Opinion | China Is Worried About A.I. Too

If you are going to try to distill the mood in China, the public mood around A.I., how would you describe it and how is it different from the U.S.? I think the biggest anxiety right now in China is an anxiety around falling behind on technology. So I think in the U.S. there’s a lot of worries about job displacement, of A.I. being a net negative force in society. In China there are some of those concerns, and I can come back to that. But I think right now the fear among individuals and companies and workers is that they’re not keeping pace with A.I., that they’re not using it enough and they’re not savvy enough with this new technology so that they won’t be competitive enough in the labor marketplace. And it’s interesting, this anxiety at the individual level kind of mirrors China’s anxiety at the national level. When ChatGPT first came out, there was a lot of anxiety in China among China’s A.I. industry and among policymakers in Beijing, worried that China was also falling behind, that they were not making the most of this new transformative technology. So it’s interesting to see this kind of mirroring where it’s not about how do I keep out this technology from my life; it’s about how do I bring it in even more and integrate it and give myself that edge in a very, very crowded marketplace. But it is a very Silicon Valley tech and tech-adjacent attitude. It is. It’s spreading, but you see it in a pretty confined zone of the American economy. But are you saying that in China it is just much more widespread, that you don’t have to be working for DeepSeek or working for Alibaba or something to have this “Am I falling behind? I must add A.I. protocols” mind-set? That’s right. So it’s interesting that A.I. is hitting at a time when China was already experiencing a whole bunch of anxieties around labor markets, especially for young college graduates. So, for example, the unemployment rate for young people in China is basically double what it is in the United States. It’s something close to 17 percent, which is extremely high. The number of new college graduates hitting the job market this year alone is 12 million-plus in China. These are all people competing for many of the same jobs. They don’t want to work in the factories. They don’t want to have those blue-collar jobs or delivery jobs. They want, in their minds, the good jobs. And they’re worried that if they don’t keep up with A.I., they might not be able to get those. So it’s a longer-sanding concern about this hyper hyper-competitive environment in China.