Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.

The highlights this week: China’s new rules governing artificial intelligence companions take effect, a deadly shoe factory fire devastates the southeastern city of Jinjiang, and China braces for an active typhoon season.

AI Companion Regulations Take Effect

China’s new rules governing artificial intelligence companions will come into effect on Wednesday, prompting many industry players to cancel or suspend services until the impact of the regulations becomes clear.

AI companions are large language models wrapped in a fictional persona, creating the illusion of an individual with whom users can form a relationship. One could approximate this with conventional AI models through careful prompts, but apps such as Xingye (“Star Field”) or Zhumengdao (“Dream Island”) are designed specifically for this experience. Comparable Western apps exist, but most are blocked in China.

The apps allow users to create their so-called dream lovers and provides a platform for playing out romantic scenarios, complete with picture generation. Obviously, part of the appeal is sexual fantasy. Chinese AI services are already prohibited from generating explicit sexual content, but users have found ways around those restrictions.

However, the strongest attraction to the products seems to be emotional or romantic rather than erotic.

AI companionship is already a substantial industry in China that has seen rapid growth in recent years. As of last December, the country’s most popular dedicated service, Talkie, had 23.5 million monthly users; several competitors counted users in the low millions.

The new regulations, somewhat weakened from the draft released last year, require AI companions to remind users regularly that they are communicating with a bot, mandate interventions when users appear to be in a heightened emotional state, prohibit children under 14 from using the services, and require an easy way to exit the service.

These are all sensible measures that are also included in regulations in the West. But as is often the case in China, it’s not just the rules that matter but what they signal. Some companies are already disabling AI companion features to demonstrate compliance with the state, even though the regulations don’t require it. (They may reenable them after the enforcement of the regulations becomes clearer.)

AI companionship has flourished in China in part because dating life there is arguably more difficult than in much of the West. Women report being sexually harassed or pressured for sex, and feminists who try to raise awareness of these issues have faced government retribution. For queer users, AI companions can offer a way to explore romantic feelings that might be inaccessible in the real world, as the government has severely restricted queer spaces.

Unlike the global companionship market, which largely focuses on so-called AI girlfriends, the Chinese market skews toward female users seeking AI boyfriends. That might be because it grew out of China’s enthusiasm for “2D culture”—the mostly Japanese world of anime characters and other cartoons with a fandom that has shifted from predominantly male to predominantly female over the last decade.

Meanwhile, some men are resentful of their perceived financial or social exclusion from the dating market. A visiting Western academic told me that he recently met a male university student who said that because he knew he lacked the money and status to get a date, he had three AI girlfriends instead.

Much of AI companionship is harmless play, but building an emotional relationship with a chatbot is not healthy, especially for younger users. China has been quicker to regulate these services than most Western countries, and it is tempting to attribute this speed to demographic anxiety.

With China’s birth rate at a historic low, authorities may have little enthusiasm for technologies that encourage people to invest emotionally in machines rather than human relationships. The popularity of sensitive, effeminate AI boyfriends also cuts against the vision of masculinity that Beijing seeks to enforce.

The bigger reason, however, is that China already has the infrastructure in place to regulate the industry. In a country where online life is censored and tech companies are highly responsive to official preferences, it is simply easier to change and enforce online rules.

That is not the case for China’s offline economy. Vested interests, corruption, and the country’s sheer size often create a substantial gap between regulations and reality. Contrary to hopes that the internet would liberalize China, the digital world has instead become one of the easiest domains for the Chinese state to control.

What We’re Following

Jinjiang factory fire. After a shoe factory fire in Jinjiang, a city in southeastern China, killed at least 28 people, Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for stricter enforcement of workplace safety laws. China has an extensive body of safety regulations on paper, but enforcement is often lax, as recent fatal mining disasters have demonstrated.

China’s 300 million migrant workers, many of whom are employed off the books, are particularly vulnerable to poor working conditions. I would expect a modest slowdown in manufacturing over the next two to three months as regulators step up inspections and firms scale back illegal activities.

As usual, however, the structural incentives for corruption make it unlikely that this crackdown will produce long-term changes.

Typhoon season. China appears to have avoided the worst-case scenario from Typhoon Bavi, which struck the country’s east coast over the weekend. Although more than 2 million people were evacuated, the storm weakened and flooding proved less severe than many feared. But the respite may be short-lived: Forecasters expect a rough typhoon season ahead, with as many as six more storms on the horizon.

China has an extensive hydraulic control system, but extreme rainfall can overwhelm it and, in rare cases, cause dam collapses. In 1975, for instance, Typhoon Nina caused multiple dam collapses across China, most notably the Banqiao Dam. The resulting floods—and the famine and disease that followed—claimed an estimated 230,000 lives.

FP’s Most Read This Week

• Marco Rubio Burned Down the House to Fix a Sink by Amanda Klasing
• Ukraine Finally Has a Theory of Victory. Will It Work? by Christian Caryl
• Why We Know More About China’s Next-Generation Fighters Than America’s by Sam Roggeveen and David Vallance

Tech and Business

Unemployment rates. There has long been skepticism over China’s official unemployment numbers, which currently stand at a concerning but not yet critical 5.1 percent. Those doubts intensified in 2023, when the government abruptly stopped publishing youth unemployment data for several months before resuming under a revised methodology.

Li Daokui, a professor at Tsinghua University, has concluded that the real long-term overall unemployment rate is currently 10.2 percent, based on data from the National Bureau of Statistics. If that estimate is accurate, it would deepen authorities’ worries about the impact of AI on employment and could strengthen the case for public job initiatives.

Russian military aid. A joint investigation by the Insider, Der Spiegel, and Le Monde highlights the growing depth of Chinese-Russian military cooperation since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The investigation found substantial coordination between Moscow and Beijing, particularly regarding the Starlink satellite system and sharing technical information about weapons.

Although China continues to avoid providing Russia with weapons directly, it has a vested interest in a Russian victory in Ukraine potentially weakening the West.