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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
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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.