> This would also certainly require international coordination with China on a slowdown or pause

Personally I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system that also just outright kills you if you sell weed will have a hard time sympathizing with Bay Area thinkers who talk about AI killing us all during their ayahuasca breakfast before returning to their meth fueled crunch towards releasing the next version of the AI that will kill us all.

>I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system

Not really relevant to the broader discussion, but this simply isn’t an accurate description of China. Starting with the gaokao, admission quotas are set by province and admits to Peking university and Tsinghua are disproportionately from the urban professional class. Candidate party members must be politically vetted, which means that people whose families have expressed anti-communist views, are members of banned organizations (e.g. falun gong), or have substantial criminal records will not be permitted to advance. And once you make it into the party and enter political service, your advancement relies upon opaque patronage networks that someone without connections is unlikely to be able to navigate, even if they successfully satisfy the economic metrics the state assigns them.

I don’t want to overstate this, the Chinese system does filter out a lot of chaff and the current Chinese leadership has a lot of very capable people in positions of power. But I do not think it is substantially more meritocratic than Western political institutions

You're in luck, neither I nor anyone else want those people near a negotiation table.