The Chinese government over the past two years has gotten much more worried about the impact of AI on jobs in China. When I was talking to Chinese AI policy scholars two years ago, AI's impact on jobs was almost always near the bottom of the list. In just the last two years that's flipped around and worry about jobs is at the top. We're seeing that reflected in government policy: rules about not being able to fire people because they've been displaced by AI, policy around expanding employment opportunities, the one-person companies.

The most significant so far has been the series of rulings in Chinese labor courts around whether you can fire an employee because they've been replaced by AI. Three different Chinese courts have ruled that the use of AI by a company is a voluntary choice, not a change in objective circumstances, and therefore you cannot fire an employee just because they've been replaced. Companies in China are facing a different set of incentives. They have to deal with the markets but they also know they have to answer to the government. The government is sending a clear signal: we do not want to see large-scale layoffs.

This is a tension faced by every country. China has been pushing as hard as they can on pushing AI applications with their AI-plus policy. Now they're trying to account for the impacts. A generous reading is that a lot of this is going to come down to speed of transition. The policies around not firing people are attempts to throw a little bit of sand in the gears, slightly slowing down the transition towards more productive outcomes, but forcing companies to take these into account. That's how they're going to try to thread the needle and spread out the change so that we don't see major disruptions that could cause political problems.