Former Fox VP Blasts China Metaverse: CCP ‘Is Not Our Friend’

A software engineer at EPFL's Laboratory for Experimental Museology (eM+) explores with a virtual reality helmet the most detailed 3D map of the universe with the virtual reality software VIRUP, Virtual Reality Universe Project developed by Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in St-Sulpice near Lausanne, Switzerland, on Oct. 12, 2021. Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP

A former Fox News executive has condemned the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to steal U.S. technologies and warned that the regime seeks to use the metaverse to further its authoritarian control of society.

Former Fox News Executive Vice President John Moody said the United States and the CCP are in a bitter race for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) during an interview with “China in Focus” on NTD, a sister media outlet of The Epoch Times. He also said the United States is losing that race.

“It’s a race between China and the United States, but China is running full speed, and the United States is hobbling along as though it has a sore leg,” he said. “China is way ahead of the United States in AI research and in the applications of artificial intelligence.”

Moody recently authored the novel “The World We Wish,” which offered a fictional account of the Chinese communist system from his decades of real-world experience as a journalist. The book focuses on his concern about the emergent efforts by major tech companies to create metaverses wherein users can increasingly lead virtual lives.

He said the metaverse could become a new battleground for personal data and freedom, intrinsically tied to the greater Sino–American struggle for next-generation technologies.

“The metaverse would not exist without artificial intelligence,” Moody said. “The metaverse is, so far ... mostly about games that you can play ... but it’s only touching the beginning of [the] potential for the metaverse.

“What China is doing is applying its AI research to creating a more realistic, a more compelling metaverse, and I believe that their goal is to become the sole provider of AI-powered metaverses.”

Chinese Metaverse

Chinese tech giants have mulled the possibility of creating an $8 trillion Chinese metaverse, which has been referred to as a “metaverse with Chinese characteristics”—a play on the CCP’s version of communism, which it refers to as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Moody questioned the intentions of CCP leadership in pursuing such a goal and cautioned against how the regime might use control over such a platform to examine and control people’s lives.

“I don’t think China has the best intentions,” he said. “When it comes to supplying things and services to the rest of the world, I think they want to control those things.”

Moody also said the data involved in the metaverse would be of vital importance in the age of informationized warfare.

“We can no longer wage wars simply with warriors,” he said. “We have to have information. We have to have the ability to outmaneuver and outthink an opponent.

“In the world of cyberspace and cyber wars, information is, in fact, the best weapon to have to make sure that you are victorious and your enemy is vanquished.”

Moody’s comments followed the leak of part of an internal Pentagon report that found that China “is the ultimate beneficiary of DoD [Department of Defense] and other [U.S. government] research investments” due to the regime’s campaign to systematically steal technology from the United States.

He urged viewers to remember that, regardless of the apparent economic benefit of maintaining ties, the CCP is fundamentally an adversary of the United States and seeks to displace it as the lead superpower in the world.

“I say this, and I hope I don’t sound like too much of a Cold War dinosaur, but we have to understand that China ... is not our friend,” Moody said. “It wants to dominate us, it wants to destroy America, and it wants to be in a position to call all the shots for the rest of the world.”