Artificial intelligence is beginning to reshape China’s enormous labour market, turning fears about job displacement into reality for some workers. One striking example is Beijing programmer Fei Zhaojun. His manager asked whether he believed AI could soon replace humans in coding jobs, and just two weeks later Fei was laid off along with around 160 colleagues. Similar disruption is appearing among programmers, translators, scriptwriters, video creators and other occupations where generative AI can take over significant portions of everyday work. China is among the countries pushing most aggressively for adoption of the technology through government initiatives including its “AI Plus” strategy, automation and robotics. The speed of the transformation is visible in the numbers: according to IDC, the share of Chinese industrial enterprises reporting that they use AI models and AI agents jumped from 9.6% in 2024 to 47.5% in 2025. Translator Du Qinchun, for example, is now helping train an AI translation model, providing him with additional work for the moment, but he says pay in the translation industry has fallen by more than half compared with previous years. In some sectors, AI is not eliminating an occupation entirely but allowing the same volume of work to be performed by far fewer people.
The disruption is particularly sensitive because it is arriving when China already faces a difficult employment environment. Overall urban unemployment is around 5%, while unemployment among 16-to-24-year-olds excluding students is roughly three times higher. Chinese technology companies are also restructuring and cutting jobs while robots gradually expand into logistics, manufacturing and services, performing tasks ranging from sorting parcels to making coffee and other physical work. Yet there is a paradox at the heart of China’s AI transformation: the same automation threatening some jobs today could become essential to the economy in the decades ahead. China’s population is aging and shrinking, and projections indicate that by the middle of the century there could be fewer than two working-age adults supporting each retiree. AI and robotics could therefore eliminate certain jobs while simultaneously helping compensate for a future shortage of workers. Increasingly, Chinese workers are concluding that rather than trying to compete directly against the technology, they need to learn how to use it. The central question is therefore no longer simply whether artificial intelligence will replace humans, but which occupations will disappear, which will be transformed and whether millions of workers can acquire new skills quickly enough for an economy in which people and AI increasingly work side by side.
