World may find itself ‘in a very Chinese time’ of data governance

At the end of March, China inaugurated the World Data Organisation in Beijing, a body with a stated mission of “bridging the data divide, unlocking data’s value and powering the digital economy”.The move is the latest signal of a broader trend: over the past several years, Beijing has developed a distinct data governance strategy to drive artificial intelligence (AI) development as it reshapes the terms of technological competition.Since late 2025, Beijing has pursued an aggressive AI adoption strategy across industries through its “AI-plus” initiative. At the core of this shift is data, which Chinese policymakers see as the “new oil” powering AI. But, like oil, the supply of usable data is finite. In 2024, former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever warned that the world had effectively exhausted human-generated data for AI training – a constraint China has taken seriously.