Fei Zhaojun's boss asked him a question that should have been a warning: could artificial intelligence soon do the coding? Two weeks later Fei, a 40-year-old programmer in Beijing, was laid off along with about 160 colleagues. He is philosophical about it in the way people are when the ground has already moved. "Mid-level coders' jobs are essentially replaceable in most cases," he told the Associated Press, and even if replacing them proves to be a mistake, "you just have to use it, as everyone else is using it." He now makes short vlog-style videos about ordinary lives while he works out what comes next.
His story, reported this week across the AP wire and the Los Angeles Times, is becoming a common one in the country that has leaned into AI harder than any other. Under the government's "AI Plus" initiative and its five-year plan through 2030, Beijing is actively pushing artificial intelligence into every corner of the economy to gain an edge over the United States. The uptake is real: the share of Chinese industrial firms using AI models and agents jumped to 47.5 percent this year from 9.6 percent in 2024, according to the research firm IDC. Humanoid robots are starting to sort parcels, direct traffic and make coffee. Delivery robots are spreading across cities, a quiet threat to millions of couriers.
What is striking is the mood. "There appears to be far less anti-AI sentiment in China than elsewhere," said Shujing He, an analyst at the advisory firm Plenum. "Most people seem either positive, neutral, or mildly interested." Many of the displaced do not rage against the machine so much as try to climb aboard it. Du Qinchun, a translator in Chengdu, now trains AI translation models, which has brought him more work, at least for now. The catch sits in his pay: rates in his industry have fallen by more than half in a few years. University foreign-language programs, once a reliable path, are emptying out as the tools improve.
The displacement is not evenly shared. The International Labour Organization finds women are at higher risk, because they cluster in automatable roles such as electronics assembly and are underrepresented in technology jobs. China's short-drama industry, a booming corner of its entertainment economy, saw the number of live-action mobile series fall roughly 75 percent in a single quarter as generative tools took over writing, production and distribution. "Tasks that once required specialized training can now be performed by almost anyone with access to AI tools," He said. The narrower your skill, the sharper the edge pointed at it.
There is a macroeconomic sting in this that Beijing cannot fully wave away. China's growth is already slowing, its property market is weak, and consumers are nervous. Automating jobs while households are anxious about their incomes risks deepening the very reluctance to spend that policymakers are trying to cure. "China's tech industries may be innovative, with high productivity, but they may not generate many new jobs," warned Eswar Prasad of Cornell University. A country can win the productivity race and still lose demand if the people who used to earn wages are now watching a robot do the work.
That is the tension worth watching. In the West, AI anxiety often shows up as resistance and regulation. In China it shows up as a national program, embraced from the top and, for now, tolerated from below. The open question is how long tolerance holds when the career ladder starts losing its lower rungs. As one analyst told the podcast ChinaTalk this week, even a small amount of AI-driven unemployment can turn political fast if it breaks the pipeline that carries young workers into their first jobs. China is running that experiment at full speed, on itself.