In recent years, China's aspiration for global technology leadership has driven its significant investments in artificial intelligence (AI) for national security, economic growth, and societal well-being. Although there is increasing research and analysis on China's domestic AI development ecosystems and drivers, the details of China's development-financed AI exports remain elusive. Despite being the single-largest provider of foreign development assistance, Beijing does not participate in aid or debt transparency initiatives. To address this gap, researchers from the RAND Corporation and AidData jointly built a new database on China's AI export projects that are funded with official development financing: China's AI Exports Database (CAIED). CAIED uses data from multiple public databases and indexes related to China's global financing and recipient countries' electoral democracy, freedom, and data protection and privacy status. In this report, the authors analyze this quantitative dataset — adding qualitative country case studies based on interviews and social media analysis — to examine the distribution, technology, financing, and data safety aspects of China's AI exports.

With average annual commitments reaching $85 billion, the Chinese government is now the world's largest provider of development financing. Supported by large funding, many Chinese technology companies can deploy state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) tools in development contracts in recipient countries. The AI exports facilitated by these arrangements are likely to bolster China's growing global AI technology-related supply chains, trade flows, technology standards, and regulatory systems. This report is the technical documentation for the China's AI Exports Database (CAIED), which is a tool that tracks Chinese government–supported development finance projects that used or enabled AI technology in the Global South between 2000 and 2017. The goal of the report is to explain the motivation, data source, and methodology of building the tool. This report also presents a detailed codebook for the database and explanations on how to use the interactive world map and country selector. CAIED was built on AidData's Global Chinese Development Finance (GCDF) Dataset version 2.0. Using advanced data mining tools, the authors identified 155 projects enabling AI exports and described their characteristics in rich detail. Users can filter the world map by AI technology categories associated with the development finance projects and learn further details of the exported China AI project by clicking on the country of interest.

Ulcerative colitis (UC), a chronic and nonspecific inflammatory disease of the intestine, has become a prevalent global health concern. This guideline aims to equip clinicians and caregivers with effective strategies for the treatment and management of adult UC patients using traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). The guideline systematically evaluated contemporary evidence through the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation framework. Additionally, it incorporated insights from ancient Chinese medical sources, employing the evidence grading method found in traditional TCM literature. The development process involved collaboration with multidisciplinary experts and included input from patients with UC. The guideline, based on a comprehensive review of available evidence, present 40 recommendations. They offer a condensed overview of TCM's role in understanding the pathogenesis, diagnosis, and treatment of UC, along with an assessment of the efficacy of various TCM-based treatments. TCM exhibits promising outcomes in the treatment of UC. However, to establish its efficacy conclusively, further high-quality clinical studies on TCM for UC are essential.

The United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) involve society, economy, and environment, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is an important path to implement the SDGs. Moreover, the BRI is a vision for economic development of countries along the route. Although many studies documented the effect of the BRI on environment and economic performance, few studies have discussed the effect of the BRI on social and economic benefits. Therefore, we introduce the public health expenditure to explore the relationship between the BRI and the public health and economic growth of countries along the route from the dual perspective of social development and economic growth. Based on a panel data from 171 countries from 2010 to 2018, the current research explores whether the BRI can boost public health and promote economic growth in the belt-road countries. As a result, we found that the BRI boosted the expenditure of public health and effectively spurred economic growth in the belt-road countries. Furthermore, the effect of the BRI on the economic growth in the countries along the route depends on the level of public health expenditure in each country; the positive effect of the BRI on economic growth is significant when the public health expenditure level is moderate instead of low or high. The findings provide theoretical and practical insights into the SDGs of the BRI.