superpowers’ (2018), and based in Beijing, is a huge tech celebrity in China who speaks frequently on college campuses there—despite being a vocal critic of some gov’t tech policies.
Conversely, there are plenty of topics in the West, especially in American academia, that are de facto censored (through cancel culture). For example, it was much less trouble to teach about evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, intelligence research, and even sex research in a Chinese university than in an American university.
I’m not a China expert, but I have some experience running classes and discussion forums in a Chinese university. In my experience, people in China feel considerably more freedom to express their views on a wide variety of issues than Westerners typically think they do. There is a short list of censored topics, centered around criticism of the CCP itself, Xi Jinping, Uyghurs, Tibet, and Taiwan. But I would bet that they have plenty of freedom to discuss AI X risks, alignment, and geopolitical issues around AI, as exemplified by the fact that Kai-Fu Lee, author of ‘AI Superpowers’ (2018), and based in Beijing, is a huge tech celebrity in China who speaks frequently on college campuses there—despite being a vocal critic of some gov’t tech policies.
Conversely, there are plenty of topics in the West, especially in American academia, that are de facto censored (through cancel culture). For example, it was much less trouble to teach about evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, intelligence research, and even sex research in a Chinese university than in an American university.