China wants more robots but not fewer workers

A year ago the city of Qingdao had just a handful of autonomous vehicles. Now it has more than almost anywhere else on Earth. One firm, Neolix, has put around 1,200 unmanned delivery vans on local roads; it hopes to have 4,000 by the end of the year. With several other autonomous taxi and food-delivery projects under way, Qingdao exemplifies how rapidly artificial intelligence is transforming China. It is also the front line of the clash between unmanned vehicles and drivers.

Autonomous cars and drones are being deployed in China at a dizzying pace. About 33,000 short-range delivery vehicles, including the ones in Qingdao, were on Chinese roads at the end of 2025. The number of unmanned cabs is expected to hit 14,000 by the end of 2026. Goldman Sachs, a bank, reckons that more than 700,000 robotaxis (meaning 12% of all ride-hailing vehicles) will roam Chinese cities within five years. Meituan, a delivery super-app, believes it could use drones for 10% of the country’s instant food deliveries, of which 60bn were made last year.

Though each such delivery is a technological miracle, in the short run it may deprive a human driver of a fare. This puts Chinese leaders in a bind: they want to lead the world in AI and automation but not destroy jobs. An economic plan for the next five years says the country must “prevent and resolve large-scale unemployment risks”. In April a cyber-security watchdog told developers in a draft document that they should “not apply AI with the goal of replacing human employment”.

The first question is whether technology will be able to replace millions of drivers in short order. Projects have been launched in dozens of Chinese cities, but growth has slowed owing to congestion and technical glitches. No company has deployed more than 1,200 vehicles in any one city. The size of Neolix’s fleet in Qingdao has fluctuated in response to traffic jams caused by its vans. Although these are permitted to drive at any time, they are only allowed to make deliveries only in off-peak daytime hours. Even so, on an April morning near a large wholesale market, bands of Neolix vehicles could be seen clogging up the road to honks and jeers.

In the city of Wuhan, home to one of the world’s biggest robotaxi projects, autonomous vehicles have also jammed traffic. Baidu, a tech giant and Wuhan’s main operator of driverless taxis, has a fleet of around 1,000 for well over a year. It may not grow for a while. In March dozens of Baidu’s cabs suddenly froze, snarling up traffic and prompting a rescue effort for stranded passengers. Since then the central government has suspended the issuance of new licences for robotaxis.

A second question is which jobs are threatened and which are safe in the longer run. Authorities in Qingdao are not worried about unemployment caused by Neolix, says Wang Honglei, a company executive. In fact, senior officials in the wider Shandong province want as many as 15,000 driverless short-delivery vehicles on roads by the end of 2027. One reason for the insouciance is the sort of human drivers these might displace. Neolix runs only business-to-business services, such as delivering meat from markets to restaurants. Many people who do this are in their 60s and drive small, three-wheeled vehicles that tip over in traffic. Few young people seek to replace them when they retire because this perilous work pays poorly and entails a lot of heavy lifting. This makes machines the obvious choice for the job.

Drivers who ferry people to their destinations and packages to consumers are another matter. Tech platforms employ around 22m such workers; many more drive city cabs. The platform workers are generally young, rural migrants in cities and people who have lost other work. Youth unemployment is already high and officials do not want to make it worse.

Another crucial difference is that taxi and delivery drivers have been better at organising strikes and protests. They did just that in Wuhan in 2024, as Baidu’s project was gaining momentum. In response city officials told Baidu to stop publicising its robotaxi figures. Authorities, though supportive of the technology, fear social disruption far more than tech glitches.

To allay those fears, the biggest automation companies are providing help to the disaffected. Meituan has started training delivery drivers to help operate drone deliveries in Shanghai. Jobs range from loading food onto drones to monitoring flights from a command centre. So far only 200 people are on this team, compared with millions of drivers. But this will expand, says Mao Yinian of Meituan. Whereas the company previously only trained its own employees for such work, he says, it now trains other workers, too. These include staff at hospitals, where drones already deliver some test samples.

The point of automation is ultimately to replace workers, who need to be paid a regular wage, with robots, which do not. This will eventually end up being true in China, too. In the meantime, a world anxious about an AI jobs apocalypse will be watching the Chinese experiment in human-first automation closely.■