{"id":589627,"date":"2026-09-04T06:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-09-04T06:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/589627\/"},"modified":"2026-09-04T06:02:13","modified_gmt":"2026-09-04T06:02:13","slug":"how-chinas-ai-race-is-shrinking-job-market-forcing-workers-into-low-paid-manual-roles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/589627\/","title":{"rendered":"How China\u2019s AI race is shrinking job market, forcing workers into low-paid, manual roles"},"content":{"rendered":"

For four years, Beijing-based Clare Zhang worked as a research analyst at a corporate advisory firm, helping companies assess technologies and competitors for projects they planned to list \u2013 until late last year, when she was told that artificial intelligence<\/a> had reduced the number of analysts the company needed and could afford.<\/p>\n

Her job involved combing through company filings and public records to produce market and competitor studies that sometimes ran to 500 pages. But AI could increasingly collect and organise the information, analyse data and generate charts in a fraction of the time.<\/p>\n

Zhang said the company\u2019s human resources department explicitly cited AI<\/a> when dismissing her, explaining that it could no longer justify employing so many analysts. Two of her former colleagues were laid off shortly afterwards.<\/p>\n

The pressure soon spread beyond individual jobs. Zhang recently learned that her former boss was also struggling with a declining number of clients, as they increasingly brought research in-house with AI, though her team had warned clients that AI could invent sources and produce convincing but unreliable findings.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would rather trust AI because our reports were considered too expensive,\u201d Zhang said.<\/p>\n

In May, a Chinese court ruled it was illegal<\/a> for a company to terminate an employee on the grounds that an artificial intelligence replacement would be cheaper, after a 35-year-old worker, who oversaw AI-generated responses at a Hangzhou fintech firm, was fired over refusing a demotion and pay cut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For four years, Beijing-based Clare Zhang worked as a research analyst at a corporate advisory firm, helping companies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":589628,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,4177,607,290283,290282,8870,137167,290284,111,139,69,47419,290281,145],"class_list":["post-589627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-beijing","tag-china","tag-chinese-court","tag-clare-zhang","tag-hangzhou","tag-international-labour-organization","tag-juno-zhu","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pwc","tag-shanghaitech-university","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589627\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/589628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}