Quote · The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
China Decode: China Drops Its Jobs Target, Tencent Buys Back Manus, and the Rise of "Tier 3 City" Living
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China Drops Its Jobs Target: The Five-Year Plan Shocker
At 4:50 · chapter starts 2:35
Alice Han opens the main discussion with what she frames as a historic break: the 15th Five-Year Plan, released by China's Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, quietly dropped its urban jobs number — the first time this has happened since at least the 1990s [1] — Alice Han "No jobs target for first time since 1990s: China's 15th Five-Year Plan omitted a numerical urban job creation target for the first time sin…" 02:00 . The previous plan had set a target of just over 55 million new urban jobs, itself up from the roughly 40 million target of the late 1990s. Alice reads this absence as a signal about uncertainty rather than confidence: Beijing doesn't know how fast AI will displace white-collar roles, how quickly the population will shrink, or how the gig economy will evolve. She notes the government is trying to protect workers through court rulings and policy statements discouraging AI-driven layoffs, even as public enthusiasm for AI in China remains higher than in Western countries. The stakes are high in a system where economic targets are political commitments — dropping one is not a bureaucratic footnote but a rare admission of genuine unknowing.
The official target for new urban jobs over the prior five-year plan was just over 55 million, slightly higher than the ~40 million target set in the late 1990s.
Every passenger James Kynge spoke to on a 24-hour train from Shenzhen to Beijing voiced fears about AI taking their jobs. Meanwhile Xiaomi's factory produces a car every 76 seconds with zero human workers on the line. China isn't just adopting AI faster than anywhere else — it has become the uncontrolled experiment for what automation does to a society at scale.
Xiaomi's car factory in Beijing uses 100% automation with 700 robots and zero human workers on production lines, producing a new car every 76 seconds.
