China's AI approach is the tobacco playbook — get the world addicted to cheap product, then extract data, set standards, and make switching costs prohibitive; the West is treating this as a tech race when it's actually a dependency war.
The cheap AI dependency strategy directly maps to the CIPS/mBridge financial rails story: in payments AND in AI, China is building the infrastructure layer that others will run on — the arbitrage is building products on top of Chinese rails before Western alternatives exist at comparable price.
Signal strength today: 3 genuine findings + 1 thread update. Not a 5-finding day — honest calibration.