PERSON
Zheng Yongnian
The Chinese political scientist who made the civilizational stakes of AI governance legible—arguing that the frameworks dominating the global discourse are not neutral but culturally specific, and that a world governed by Western AI ethics alone is a world in which one civilization’s self-understanding is being embedded, at scale, into every other civilization’s social fabric.
Zheng Yongnian is the political scientist who names what the global AI governance discourse cannot ask:
whose civilization is being governed? The dominant frameworks of AI ethics—fairness, transparency, accountability, individual rights—present themselves as universal, but they emerged from particular laboratories, legal traditions, and intellectual histories. Zheng’s scholarship on the Chinese state and civilizational governance argues that applying these frameworks to a civilization organized on different premises is not a helpful universalism; it is a form of intellectual colonialism that distorts the very phenomenon it claims to analyze. His concept of the
civilizational state—a political institution whose legitimacy rests not on procedural mandate but on the capacity to maintain the conditions for social harmony across millennia—reframes Chinese AI governance not as authoritarian deviation from liberal norms but as a different institutional logic pursuing a different conception of the public good. His