China is bankrolling an effort to become an innovator in artificial intelligence to move further its growth into a truly wealthy power, and in part to keep better track of individuals it considers criminals and dissidents.

Can a repressive state, led by a central government specializing in five-year plans and surveillance of its own people, make such a leap? Economic history includes few examples of authoritarian states becoming innovative business leaders. But China aims to make that jump in artificial intelligence--or high-level machine learning--with an unusual approach that can't be dismissed. Beijing is bankrolling a big effort in AI, in part, to keep better track of homegrown individuals it considers criminals and dissidents, and to intimidate would-be opponents. That work involves fundamental research in image recognition, data collection and sorting that could have commercial spinoffs in the software used to run complex systems.