On the eve of May Day, Chinese President Xi Jinping extended festive greetings and best wishes to the country’s working people. He called on workers across the country to work hard, deliver solid results, and play a leading role in driving high-quality economic and social development. Party committees and governments at all levels, he added, should safeguard workers’ lawful rights and interests, address their most pressing concerns, and encourage them to strive unremittingly for the country’s grand goals.
A feature article published by the Xinhua News Agency explored these themes in greater depth.
Noting that Xi Jinping has said that “model workers and exemplary individuals are the moral exemplars of the people and the pillars of the nation,” it added that in the week leading up to May Day, 3,024 individuals and organisations were honoured for their contributions to major national strategies, projects and priority industries. Recipients ranged from engineers, technicians, teachers and doctors, to delivery workers.
The article added: “Xi has built a reputation for hard work since his early years as a village official in a poor rural area of northwest China more than half a century ago. As the country’s top leader, he has called on the society as a whole to respect model workers and promote the spirit they embody and has backed the commitment with a range of policy and institutional measures.
“He has called for building a large, highly skilled industrial workforce with strong ideals, technical expertise, a capacity for innovation, and a sense of responsibility and dedication, while also emphasising workers’ welfare and protections.
“In recent years, China has continued to expand legal protections and social security coverage for workers, with growing attention to those in new forms of employment such as food delivery couriers and ride-hailing drivers, as well as older workers beyond the standard retirement age…
“Beyond policy measures, Xi has also conducted on-site inspections to ensure their needs are being met. In 2023, he went to a migrant worker housing complex in Shanghai, entering homes, inspecting shared facilities such as communal kitchens and laundries, and speaking with residents about their daily lives.
“He said migrant workers, who come to contribute to Shanghai, are not outsiders but part of the city. ‘It is our responsibility to ensure they can arrive, settle down, live comfortably, and thrive here.’
“China’s working class has played a key role from the revolutionary years to the building and development of the People’s Republic of China. Today, that same formula of gritty, hands-on effort and intellectual contribution remains essential.
“At the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ centenary last year, Xi said the central task of the workers’ movement today is to advance the building of a strong China. He also stressed, on other occasions, that Chinese modernisation is built through hard work and that great endeavours are accomplished through practical action…
“As China advances its modernisation drive, the importance of innovation has become increasingly evident, emerging as a key focus of its push for progress.
“Xi has thus called on workers to tackle challenges in upgrading traditional industries, forge ahead in developing emerging sectors, and explore new frontiers in future industries.
“That priority is reflected in his inspection tours, where he visits factory floors, research labs and technology parks, meeting with engineers and technicians and urging them to strengthen innovation and applied research.”
On April 30, China’s top legislature, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC), voted to adopt a law on social assistance, aimed at strengthening basic living support and providing a stronger safety net for vulnerable groups.
The social assistance law, a foundational piece of social security legislation, provides solid legal guarantees to promote the development of high-quality social assistance and ensure that all Chinese people benefit from the country’s reform and development.
Building on existing categories, such as extremely impoverished individuals and households receiving minimum living allowances, the law introduces additional groups. Households on the margins of minimum living allowance eligibility, households facing financial strain from essential and inflexible expenditures, disaster-affected individuals, and homeless persons without means of support and others are now under the umbrella.
The expansion of the recipients reflects a significant shift in the underlying philosophy of China’s social assistance system, according to Zhu Jianhua, a professor from Zhejiang University of Technology:
“While the priority in the past was mainly ensuring basic survival, the system is now moving towards securing basic living standards, preventing risks, and supporting longer-term development.”
The new law seeks to improve the country’s social assistance services and ensure that they are delivered in a timely and convenient manner.
It requires county-level governments to establish a “one-stop, coordinated” system, and township governments and subdistrict offices to set up service windows to receive applications and promptly forward them for processing. It also requires improvements to the social assistance statistics system to ensure information is accurate, complete, and shared across departments, and states that authorities should not require applicants to provide information that can already be verified through household economic status checks.
Earlier, on April 28, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced that China will expand its pilot occupational injury insurance program to fully cover platform companies in the ride-hailing, rapid delivery and intra-city freight sectors this year. Starting July, nine companies from the ride-hailing sector, including Meituan’s ride-hailing platform, and five from the rapid delivery sector will be brought into the program.
Launched in July 2022, the program provides workers in new forms of employment with critical protections in the event of severe workplace accidents, covering more than 27 million people. New forms of employment refer to jobs emerging with the rise of the internet and the digital economy, such as food delivery couriers, ride-hailing drivers and online marketers, who rely on internet platforms for their work. China currently has 84 million people engaged in such work.
And on April 30, a Chinese court ruled in favour of an employee in a labour dispute caused by AI replacement, which experts said may send a reassuring message to labour rights protection efforts in the age of automation.
The case was published by the Intermediate People’s Court in Hangzhou, an AI hub in Zhejiang Province, along with a set of “typical examples of protecting the rights of AI enterprises and workers” in the lead-up to International Workers’ Day.
At the heart of the case was whether AI-driven job replacement constitutes a “major change in the objective circumstances,” which can lead to termination of the contract under China’s Labour Contract Law.
The court found that the grounds the company cited for the dismissal did not constitute such a “major change,” which typically refers to significant events like the company’s relocation or mergers. It also ruled that the company had failed to demonstrate that the contract had become impossible to perform. Moreover, the alternative position offered came with a substantial pay cut, which the court ruled was not a reasonable reassignment proposal. As a result, the company’s termination of the contract was deemed unlawful.
In an article explaining the significance of this and a related legal ruling, carried by the US publication Struggle/La Lucha, Gary Wilson writes that:
“In the early 1980s, as the Reagan administration’s assault on labour accelerated and plant closures gutted the industrial Midwest, a grassroots campaign put forward a demand that US ruling-class politicians dismissed as utopian: a job is a right. Workers, the campaign argued, acquire a stake in their jobs through years of labour that corporations cannot simply extinguish — the right to work is a social right, not a management prerogative.
“US workers never won that demand as enforceable labour law. In China, the Labour Contract Law recognises that right in concrete form — not as an abstract promise, but as a legal limit on arbitrary dismissal. Two recent Chinese rulings — one in Beijing and one in Hangzhou — did not invent a new right for the AI age. They upheld existing labour law against employers trying to use AI as a shortcut around it…
“The Beijing arbitration committee put the underlying principle plainly: the company’s termination of Liu’s contract was essentially shifting the risk of technological change onto the employee. That, the committee ruled, is illegal.
“This is the legal recognition of what the ‘A Job Is A Right’ campaign argued four decades ago in the United States — that a corporation’s voluntary decision to restructure does not erase workers’ claims. China’s Labour Contract Law, as interpreted by these rulings, encodes that claim as an enforceable right…
“The demand that animated the streets of Detroit, Baltimore and Philadelphia in the 1980s — a job is a right — remains unmet in the country where it was raised. In China, labour law gives that demand legal form, and courts have now upheld it against employers trying to use AI as a firing weapon. Whether workers in the United States can ever win the same will depend, as it always has, on their fight for it.”
Xinhua also reported on April 30 that China’s migrant workers saw rising incomes and enjoyed an improved quality of life over the past year, according to a survey released by the National Bureau of Statistics.
The average monthly income of migrant workers rose to 5,075 yuan (about 739 US dollars) in 2025, up 2.3 percent year on year. Those working outside their hometowns earned an average of 5,774 yuan per month, up 2.5 percent, while those working within their registered townships saw a wage growth of 2 percent, with average monthly earnings reaching 4,376 yuan.
Migrant workers in this context refers to rural residents with agricultural household registration engaged in non-agricultural work locally or outside their hometowns for six months or longer annually.
A further Xinhua report from Taipei, capital of China’s Taiwan province, highlighted a May Day rally, urging the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities to pay greater attention to labour rights and improve workers’ pay and working conditions. More than 300 union representatives and members of the public joined the demonstration organised by Taiwan’s Labour Party and the Labour Rights Association.
In a statement, the Labour Party criticised the DPP authorities’ economic development model centred on the semiconductor and optoelectronics industries, saying it had widened the wealth gap and failed to improve the living standards of ordinary workers.
Addressing the rally, Wang Wu-lang, secretary-general of the Labour Party, urged the authorities to stop neglecting labour issues and improve labour insurance and pension systems. He also called for the resumption of cross-Strait dialogue to ensure the benefits of peace are shared by the public.
Hsu Meng-hsiang, deputy secretary-general of the party, criticised the DPP authorities for prioritising military expenditure over spending on education, social insurance and welfare programs.
The following articles were originally published by the Xinhua News Agency and Struggle/La Lucha.
Xi extends greetings to working people nationwide ahead of Int’l Workers’ Day
BEIJING, April 30 (Xinhua) — Chinese President Xi Jinping has extended festive greetings and best wishes to the country’s working people ahead of the International Workers’ Day, which falls on May 1.
Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, sent the greetings on behalf of the CPC Central Committee.
This year marks the 105th anniversary of the founding of the CPC and the first year of the country’s 15th Five-Year Plan period (2026-2030).
Xi called on workers across the country to work hard, deliver solid results, and play a leading role in driving high-quality economic and social development.
Party committees and governments at all levels should safeguard workers’ lawful rights and interests, address their most pressing concerns, and encourage them to strive unremittingly for the country’s grand goals, Xi stressed.
Advancing Chinese modernization with hard work, perseverance
BEIJING, April 30 (Xinhua) — At the Ningbo-Zhoushan Port in east China, national model worker and veteran crane operator Zhu Shijie is working with electrical control engineers to advance the smart, standardized operation of remotely controlled gantry cranes.
Recognized with one of China’s highest honors for workers for his spirit of hard work and innovation, Zhu has drawn on more than two decades of hands-on experience to develop a high-efficiency crane operation method now promoted across China’s ports.
In 2020, Chinese President Xi Jinping met Zhu at the site, encouraging him to make full use of his role as a model worker and help cultivate more like him.
Zhu has taken those words to heart. Dedicated efforts by Zhu and his colleagues have ensured the smooth operation of the port, which handles an average of 3.9 million tonnes of cargo daily. Zhu has also led a team that has trained more than 3,500 workers, helping nurture a new generation of skilled port professionals.
PROMOTING SPIRIT OF HARD WORK
Xi has hailed the value of outstanding workers like Zhu as they take on vital responsibilities to drive the country’s overall development.
“Model workers and exemplary individuals are the moral exemplars of the people and the pillars of the nation,” Xi said.
This week, 3,024 individuals and organizations were honored for their contributions to major national strategies, projects and priority industries. Recipients range from engineers, technicians, teachers and doctors, to delivery workers.
Ahead of this year’s International Workers’ Day, which falls on Friday, Xi extended festive greetings to the working people nationwide and called on them to work hard, deliver solid results, and play a leading role in driving high-quality economic and social development.
Xi has built a reputation for hard work since his early years as a village official in a poor rural area of northwest China more than half a century ago. As the country’s top leader, he has called on the society as a whole to respect model workers and promote the spirit they embody, and has backed the commitment with a range of policy and institutional measures.
He has called for building a large, highly skilled industrial workforce with strong ideals, technical expertise, a capacity for innovation, and a sense of responsibility and dedication, while also emphasizing workers’ welfare and protections.
In recent years, China has continued to expand legal protections and social security coverage for workers, with growing attention to those in new forms of employment such as food delivery couriers and ride-hailing drivers, as well as older workers beyond the standard retirement age.
In his greetings to workers this year, Xi reiterated the importance of effectively protecting the legitimate rights and interests of workers and addressing their most pressing concerns.
Beyond policy measures, Xi has also conducted on-site inspections to ensure their needs are being met. In 2023, he went to a migrant worker housing complex in Shanghai, entering homes, inspecting shared facilities such as communal kitchens and laundries, and speaking with residents about their daily lives.
He said migrant workers, who come to contribute to Shanghai, are not outsiders but part of the city. “It is our responsibility to ensure they can arrive, settle down, live comfortably, and thrive here,” Xi said.
MODERNIZATION IS BUILT ON HARD WORK
China’s working class has played a key role from the revolutionary years to the building and development of the People’s Republic of China. Today, that same formula of gritty, hands-on effort and intellectual contribution remains essential.
At the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ centenary last year, Xi said the central task of the workers’ movement today is to advance the building of a strong China. He also stressed, on other occasions, that Chinese modernization is built through hard work and that great endeavors are accomplished through practical action.
This year marks the beginning of China’s 15th Five-Year Plan (2026-2030), a key period for the country’s goal of basically achieving socialist modernization by 2035.
In March, after the top legislature approved the new plan, Xi went to inspect Xiong’an New Area, about an hour’s drive from Beijing.
Designed to take on functions nonessential to the national capital, Xiong’an offers a glimpse of how a modern city is built from blueprint to reality through sustained hard work. There, Xi called on the residents to continue steady work in shaping the city’s future.
As China advances its modernization drive, the importance of innovation has become increasingly evident, emerging as a key focus of its push for progress.
Xi has thus called on workers to tackle challenges in upgrading traditional industries, forge ahead in developing emerging sectors, and explore new frontiers in future industries.
That priority is reflected in his inspection tours, where he visits factory floors, research labs and technology parks, meeting with engineers and technicians and urging them to strengthen innovation and applied research.
One such encounter remains vivid for Liao Xi, a 40-year-old steel technician in Shanxi. In May 2020, during a visit to Liao’s workshop, Xi picked up an ultra-thin stainless steel strip, gave it a little twist and it bent slightly.
“The craftsmanship is excellent,” Xi said. “It is as thin as foil and remarkably flexible.” He encouraged Liao and his colleagues to keep pushing forward in innovation in high-end manufacturing. The material is now much sought after in foldable phones, new-energy cars, and aerospace.
For Liao, the breakthrough was anything but smooth. When Xi first visited the company three years earlier, he had just started working on the project, when experiments were failing roughly every other day. After more than 700 attempts, the team finally succeeded in producing what was then the world’s thinnest stainless steel strip.
“We have achieved remarkable progress through hard work, and we will continue to rely on it to build an even better future,” Xi once said.
China adopts social assistance law to bolster safety net for vulnerable
BEIJING, April 30 (Xinhua) — China’s top legislature on Thursday voted to adopt a law on social assistance, aimed at strengthening basic living support and providing a stronger safety net for vulnerable groups.
The law was passed after its third reading at a legislative session of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, which runs from Monday to Thursday.
The social assistance law, a foundational piece of social security legislation, provides solid legal guarantees to promote the development of high-quality social assistance and ensure that all Chinese people benefit from the country’s reform and development.
“The social assistance law is essentially a systematic effort to review and bring together China’s nearly 30 years of practice in the field. It consolidates a large number of scattered policy documents and regulations into a single and comprehensive legal framework,” said Gao Huajun, former dean of the China Philanthropy Research Institute at Beijing Normal University.
With 78 articles in seven chapters, the law sets out general provisions, beneficiaries and types of assistance, assistance procedures, participation of social forces, supervision and safeguards, legal liabilities, and others.
The law will take effect on July 1, 2026.
BROADER COVERAGE
Building on existing categories, such as extremely impoverished individuals and households receiving minimum living allowances, the law introduces additional groups.
Households on the margins of minimum living allowance eligibility, households facing financial strain from essential and inflexible expenditures, disaster-affected individuals, and homeless persons without means of support and others are now under the umbrella.
The expansion of the recipients reflects a significant shift in the underlying philosophy of China’s social assistance system, said Zhu Jianhua, professor from Zhejiang University of Technology.
“While the priority in the past was mainly ensuring basic survival, the system is now moving towards securing basic living standards, preventing risks, and supporting longer-term development,” said Zhu.
In recent years, civil affairs authorities have in fact gradually expanded the scope of social assistance to cover a broader range of low-income households, according to Guan Xinping, senior scholar from Nankai University.
The law, drawing on increasingly established practices in recent years, is expected to further strengthen the social assistance system’s functions and enhance its overall social impact, said Guan.
FASTER, EASIER SERVICES
The law seeks to improve the country’s social assistance services and ensure that the assistance is delivered in a timely and convenient manner.
It requires county-level governments to establish a “one-stop, coordinated” system, and township governments and subdistrict offices to set up service windows to receive applications and promptly forward them for processing.
Professor Wan Guowei from the East China Normal University said the social assistance system should make it easier for low-income households to apply, adding that the law would streamline procedures, cut duplication, and enable more targeted assistance.
The law requires improvements to the social assistance statistics system to ensure information is accurate, complete, and shared across departments, and states that authorities should not require applicants to provide information that can already be verified through household economic status checks.
The law also calls for greater use of digital technology to bring social assistance services onto mobile platforms, allowing people to apply, track applications and file complaints more easily.
ENHANCED ROLE FOR SOCIAL FORCES
The law also includes a dedicated chapter on the participation of social forces in social assistance work, which experts say is highly important.
“Such actors were previously seen as a supplement to government-led efforts, but are now viewed as partners working on a more equal footing under a government-society collaboration model to strengthen social assistance,” Gao said.
The law encourages and supports social forces in providing voluntary assistance and calls on charitable groups to increase their support for social assistance efforts.
It states that such efforts are entitled to relevant preferential policies.
Gao Jinghua, a scholar from China Agricultural University, said the move would help promote more diversified development of the social assistance system.
She noted that in some areas, grassroots-level staffing remains insufficient, and social actors are already involved.
“Social actors such as charities, social work service organizations and volunteer groups are likely to play a more active role in social assistance in the future,” said Gao.
China to expand injury insurance program for new-occupation workers
BEIJING, April 28 (Xinhua) — China will expand its pilot occupational injury insurance program to fully cover platform companies in the ride-hailing, rapid delivery and intra-city freight sectors this year, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security said Tuesday.
The expanded program will be implemented across 31 provincial-level regions, according to the ministry.
Starting July, nine companies from the ride-hailing sector, including Meituan’s ride-hailing platform, and five from the rapid delivery sector will be brought into the program.
Small and medium-sized platform enterprises registered and operating within a given province or its neighboring provinces will also be included within the year.
Launched in July 2022, the program provides workers in new forms of employment with critical protections in the event of severe workplace accidents, covering more than 27 million people.
New forms of employment refer to jobs emerging with the rise of the internet and the digital economy, such as food delivery couriers, ride-hailing drivers and online marketers, who rely on internet platforms for their work.
China currently has 84 million people engaged in such work. They play a significant role in serving people’s livelihoods and helping maintain the smooth operation of the economy.
Chinese court defends labor rights in new AI-replacement case
HANGZHOU, April 30 (Xinhua) — A Chinese court has ruled in favor of a human employee in a labor dispute caused by AI replacement, which experts said may send a reassuring message to labor rights protection efforts in the age of automation.
The case was published on Tuesday by the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court in Hangzhou, an AI hub in Zhejiang Province in east China, along with a set of “typical examples of protecting the rights of AI enterprises and workers” in the lead-up to International Workers’ Day, which falls on May 1.
This case involves an AI-related tech company firing a senior tech worker but refusing to pay a higher compensation pact requested by the employee. The court ruled against the company, upholding a lower-level court’s decision that the job dismissal was unlawful.
Similar disputes have drawn wide attention as China seeks to balance pressures to cement employment, protect labor rights and accelerate application of AI in the industrial world.
According to the file released by this court, the worker surnamed Zhou joined the company in November 2022 as a quality assurance supervisor, earning a monthly salary of 25,000 yuan (about 3,640 U.S. dollars). His tasks involved matching user queries with large language models and filtering illegal or privacy-violating content, among others, to ensure accurate output by AI models.
His job, however, was later taken over by AI large language models, and the company attempted to reassign Zhou to a lower-level position with a reduced salary of 15,000 yuan per month. After Zhou refused, the company terminated his contract with an offer of 311,695 yuan in compensation, citing organizational restructuring and reduced staffing needs.
Zhou contested the sum and sought higher compensation through arbitration. The arbitration panel ruled the dismissal unlawful and supported Zhou’s claim for additional compensation.
Unhappy with the arbitration outcome, the company filed a lawsuit with a district court in Hangzhou in August 2025, and later appealed to the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court.
At the heart of the case was whether AI-driven job replacement constitutes a “major change in the objective circumstances,” which can lead to termination of the contract under China’s Labor Contract Law.
The intermediate court found that the grounds the company cited for Zhou’s dismissal didn’t constitute such a “major change,” which typically refers to significant events like the company’s relocation or mergers. It also ruled that the company had failed to demonstrate that the contract had become impossible to perform.
Moreover, the alternative position offered to Zhou came with a substantial pay cut, which the court ruled was not a reasonable reassignment proposal. As a result, the company’s termination of the contract was deemed unlawful.
Wang Xuyang, a lawyer from Zhejiang Xingjing law firm, noted that the ruling clarified an important principle: while companies may benefit from AI-driven efficiency gains, they must also bear corresponding social responsibilities. AI replacement, notably, does not automatically justify terminating a labor contract.
A case prior to this one sent a similar message. On Dec. 26 last year, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security released a set of typical arbitration cases for 2025, including a dispute triggered by AI-driven job displacement that involved a map data collector. In that case, the arbitration panel made it clear that AI replacement does not validate a dismissal.
The panel found that the company’s adoption of AI technology was a voluntary move to stay competitive. By citing AI replacement as grounds for dismissal, the company had effectively shifted the risks of technological iteration onto its employees. The arbitration panel therefore ruled the dismissal unlawful.
BALANCING TECH ADOPTION, LABOR RIGHTS
Official data show that China’s core AI industry exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025, featuring more than 6,200 related enterprises. By 2030, the penetration rate of next-generation intelligent terminals and agents in China is expected to exceed 90 percent.
Such sweeping AI adoption has stirred worries about abusive AI replacement. Recent media reports of a company in east China’s Shandong Province using an AI digital replica of a former employee to continue performing his tasks have sparked widespread attention. In open-source communities, a trend has emerged to harvest human capabilities into reusable AI “skills.”
These experiments at the frontier of innovation are raising sharp questions regarding some fundamental issues in labor law, including who qualifies as a legal subject in an employment relationship and where the boundaries of personality rights lie, according to Wang Tianyu, a researcher with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
“Technological progress may be irreversible, but it cannot exist outside a legal framework,” Wang commented, adding that safeguarding the dignity and rights of workers as human beings will require forward-looking institutional design.
Legal scholars have emphasized a key principle in tackling AI-related labor disputes: the costs of technological transformation should not be borne solely by workers.
Companies, they argue, should not use AI adoption as a pretext for layoffs or as a means to sidestep their obligations. At the same time, employees are encouraged to adapt by upgrading their skills.
Pan Helin, an economist and a member of an expert committee under China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, argued that while AI-driven job displacement may be inevitable, companies must ensure fair treatment during transitions, including reasonable reassignment arrangements and adequate compensation for layoffs.
This year’s government work report called for improving measures to promote employment and entrepreneurship in response to the development of AI, marking the inclusion of AI’s impact on jobs within a national policy framework.
Goldman Sachs researchers cautioned in a 2025 report: “It’s early days for AI adoption, and the impact on jobs will largely depend on how employers ultimately put the technology to best use.”
China’s labor law says a job is a right — even in the age of AI
May 1 (Struggle La Lucha) – In the early 1980s, as the Reagan administration’s assault on labor accelerated and plant closures gutted the industrial Midwest, a grassroots campaign put forward a demand that U.S. ruling-class politicians dismissed as utopian: a job is a right. Workers, the campaign argued, acquire a stake in their jobs through years of labor that corporations cannot simply extinguish — the right to work is a social right, not a management prerogative.
U.S. workers never won that demand as enforceable labor law. In China, the Labor Contract Law recognizes that right in concrete form — not as an abstract promise, but as a legal limit on arbitrary dismissal. Two recent Chinese rulings — one in Beijing and one in Hangzhou — did not invent a new right for the AI age. They upheld existing labor law against employers trying to use AI as a shortcut around it.
The issue was not whether companies may use AI. It was whether management can treat its own decision to automate, restructure or cut labor costs as an outside force that cancels its obligations to workers. The answer was no. A company’s business decision is not a natural disaster. It does not by itself wipe out the worker’s claim under the labor contract.
The cases
The Beijing case came first. In late 2024, a tech company eliminated the department of a map data collector named Liu after switching to AI-powered automated data collection. The company terminated Liu’s contract, citing “major changes in objective circumstances” — language from China’s Labor Contract Law that permits dismissal in cases of genuine, unforeseeable disruption, such as natural disasters, company relocations, or regulatory shifts.
Liu challenged the firing. In December 2025, the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security published the case as a model ruling for the year. The arbitration committee found that the company’s decision to adopt AI was a voluntary business choice to stay competitive — not an uncontrollable event outside the normal scope of management decisions. Terminating Liu’s contract on those grounds was ruled illegal. The company sued to overturn the arbitration award, but both the trial court and the appeals court upheld the ruling.
The Hangzhou case followed a similar arc. Zhou had worked since November 2022 as a quality assurance supervisor at an AI-related tech company, earning 25,000 yuan per month. His job involved matching user queries with large language models and filtering problematic content — tasks that AI systems eventually took over. The company tried to reassign him at 15,000 yuan per month. When Zhou refused the pay cut, the company terminated his contract and offered 311,695 yuan in compensation.
Zhou contested the sum. An arbitration panel ruled his dismissal unlawful. The company appealed, first to a Hangzhou district court and then to the Hangzhou Intermediate People’s Court — in Zhejiang Province, one of China’s main AI industry hubs. The intermediate court upheld the lower rulings on April 30, 2026, the day before Workers’ Day. The Hangzhou court published the case alongside a set of “typical examples of protecting the rights of AI enterprises and workers” — a deliberate signal timed to May 1.
The court found that AI-driven job displacement does not constitute a “major change in objective circumstances” under the Labor Contract Law. It also ruled that offering Zhou a 40% pay cut was not a reasonable reassignment proposal. The dismissal was unlawful on both counts.
The principle
Wang Xuyang, a lawyer at Zhejiang Xingjing law firm, summarized the legal logic running through both rulings: while companies may benefit from AI-driven efficiency gains, they must also bear the corresponding social responsibilities. The costs of technological transformation, legal scholars emphasized in both cases, should not be borne by workers.
Companies that automate cannot simply announce that AI has erased a job. They must deal with the worker — through negotiation, training, reasonable reassignment or lawful compensation — instead of dumping the cost of technology onto the worker.
The Beijing arbitration committee put the underlying principle plainly: the company’s termination of Liu’s contract was essentially shifting the risk of technological change onto the employee. That, the committee ruled, is illegal.
This is the legal recognition of what the “A Job Is A Right” campaign argued four decades ago in the United States — that a corporation’s voluntary decision to restructure does not erase workers’ claims. China’s Labor Contract Law, as interpreted by these rulings, encodes that claim as an enforceable right.
The rulings arrive as AI adoption accelerates across Chinese industry. China’s core AI sector exceeded 1.2 trillion yuan in 2025, with more than 6,200 AI-related enterprises operating across the country. The government’s 2026 work report called explicitly for measures to address AI’s impact on employment — marking the first time the issue entered the national policy framework at that level.
What U.S. workers don’t have
No equivalent legal protection exists in the United States. U.S. labor law does not restrict employers from eliminating positions due to automation. The Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act requires 60 days’ notice before mass layoffs at large employers, but it does not prohibit AI-driven terminations or require negotiation, retraining, or reassignment. Workers in non-union workplaces — the vast majority of the U.S. workforce — have no contractual recourse at all.
U.S. tech companies have moved aggressively on AI-driven workforce reduction. Since 2023, major technology employers have cut tens of thousands of positions while publicly attributing the reductions to AI efficiency gains. But no broad U.S. rule treats AI replacement itself as an unlawful reason to fire a worker.
The demand that animated the streets of Detroit, Baltimore and Philadelphia in the 1980s — a job is a right — remains unmet in the country where it was raised. In China, labor law gives that demand legal form, and courts have now upheld it against employers trying to use AI as a firing weapon. Whether workers in the United States can ever win the same will depend, as it always has, on their fight for it.
Income of China’s migrant workers continues to grow in 2025
BEIJING, April 30 (Xinhua) — China’s migrant workers saw rising incomes and enjoyed an improved quality of life over the past year, according to a survey released by the National Bureau of Statistics on Thursday.
In 2025, the total number of migrant workers in the country reached 301.15 million, up 1.42 million from the previous year, representing an increase of 0.5 percent, the survey showed.
The average monthly income of migrant workers rose to 5,075 yuan (about 739 U.S. dollars) in 2025, up 2.3 percent year on year. Those working outside their hometowns earned an average of 5,774 yuan per month, up 2.5 percent, while those working within their registered townships saw a wage growth of 2 percent, with average monthly earnings reaching 4,376 yuan.
The tertiary sector continued to dominate migrant worker employment in 2025, accounting for 54.7 percent of the workforce. Meanwhile, the share of workers in the secondary sector declined by 0.2 percentage points to 44.5 percent.
The quality of migrant workers also showed improvement. The average living space for migrant workers in urban areas increased to 24.9 square meters per person, up by 0.2 square meters from 2024.
Migrant workers refer to rural residents with agricultural household registration engaged in non-agricultural work locally or outside their hometowns for six months or longer annually.
Labor Day rally staged in Taipei calling for labor rights protection
TAIPEI, May 1 (Xinhua) — A Labor Day rally was staged on Friday in Taipei, urging the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) authorities to pay greater attention to labor rights and improve workers’ pay and working conditions.
More than 300 union representatives and members of the public joined the demonstration organized by Taiwan’s Labor Party and the Labor Rights Association on Ketagalan Boulevard in front of the island’s leadership office in Taipei.
The rally, themed around reforming labor insurance and pension systems, called for higher employer contribution rates to labor insurance programs and mandatory labor insurance coverage for employees at businesses with fewer than five workers.
In a previously released statement, the Labor Party criticized the DPP authorities’ economic development model centered on the semiconductor and optoelectronics industries, saying it had widened the wealth gap and failed to improve the living standards of ordinary workers despite rising per capita GDP.
Addressing the rally, Wang Wu-lang, secretary-general of the Labor Party, urged the authorities to stop neglecting labor issues and improve labor insurance and pension systems. He also called for the resumption of cross-Strait dialogue to ensure the benefits of peace are shared by the public.
Hsu Meng-hsiang, deputy secretary-general of the party, said Taiwan is facing mounting social challenges, including an aging population, low birth rates and uneven distribution of economic gains. He criticized the DPP authorities for prioritizing military expenditure over spending on education, social insurance and welfare programs.
Some representatives from the Labor Party and the Labor Rights Association delivered speeches from campaign vehicles to appeal for broader public attention.
Other participants at the rally, including research fellows and primary-level representatives, also expressed concerns over workers’ pay and social protections, urging the DPP authorities to improve workplace conditions and labor welfare.
