596
Chinese Courts Rule Companies Cannot Fire Workers Simply to Replace Them With AI
(www.caixinglobal.com)
wow, rare win for Chinese workers.
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
596 points (94.5% liked)
Technology
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I think in terms of workers rights, China is rapidly coming up to the West in the 50s. There's a massive growth in middle class as well as white collar jobs, especially in tech and engineering.
This has put pressure on society as a whole for much higher standards of living, and thus better wages and better rights. They are no longer the cheap ass labor country, that's being exported to Africa and such.
Although the 996 culture is still insane, but I think that partly comes from the extreme competitive environment in the tech sector. There were similar stories years ago in the video game industry, and that probably hasn't changed much.
This assumes that people can generally be replaced by AI, which is not true.
AI is an excuse to fire people, and a powerful marketing tool to make a company look better to investors, but it has not had the massive impact techbros want us to believe it has.
Shame, because like everything, it could genuinely be helpful, and instead, we’ve mostly got a bunch of applications no one asked for, and a constant bombardment of dreadful predictions that make regular people go mad.
How is it not true? Just look at translators: during the past few years, most of their jobs just disappeared because AI can do their job just slightly worse than humans but costs much less. Some jobs are easier to replace than others but there certainly are examples of jobs that can be replaced by AI
Past few years? No. MT has existed for well over 20 years now. Also, AI still struggles with interpretation, which is the hard part of translating texts and speech.
Regardless, I said “most” jobs, not all jobs. AI is still by and large the excuse, not the motivation, for layoffs.
Based China
Good
Why? This will hold back automation dramatically
Because at this point the only ones profiting from automation are the capitalists.
China is not a capitalist country?
I believe they mean the capital owners benefit from automation but the workers do not.
There are so many speech restrictions and humans rights violations in China that scare the hell out of me, but then I see rulings like this and their progress on robotics and tech and I think "Well, they are doing something right..." I hope one day there is more free speech for people in China who deserve to be able to say what they want.
It's a great ruling because companies that would normally favor efficiency and profit increases are in a better position to take these existing workers and utilize them in different ways than just have everyone fired en masse and then somehow the market will sort it out. Even under classical economic theories, governments are supposed to regulate externalities and AI displacing workers too rapidly could be considered a type of externality.
There are so many speech restrictions and humans rights violations in China that scare the hell out of me
I hear an earful about how horrible and repressive the Chinese state government is to its citizens from the outside, largely by national media talking heads and Big Data surveillance company flaks. Meanwhile, the consequences of talking shit on the Chinese internet - account suspension/deactivation, getting in trouble with your employer/school possibly with the threat of firing/expulsion, periodic investigation by state police for threats of violence, possible restrictions on business/travel because you've been added to a "watch list", potential for arrest on some bullshit charge - seem to be all the same kinds of consequences periodically doled out to western citizens.
I'm told Americans have "free speech". But then the Supreme Court lays so many caveats down that even a silly toothless joke is strictly prohibited under US laws. I'm told Chinese officials are brutal and draconian and mean-spirited, but they don't have anything approaching our prison population. I haven't seen evidence of any kind of mob-rule social media gang dedicated to doxing Chinese dissidents, either. So they manage to stay ahead of Canary Mission and Project Veritas in that regard.
I hope one day there is more free speech for people in China who deserve to be able to say what they want.
I want to know what that's supposed to look like in practice. Where can I find the Free Speech that the Evil Foreign Country is supposed to one day get?
Because if the dream is an American style system of free expression... What are we pinning for, really? Chinese Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson? Uyghurs given the Palestine Action treatment? An independent Taiwan that enjoys all the diplomatic kindness we afford to our neighbors down in Haiti and Cuba?
What are we even asking for?
I think if you look towards northern Europe instead of the US you'll find better references and goals.
if you look towards northern Europe instead of the US
The UK has some of the most repressive speech laws on Earth. Germany isn't far behind. Given the groundswell of fascist tendency across the Scandinavian bloc, I would not bank on them serving as a model much longer. An uptick in Muslim immigration has kicked off a tidal wave of Islamophobia, which now dominates their domestic politics.
Now that you mention it I definitely want Chinese tucker Carlson and Alex jones
I definitely want Chinese tucker Carlson and Alex jones
It’s crazy that a country with no free speech has tens of thousands of protests every year.
I saw that protests are free as long as they are against the local government. People can complain online and in-person against local authorities and demand central government step in to save them, too. But if the rethoric starts going to "central government is wrong", then it gets supressed
Do you have a source that says that happens in today’s China? I know that Falun Gong is suppressed, but they are literally a CIA-funded group created to undermine the state.
Falun Gong have allied with foreign intelligence services, but they weren't created by those services. Originally, the organization was allied with the Communist Party and on generally good terms. They only ran afoul of the Chinese Communists when Falun Gong leaders became embroiled in increasingly noxious financial and abuse scandals. Not unlike how the Catholic Church's status soured across Europe and the US East Coast following the slew of child sex abuse allegations.
That's when Falun Gong officials started fleeing to the NATO block and issuing increasingly hysterical allegations about the conduct of the CCP towards its members.
Thanks for the correction. The point remains that today's CCP mostly limits itself to suppressing foreign actors. And why should it need to suppress its own citizens, anyways? The CCP has a 95.5% approval rate. The Chinese people are utterly committed to their socialist project, and rightly view it as a creation to be proud of.
And why should it need to suppress its own citizens, anyways?
The goal of the modern CCP is largely understood to be economic growth and steadily improving quality of life for domestic citizenry as a means of discouraging domestic upheavels (Tianamen and the Falun Gong lead movements being two classic examples).
That's going to come with some level of suppression due to friction between what any subset of the population believes/wants and what the central government believes/wants.
But this isn't - at it's root - a Socialist policy. It is a Confucian policy, with Socialist Characteristics.
The CCP has a 95.5% approval rate.
I hope you're joking.
There's no shortage of dissatisfaction with the CCP from within the Chinese polity. There's no shortage from within the CCP.
But what westerners don't like to talk about is the Mass Line approach employed by Chinese political leadership, which legitimately seeks to minimize conflict in pursuit of maximum economic benefits.
You don't have gonzo gunmen storming Beijing in hopes of winging President Xi, right now, because you don't have a public openly at odds with the mission of the chief executive.
Not joking. Harvard even agrees with me. The Chinese people love the CCP.
I heard online that it's illegal to be against Christianity in America, as well as it being illegal to be against fascism, or 'anti fascist' in the USA as you'll be labelled a domestic terrorist. I heard in America that the cops won't kill you if you are a white person walking at night but not if you are a black teenager. I heard in America that the government will allow your father to shoot you until you die if you disagree with him politically but ask to see his gun. I heard in America you will be killed by the government for being ~~homeless~~ poor and there's nothing anyone will do about it.
But America is where freedom is. If you live in any conditions freer than that, you are actually in a less free country than America because actually America is actually freer than any other country actually.
I heard in America that the government will allow your father to shoot you until you die if you disagree with him politically but ask to see his gun.
I think this is a great illustration of the kind of propaganda we see online wrt any "Evil Foreign Country". In this case, it was the British Press reporting hysterically about a father hosting his daughter's family for Thanksgiving, bragging about being a Trump supporter, bragging about owning a gun, and then accidentally shooting his daughter (literally a room away from the rest of the family) because he's the exact kind of dipshit that doesn't know how to handle a firearm professionally. Grand Jury threw the charges out precisely because it was so obvious that he'd been negligent rather than willful. The rest of the family confirms it. But the Brits report it like it was an Honor Killing that the local government endorsed and facilitated.
We see this kind of manipulation of events in US media - wrt China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, France, Mexico, Antifa, Immigrants, Brown People, you name it - any time national news organizations decide they need to flog a particular government or demographic group.
Hardly unique to the US. But when you're getting the full Clockwork Orange, it's hard to know what it feels like to be an outsider looking in.
I understand the parallel, but all you said can be confirmed or denied by several sources I have access to. I don't have alternative sources for most of the claims about China. Could you provide them? When I read about these things, it seemed trustworthy.
Also, I'm not even american, chill. I am not chinese either, I don't have a horse in this race. Both can burn in nuclear winter as far as I care
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It's almost as if the speech restrictions and human rights violations are grossly exaggerated or entirely misreported by companies that are exclusively funded by the US intelligence community. . .
Don't get me wrong, some still do exist (especially on the company side of things). Since, you know, it's a country consisting of 1/7th of humanity; but equally it's pretty silly to think 1/7th of humanity is too stupid to do anything about a single supposedly hyper repressive government that allegedly doesn't let them speak against it.
You mean like how the West mashes people skulls in for holding a banner against genocide?
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