MA XUEJING/CHINA DAILY
In a small apartment somewhere in Southeast Asia, a designer taps a phone screen and asks an artificial intelligence tool to sharpen a blurred product photo, soften the lighting and remove a messy background.
The request looks weightless. It travels as text and pixels, invisible and almost instant. But behind it is a new kind of Chinese export: not a toy, a solar panel, an electric vehicle or a container of electronics, but a string of AI "tokens" produced by servers running in China and sold as a digital service to overseas users.
In April, South China's port city of Shantou, Guangdong province, had completed China's first city-level closed-loop verification for token exports. It was a full process covering offshore data centers, token generation, overseas application programming interface requests and compliant cross-border data transmission and meant that overseas users in parts of Southeast Asia had begun calling AI services powered by tokens generated in Shantou.
The language is technical, but the ambition is straightforward: China wants to turn domestic electricity, data centers and large-language-model capability into a high-value export product.
