AI and Education in China

Jeremy Knox is Senior Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and Co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education. His research interests include the relationships between education, data-driven technologies, and wider society, and he has led projects funded by the Economic Social Research Council (ESRC) and the British Council in the UK. Jeremy’s published work includes Posthumanism and the MOOC: contaminating the subject of global education in 2016.

• 1 Introduction 2. Policy, governance, and the state 3. Innovation, entrepreneurialism, and private enterprise 4. ‘Double reduction’ and the return of the state 5. Cities, regions, and rural divides 6. ‘Talent’ and the international flow of AI expertise 7. Personalisation, subjectivity, and the Chinese ‘self’ 8. Conclusions

"Western commentators often talk about the rise of AI in Chinese education with a mixture of fascination and horror. Jeremy Knox moves beyond the usual techno-orientalist stereotypes, and offers a clear-eyed appraisal of what China can teach us about the fast-changing relationships between AI, education, society and culture."Neil Selwyn, Monash University, Australia“AI and Education in China: Imagining the Future, Excavating the Past succeeds in expertly guiding readers through the maze of AI-related policies/reforms/initiatives, geopolitical pressures, ideological constraints, spatial terrains, and philosophical currents that underlie the multiple, and at times adversarial, discourses, visions, and socio-technical imaginaries of AI for educational development in China.”Benjamin J. Green, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China. In Postdigital Science and Education (2024) 6:1355–1365.