Chinese new year seems to have gained a new ritual. For the second year running, hundreds of millions of Chinese tuning into the state broadcaster’s Spring Festival Gala were treated to a performance by the country’s cutting-edge humanoid robots. They backflipped, high kicked, dodged, sliced, just like real kung fu masters.

China’s leading AI laboratories took the opportunity to release their latest models too. The most impressive came from ByteDance, the owner of TikTok. The hyper-realistic videos from SeeDance 2.0 have to be seen to be believed.

The robots are coming for us all, and no one knows how quickly. China is explicitly aiming to deploy AI and robotics across civil society — it’s equipped with half the world’s AI talent — and it is driven to take on the US for superpowerdom in all its physical and digital forms. But is Beijing thinking enough about its hundreds of millions of workers?

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This was one of the questions I was asked to consider during an AI war game. Faculty, a British AI company, brought together figures from politics, civil society and tech, with our gameplay filmed for a documentary to be released next month. Assigned to teams representing major AI players — the US, UK, EU, China, big tech and civil society — we weighed the interests of humanity against those of our teams.

On the China team we had to balance the need to keep up with American AI while maintaining stability at home. We played as we imagined Beijing would play: ruthlessly, strategically and not always for the common good. I left feeling fearful about the future and relieved that I don’t really have to decide how to prioritise progress against social upheaval. Those Chinese new year displays, though, show just how soon such decisions will have to be taken.

Even eight years ago, the professional services company PwC was estimating that a quarter of Chinese jobs could be displaced by AI, while the consultancy McKinsey said up to 100 million Chinese workers might need to change jobs. But that was before the arrival of ChatGPT. Few, even AI engineers, predicted the leaps of the past three years.

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What will AI mean for the 50 million young Chinese just starting out? They already face high unemployment, with up to one in five jobless, while each year more graduate from university (12 million last year, and rising). What will AI mean for the migrant workers who left farms and fields to build cities and work on assembly lines? Two thirds of them left school before 16 and now face mass automation.

“China is still in a phase of innocence on technology,” says Afra Wang, a tech analyst and writer of Concurrent, a Substack on AI and China. The country’s rapid economic rise has meant almost everyone is a winner compared with where they were 40 years ago. AI could be the first “divergent moment” where the losers are shaken loose from the winners.

There have been some early losers; so far they have been absorbed by the gig economy. The number of registered ride-hailing drivers tripled between 2020 and 2024. But automation is coming for this shock-absorber industry too, with driverless taxis and drone deliveries already a part of life in a handful of cities.

Of course, in some ways China has more options than democratic states. Propaganda, censorship and suppression form a formidable combination of soft and hard tools to control the population. This is a state that spends more on its internal security than on defence, according to publicly available figures.

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But masses of disgruntled, unemployed and listless people still pose a threat to the Chinese Communist Party. At least regular elections serve as pressure valves. Without elections, authoritarian states know things can escalate quickly.

There’s always the option of slowing progress. In 2024, when Baidu’s robotaxis undercut human drivers by 80 per cent, the backlash led to the local government in Wuhan easing the rollout. But as we on the war game’s China team found out, the threat of America pushing the frontier and creating an almost omnipotent AI drove us to go full speed ahead too. We cared about social stability; we cared even more about winning the arms race.

To cater for the former we opted for a universal basic income, a minimal monthly stipend to all citizens regardless of age or profession, funded perhaps by taxing big tech. The jobless would have enough to live on while the elites continued our great power rivalry. This was also one of the recommendations made by Cai Fang, a labour economist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, along with extending compulsory education.

To do so would mean Beijing having to get over its fear of “welfarism”. Generous welfare has “raised a group of ‘lazy people’ [in some countries]”, President Xi wrote in 2022. “Welfare benefits cannot decrease if they go up, and ‘welfarism’ that exceeds one’s ability is unsustainable.” The belief is so strongly held that, even during the pandemic, China refrained from handing out cash to citizens. Choosing a universal basic income would be no easy, or cheap, decision.

No doubt Beijing is hoping that AI will bring enough benefits to at least pad out these costs. Robots in an ageing and declining society could be a big help, and who knows what new jobs will be created as the old are destroyed. Besides, international relations is a game of relative power; it’s not clear whether the US or any other country has the answers to these tough questions either.
It’s game on.

The documentary Intelligence Rising will premiere in Copenhagen next month