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While American AI researchers debate whether the technology could pose an existential threat to humanity within the decade, the fear dominating conversations in China looks considerably more immediate and personal. Milo Jiang, a young professional in Hong Kong, told NBC News he isn’t worried about AI wiping out the human race. He’s worried about losing his job, a distinction that captures how differently AI anxiety has taken shape in the world’s second-largest economy compared with the doomsday framing increasingly common in Silicon Valley.
That shift in Chinese public sentiment has happened remarkably quickly. According to analysis published by AI policy researcher Matt Sheehan, informal surveys of roughly a dozen Chinese AI policy professionals conducted in early 2024 and again in early 2026 showed a dramatic reordering of priorities. In 2024, participants ranked AI’s impact on jobs sixth out of seven concerns, near the bottom of the list. By 2026, job displacement had jumped to a virtual tie for the top spot alongside misinformation, far ahead of every other option. Sheehan cautioned the sample size is small and unscientific, but noted the pattern tracks closely with broader trends he has observed across China’s AI policy ecosystem over the same period.
The anxiety is not abstract. China’s government has been pushing AI adoption aggressively from the top down, even as the country’s broader economy remains sluggish and youth unemployment stays elevated, with nearly one in six people aged 16 to 24 unable to find work as of June, according to NPR’s reporting. That combination, an economy already struggling to absorb young graduates paired with a state-driven push toward faster AI deployment across industries, has left many workers feeling squeezed from both directions at once.
Chinese courts have begun pushing back on at least some of the resulting job losses. In June, a court in Guangzhou publicized the case of a graphic designer identified only by his surname, Wei, who had worked at a tech company for more than three years before AI took over his responsibilities. The company dismissed him and offered 41,000 yuan, roughly $6,000, in severance, citing what it called major changes in objective circumstances. The Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court upheld a lower court’s finding that the dismissal was unlawful and ordered the company to pay Wei an additional 35,000 yuan, about $5,200. Judge Chen Shiyuan wrote in her judgment that employers cannot shift the risks tied to normal technological updates onto their employees, adding that companies should offer displaced workers alternative positions or retraining before terminating their contracts.
Similar rulings have emerged from other Chinese cities, and the pattern has drawn attention well beyond the country’s borders. Guang Li, a Chinese employment and labor law specialist at the global law firm Taylor Wessing’s Munich office, said colleagues in Germany, the Netherlands, France and the UK have begun asking about China’s approach after he wrote about an earlier AI-related dismissal arbitration case in Beijing, noting that those countries are seeing more and more similar cases of their own. On paper, China’s labor protections are notably strong. Li said that compared with Germany, other parts of Europe or the United States, Chinese labor law is, in some respects, even more protective of employees.
The gap, according to Cornell University global labor professor Eli Friedman, lies in enforcement rather than the underlying legal framework. Friedman said the Chinese state lacks both the capacity and, in many cases, the genuine interest to rigorously enforce its own labor protections, leaving individual workers to navigate the legal system largely on their own when disputes arise. That enforcement gap matters considerably given the specific vulnerabilities AI displacement tends to expose. One tech worker in Hangzhou won his case against his employer earlier this year after being displaced by AI, but at 35 years old, he now faces a job market where many technology companies consider that age too old for hiring, a pattern of age discrimination that predates the AI boom but that displacement cases are now bringing into sharper focus. Friedman argued bluntly that a country cannot simultaneously champion dominance in AI industries while objecting when companies actually use the technology to replace workers.
Beijing’s policy response has moved from acknowledgment toward, at least on paper, more concrete commitments. In late January 2026, China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced plans to implement measures aimed at stabilizing jobs, expanding employment capacity, and rolling out targeted support for key industries affected by AI, according to Sheehan’s reporting. Two months later, China’s 15th Five Year Plan included direct language calling for the country to comprehensively address AI’s impact on employment and establish an evaluation system for high-quality, full employment. Whether those commitments translate into enforceable, on-the-ground protections comparable to the individual court rulings already being handed down remains an open question, since policy pledges and consistent enforcement have historically been two separate things in China’s labor system.
For individual workers like Elowen Wu, an economics graduate who spent her studies using AI chatbots to organize research and draft code, the anxiety runs deeper than any single policy announcement can address. Wu told NPR that a recent internship at an AI startup left her feeling like her AI skills were essentially worthless once she saw how advanced the underlying technology already was, describing the realization as a genuine shock. She said legal protection is necessary but will take time to get right, and in the meantime she keeps listening to podcasts and watching videos about AI daily, reasoning that people tend to fear what they don’t understand and that experiencing the technology firsthand, limitations included, makes it feel less frightening. Otherwise, she said, you risk being left behind entirely.
That tension, between genuine legal protections that exist on paper, inconsistent enforcement in practice, and a workforce trying to stay ahead of a technology reshaping their industries in real time, captures what AI anxiety actually looks like across China right now: less a fear of civilizational collapse and more a daily, practical worry about whether tomorrow’s job will still exist. Continuing coverage of how AI is reshaping global labor markets and public policy is available on Business Tech. Additional reporting on China’s AI labor court cases is available through NPR’s original coverage, and further analysis of shifting Chinese AI policy sentiment can be found through Matt Sheehan’s independent research.
