China mandates AI to automate bidding and contract review — every government procurement must use it by 2027

China's development agency just ordered all provinces and central enterprises to deploy AI across the entire government procurement process — from bid planning through contract signing. By end of 2027, AI systems must handle bid document checking, expert selection, scoring review, and contract generation in every major procurement across the country.

This is a mandatory, nationwide deployment order with hard deadlines, not a pilot or guideline. It rewires how $trillions in government spending gets allocated by removing human discretion from bid evaluation, expert selection, and contract terms — replacing it with algorithmic scoring and automated flagging. The structural shift: procurement officers lose veto power over which experts evaluate bids and how contracts get written. What becomes possible is standardized, auditable procurement at scale; what becomes impossible is the informal networks and personal relationships that currently shape who wins government contracts. This is a definitional move — it's establishing AI-driven procurement as the baseline for all future government spending, which locks in a particular model of 'fairness' (algorithmic consistency) over other models (relationship-based trust or local knowledge).