China experienced its sputnik moment in March of 2016. That month, AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence program, defeated a South Korean grandmaster at Go, a challenging Chinese board game. Around 280 million people in China tuned in to watch the five-game series. AlphaGo defeated China’s 19-year-old prodigy Ke Jie in May 2017, and the Chinese government unveiled an AI policy two months later, predicting that the country will become the world’s center of AI research by 2030. After the year, China accounted for more than half of all AI venture capital funding globally.