A health management robot for taking food orders and offering dietary advice, along with a contactless meal-pickup terminal, on display at the world’s first robotics-powered smart elderly care station in the Beijing Economic Technological Development Area, which began operations on March 12 Photo: IC PHOTO

The year 2025 marks a milestone in China’s research on the intelligent society. During this period, the construction of an intelligent society moved beyond technology-driven industrial practice toward a new stage characterized by deeper institutional integration and the reconfiguration of social operating paradigms. In parallel, research on the intelligent society has also been incorporated into the broader blueprint for modernizing China’s system and capacity for governance.

This process of deepening reflects a progression from concrete policy deployment to national strategy. In August 2025, the State Council rolled out guidelines for the “AI Plus” initiative, outlining a concrete roadmap for building an intelligent society. It proposed that by 2035 “China will enter a new stage of intelligent economy and intelligent society comprehensively,” and identified the innovation of research methods in the philosophy and social sciences as a key priority, calling for a shift toward human–machine collaborative research paradigms. In October 2025, the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Communist Party of China Central Committee adopted the Recommendations of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China for Formulating the 15th Five-Year Plan for National Economic and Social Development, further affirming that “The AI Plus Initiative should be advanced across the board. We should steer the transformation of scientific research paradigms with AI.” Together, these moves provide a fundamental guideline for the deep governance of the intelligent society.

Toward systematic deepening in research

Driven by top-level national planning and the substantive advancement of the “AI Plus” initiative, China’s academic community achieved significant progress in 2025 across three dimensions: foundational theory, research paradigms, and empirical studies. The focus of research has shifted from descriptive tracking of emerging phenomena to the interpretation of underlying structural dynamics.

At the level of foundational theory, the analytical framework has expanded from the traditional “human–human” binary to a “human–machine–object” triadic configuration. The emerging interactive capacities of generative AI have prompted scholars to reconsider the nature of social actors. Intelligent technologies are no longer seen merely as tools but increasingly display characteristics of “quasi-social actors.” This shift broadens the scope of sociological inquiry and encourages new interpretations of foundational concepts such as social solidarity and trust, enabling more effective analysis of social order in environments of human–machine symbiosis. At the intersection of social action and structure, attention has increasingly shifted toward the complex interplay between technological logics and individual autonomy. A growing consensus holds that algorithms now possess institutional properties that regulate behavior, while digital capital is profoundly reshaping mechanisms of social stratification.

At the level of research paradigms, systems of knowledge production are transitioning from “computational simulation” to “human–machine collaboration.” Confronted with the complexity of social systems, traditional simulation approaches are evolving toward what is termed “generative sociology.” Social simulation technologies have progressed from rule-based “agent-based modeling” (ABM) to cognition-based “generative agent-based modeling” (GABM). Researchers are experimenting with generative agents capable of simulating actors endowed with psychological and social attributes, offering new digital tools for modeling social evolution. At the same time, computational qualitative analysis is gaining traction, combining the breadth of quantitative data with the depth of qualitative interpretation and extending the boundaries of digital ethnography.

At the empirical level, research grounded in China’s social practice has examined how intelligent technologies are reshaping social order across multiple dimensions. Structurally, studies reveal a paradox within the platform economy, where the involution of labor control coexists with the empowerment of vulnerable groups, challenging earlier one-dimensional narratives of technological pessimism. Institutionally, scholars have identified an agile governance paradigm with Chinese characteristics: As traditional bureaucratic systems transition toward adaptive governance, a form of trace-based trust grounded in data records is gradually replacing relational trust, emerging as a new social bond within intelligent communities. At the level of everyday life, research has probed deeply into the most intimate bodily and emotional domains of individual experience, capturing emerging phenomena ranging from the disciplining of the body among Generation Z to the increasing fluidity of intimate relationships associated with the rise of human–machine romance.

Synergistic development of academic publishing and disciplinary formation

In parallel with cutting-edge journal articles, academic book publishing has achieved notable advances in both quality and thematic scope. Recent works have moved beyond early-stage translation and introductory application toward a dual deepening of indigenous theoretical construction and methodological innovation, thereby strengthening the disciplinary foundations of intelligent sociology. These contributions span three main areas: foundational theory, methodological tools, and applied scenarios.

In foundational theory and ethical inquiry, works such as Artificial Intelligence and the Future Society, The Intelligent Society: Unveiling Emerging Human-Machine Relationships, and Artificial Intelligence for Good systematically examine the ethical risks of human–machine symbiosis and seek to construct social contracts and governance frameworks suited to the intelligent era, directly engaging with the “human–machine–object” framework. In methodological innovation and practical tools, a wave of hands-on publications has accelerated the transformation of research paradigms. Works such as Machine Learning in Social Science: Applications and Advances (in English), Building AI Scientists: A Practical Guide to DeepSeek and ChatGPT, and Intelligent Social Surveys: AI-Empowered Methods and Practices signal the transition of computational social science from a high-threshold technical specialization to a broadly accessible research competency, supporting the move toward human–machine collaboration. In applied scenarios, works like Intelligent Society and the Development of Future Cities and Urban Population Flows and Spatiotemporal Simulation in the Intelligent Society effectively translate abstract theory into concrete governance strategies, linking theoretical logic with practical application.

These academic trends are further reflected in the 2025 list of projects funded by the National Social Science Fund of China. Compared with previous years, the 2025 projects move beyond a singular technological perspective and are distributed across three levels: macro governance, meso-level social groups, and micro-level cognition, complementing parallel developments in academic publishing. At the macro level, projects such as “Mechanisms, Transmission Pathways, and Prevention Strategies of Risks in the Intelligent Society” and “Collaborative Governance Mechanisms for the Social Integration of New Employment Groups in the Digital Era” align closely with the modernization of the national governance system. At the meso level, research exhibits a strong humanistic orientation, focusing on individuals within the tide of technological change. Topics such as “Digital Resilience among Youth in the Intelligent Era,” “Digital Inclusion of the Elderly in China: Multidimensional Deconstruction, Challenges, and Pathways,” and “Job Stability of Emerging Occupational Groups in the Age of AI” examine the lived conditions and developmental rights of different groups within digital stratification, offering nuanced dialectical analyses of empowerment and control. At the micro and theoretical frontier, projects such as “Dynamic Equilibrium between Intelligent Agent Algorithms and Adolescent Cognitive Development” and “Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Autopoiesis and its Application in the Age of AI” indicate a shift from policy-oriented application toward foundational theoretical engagement, aiming to achieve breakthroughs in core concepts and explanatory frameworks.

In promoting disciplinary development, the Journal of Intelligent Society played an active platform role in 2025. Through events such as a symposium on the journal’s high-quality development in Beijing and the first annual forum, along with the second plenary meeting of its advisory committee and editorial board in Harbin, it fostered expert consensus that Chinese sociology, in the intelligent era, must move beyond purely empirical research. It should instead maintain reflexivity across cultural, theoretical, practical, and methodological dimensions—remaining open to emerging technologies such as generative AI while upholding the discipline’s humanistic foundations. Through ongoing initiatives like the “Elite Forum on the Intelligent Society,” the journal has also built interdisciplinary dialogue platforms linking sociology, AI, computer science, and law, with particular support for emerging scholars. This model—linking journals and conferences to drive research—has helped transform dispersed academic efforts into more coordinated disciplinary development.

From technological application to foundational theory

Looking ahead to 2026, research on the intelligent society is likely to move further from technological applications toward foundational theory. One key direction concerns interactions in physical settings: As intelligent agents move from algorithms in virtual space to embodied forms increasingly entering households and public spaces, research will naturally extend to human–machine interaction in physical environments, with particular attention to the challenges posed to existing social norms and legal boundaries.

Another direction involves ontological reflection. As technology intervenes in human cognition and neural systems, debates over privacy boundaries, cognitive justice, and human subjectivity will move beyond applied ethics into deeper philosophical inquiry. Meanwhile, the evolution from single-agent intelligence to multi-agent systems—along with the emergence of silicon-based social forms, new modes of intelligent collaboration, and automated organizational structures—will drive the renewal of organizational sociology, prompting scholars to reassess the explanatory power of classical theories, such as the theory of bureaucracy. Ultimately, these explorations aim to establish human-centered principles at the level of civilizational development, providing a robust theoretical foundation for building a shared future in cyberspace.

The widespread deployment of intelligent agents in 2026 will introduce numerous unknown variables into social operations. In the face of such nonlinear and rapid change, research on the intelligent society must remain attentive and responsive—documenting the digital traces of the era with empirical rigor while interpreting its complexity through theoretical frameworks grounded in China’s intellectual traditions. At this critical juncture of civilizational transformation, building an independent and original knowledge system for the intelligent society will be essential to offering both theoretical support and a distinctively Chinese approach to the global development and governance of intelligent societies.

Zheng Li is a professor from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Harbin Engineering University. Wang Yuzi is from the Department of Sociology at Tsinghua University.