Dr. Wen-Ling Tu, President of the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology (DSET), on May 6, 2026, together with members of DSET’s Democratic Governance Program, visited the National Democratic Institute (NDI) for an exchange with NDI’s Asia-Pacific team and Democracy Innovation Lab. The discussion focused on the global diffusion of Chinese artificial intelligence, foreign information manipulation and interference, and the resilience of civil society across the Asia-Pacific region.
Kai-Shen Huang, Director of DSET’s Democratic Governance Program, presented his recent research analyzing how the capabilities of China’s AI ecosystem are advancing through several key vectors—including open-weight models, open architectures, and modular components. He cautioned that existing U.S. regulatory and policy responses remain inadequate to address these developments.
Violet (Yueh-Ning) Chiang, Non-Resident Fellow at DSET, introduced the team’s ongoing project on FIMI in AI, including its methodology and an in-house trained censorship-detection classifier. You-Hao Lai, Deputy Director of the Democratic Governance Program, gave a brief overview of the analytical methodology developed in The Authoritarian Gaze report, which examines the terms of service and privacy policies of Chinese AI services. He explained how this approach can be extended to trace the ownership structures and cross-border data flows of Chinese digital services operating in third countries.
NDI’s team engaged closely with DSET’s research presentations, and the discussion explored how DSET’s research methods and tools could be adapted for use by NDI’s civil society partners across the Asia-Pacific region in their advocacy and research work. NDI expressed strong interest in working with DSET to strengthen regional partners’ capacity to integrate AI into their advocacy and research efforts, particularly in monitoring and responding to Chinese influence operations and other forms of digital authoritarian influence. Both sides looked forward to advancing further regional cooperation and contributing research and practical capacity to democratic resilience and civil society strength across the Indo-Pacific.
