China in a Good Position to Enjoy Delayed AI Benefits: Stephen Roach

By Harry Wu, 21st Century Business Herald, SFC

China possesses unique advantages in AI application scenarios, data scale, and government momentum. As China's potential for application-driven innovation is gradually unleashed, the Chinese economy is poised to gain new growth momentum, said Stephen Roach, Senior Fellow at Yale University and former Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia.

At the 2025 Bund Summit, Roach told 21st Century Business Herald that in terms of the economic impact of AI, the benefits from the application side are likely to be far more meaningful over the short to medium term, and “China is in a good position to enjoy those benefits.”

Roach personally experienced early technological waves, whose impacts took time to manifest. In the late 1990s, he conducted extensive research on the impact of information technology on productivity, which eventually showed up in the productivity statistics.

Regarding the era of AI, he said that similar, albeit delayed, impacts are likely to be seen in the future, both for China and the United States.

As AI technology develops, Roach believes that shared challenges will create much-needed new areas for cooperation between China and the United States, becoming an unexpected fulcrum for stabilizing bilateral relations. He hopes that China and the United States will cooperate more to defend common interests on important issues, from AI to cybersecurity to global health.