Boarding China’s Last Bus

Zilan Qian China’s AI enthusiasm seems real. But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside. Americans  — left, right, and everywhere in between — seem to be afraid of AI. They fear data centers speeding up climate change, disinformation and deepfakes, AI companionship, and, above all, job loss from automation. Meanwhile, the Chinese public seems to be perfectly fine with the technology, or even “optimistic” about it. The polling data is striking: Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report shows that more than 85% of Chinese respondents see AI as more beneficial than harmful, compared to less than 45% of respondents in the United States. A 2025 report published by the University of Queensland and KPMG Australia revealed that 73% of Chinese respondents are willing to trust AI system outputs and share relevant information with AI at work, and 88% intentionally use the technology, compared to 52% and 48% of Americans, respectively. Why does Chinese society, which suffers from acute job loss and a youth unemployment rate close to 17%, embrace a technology it knows is likely to take away more jobs? The question was answered three decades ago. The answer is not a narrative about AI, but about an earlier transformation also perceived as inevitable. It is a story about how Chinese society has learned, through repeated upheaval, what it believes to be the only permissible response to disruption. Accurately interpreting that response — which is often misleadingly called “enthusiasm” — is essential to understanding that worried Americans watching China’s AI frenzy might not be looking at a rival but into a mirror. The millennium that broke two ways Lived this way for thirty years Until the great mansion collapsedThe deep, dark cloudsAre drowning the view in my heart. 如此生活三十年 ruci shenghuo sanshi nian直到大厦崩塌 zhidao dasha bengta云层深处的黑暗啊 yunceng shenchu de hei’an a淹没心底的景观 yanmo xindi de jingguan–“Killing the One from Shijiazhuang,” Omnipotent Youth Society, 2010 In December 1978, reeling from the economic wreckage of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, China’s Communist Party formally shifted its central task from class struggle to economic construction, launching Deng Xiaoping’s “Reform and Opening Up” and beginning a gradual dismantling of three decades of central planning. In 1992, the country formally declared a turn toward a socialist market economy — an acknowledgment that market forces, not central planners, would now drive growth. The country’s enterprises, built for a planned economy, were suddenly exposed to market competition — and consequently began hemorrhaging money, especially in industries like steel and textiles. By 1997, the state had decided to consolidate the strategic enterprises and let the rest restructure, merge, or collapse. The slogan it coined was 减员增效 (jianyuan zengxiao) — “reduce headcount, increase efficiency.” The consequences of this transformation depended on where you lived. Over 24 million workers in China lost their jobs in the state sector by the end of 1999. The layoffs were concentrated in the northeast — Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Jilin — once the industrial heartland of socialist China and now called China’s rust belt. In 1957, the city of Shenyang’s Tiexi district produced  the nation's entire output of lathes, rock drills, gliders, rubber boats, and tower cranes, earning it the nickname “the Eastern Ruhr.” By the late 1990s, 80% of the companies responsible for this output had gone out of production, and half of the district's 300,000 industrial workers had been laid off. Between 1998 and 2000, nearly every year saw 7 to 9 million workers laid off nationally. Liaoning, for example, was laying off nearly 1,700 workers every single day. The moment was so unique that even the act of being laid off had a special name: 下岗 (xiagang), which literally means “stepping down from the post.” Yet while the transition led northern China into economic crisis, the Pearl River Delta — geographically proximate to Hong Kong and Macau, home to China’s first Special Economic Zones, and the ancestral homeland of much of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and beyond — embraced rapid modernization and internationalization. The historical “land of fish and rice” became the “world factory.” Hong Kong investors established over 65,000 factories, employing about six million workers in the Delta. From 1991 to 2001, the Pearl River Delta’s regional GDP grew almost eightfold, and its population increased from 20 to 43 million.For these citizens, the new economy meant good lives, which now included new technology. In 1998, Microsoft unveiled the mainland China version of Windows 98, and signed musician Pu Shu to endorse it. “New Boy,” a track on his 1999 album, name-checks Windows 98 and Pentium computers in its chorus  and became a genuine millennium anthem for a generation. Put on new clothes, get a new haircutRelax with Windows 98The road ahead will have no more sufferingHow cool our future will be.穿新衣吧, 剪新发型呀 chuan xinyi ba, jian xin faxing a轻松一下, Windows 98 qingsong yixia, Windows 98以后的路不再会有痛苦 yihou de lu, bu zai hui you tongku我们的未来该有多酷 women de weilai gai you duo ku–“New Boy,” Pu Shu, 1999China’s tech giants — Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu — were all founded between 1998 and 2000. By the end of 2000, the number of internet users in China had jumped from 3000 in early 1995 to 22.5 million. In 2001, China joined the WTO. Urbanization accelerated, and the growth of the middle class fueled demand for luxury goods, tourism, and better nutrition. The number of private cars in China went up from 1 million in 1992 to almost 10 million by 2002. Many people envisioned a hopeful future in which they could acquire new clothes, new luxuries, and new technology in the new millennium. But the “many” did not include the 100 million people residing in the Northeast — roughly 8.5% of China’s total population as of 2000. By the 1990s, urban shrinkage, which is measured by sustained population loss, had already taken hold across 52 cities in the Northeast. And of the 68 cities across China whose populations diminished continuously into the 2010s, half were in this region. The regional birth rate has been trending lower than the national average for more than three decades, and net outmigration has become an increasing problem since 2000. In 1990, the Northeast represented 8.66% of the country’s population; by 2016, that proportion had dropped to 7.9%. The one-time cradle of China's industrial development has become a place that many would rather not raise kids or live in, given the choice.In the span of a decade, Chinese society simultaneously experienced rapid economic growth and extreme economic precarity. Individuals were offered transformative opportunities and faced catastrophic crises, all due to the same factors put in place by a select elite who generated the incredible promise and acute challenges modern China still faces. To many Americans watching AI reshape their economy, this narrative may sound familiar, though calls to regulate, pause, or stop the technology reflect a belief that the transformation can still be steered or stopped. That option did not exist for Chinese workers in the 1990s. Painful, “rewarding” reform