Will AI take jobs faster where the government is pushing it? What China's rollout has done to workers

The Associated Press reported on 24 August 2026, in a dispatch by Chan Ho-him and Fu Ting carried here by PBS NewsHour, that AI is pushing Chinese workers out of jobs while state policy actively accelerates its spread. Beijing programmer Fei Zhaojun, 40, was laid off with about 160 colleagues two weeks after his boss asked whether AI could soon replace human coders: "Mid-level coders' job are essentially replaceable in most of the cases," he told AP. The share of Chinese industrial enterprises using AI models and agents rose to 47.5% last year from 9.6% in 2024, according to the research firm IDC, and humanoid robots are already sorting parcels and directing traffic. China's urban unemployment rate sits near 5%, but for 16-to-24-year-olds outside education it is roughly triple that, and an International Labour Organization report found women face the higher displacement risk because they are concentrated in work such as electronics assembly. Cornell economist Eswar Prasad warned that AI "could have a severe disruptive effect on employment, worsening the employment growth problem and resulting in a detrimental effect on social stability". Not everyone reads it that way: Xuenan Cao of San Francisco Bay University points out that by 2050 China is projected to have fewer than two working-age adults per retiree, so "automation could partially offset a shrinking workforce rather than being purely a threat to it". It matters because China, under its "AI Plus" initiative and a five-year plan to 2030, is the closest thing anyone has to a test of what happens when a government pushes AI into every industry at once.