Between European theoretical rigor and Chinese hyper-deployment, scientific collaboration is becoming a necessity in the face of global challenges.
The Two Sessions of 2026 mark a decisive turning point with the structuring of the 15th Five-Year Plan. China reaffirms its ambition to transform its economic model by relying on new quality productive forces. At the heart of this strategy, artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer seen as a simple field of research, but as the basic infrastructure of national industrial modernization, illustrated by the acceleration of the “IA+” (AI Plus) action plan.
My background, from my training in applied mathematics in France to my current role as a machine learning engineer within the Beijing startup MoleculeMind, offers me a direct point of view on these developments. This article proposes to analyze the pragmatism of Chinese AI, its concrete applications and the prospects for Franco-Chinese cooperation.
From theory to hyper-deployment: the singularity of Chinese AI
The global AI industry is developing along distinct regional logics. The European ecosystem, and particularly the French one, is characterized by rigorous academic requirements. Research and engineering training promote the depth of mathematical models, theoretical understanding and the explainability of algorithms. It is an environment that favors conceptual solidity, prudence and an ethical framework before any commercial deployment.
In China, the dynamic is based on a different paradigm. The singularity of the local ecosystem lies in its absolute pragmatism and its speed of execution. The market favors applied engineering over pure research. The main objective of technology companies is not systematically to design new fundamental architectures, but to appropriate existing models to integrate them as quickly as possible into viable products. The development cycles are extremely dense: a solution is put on the market, tested by users, then corrected through successive iterations. This working method allows instant adaptation to the needs of the industry.
This hyper-deployment model is supported by an incontestable structural advantage: the size of the internal market. The strong penetration of digital technology into everyday life and the rapid adoption of innovations by the economic fabric generate an unparalleled volume of data. This continuous flow of information is the driving force behind Chinese AI. It allows algorithms to be trained, refined and specialized for real use cases, whether computer vision for the manufacturing sector or natural language processing for services.
Finally, this pragmatism translates into remarkable optimization of resources. Faced with global constraints on computer hardware, Chinese engineers are focusing their efforts on the efficiency of models. The challenge is to reduce computational costs and facilitate large-scale inference. China’s strength lies in this software industrialization capacity. Artificial intelligence has left the field of experimentation to become a real production tool, designed to provide concrete and immediate responses to economic challenges.
AI serving reality: from structural biology to the energy transition
The integration of AI into Chinese society goes far beyond mainstream applications. Its real impact is measured today in its ability to respond to complex structural challenges, particularly in the health and energy sectors.
In the biomedical field, AI is causing a profound methodological breakthrough, a daily reality within companies like MoleculeMind. Structural biology and protein design, historically constrained by time-consuming and expensive experimental processes, are being transformed by machine learning. AI models can now predict protein structures and simulate molecular dynamics with unprecedented precision. Concretely, the research phase for new medical treatments or industrial enzymes is drastically shortened. AI does not replace the researcher, it provides them with a predictive modeling tool of unparalleled power, accelerating the response to public health challenges.
At the same time, China’s energy transition is increasingly based on algorithmic optimization. While China is installing massive renewable energy capacity, with recent record additions in solar and wind, the intermittency of these sources poses a major challenge for the stability of the electricity grid. AI intervenes here as an essential balancing tool. The development of smart grids driven by algorithms makes it possible to predict energy production based on the weather, anticipate consumption peaks and optimize electricity distribution in real time. This integration into the national energy system aims to reduce waste while maximizing the resilience of infrastructure to climatic hazards.
Finally, in everyday urban and industrial life, this technology has become an invisible infrastructural layer. From optimizing logistics flows in ports to traffic management in megacities, AI serves above all as a rationalization tool, processing massive volumes of data to streamline physical operations.
Public policies: AI as a driver of new quality productive forces
The direction of China’s AI industry is inseparable from strong state leadership. The meetings of the Two Sessions confirm a constant economic doctrine: the transition towards growth based on technological innovation. In this framework, AI is not treated as an isolated software sector, but as the catalyst for new quality productive forces, a central concept of current industrial policy.
This political vision is reflected in the government initiative “IA+”, which aims to infuse AI into all traditional industries to modernize them. On the ground, this strategy modifies the professional environment. The state does not just set objectives, it deploys considerable resources to build the underlying infrastructure. Access to computing power, a critical issue in the face of geopolitical restrictions on semiconductors, is thus supported by the construction of vast national data centers financed by public funds.
For industry players, this focus creates massive market opportunities. Public orders and grants direct research towards priority areas, such as advanced manufacturing, biotechnologies or new energies, rather than just towards consumer digital services. This allocation of capital guarantees innovative companies the resources necessary to move from proof of concept to large-scale deployment.
In terms of human resources, this dynamic reinforces the attractiveness of the market. The government is increasing incentives to retain talent and structure dense technological hubs in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. This concentration of academic skills, engineering and capital creates a highly competitive ecosystem, but strictly aligned with a clear objective: ensuring technological autonomy and maintaining the competitiveness of the national industry on the global stage.
Crossed perspectives: opportunities for France-China cooperation
The French and Chinese technological ecosystems, although structured by different philosophies, present objective complementarities. France, and more broadly Europe, maintains a leading position in fundamental research and cutting-edge mathematics. The European focus on security, explainability of algorithms and the creation of regulatory frameworks ensures robust and ethical technological development.
For its part, China offers massive engineering capacity, a dynamic financing ecosystem and a continental-scale testing environment. The convergence of these two models opens up prospects for fruitful cooperation, particularly in sectors of common interest and not geopolitically sensitive. Global challenges such as climate transition, energy optimization or medical research, particularly the use of AI in structural biology, constitute natural areas of common ground.
The future of meaningful bilateral collaboration lies in supporting open-source initiatives. This synergy is already a tangible reality: cutting-edge Chinese models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen or DeepSeek’s architectures, are today massively shared and studied on European and French collaborative platforms like HuggingFace. Sharing these open models and scientific data sets makes it possible to combine European analytical rigor with the power of Chinese iteration, thus accelerating innovation in the service of major global challenges.
Ultimately, artificial intelligence in China has passed the threshold of simple experimentation to establish itself as the operational engine of the real economy. Its uniqueness is based on an assumed pragmatism, aiming to transform computing power into tangible industrial tools as quickly as possible.
Faced with the urgency of climate and health challenges, technological isolation constitutes a dead end. The collaboration between European conceptual excellence and the Chinese deployment force goes beyond the strict framework of economic opportunities. It is today asserting itself as a scientific necessity for designing solutions that meet contemporary challenges.
*RAPHAËL PERRI is a machine learning engineer at the startup MoleculeMind.
