At the New Enlightenment Conference in Edinburgh, held to mark 250 years of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, Eamonn Butler, co-founder and director of the Adam Smith Institute, put a pointed question to George Yeo, Singapore’s former Foreign Minister. Paper and the Enlightenment, Butler argued, broke the hold of old elites over ideas, and artificial intelligence will do the same. How, he asked, will China resist “the liberation which AI would give to its own people”?
Yeo begins with candour. He says he does not know, and that Beijing does not know either. He then builds his answer from three pieces of first-hand evidence.
The first is institutional. Yeo walks through the main departments of the Chinese Communist Party and singles out a newer one, the Social Work Department, announced in March 2023. He treats its creation as a signal of how the party views the social effects of new technology. Reporting by AsiaNews and The Star describes the department’s remit as covering the petition system, grassroots governance, and party organisations inside private firms and civil society groups.
The second is personal. On a recent visit to his family’s ancestral village, Yeo watched the annual dragon boat race and noticed who local officials had made sure to invite. He is also trying to take over his grandfather’s house there, which he calls “a complicated political exercise”. Both experiences inform a view of village-level China that many viewers will find unexpected.
The third goes back to the 1990s, when Yeo was Singapore’s Minister for Information and the Arts and oversaw the regulation of the internet. A delegation of Chinese ministers spent a week in Singapore as his guests and, by his account, worked from morning to night. Their purpose puzzled him at the time. He links what followed to companies that now define China’s technology sector.
Yeo closes on the idea that runs through his Edinburgh keynote: Adam Smith’s two hands, and how much work each should do.
Why it matters for Asia
Beijing moved early to regulate generative AI. Its Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services, led by the Cyberspace Administration of China, took effect on 15 August 2023.
Southeast Asia now builds directly on Chinese models. In November 2025, AI Singapore and Alibaba Cloud released Qwen-SEA-LION-v4, a regional-language model built on Alibaba’s open Qwen3-32B base and trained further on Southeast Asian language data. Decisions in Beijing about how open its AI should be therefore reach ASEAN’s own tools.
ASEAN has set out its own approach. Digital ministers released the ASEAN Guide on AI Governance and Ethics in February 2024 under Singapore’s chairmanship, as a voluntary framework for companies and governments.
The balance China strikes between control and openness will shape the models, rules and markets its neighbours rely on. Yeo offers a reading of that balance from someone who has watched Chinese policymaking at close range since the 1990s.
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Further Reading
- Yuen Yuen Ang, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap (Cornell University Press, 2016).
How Beijing and local officials adapted policy during the reform era. - Sebastian Heilmann, Red Swan: How Unorthodox Policy-Making Facilitated China’s Rise (Chinese University Press, 2018).
A study of how China tests and scales policy. - Richard McGregor, The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers (2010).
An inside account of the party’s departments and how they operate. - Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
Smith’s first book, and the source of the moral framework Yeo draws on.
Excerpt from the Q&A following George Yeo’s keynote at the New Enlightenment Conference, hosted by Adam Smith’s Panmure House, Edinburgh, marking 250 years of The Wealth of Nations. Used for commentary and analysis. Views expressed are the speakers’ own. Watch the original
