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Chinese Courts Rule Companies Cannot Fire Workers Simply to Replace Them With AI
(www.caixinglobal.com)
this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2026
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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.
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 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?
there is. it's just not translated as doxxing for some reason i can never understand:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_flesh_search_engine
these already exist... it can only get better if china has better free speech because currently these exist only on the pro-china side. nationalism anywhere is suffocating but it feels worse in china when it's a one-sided battle
That doesn't sound like a campaign of independent agents backed by the CCP to harass dissidents of the government. Just the opposite.
This is a radical departure from the American mainstream social media organizing that has often been encouraged, facilitated, and collaborated with by state and national government agencies.
Again, I'm sure there are folks on the internet with bad takes. I've yet to see an Alex Jones equivalent on the scale of "Mainstream, high profile internet show dedicated to denying the existence of school shooters as a pretext for imposing gun regulations". When that kind of personality pops up on the Chinese internet, authorities tend to move quickly to censure and de-list their content.
And a Chinese Tucker Carlson? What would that even look like? A Reagan-Era Maoist with family ties to the PLA who maintains an enormous following of Millennial / GenA viewers built on the back of qigong enthusiasts criticizing Xi Jinping from the Left? Seriously, name some names. I'd love to learn more about this individual.
I've dipped my toe in the waters of Chinese media and you just don't find these kinds of firebrand figures anywhere in the mainstream. If anything, my experience has been with very baby-brained paternalistic bullshit. Hour long shows that have people cosplaying as historical figures and a crowd of academics and talking heads all just nod along agreeing with one another. Entertainment idols and rising political stars jerking each other off to some banal socio-economic milestone or hagiographical rendition of past glories.
If American media is All Red Meat All The Time, Chinese media is unseasoned tofu. It's a totally different atmosphere.
in the past ten years, human flesh searching most often targets those perceived to make anti-nationalist comments.
i'll agree that it's questionable if it has state backing but i completely missed your claim that doxxing campaigns are the result of the government. unfortunately my honest reaction to that is "huh‽"
March 2006 was a much more liberalized time.
well yeah, because there are no mainstream politics in china that are not local. instead, they do non–party-threatening punditry. i'm talking people like zhang xuefeng and yuan tengfei (note that despite impressions some outdated reports might give, zhang xuefeng was only temporarily suspended, which well carlson has been too.), or hardcore hardcore domestic tankies like guyanmuchan.
Is there any actual evidence of this?
:-/
Again, that doesn't seem to be the case. These influencers are consistently at odds with state media and censors.
https://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%E4%BA%BA%E8%82%89+%E8%BE%B1%E5%8D%8E
seems to be still up: https://space.bilibili.com/19248926 again, it is normal for tucker carlson and alex jones to be occasionally suspended
I think if you look towards northern Europe instead of the US you'll find better references and goals.
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
This is exactly right. 'Free speech' in the US is about to be all but eliminated in a couple of short years. They are starting with the BS age confirmation every State is slowly adding right after California to operating systems. Just watch how fast that turns into China.
12h ago: Trump says it's treasonous to say the US isn't winning the war in Iran
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.
It’s crazy that a country with no free speech has tens of thousands of protests every year.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China
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.
from your link:
And? All that says is that most movements don't target the CPC rule, but that there still are some movements that seek systemic change. Seems to support my point.
your point (on free speech) is not supported if there are seldom protests on national issues.
could you give an example of a dissident movement that has openly protested? i would not think the white paper protestor count as an organization (organizing, sure, but there's a difference)
OR the Chinese populace is actually incredibly satisfied with their central government. Which is the case. The national CPC has a 95.5% satisfaction rating.
that can’t help you illustrate free speech either
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.
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.
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.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/07/long-term-survey-reveals-chinese-government-satisfaction/
...
So, I am not going to dive into the raw numbers, but I'm already a little turned around at
relatively satisfied
highly satisfied
very satisfied
I'll simply note that local governments are also run by Communist Party officials. So claiming the CCP has 99.5% approval (even considering how this is a decade out of date and how "relatively" and "highly" satisfied suggest a bit of a gulf in opinion) is a serious fudge of the real public view.
That said, yeah. Much higher domestic view of the state than in the US/EU block. Definitely a problem for all those NAFO-heads who pine for Regime Change in Beijing.
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 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.
You mean like how the West mashes people skulls in for holding a banner against genocide?
I bet in China you can talk about the genocide in Gaza without getting beaten, jailed, or deported.