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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
628 points (94.9% liked)
Technology
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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?
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.
Please, everything you know about the Uyghur was manufactured by Zionist media with the "data" of literal cofounder of Victims of Communism Memorial Association and rabid Christian conservative "Adrian Zenz".
It's beyond me why after seeing the literal entire western media establishment manufacturing consent for a genocide that we've seen televised in our own phones for the first time thanks to Chinese social media such as TikTok, people are still willing to take these same media's claims at face value when it comes to the human rights of peoples in geopolitically tense regions of the world.
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.
I said China abuses Uyghurs.
And you're a liar or extremely Zionist/Western imperialist propagandized. And you most certainly did conflate Zionism with Judaism. Gtfooh with your hasbara 🐂 💩
Conflating Zionism with Judaism is extremely antisemitic, thankfully many Jews are not rabid genociders like Zionists, certainly most I interact with aren't.
Whenever you pretend to be 1% as concerned about Roma people in Europe or black people in the US as you concern-troll for Uyghurs, you'll be taken seriously.
What does any of that have to do with China's mistreatment of the Uyghurs?
You're concern-trolling for a particular ethnicity outside your country you know nothing about while continuously disregarding the systematic and much worse abuses against ethnic minorities in your own, because Zionist media told you so.
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.