China’s massive Confucius cultural project gets AI boost with ByteDance donation

Foundation gives US$3 million to Ruzang effort that aims to compile all known classics by the ancient philosopher

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The donation by the Beijing ByteDance Public Welfare Foundation will help to make the Ruzang project’s Confucius texts permanently accessible to the public, its chairman said on Monday. Photo: Shutterstock

Published: 4:19pm, 10 Dec 2024Updated: 7:00pm, 10 Dec 2024

Chinese internet giant ByteDance has donated 25 million yuan (US$3.4 million) to digitise a national cultural project that is compiling all known Confucius classics, with the help of artificial intelligence.

ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, said the donation would support the compilation and digitisation of the Ruzang, or “Confucian Canon” project, which started in 2003 and is led by Peking University.

Zhang Yu, chairman of the Beijing ByteDance Public Welfare Foundation, said the Shidianguji digital platform – jointly developed by ByteDance Open Lab for Digital Humanities and Peking University – would help to streamline the project.

The platform has already digitised more than 2,000 ancient texts since its launch in 2022, using cutting-edge technologies like optical character recognition and AI to improve text recognition accuracy.

There are an estimated 200,000 ancient texts in China, of which about 80,000 have been scanned as images. Only 30,000 to 40,000 have been fully digitised into text, according to a ByteDance article in 2022, at the start of the Shidianguji platform.

In a post on the foundation’s Douyin account, Zhang said the outcomes of the Ruzang project would be made permanently accessible to the public on the platform, “allowing more people to access and read traditional Chinese culture and Confucian culture more conveniently”.

The announcement on Monday was made as China strengthens its intellectual foundation and governance philosophy through a set of cultural projects in response to the increasing ideological rivalry with the US-led West.