It’s noteworthy that China’s tech discourse is currently experiencing a certain kind of silence. A few years ago, Chinese researchers, philosophers, and the occasional tech executive were still willing to voice unsettling concerns about AI, such as the loss of human relevance, job losses, and runaway systems. Most of those voices are now silent. Not because the anxieties vanished. Because it no longer felt safe, helpful, or even welcome to say them aloud.
It is easy to understand why. Beijing has made a significant political investment in AI as the catalyst for its upcoming economic phase. By 2027, the “AI Plus” initiative hopes to have 70% of important sectors adopt it; by 2030, that number is expected to reach 90%. Skepticism begins to resemble obstruction rather than analysis when the state presents a technology as a national mission. Builders, not worriers, are what officials want.
In the meantime, the layoffs that doomers predicted are occurring, but not in the manner that anyone anticipated. Mass cuts are not being announced by businesses. They’re working in silence. Liu, a contractor from Hangzhou, told Reuters that her employer started terminating contract employees in March, soon after employees were told to integrate an AI agent known as OpenClaw into their regular tasks. According to her, a worker becomes interchangeable once their tasks are fully mapped into the system. There was no press conference. People simply stopped renewing their contracts.
The loud pessimism has likely subsided because of this quiet aspect of China’s AI story. Chinese labor law requires government approval for any company to reduce its workforce by more than 10%, and courts have already ruled against a few companies that attempted to fire employees in order to replace them with AI. As a result, companies have learned to be patient. Attrition is effective. Restructuring takes time. In the words of a senior manager at a Chinese fintech company, businesses will put up with some inefficiency rather than take the chance of making enough layoffs to cause “social instability.”
Something almost paradoxical is taking place. The anxiety is real and quantifiable; in recent months, searches for terms related to AI-related concerns have increased on Chinese social media platforms, and the hashtag “AI anxiety” has received almost 8 million views on RedNote. Younger white-collar workers appear to be particularly affected; according to a Tencent Research Institute survey, almost 80% of younger respondents expressed concern that their skills would be undervalued. Thus, the anxiety is still present. The organized, public expression of doom, the kind of structural criticism one might anticipate from labor activists or economists, has vanished.
It would be easy to attribute all of this to censorship, and that is undoubtedly a contributing factor. However, it is not the complete picture. In contrast to their American counterparts, Chinese workers lack institutional avenues for collective pessimism to solidify into a movement, such as sizable tech unions and widely reported congressional hearings. Memes, anonymous interviews, and an employee telling a reporter she wants to “go back to farming” are examples of how anxiety is typically kept private in China.
Observing this from the outside, it appears that China hasn’t solved the AI displacement issue so much as delayed its reckoning, spreading it out so discreetly that no single moment necessitates a confrontation. How long employees are willing to put up with the slow squeeze without raising their voices loud enough for others to hear will determine whether or not that strategy succeeds.
