Replaced by AI: Inside China's Growing Job Market Shock

The question came first, then the pink slip. When computer programmer Fei Zhaojun’s boss asked him whether artificial intelligence could soon replace humans in coding jobs, Fei didn’t know it was a rehearsal. Two weeks later, he was laid off from his Beijing employer — together with about 160 colleagues.

His story, reported this weekend by the Associated Press and carried by The Washington Post, is becoming an increasingly common one in China, where government policy is actively accelerating AI adoption across every layer of the economy. The result is a natural experiment unfolding at a scale and speed no other country matches — and a growing chorus of economists warning that it could eventually undermine the strength of the world’s second-largest economy.

A country told to embrace the thing replacing it

What makes China’s situation distinctive is not just the pace of adoption but the posture of the state. Under the “AI Plus” initiative and a five-year plan running through 2030, Beijing is pushing to infuse AI into industries from logistics to education, aiming to gain an edge in its technology rivalry with the United States.

“What is specific to China is that the government is really into diffusing AI across the economy, so AI may get into different domains more quickly comparing to other countries,” Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, told the AP.

The numbers back that up. According to market intelligence firm IDC, the share of Chinese industrial enterprises reporting use of AI models and “agents” jumped to 47.5% last year — nearly five times the 9.6% recorded in 2024. IDC senior research manager Yanze Du credits China’s vibrant open-source model ecosystem, which has “gradually clos[ed] the gap between foundational model capabilities and real-world enterprise value creation.”

That open-source firehose — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi and dozens of derivatives — has made capable AI effectively free for any Chinese business that wants it. The adoption curve is the payoff, and the labor market is the bill.

The human ledger

The article assembles a cross-section of the displacement already underway:

Programmers. Fei, 40, now doubts his own skepticism that AI couldn’t do programming work well. “Mid-level coders’ jobs are essentially replaceable in most of the cases,” he said. “Even if it is a disaster that leads to replacing all humans, at this stage, you just have to use it as everyone else is using it.” He’s currently making vlog-style short videos about ordinary people’s lives while figuring out his next move.

Translators. Du Qinchun, a part-time translator in Chengdu, now earns money helping train the AI models that do translations — work that exists only because his industry is being automated. “The pay in the industry has been cut by more than half compared to what it was years ago,” he said. Foreign-language programs, once among the most popular college majors in China, have increasingly fallen out of favor.

Writers. Wang Zhicheng, 32, watched his employer — a company producing 3D animated educational content for children — lay off roughly half of its 13 scriptwriters. He resigned and now runs his own studio making illustrated children’s books. His verdict on AI-generated scripts: repetitive, formulaic, with wildly inconsistent depth. “You can treat AI as a tool just like Word,” he said. “Humans are still the decision makers on which one to pick or pursue among all that AI generates.”

Short-drama crews. Generative AI now handles creation, production, and distribution across China’s short-drama industry. According to Chinese media reports cited by the AP, the number of live-action short and vertical video series produced for mobile phones fell about 75% year-over-year in the first quarter of 2026.

Delivery workers. Food delivery robots are gaining ground across the country, potentially threatening the livelihoods of millions of delivery riders — one of China’s largest pools of flexible employment. Humanoid robots, meanwhile, are already sorting parcels in postal centers and edging into tasks like directing traffic and making coffee, albeit at small scale.

Recruitment data reflects the squeeze. Zhaopin, one of China’s largest employment platforms, recorded a 29% year-over-year drop in hiring demand in the first quarter of 2026.

Not everyone is afraid

Strikingly, the report finds little of the backlash visible in Western markets. “There appears to be far less anti-AI sentiment in China,” said Shujing He, a Beijing-based senior analyst at advisory firm Plenum. “Most people seem either positive, neutral, or mildly interested in AI.” Displaced workers, she noted, are often eager to launch AI-enabled businesses and independent ventures — “the level of interest is striking.”

There are holdouts of optimism. High school chemistry teacher Yang Zheng, 29, doesn’t see AI as a threat even though his students use it for homework. “Teachers cannot be there all the time,” he said. “It often gets things wrong, but it improves over time.”

The macro risk

The economic stakes go beyond individual careers. China’s overall urban unemployment rate hovers around 5%, but for people aged 16 to 24 — excluding students — it is roughly triple that. An International Labour Organization report found that women face higher risks of AI-driven job loss than men, as they tend to work in more automatable sectors like electronics assembly and remain underrepresented in science and technology.

Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics and trade policy at Cornell University, frames the tension bluntly: China’s AI industries may be innovative and highly productive, but they may not generate many new jobs. “AI is likely to lift productivity across the board but could have a severe disruptive effect on employment, worsening the employment growth problem and resulting in a detrimental effect on social stability,” he told the AP.

Weak consumer confidence compounds the problem. Chinese households, already squeezed by a prolonged housing downturn that eroded household wealth, are growing reluctant to spend — partly because they fear losing their jobs to AI.

The long view: shrinkage as a counterweight

There is one demographic twist in China’s favor. The country’s 1.4 billion population is rapidly aging and shrinking. By 2050, China is projected to have fewer than two working-age adults supporting each retiree, compared with more than 2.5 in the United States, according to Xuenan Cao, a professor at San Francisco Bay University who studies technology and society.

“Automation could partially offset a shrinking workforce rather than being purely a threat to it,” Cao said.

Why this matters beyond China

China is running ahead of the global adoption curve, which makes it a preview of dilemmas other economies will face within a few years. Stanford HAI’s 2026 AI Index Report found generative AI reached 53% population adoption within three years — faster than either the PC or the internet. When a state actively subsidizes that adoption, as Beijing does, the social effects arrive sooner and more sharply.

The unresolved question is whether retraining and new venture creation can absorb displaced workers as fast as the “AI Plus” push displaces them. For now, workers like Fei are hedging the only way available: learning the tools that replaced them. As he put it, at this stage, “you just have to use it as everyone else is using it.”