cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/58092678

Archived

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Under China’s “AI Plus” initiative and its five-year plan through 2030, the government is pushing to infuse AI across many industries.

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“What is specific to China is that the government is really into diffusing AI across the economy, so AI may get into different domains more quickly comparing to other countries,” said Zilan Qian, a research associate at Oxford China Policy Lab.

China’s economic growth has already been slowing. Consumer spending has lagged partly due to people becoming reluctant to spend because they’re worried about losing their jobs. It’s added to problems stemming from a prolonged downturn in the housing market that has undermined household wealth.

China’s tech industries may be innovative with high productivity, but they may not generate many new jobs, said Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics and trade policy at Cornell University.

“AI is likely to lift productivity across the board but could have a severe disruptive effect on employment, worsening the employment growth problem and resulting in a detrimental effect on social stability,” he said.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/57221757

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China’s premier, Li Qiang, suggested ... that efforts to bolster overseas demand for goods could be used to make up for weak domestic demand.

“Currently, the ⁠problem of insufficient ⁠domestic demand remains prominent, some industries and enterprises are facing increasing difficulties, and uncertainties in external environment are rising,” Li told ⁠a meeting of China’s state council.

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Web Archive link

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/57223871

• Economics professor says flexibility of gig work is a form of benefit
• Think tank estimates number of gig workers to rise 14% on-year to 320 million this year
• Gig workers account for about 44% of China's urban workforce, think tank says
• China's ​cooling economy has made full-time employment harder to find

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The term "flexible employment" has gone viral ‌in China after a prominent economics professor described gig work as a form of "welfare", drawing widespread public anger and highlighting deep anxieties over job insecurity.

Zhang Dandan, a professor of economics and deputy dean at Peking University's National School of Development, made the remarks during a discussion on ​social protection for gig workers, on the popular financial show "Let's Talk" last week.

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She argued that from the perspective ​of labour economics, "flexibility itself is a form of welfare."

While regular employees trade schedule flexibility for ⁠pensions and other benefits, flexible workers enjoy greater control over their time at the cost of weaker social protections, Zhang ​said.

The comments triggered a fierce backlash over the weekend, with social media users accusing Zhang of being oblivious to the harsh ​realities of the gig economy.

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The controversy has struck a nerve for many in China, where a cooling economy has made secure, full-time employment harder to find.

The China New Employment Forms Research Center, a think tank, estimates the ​number of flexible workers — those without permanent full-time contracts — will rise to 320 million this year from 280 million in ​2025. That represents about 44% of China's urban workforce and is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the United States.

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'RUBBING SALT INTO WOUNDS'

The ‌rise of ⁠gig jobs in China, where employers are not mandated to make social insurance contributions, heightens long-term risks for China's already strained welfare and pension systems, some industry experts have warned. Prominent nationalist commentator Hu Xijin, a former editor at the state-backed Global Times newspaper, called Zhang's remarks "shocking" and "unacceptable."

"She has paid the price for her reputation for speaking this way, and the responsibility lies ​with her," Hu wrote on ​his Weibo account, adding that ⁠she should "respond to public opinion, explain where necessary, and apologize where appropriate."

Despite the backlash, some social media users pointed out Zhang's academic career had focused largely on documenting the struggles ​of gig workers and advocating for their social security.

Zhang noted last year that on-demand workers ​made up about ⁠31% of the workforce in China's manufacturing sector.

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During peak seasons, that proportion can rise to as high as 80% for large manufacturers with more than 10,000 workers, she said. Nevertheless, Zhang's framing of "flexibility" as a benefit was seen as insensitive.

"Such comments from experts are ⁠no less ​than rubbing salt into the wounds of those without job security," one ​Weibo user wrote.

Another user pointed out the relentless pressure faced by delivery drivers and couriers: "Every day, they are racing against the platform's algorithm at all ​costs, without rest... [flexible work] is precisely the most unavoidable of choices, not a preference."

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Web Archive link

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/economy/p/1355359/us-president-trump-says-tariffs-on-all-cars-trucks-automotive-parts-and-steel-from-canad

Canada has been ripping off the United States of America for years. Their ridiculously high tariffs on our Farmers and farm products has made life impossible for these great American Patriots, and has long created a 60 Billion Dollar Deficit between our two Countries. Not sustainable, and NOT ANYMORE! On January First, 2027, Tariffs on all Cars, Trucks, both large and small, Automotive Parts, and Steel, will be increased to 50%. Build in the U.S. and there are ZERO TARIFFS. Canada will be treated like a State no longer! On Trade, and in other ways, also, they are among the worst Nations in the World to deal with. They feel entitled, and yet, WE DON’T NEED CANADA, THEY NEED US! They do 95% of their business with the U.S., with us, the exact opposite! Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Source: Trump on Truth Social.

I’m interested in your take of the risks to markets with this Iran war quagmire. So tell me do you care if this war drags on? Are you hedging? Are you worried about a oil shock and the implications of that?

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/economy/p/1351765/6-imbalances-facing-the-u-s-economy

• Inflation;
• Federal Budget Deficit and Borrowing Costs;
• Trade Deficit;
• Artificial Intelligence (AI);
• Housing Markets;
• Labor Supply Slowdown.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/economy/p/1350904/global-food-prices-to-surge-11-8-in-2026-key-drivers-and-impacts

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/56932020

Industrial output growth slows and retail sales nearly flat as policymakers face calls to step up support.

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China’s industrial output softened last month and consumer spending was muted, underlining pressure on the country’s top leadership to accelerate fiscal stimulus spending and revive stronger growth in the second half of the year.

Industrial output expanded 4.5 per cent in July on a year earlier, official statistics showed on Monday.

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Retail sales rose just 0.6 per cent last month, compared with analyst forecasts of 1.5 per cent growth and 1 per cent in June, as the waning effects of consumer goods trade-in subsidies weighed on household spending. Fixed asset investment declined 6.7 per cent for the first seven months of the year on the same period in 2025, deepening from a 5.7 per cent drop in the year to June.

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Fu Linghui, spokesperson and chief economist for the National Bureau of Statistics, said: “Some regions experienced extreme weather such as high temperatures and heavy rainfall in July, disrupting market supply and demand.”

He added that the readings were affected by a “complex and severe” international situation, while weak domestic demand, which analysts say is because of a grinding years-long property slowdown, also played a role. “Domestically the imbalance between strong supply and weak demand is relatively prominent,” Fu said.

China last month unveiled second-quarter growth of 4.3 per cent, one of its lowest readings in decades, as weak consumer demand and falling investment weighed on sentiment.

The figure, which fell below Beijing’s official 2026 full-year growth target band of 4.5-5 per cent, was the lowest reading since the formal introduction of GDP reporting in the early 1990s, apart from the three-year period of Covid-19 restrictions.

China has relied on industrial output and exports — which rose 23.9 per cent in July — for economic activity in recent years as the property sector slowdown has constrained household spending.

But an official gauge of factory activity unexpectedly contracted in July, adding to concerns over momentum in the world’s second-largest economy.

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Goldman Sachs economists said the government-subsidised consumer goods trade-in programme, which supported retail sales from late 2024, had also become a drag.

“Fading support from the trade-in program will continue to depress retail sales growth through the rest of this year,” they said.

“With confidence and income expectations still low and property prices yet to find a bottom,” retail sales growth will be subdued at 1.5 per cent year on year in 2026, they estimated.

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/57661434

Gig work is increasingly drawing in graduates, of whom there are more than 12mn entering the labour market this year, while adequate entry level jobs are disappearing.

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China’s unprecedented economic expansion, from around 1980 until 2020, was underpinned by the migration of hundreds of millions of people from poor rural areas in its interior to work in the factories and construction sites around its cities.

But amid a prolonged property bust, a consumer spending downturn and the persistent spectre of deflation, those job prospects are now fewer in number. In their place, a precarious gig economy of ridesharing drivers and delivery couriers has been soaking up China’s surplus labour.

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The labour market has long been at the heart of the social contract between China’s government, eager to maintain stability, and a vast population yearning for economic betterment.

Today it is under strain as rarely before. While flexible work has served as an economic escape valve, it too now risks becoming overloaded by more people than it can provide jobs for.

The economy as a whole is struggling for momentum. Consumer confidence has been subdued for years and an official index tracking it has been dragged down by pessimism about job prospects. As China’s property slowdown grinds through its fifth year, metrics ranging from investment to retail sales have seen growth rates fall to levels reached during the lockdowns of 2022.

Against this backdrop the gig economy — described by one economist as “an immense shock absorber for the Chinese labour market” — is being scrutinised for signs that it is also reaching the limits of its capacity.

More than 53mn people as of 2025 work as food delivery or ridesharing drivers in China, up 10mn in two years, estimates the China New Employment Forms Research Center, a think-tank affiliated with Beijing’s Capital University of Economics and Business.

“I think there’s certainly a vast expansion in gig jobs,” says Frederic Neumann, chief Asia economist at HSBC. “We have potentially many more gig workers employed than there’s a need for gig workers.” Several municipalities have reported an oversupply of ride-hailing drivers and in June, the southern city of Shenzhen declared its ride-hailing market saturated.

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[China's] workers are increasingly bearing the brunt of what the International Labour Organization last year described as a “polarisation” that has intensified since 2016. In some sectors, there is not enough work available whereas in others there are long hours, though these may “actually reflect poor job quality”.

Jack Linzhou Xing, an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says the market may be approaching the point where gig work incomes become unliveable. “And nobody knows what would happen.”

Hou, the Guangzhou taxi driver, could join DiDi, China’s equivalent of Uber, but says it is “troublesome” on the ride-hailing platform, where working for up to 15 or 16 hours at a time can result in accidents.

“It is tiring, but there’s no other way,” says a ride-hailing driver in Shanghai, who declined to be named, of the long working days.

“That’s just how the environment is now.”

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It is hard to discern these trends from China’s unemployment statistics, which show an exclusively urban jobless rate that has scarcely deviated from 5 per cent in years.

Even in a country whose official data is widely questioned, labour market numbers offer little insight. Other than the urban employment rate, which ignores anyone returning to a countryside population that numbers hundreds of millions, there are only a handful of other relevant metrics.

“In all the other economies I look at there is a huge range of employment data,” says Paul Cavey, founder of consultancy East Asia Econ, citing series such as participation rates. “The kind of analysis that would be possible in another market around employment will just not be possible in China.”

Annual figures at least confirm that the total labour force, which peaked at over 800mn in 2015, is shrinking as the population declines. This should in theory benefit workers in line with the so-called Lewis turning point — a concept in development economics that marks the moment excess rural workers are fully absorbed into cities. Wages should rise sharply, with implications for inflation and consumption.

Instead, China flirts with deflation and suffers weak consumption plus a marked slowdown in urban wage growth, which on one measure hit a record low of 3.4 per cent in 2025. “I would say the demand for labour is falling faster than the supply of labour is declining,” says HSBC’s Neumann, citing automation in factories, the property slowdown and the as-yet unquantified impact of AI.

For those reasons flexible employment, an official term that is vaguely defined but implies a broader scope than gig work, has come into greater focus. It stood at 200mn in 2021, according to an official estimate that included part-time work and self-employment as well as “new [forms of] employment”.

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Traditional sectors such as manufacturing and construction have long incorporated flexible labour as the country transformed itself from a state-run economy over decades.

The ILO notes that China does not publish data on part-time work, defined as fewer than 24 hours a week, but says that new technologies and labour market slackness mean “work modes are becoming more flexible overall”.

China New Employment Forms Research Center has estimated that flexible employment will hit 320mn this year, up from 280mn last year. Its report provided figures for what it termed “blue-collar” work in selected sectors, including food delivery riders and ride-hailing drivers, for whom it said hourly wages rose and fell respectively last year.

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Just after 6am one Friday last month, men hopeful of finding work had already gathered in large numbers, but the mood was in several cases downbeat. One 34-year-old had previously worked as a driver, but quit because the hours were too long and now only works around 10 days each month.

Ma Yuzhu, a 54-year-old construction worker, typically works in demolition and makes about Rmb300 ($45) for an eight-hour shift. But he only worked five days in the past month and has not been able to afford to return home for lunar new year for years.

“It’s bad, really bad,” he says. “Regular factories don’t want workers of our age any more. We can only take temporary jobs.”

Delivery riders in Shipai Village, a scrappy inner-city area of Guangzhou with narrow alleyways that lies next to the city’s gleaming office blocks, have the opposite problem.

Jash Wang, a 33-year-old rider in Shipai, a place known locally as the King of Orders, says he used to get by working nine hours a day, but now needs to do 11 as a minimum because fees on orders have fallen by as much as a third since he started six years ago. “You have to work about 40 per cent harder now,” he says. He earns Rmb6,000-Rmb8,000 (around $900-$1,200) each month.

Gig workers “often face lower income stability, weaker labour protection and incomplete social security coverage compared with traditional employment, likely dampening consumption appetite”, Standard Chartered economists said this month. They added that the official unemployment rate “masks rising underemployed and discouraged workers”.

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Gig work is increasingly drawing in graduates, of whom there are more than 12mn entering the labour market this year, as well as offering options for migrant workers. “I didn’t really know what to do after graduation, so I just started delivering food right away,” says Chen Yumin, a 24-year-old graduate of business management who was coaching a batch of new recruits at a Shipai underpass.

He earns about Rmb13,000 ($1,920) a month, but he also says fees per order have declined by around a fifth since he started just over two years ago. Overall, around half a dozen delivery riders in the vicinity said their fees had also fallen, with estimates ranging from 20 to 50 per cent. The most precarious of those workers described earning about Rmb2,000 ($300) a month after costs.

“The anecdotal evidence suggests that gig worker incomes are trending towards subsistence levels, given the competition among workers in China for jobs,” says [chief Asia economist at HSBC Frederic] Neumann.

Xing, [the professor] at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, says that “a lot of these people are going into the gig work and they still have the work, they still have a piece of income, but it’s very poor [quality],” describing the situation as “a very fragile balance”.

“Capital is testing the limits of the working class,” says Wang in Shipai, smoking a cigarette while perched on a black moped. “If the price drops too low, there will be more discontent . . . they’ll tentatively adjust it upwards.”

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The rise of gig economy platforms in the US and Europe has long fuelled concerns over exploitation of workers, especially after economic shocks such as the global financial crisis of 2008 reduced opportunities in other sectors.

But it also provides an example of how conditions can change if job openings increase while the number of available workers falls. “When the labour market tightened, the supply of Uber drivers shrank and prices for Uber rides went way up,” says Gavekal’s Batson. “The actual reason there had been so much flexible employment was because people did not have any better options due to the macro situation,” he adds. “The same thing will happen in China, if and when the labour market ever tightens.”

Such a tightening in China would depend on major shifts, including the eventual impact of a declining population, the offsetting effects of automation and AI, which could eliminate manufacturing jobs, and overall economic momentum.

In contrast to the overall labour force, urban employment in China is still rising but its growth rate has slowed dramatically, rising by just 2mn workers on a net basis in 2025 compared to increases of tens of millions each year before the Covid-19 pandemic.

“This farm-to-factory [movement] has been such an important driver of growth — if that has slowed, it’s a real headwind,” says Steven Barnett, a professor at Hong Kong University and former China head for the IMF.

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In Invisible China, a book on rural development in the country, [development economist at Stanford University Scott] Rozelle, and co-author Natalie Hell warned of a potential eruption if educational outlooks were not improved. “There is no social volcano yet,” adds Rozelle. “Many young rural workers are earning 4,000 yuan ($593) instead of 8,000 yuan [a month] or 3,000 instead of 6,000 — but since it’s better than them farming, I think they just shrug their shoulders and go about it.”

The risk of such resignation developing into unrest can partially be tracked on social media. Kevin Slaten, who heads China Dissent Monitor, part of the Washington-based non-profit Freedom House, says most online protests relate to working conditions, especially pay.

There was a sudden upsurge at the start of the year, he says, which amounted to the “largest spike in our database” since it launched in June 2022, but the numbers have since died down.

At Majuqiao in Beijing, a couple of police officers keep an eye on the swell of hopeful workers. “When we can’t find work, we just bring a small stool and try to set up a street stall,” says Ma, the demolition worker. “But the authorities won’t let us.”

“For someone my age, I don’t have any hope,” he adds. “I really don’t have any hope.”

[...]

Crossposted from r/economy