Abstract: At present, China’s artificial intelligence (AI) industry has moved beyond an initial stage characterized primarily by scale expansion and has entered a new phase in which high-quality development has become the central objective and deep structural contradictions are increasingly salient. Grounded in the guiding principles articulated at the Fourth Plenary Session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, this paper situates China’s AI industry within the two fundamental principles that must guide economic and social development during the 15th Five-Year Plan period—namely, high-quality development and the coordinated advancement of development and security—and systematically examines three major strategic contradictions confronting the industry. First, there exists an external tension between the strategic mobilization of the new nationwide system to advance high-level technological self-reliance and self-strengthening, and the industry’s embedded dependence on the global technology system in areas such as computing power, foundational software ecosystems, and knowledge networks. Second, there is an internal tension between the logic of an “effective government,” characterized by national strategic guidance and resource coordination, and the mechanisms of an “efficient market,” which underpin demand discovery, resource allocation, and innovation incentives—giving rise to risks such as crowding-out effects in resource allocation and path dependence in innovation trajectories. Third, a frontier-level tension has emerged between the accelerating diffusion of AI as a core engine of new-quality productive forces and the relative lag of governance systems under the baseline requirement of integrating development and security, a tension that is manifested in the institutional trade-off between chilling effects on innovation and lag effects in risk governance. In response to these contradictions, this paper proposes a set of strategic governance pathways, with the aim of providing analytical reference for institutional design and policymaking in the governance of China’s AI industry during the 15th Five-Year Plan period.