China's courts side with workers displaced by AI, but job anxiety persists

Travelers walk past an Alibaba Cloud advertisement at Shenzhen Bao'an International Airport in Shenzhen, China, on Tues., Oct. 7, 2025. In the most recent quarter, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reported triple-digit growth in its AI-related products. Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption toggle caption Qilai Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images BEIJING — Economics graduate Elowen Wu is no rookie when it comes to artificial intelligence, but this summer, she felt like one. Throughout her studies, Wu used chatbots to organize articles, generate outlines for homework assignments, and even write code. Then in June, Wu got an internship at an AI startup in eastern China's Anhui province. Suddenly, she felt her AI skills were close to zero. "It was a huge shock for me because I didn't know how advanced AI was already and how powerful some of its functions are," she said. "I felt very afraid." She has been documenting her anxiety on the social media platform Xiaohongshu. "Will I be replaced by AI?" she wrote in one post. There is a similar concern in the U.S. However, firms in China are adopting AI at a scale that far outpaces those in America, and the push is coming from the country...