China’s internet giant ByteDance has donated 25 million yuan (US$3.4 million) for the digitalisation of a national cultural project that is compiling all known Confucius classics, with the help of artificial intelligence.
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ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin, China’s TikTok, said the donation will support the compilation and digitalisation 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 digitalised more than 2,000 ancient texts since its launch in 2022, using cutting-edge technologies like optical character recognition and AI to enhance 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.
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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.