On 14 May 2025, Chinese Ambassador to the UK Zheng Zeguang attended the 2025 Sino-UK Entrepreneur Forum and delivered a keynote address titled “Upholding Openness and Cooperation, and Promoting Exchange and Mutual Learning”.

In his address, Ambassador Zheng outlined four main characteristics of AI development in China: First, expanding scale. China is home to over 4,500 AI-related enterprises, with the core AI industry valued at nearly 600 billion yuan and the AI chip market exceeding 150 billion yuan. Second, flourishing innovation. In 2024, AI patent applications from China accounted for 61.5% of the global total. Chinese tech companies have launched models such as Baidu’s “Wenxin Yiyan”, ByteDance’s “Doubao”, Tencent’s “Yuanbao”, Alibaba’s “Tongyi”, and Huawei’s “Pangu”. The open-source large language model DeepSeek, developed by a young Chinese team, gained global popularity upon release. The world’s first fully autonomous AI agent, Manus, has the capacity to function without human micromanagement. Third, improving computing power. China’s supercomputers account for 45% of the global total. With over 4 million 5G base stations, China has built the world’s largest mobile communication and fibre broadband networks. In 2024, data production in China exceeded 41 zettabytes (ZB), a 25% year-on-year increase, achieving both quantitative and qualitative growth. Fourth, increasing application empowerment. The vigorous development of AI is a reflection of China’s high-quality growth. Technologies represented by AI are fostering new industries and business models, and transforming traditional industries. They have also helped bring the Chinese economy to the higher-end, and made it smarter and greener.