160 Coders Laid Off as China's AI Push Reshapes the Workforce

For HR and workforce leaders, China is running the experiment the rest of the world is watching: when a boss asks whether AI can replace staff, it is increasingly a restructuring trigger, not a thought exercise. Fei Zhaojun's layoff — along with 160 colleagues — shows mid-level technical and language roles are the first to fall, while displaced workers pivot to gig work that does not yet replace their lost income.

An Associated Press dispatch from Hong Kong dated August 24, 2026, brings the human cost of China's aggressive artificial intelligence strategy into sharp focus. Forty-year-old Beijing programmer Fei Zhaojun was laid off — together with roughly 160 of his colleagues — just two weeks after his employer asked whether AI could soon replace human coders. The episode is not an outlier; the AP describes it as an increasingly common scenario as state-backed AI adoption reshapes the labor market of the world's second-largest economy. Rapid adoption is now reaching across white-collar and creative fields, from computer programming to script writing, and into physical tasks through robotics, pushing people out of jobs or leaving them afraid that it might.

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Shujing He, a Beijing-based senior analyst at advisory and research firm Plenum, notes there appears to be far less anti-AI sentiment in China than elsewhere, with most people either positive, neutral, or mildly interested in the technology.

The policy backdrop is decisive. China is described as being at the vanguard of AI adoption because government policies actively encourage people and businesses to use AI applications and robotics in all aspects of life. This creates a strikingly different cultural environment from Western markets, where anti-AI sentiment, union resistance, and regulatory friction dominate much of the discourse. Shujing He, a Beijing-based senior analyst at advisory and research firm Plenum, notes there appears to be far less anti-AI sentiment in China than elsewhere, with most people either positive, neutral, or mildly interested in the technology. Crucially, she observes that individuals who worry about being replaced — as well as those who have already left traditional workplaces — are often eager to experiment with AI-enabled businesses and independent ventures, calling the level of interest striking.

The displacement spans skill levels and functions, but the most vulnerable are mid-tier knowledge workers. Fei himself is blunt about the economics: mid-level coders' jobs are essentially replaceable in most cases. Even while acknowledging the possibility of a broader disaster that replaces all humans, he frames adaptation as compulsory — at this stage, you just have to use it as everyone else is using it. The same squeeze is visible in language work. Du Qinchun, a part-time translator, is helping to train an AI model to do translation, effectively automating the very function she performs. After his layoff, Fei has pivoted to making vlog-style short videos about ordinary people's lives during a career break, though he is not yet earning a living from them — a signal that displacement currently outpaces the income potential of the gig-style alternatives workers are creating.