The next Doha Debates Town Hall is coming soon! 📅 October 15, 2026 ⏰ 7:30 p.m. 📍@QF's Education City | Doha, Qatar

Thank you @rajonlaw for taking part in this lively and timely debate alongside your fellow experts. We look forward to viewers engaging with the debate and continuing the conversation.

This was one of the most interesting moments of our @DohaDebates on Al Jazeera: why do more and more countries, including the U.S., refer to themselves as civilizations? Many view this as nationalistic or chauvinistic rhetoric, but I made the point that it's close to the opposite, that it's actually the world moving towards a healthier balance. Why? Because, by definition, when you define yourself as a civilization you're implicitly accepting that there are other civilizations too, with their own values and their own ways of seeing the world. As I argued, this marks a turning point after decades of liberal universalism when you never heard the word "civilization" because everything was about "universal values," with the assumption that there was only one legitimate way of seeing the world that everyone was expected - and often pushed - to adopt. Talking of civilizations means it becomes acceptable to say "you are the way you are, I am the way I am, let's coexist," rather than trying to impose your model on everyone else. Which is inherently less conflictual. And, as such, far from being chauvinistic, it's at heart more genuinely respectful of diversity than the liberal hegemony mindset where "diversity" was welcome as long as everyone ended up sharing the same values: ours. My contradictor, Isabel Hilton, countered that liberal ideas have genuine grassroots support in China and are debated there by the Chinese themselves. Which I don't dispute in the slightest: as I replied to her, a country debating its own future internally is the most normal thing in the world. When it starts to become wrong is when outsiders are trying to settle that debate from abroad. As I put it to her, if China tried to spread socialism with Chinese characteristics in Britain, the British would rightly have a problem with it. You can watch the full debate here below 👇 or on YouTube: piped.video/watch?v=C_GZKMC5…

US President Trump and China's President Xi are meeting at the White House today, with trade, AI and Iran on the agenda. On the Doha Debates Podcast this week, we ask: Will China or the West lead the world into the future? Watch the full debate below ⤵️

"We should place our global AI governance and interests under a shared U.N.-linked umbrella with functions that would include common definitions of frontier risk, interoperable testing and reporting standards, incident notification, and representation for countries that are major users rather than just major model developers."—@HuiyaoWang Henry Wang joined us as a guest on the first episode of the new Doha Debates Podcast season, “Will China or the West lead the world into the future?” As Chinese president Xi Jinping visits the U.S., Wang discusses the importance of U.S.–China cooperation around AI governance in his latest Substack article. Read the full article: pekingnology.com/p/henry-hui… Watch or listen to Henry Wang discuss China's approach to AI on the Doha Debates Podcast: Watch 📺 piped.video/C_GZKMC5YTo?t=4342 Listen 🎧 open.spotify.com/podcast-cha…