post
I'm not going to hand my money to that paywall on such an overstimulating website riddled with AI.
China (its court, anyways) is a civil law jurisdiction (i.e. precedent doesn't exist too much) so I'm curious what law's letter is being applied here.
Firefox -> Reading mode gets past the paywall.
thanks! weird that that does it but not blocking JS
AI generated, for reference only
uhhhh
The reader mode text also doesn't seem to match the article text. I think this is on Caixing's side and not Firefox's side though, since "for reference only" (a literal translation of China-specific legal boilerplate) is a common Chinglishism.
- Zhou, in a quality-assurance role verifying AI-generated sentences, faced reassignment and a salary cut from 25,000 yuan ($3,655) to 15,000 yuan due to AI impacts; rejecting it led to dismissal.[para. 4]
that's ironic
- The Yuhang court ruled that AI cost savings do not qualify as legal termination grounds like business closure or poor performance, nor as an "objective major change" making contracts impossible, deeming the low-pay offer unreasonable and the firing illegal with compensation ordered.[para. 7][para. 8]
The case turned on whether AI job elimination counts as an "objective major change" under Labor Contract Law.[para. 19]
Beijing guidelines define such changes as uncontrollable, unpredictable events like disasters or policies causing ruin, not business decisions.[para. 20]
Just to save your eyes from being assaulted (had to turn off styling):

It just means they have to write "mistakes" or "performance issues" on the paperwork instead of "replaced by robots"
Step 1: give unrealistic KPI, cited performance increase due to AI Step 2: put employee into PIP Step 3: fire employee due to performance Step 4: do stock buyback because you have extra budget from firing employees
wow, rare win for Chinese workers.
I think in terms of workers rights, China is rapidly coming up to the West in the 50s. There's a massive growth in middle class as well as white collar jobs, especially in tech and engineering.
This has put pressure on society as a whole for much higher standards of living, and thus better wages and better rights. They are no longer the cheap ass labor country, that's being exported to Africa and such.
Although the 996 culture is still insane, but I think that partly comes from the extreme competitive environment in the tech sector. There were similar stories years ago in the video game industry, and that probably hasn't changed much.
996 is illegal in China. Employers caught violating the law are prosecuted when found out, to my understanding.
Only if they fail to bribe the right government officials
So, is this like a vibes based comment or do you know something about this?
Chinese society is oiled by the concept of guanxi (关系) which is the word for uh... it's the like standing you gain through your connections in society. This is why kids of party members routinely drive around beijing in black Audis breaking traffic regulations with impunity because the police can't touch them.
Similarly, if you pass a little something or do the right favours to the right officials, and those officials pass it up the chain, then any sort of building consent or other lawbreaking exercise becomes possible.
At least that's what things were like when I was last there in 2008. I have no reason to believe it has changed significantly since then.
I did a web search:
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2025
According to this site, China is in a four-way tie ranked 76 of 181 countries measured in terms of corruption (lower is better). It scored 43 of 100 on their "Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI)" (higher is better).
I think the parent post has merit, as China is notably more corrupt than many similarly sized western world countries. (But my afternoon web search is far from authoritative or definitive).
I genuinely don't know much about corruption in China (or other places, really), so I'm pretty ambivalent.
But when I look at transparency.org's methodology, it raises some minor doubts. What they do is they collect surveys from 12 different institutions, 10 of which are based in US allied countries. This, combined with the fact that the US is in some kind of cold war with China, makes me a bit doubtful of its veracity. Analogously, how trustworthy would I deem an assessment of America made by Iranian, Chinese, and Russian institutions? Not very.
I'm not saying China isn't corrupt, it may very well be. I don't know. But I prefer suspending judgement until I've looked into it properly.
A couple of million Uyghurs would like a word.
So in your world, are the Jews responsible for everything? Is the UN now Zionist media?
They didn't conflate Jews with Zionism. You did.
What does any of that have to do with China's mistreatment of the Uyghurs?
I see... keep spreading debunked propaganda, while thinking yourself as a freedom of speech fighter.
Debunked by whom? The UN verifies it, which instagram 'source' are you using?
My concern is that there aren't enough resources to go around.
1st world countries live off of the work of China and 3rd world countries. If China becomes a 1st world country, we will all need to get our products from somewhere else. China has more people than Europe and America combined.
So are you proposing we keep the Chinese as our slaves forever?
No. I'm proposing that there will be issues once China gets slaves of it's own.
China already has slaves of it's own, people who have a rural hukou. It creates a permanent legal underclass of exploitable labor with basically zero rights.
What I'm talking about is pretty simple, in China you're registered in the province of your birth, or parent's birth. This registration is called a hukou, and is pretty much impossible to change except in cases of extreme wealth.
Your hukou determines what social services you have access to. Social services in China are paid for at the local level, and are only available to people who have a local hukou.
The problem is that there are no jobs in the poor provinces, and if someone moves to the city for work, they have zero access to the social services that their taxes are supporting, unless they pay out of pocket.
These migrant workers have no labor protections, no unemployment, no local schools for their kids, except for criminally underfunded migrant schools, that are not free.
So you have about 15% of the population of China who you hear about, living upper middle class lives with free social services, supported by the exploitation of everyone else.
You're preaching to the choir. China does have a large middle and upper class, but this only because of its large overall population. Most people in China make less than $7500 per year. They don't have much leftover after buying food and rent.
It would take a lot of Vietnamese, Cambodian, African, etc. laborers living in inhumane conditions to give the over 1 billion people in China a 1st world lifestyle. I think this is more or less the point of the Belt and Road initiative. They are competing with Europe and the United States to obtain a "low-income" workforce.
...on the bright side, AI might make it possible to remove slave labor from the equation. On the dark side, 3rd world countries that can't afford this technology will be pretty much fucked.
I don't think it's for workers rights. Of course there is part of civil unrest, that might happen if million of people are ot of work. But also power is more consolidated in fewer people, so it would be more danger in long run (for Xi of course)
Why? This will hold back automation dramatically
Because at this point the only ones profiting from automation are the capitalists.
China is not a capitalist country?
How the hell does an article that we can't even read get so many upvotes.
Stuff like this really shakes my belief in the voting system.
Headline goes brrrrrr… I guess?
My take as well.
Was recently "assaulted" by a load of China-stans. So I assume this is similar pro-china (neutral about it) or at least anti-US (positive about that) community upvoting it.
Yeah, I certainly don’t wanna just blindly promote china, they do a lot of things I find abhorrent, but it can’t be denied that they are so much better than the US in a number of areas.
Sometimes and at certain areas here I wondered if I stumbled into r/sino, partly because of those supposedly glowing reports about Middle Kingdom futurism in contrast to the ongoing decline of the West.
People only read the title, not the article
You can't require reading the article before someone vote/comment, but what if communities could enable "ponder voting" where users can only vote 30 seconds after viewing the post? This would prevent people from scrolling by from voting, but people who at least slightly skim the article first won't be affected.
Probably not viably due to it having to be supported by all platforms, but just a thought.
EDIT: It could work by returning a JWT with a post ID and time when fetching the post and having the vote endpoint support providing it. Although, I can also see it being a bit annoying and being trivially bypassed by adding some code to the client.
Because hate for AI is so blind that you can post anything and people will immediately fall for it.
top 61 comments