Earlier this month, state media across China went into overdrive to share the heart-stopping story of how Bupatam Abdukader, a 24-year-old female police officer in Xinjiang, had descended 40 meters into a narrow well to rescue a toddler, after attempts with conventional rescue equipment had reportedly failed. Dramatic video footage from the scene showed the officer stepping forward toward the perilous shaft, barely 40 centimeters wide, as she removed her jacket and said: “I’m thin, let me go down!” 

Cue the tales of heroism and self-sacrifice, standard fare for official rescue reports in China’s tightly controlled media environment, which tend to play down questions of readiness and responsibility. State media related how Bupatam, who is from Luopu County in the region’s Hotan Prefecture, had battled oxygen and tight confines — maintaining consciousness through deep breathing techniques — to bring the small girl up from the muddy bottom of an abandoned well. “When I touched the child in the well, she grabbed my finger. Her hand was so cold, yet so strong,” she recalled emotionally to the reporters waiting above ground. “I had only one thought, to get the child up first.”

As the dramatic rescue footage captured attention across the country, including video footage showing Bupatam as she finally emerged, covered head-to-toe in mud, local officials made the most of the opportunity. They presented the officer with a reward of 10,000 yuan and nominated her for the county’s “Model of Bravery” (见义勇为模范) honor. 

But as admiration for her heroism spread across Chinese social media, the conversation shifted rather suddenly to questions about Bupatam Abdukader’s employment status. In media reports, she was referred to generally as a “female auxiliary officer” (女辅警), making clear to the news-reading audience that she was a member of the “auxiliary police” (辅助警察) — meaning that rather than being under formal hire, she was support personnel for the regular police force, receiving inferior pay and benefits. 

Why, netizens wondered, should someone who had displayed such immense courage receive fewer benefits and less compensation than her formally employed counterparts?

Typically, unlike formal police officers with what are known as “established positions,” or bianzhi (编制), auxiliary officers receive lower salaries, reduced benefits, less job security, and fewer promotion opportunities despite the fact that they do the same work and face the same risks. 

China’s two-tier system for police and rescue work has frequently become a point of social debate. One of the most egregious examples came to the fore nearly 10 years ago as a fire at a chemical storage facility in the city of Tianjin erupted as a massive explosion that killed 173 people. Many of the dead were firefighters later found to have been auxiliaries under part-time contracts. 

As the officer’s heroic act in Xinjiang made the headlines, netizens pounced on the opportunity to reopen the longstanding debate about the gap between “official” and “auxiliary” status. “She should be given a formal position!” wrote one user. Another asked directly: “Why not give her a permanent position?”

On April 24, just over a week after the rescue, local authorities announced she would be “exceptionally promoted” from seventh to fifth rank within the auxiliary system. The announcement seemed only to throw the gap into sharper relief. While significant, the promotion maintained the officer’s auxiliary status rather than granting her formal employment.

As public pressure mounted, the Xinjiang government made an announcement through its official “Xinjiang Release” (新疆发布) account on social media channels in which it sought to rationalize the process of converting auxiliary hires to formal positions. Such a transition, it said, needed to follow strict procedures, including civil service examinations, merit-based special recruitment, and targeted recruitment programs.

“Bupatam is undoubtedly a hero,” the statement read, “but compared to the beautiful wish for ‘special handling,’ strictly following legal regulations for ‘conversion to permanent status’ requirements and serious, prudent merit recognition is what represents fairness and justice to all formal police officers and auxiliary police like her who fight on the public security front in various fields, selflessly protecting people’s lives and property.” In other words, the decision to keep Bupatam and others like her in “auxiliary” status, according to the statement, was about “system design.” And ultimately, the procedural approach prevented “favoritism and corruption to the greatest extent.” 

In many respects, the statement was a distraction from the obvious. As state media are well aware, the highly discriminatory nature of China’s two-tiered employment system has been repeatedly and conclusively documented — and even, despite the country’s highly controlled media environment, talked about. 

Six years ago, a report in China Comment (半月谈), an official journal under the government’s Xinhua News Agency, found significant pay disparities between auxiliary and formal hires. The latter were generally paid three times more for a marginally larger workload. And despite the fact that they remained essential, China Comment found that auxiliary officers experienced a profound lack of belonging (归属感) and social recognition, ultimately undermining the stability of the workforce and the effectiveness of the public security system.

This time around, mindful perhaps of the potential volatility of growing public calls to improve the status of an ethnic Uighur auxiliary officer, China Comment got behind authorities in Xinjiang. The journal praised the official response as exemplary crisis management that balanced institutional constraints with public sentiment, noting how it demonstrated that officials could find “the greatest common denominator” when navigating the tension between emotional appeals and regulatory frameworks. Echoing this sentiment, the state-run China Central Television commended the way officials, as it said, “did not avoid public expectations” but “explained facts and reasoning” while maintaining “respect for the hero.” 

The mini storm of discussion prompted this month by the heroics of Bupatam Abdukader reveals how a story of dramatic rescue — or any story, in fact — can quickly transform into a platform for broader social debates about equality and fairness. But it equally reveals how rapidly and effectively such debates can be managed by the state, using the means of restraint and amplification at its disposal.

At its core, Bupatam’s story is about a gap in visions of what heroism means, and how it should be rewarded. While public sentiment called for the officer’s brave human acts to be rewarded with real and tangible benefits, and the dignity that comes with truly equal status, the authorities managed to contain her within the Party’s limited vision of heroism. In that vision, the hero’s extraordinary sacrifice works only to serve and preserve the system — even if that system is premised on the most ordinary perpetuation of inequalities.

With 12 million fresh graduates soon rushing into China’s already competitive job market, help is on the way, according to the People’s Daily. On April 7, the newspaper, the official mouthpiece of the country’s leadership, ran an article listing how AI was turbo-charging supply and demand in the job market, pointing to over 10,000 AI-related jobs on offer at a spring recruitment center in the city of Hangzhou. The piece was accompanied by a graphic from Xinhua, showing a smiling recruiter handing out jobs (岗位) to incoming students, with an AI bot ready and waiting to embrace them with open arms. The message is clear: graduates can literally walk into AI-related positions.

But according to the Qianjiang Evening News (钱江晚报), a commercial metro newspaper published in Hangzhou under the state-owned Zhejiang Daily Newspaper Group, the reality is a lot tougher for new graduates. “It’s hard to find a job with a bachelor’s degree in this major,” said one of their interviewees, a recent graduate majoring in AI who was quoted under the pseudonym “Zhang Zixuan.” The graduate said they had gone to multiple job fairs without securinig a job. “I don’t know the way forward,” they told the paper.

China’s biggest tech companies are indeed angling for the leading edge in AI, battling it out to hire “young geniuses” (天才少年) graduating from AI programs at China’s top universities. But while these rarefied talents — whoever they are — may have their choice of elite positions, the picture is less rosy for the vast majority. “Despite the booming industry,” Qianjiang Evening News concludes, “many recent graduates of artificial intelligence majors from ordinary universities are still struggling in the job market.”   

Hangzhou is now billed by Chinese media as a major hub for AI innovation and enterprise, home to China’s foremost large language model (LLM), DeepSeek. But if the city’s media are saying there are significant problems with AI recruitment, the rest of the country is likely experiencing similar complications. State-run media and universities in China are presenting the government’s AI policies as a gift for the nation’s entry-level job market. But these messages paper over a more complex reality.  

The Hunt for AI Talent

The government has made it a priority to boost national AI development. In the government work report last year at the Two Sessions, China’s major legislative meeting, Premier Li Qiang launched the “AI+” initiative (人工智能+行动). The initiative aims to augment AI for every industry in the country, considering it a way to unlock “new productive forces” (新质生产力) — a signature phrase of Chinese leader Xi Jinping — that will bolster China’s economy and job market.

The latter needs it. Youth unemployment in China stands at 16.9 percent as of February this year, and comes at a time when graduate supply has never been higher. There are nearly four million extra graduates in the class of 2025 than there were even five years ago.   

The stiff competition for jobs is a source of frustration for young Chinese. Earlier this month, Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily (南方都市报) reported that the state-owned nuclear power company CNNC had publicly apologized after boasting online that it had received 1.2 million resumes to fill roughly 8,000 positions. The company was accused by netizens of “arrogance.”

Aligning university education to accommodate AI training is considered by the leadership as key to harnessing this technology of the future. In 2017, a document from the State Council noted the country lacked the “high-level AI talents” needed to make China a global leader in AI technology. In 2023, the Ministry of Education issued a reform plan ordering that by this year 20 percent of university courses must be adjusted, with an emphasis on emerging technologies and a gradual elimination of courses “not suited for social and economic development.”  

Universities across the country have responded with dramatic overhauls of their curricula. Ta Kung Pao (大公报), the Party’s mouthpiece in Hong Kong, reports universities in neighboring Guangdong province have already established 27 AI colleges, which are supposedly training 20,000 students a year. Meanwhile, universities like Shanghai’s Fudan University announced they will be cutting places in their humanities courses by 20 per cent as ordered, focusing instead on AI training. For Jin Li (金力), Fudan’s president, university courses must now explicitly serve China’s state-directed technological development goals. “How many liberal arts undergraduates will be needed in the current era?” he questioned rhetorically.

Technical Problems

State media says AI+ is already successfully reinvigorating the job market. Attending one job fair in Beijing this month, a reporter for the China Times (华夏时报), a media outlet under the State Council, noted a “surge in demand” among state-owned enterprises (SOEs) for AI talent, quoting one graduate trained in AI as saying he had seen “many work units that meet my job expectations.” Visiting job fairs in Shanghai and Guangdong, a reporter for Shanghai Securities News (上海证券报), a subsidiary of state news agency Xinhua, observed long queues in front of booths for jobs on algorithm engineering and data labeling. On that basis, he wrote “AI fever” had gripped the gatherings.

AI itself is also spreading positive messages about the jobs it can bring. Ahead of the Two Sessions this year, People’s Daily Online (人民网) pitched DeepSeek as helping citizens understand the “happiness code” (幸福密码) embedded in the Two Sessions. It does this by describing state-imposed solutions to current social problems, to ease the concerns of netizens.

One question the outlet asked was on what AI jobs were available to recent graduates. When we at the China Media Project asked DeepSeek the same question, it told us AI “offers abundant employment opportunities for recent graduates,” listing several well-salaried ones. One of these was “data labeling” (数据标注) with DeepSeek saying these positions are increasing by 50 percent year-on-year. The source for this claim was an article from the Worker’s Daily (工人日报), a newspaper under the CCP-led All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the country’s official trade union. 

It should go without saying that the role of the ACFTU’s newspaper is to promote the leadership’s economic agenda rather than to accurately report the challenges for the nation’s workforce posed by technological change. This role can mean, once again, that hype takes precedence over fact. In this case, the Worker’s Daily cited the case of a data-annotation college in Shenzhen, suggesting that graduates from the college receive 10 job offers on average within an hour of uploading their resumes online. 

Even if such data annotation roles are available right now, this does not point the way to a rosy future for aspiring young data annotators more broadly. Some data annotation roles, in fact, require few qualifications, and fresh trainees may be trusted by tech companies to do this work after just three weeks of training. Relatively unskilled jobs like this may be created by AI, but they are also vulnerable to replacement by AI itself. China’s state broadcaster CCTV reports that 60 percent of data annotation is now being done by AI, doubling in just three years. 

The CCTV report points to a trend that few state media seem to be openly acknowledging amid the hype over AI jobs — that the field is already shifting towards more specialized employees. That will mean raising the bar for data annotator qualifications, and fewer people ultimately required to do this work. In its report, the Qianjiang Evening News quotes an anonymous application engineer as saying the number of data labellers at his company is decreasing already. “Big models can label themselves,” he told the newspaper.  

The same report suggested that the demand for AI skills varies widely between companies. Zhang, the pseudonymous recent graduate, said that most of the companies at the university job fairs in which they participated did not have AI-related jobs on offer. The ones that did have such jobs demanded a higher degree of education, generally as the master’s level. The concerning lesson drawn from Zhang’s experience is that the training provided by these new AI education centers does not suit current demand from tech companies — to say nothing of future demand. While companies often require in-depth expertise within specialized areas like fine-tuning AI models, AI courses often sacrifice depth by giving their students shorter periods of training in a wide variety of AI skills. 

Another concern emerges: who will teach the next generation of AI specialists? The sudden expansion of colleges to accommodate the needs of the AI+ initiative is no doubt creating a talent dearth of its own. In a speech earlier this month, a senior scientist from Peking University claimed many AI centers employed inexperienced professors in order to fill teaching positions. He added that certain AI centers were moving members of their mathematics and art colleges to serve as “part-time” deans of these centers. 

Vocational schools could struggle even more. These colleges are usually stigmatized in Chinese society, stereotyped as only attended by students who failed their university entrance exams. This would put them at the bottom of the pile for aspirational AI talent. For example, one vocational college in Hubei says it created an AI major in response to the Ministry of Education’s push to cultivate high-quality AI talent. But it is advertising AI teaching positions where prior experience in this complex field is merely “preferred” rather than required.

It should come as no surprise that state media narratives of jam-packed job fairs handing out AI positions are overly optimistic. The disconnect is stark. While the handful of elite graduates at the pinnacle of China’s AI sector may enjoy rich opportunities, it is misleading to suggest that their exceptional success stories are evidence that AI has promised employment for the broader masses. The larger context matters: as Xi Jinping’s government pushes AI as a cornerstone of China’s economic future, a widening gap has formed between top-down ambitions and on-the-ground realities for millions of graduates. Instead of excitedly focusing on the long queues at AI stalls in job fairs, Chinese media should also be asking deeper questions about the issues that create them.

As luminaries, including several Nobel laureates, mingled last month at the Zhongguancun Forum, an exchange in Beijing on high-tech innovation, a soaring report from China’s official Xinhua News Agency celebrated the spectacle of robots serving freshly ground coffee and performing backflips — concluding that the forum’s participants had “given aspirations wings to soar.” 

Judging from the reports filed by the four Xinhua journalists covering the forum, an annual showcase for China’s tech achievements, it’s not clear that they came down to earth long enough to attend a speech on March 29 by one of the country’s top AI scientists, who warned that the nation’s AI sector, now the crown jewel of China’s technological ambitions, is perpetuating a lofty and unrealistic self-image. “Things are exciting on the surface,” he said, “but when it comes to substance they are chaotic.” 

Currently dean of the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence, a research and development non-profit tied to the elite Peking University, Zhu Songchun (朱松纯) is one of the most influential figures in the sector. His message, that to remain globally competitive China needs fewer celebratory headlines and more substantive analysis, runs counter to the spellbound view of AI development that seems to have overtaken the government and official media like Xinhua.

But will Zhu’s message, as the lack of state media coverage suggests, fall on deaf ears?

Journalists or Cheerleaders? 

According to a detailed summary of his speech by Tencent Technology (腾讯科技), a tech news outlet published by the Chinese tech giant, Zhu did not mince words about how AI hype and AI reality have become detached in China. The current AI landscape, he said, is one in which media narratives, investment patterns, and government initiatives present a distorted picture of progress. “What’s truly blocking our progress is not foreign technology restrictions,” Zhu told the audience, “but our own limited understanding.”

The reasons for this problem? Zhu says both Chinese media and officials tasked with promoting AI have little understanding of how it works. For their part, the media have fed the public “exaggerated” stories about AI. While Zhu notes this as a key problem, he tactfully steps around an important impetus behind this coverage — the fact that the leadership’s appetite for promoting AI as the next driver of development is also exerting pressure on state media to signal positivity and success. 

Officials, meanwhile, again feeding into a vicious cycle of positive thinking, are under pressure from the public to implement policies based on the distorted narratives of the media, said Zhu. 

AI technology is complex and relatively new to news organizations globally, meaning cutting through marketing hype from tech companies is a problem for journalists around the world. But as global AI competition heats up, Chinese media face additional pressure to exaggerate the capabilities of Chinese AI. 

In March last year, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the country’s top regulator and controller of the internet and information, emphasized that online media must create “positive propaganda” (正面宣传) about Chinese achievements. At the same time, the “AI+ initiative” (人工智能+ 行动), which aims to augment AI for every industry in China and thereby turbo-charge the “new productive forces” (新质生产力) that will lift the Chinese economy out of malaise, has become a central policy of the Party-state. 

That is a lot for AI to live up to, and this approach naturally demands cheerleaders over critical reporters. This is a typical approach for the Chinese Communist Party, for which hype and propaganda are often treated as rocket fuel, necessary to send the latest policy soaring to success. But such directives inevitably lead to unrealistic reports from China’s media outlets — which, as Zhu warns, can lead to magical thinking that is counterproductive. 

On March 28, the Shenzhen-based Securities Times (证券时报), a newspaper published under a subsidiary of the CCP’s People’s Daily, ran a report for which multiple data center entrepreneurs were interviewed. All of these insiders claimed that there is high demand in China for data centers, which have been hyped by Party policy-makers and advisors as critical to the success of the AI+ initiative. However, a recent report from MIT Tech Review revealed that supply now far outstrips demand, and many of these data centers are in fact standing empty — an investor-driven bubble that is strikingly familiar to that seen over the decades in the property market. 

Read more carefully between the lines in Chinese media reports, and the red flags start to reveal themselves. At one point in the Securities Times article, an interviewee remarks that one driver of data storage demand is “AI glasses.” But smart eyewear — a notion kicked around in the West since the 1960s as the technology of the future — has been a fallback focus of technology coverage in the Chinese state media for more than a decade. In fact, the market for AI glasses is not taking off. Smart glasses remain a gimmick trotted out every year by Chinese state media during political  meetings, when outlets can demonstrate their embrace of the government’s high-tech goals. 

 Talk of AI glasses as a driver behind data centers exposes the level of unreality that often takes hold, even among those cited as expert insiders. And the hype extends from foundational technologies and trends in China to self-assessments of the state of the industry. 

In his speech, Zhu also took aim at another favorite meme among Chinese journalists, what has become known as the “six little large language model dragons” (大模型小六龙). This is a group of highly-valued AI start-ups specializing in LLMs, the artificial intelligence systems trained on massive text datasets to generate human-like responses across various tasks. Chinese media outlets are awash with coverage of these six companies and their newest releases of AI models, but they often omit key facts and context — such as more in-depth exploration of their products or business models.

Contrary to their stellar images as exemplars of Chinese AI strength, Zhu described these six companies as high-risk, overvalued and — at least so far — unprofitable. One of the six, Zhipu AI (智普AI), released its latest model at the Zhongguancun Forum, and this was billed by the Xinhua reporters as enabling AI “to leap out of the dialog box and perform real work for humans.” Once again, the language was all about leaps and bounds, even though none of the reporters actually tested the model. 

The fact that Zhipu released this latest model for free and allowing unlimited use would seem to support Zhu Songchun’s view that sustainable revenue models remain grounded. In a freer and more vibrant media environment, that might be the real story. But the point of AI coverage in China’s media is to promote, promote, promote. And this lack of scrutiny extends to AI stories fired into the air for international audiences. The priority is to emphasize the successes of China under the current CCP leadership, which Xi Jinping has called “telling China’s story well” (讲好中国故事). The story of China as a high-tech hub and innovator has become one of the CCP’s central narratives, for audiences at home and abroad. 

If you want to know whether you are being sold a rocket or a firecracker, one approach is to simply look closer at news reporting basics. In November last year, Xinhua published an English-language article touting the innovations of an image diffusion model from Chinese-owned AI platform Vidu. The article claimed that the model had made ground-breaking improvements to “consistency,” a problem plaguing image diffusion models. But the piece quoted only the company’s CEO and one Western netizen on X to back up these claims. If Xinhua journalists had tested the software, as we did, or had spoken to other experts, they would have found the model highly inconsistent — and the claims dubious.

Reports like the above are a reminder of the obvious — that Chinese state media are not just duty-bound to promote the positives of national development over the challenges, but that they often have a too-cozy relationship with the companies on which they report. 

Clipping the Wings of Criticism

For Zhu, the fundamental contradiction is clear: China’s AI sector cannot advance by chasing headlines rather than breakthroughs. He argued that when officials, media outlets and the public operate with a distorted understanding of AI capabilities, China’s entire innovation ecosystem suffers. This superficial approach, he suggested, has trapped China in a cycle of imitation rather than invention — simply scaling up language models and finding incremental applications that mirror Silicon Valley’s path. “If we just repeat the old path of the United States – computing power, algorithms, and deployment, we will always be followers,” he concluded.

Instead, Zhu called for a fundamental shift toward researching the nature of intelligence itself — a strategy that could potentially leapfrog current AI paradigms entirely. By focusing on these foundational questions rather than chasing quarterly breakthroughs trumpeted in promotional press releases, China might discover entirely new frameworks for artificial intelligence that competitors would scramble to replicate.

Yet Zhu’s critique of the propaganda-driven approach appears to have fallen victim to precisely the dynamic of hype he described. While his remarks found outlets in more market-oriented publications like Tencent Technology, Caixin and The Paper, flagship state media organizations like Xinhua and the People’s Daily conspicuously omitted his warnings from their coverage. Instead, these Party organs continued to showcase a parade of applications and robots — the very surface-level achievements that Zhu suggested are distracting China from the deeper scientific work needed to truly lead in artificial intelligence. In a system where positive messaging trumps critical analysis, even warnings from one of the nation’s top AI scientists can be edited out of the narrative.

Since the event, there are signs that Zhu’s wings may have been clipped even more decisively. On April 15, an institute from Peking University responsible for international cultural exchanges (中外人文交流) issued a “clarification” on his behalf, claiming that some media outlets had misrepresented his words in what the institute claimed had in fact been a “closed-door media communication meeting.” The timing suggests Zhu’s candid assessment of the industry may have drawn unwelcome attention from authorities eager to maintain the narrative of Chinese AI supremacy. The message is that everyone, including the media, must train their eyes upward on the future — even if it means ignoring the ground beneath their feet. 

This disconnect was illustrated once again over the weekend, as Beijing hosted a half marathon where Chinese-built robots raced alongside human competitors. The CCP’s official People’s Daily described the event as a “fierce competition” that had pushed the robots to their limits. Xinhua sang about “infinite possibilities,” and proclaimed in its headline that the racing event had “closed the distance between us and the future.” The less stellar reality, alluded to in a report by Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily that noted the “many problems” holding the race down, was that the robots had suffered constant failures and necessitated nearly constant repairs by the exhausted human crews running alongside them. In the end, only six of the 21 robot entries completed the race, and one quite literally lost its head.

But in another sense, the race pointed the way toward the possibility of a healthier, more open and more self-critical attitude toward technology and progress — an alternative to the propaganda of constant rise. The Global Times, though in English-language coverage only, remarked somewhat disingenuously that “[behind] this ‘imperfect’ robot half-marathon is the mature atmosphere of tolerance, understanding and acceptance of failure that has developed in Chinese society from top to bottom toward the high-tech industry.” If that were true, of course, no public moderation of Zhu Songchun’s remarks behind closed doors would have been necessary. It would be perfectly acceptable to say: We are getting this wrong. But the Global Times was on to something. 

In its coverage of the Beijing half marathon, Caixin, an outlet tending more than most others in China to tell it like it is, reported that the robots had “walked with a staggering gait” (步履蹒跚). This might be the best image to capture a truth applicable to all innovation — that progress is made and measured by confronting limitations, not by promoting past them. As Zhu Songchun made clear in an address that perhaps now he has been made to regret, China will need to learn to stumble honestly — and openly — if it is to reach its grand AI ambitions.

The most important step forward is coming back down to earth. 

Sitting back in early January with the latest edition of Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily, one of the country’s leading metro newspapers, daily news readers were treated to a splashy page-one story about how China’s national plans for artificial intelligence development — known as “AI+” — were being unleashed in every sector of the economy and society. But the cover, importantly, was itself proof of how AI is transforming another crucial sector: the media.

The cover featured a striking figure 8 — or infinity symbol — in gradient colors of teal, orange, and yellow, floating above a miniature cityscape. Around this mathematical representation of limitless potential were arrayed digital icons depicting various sectors transformed by AI: doctors consulting computer screens, autonomous vehicles, smart classrooms, and connected urban infrastructure. At the bottom of the bright page, down below its characteristic masthead — and its motto, “Making China’s Best Newspaper” — were the words “created with JimengAI.”

The cover signaled an important departure for a newspaper that for decades had been known for its bold front-page graphics and striking photojournalism. It is certainly just the beginning of a trend that will reverberate through China’s media sector. The country’s newspaper industry in particular has faced major challenges in recent years, with sharp declines in print circulation and the closure of 55 newspaper titles in 2023, pushing outlets to cut costs and accelerate digital transformation. 

Talk of AI-led transformation in the media sector goes back at least six years to 2019, when surveys showed that 73 percent of Chinese journalists expected significant impacts on their profession due to AI technology. Meanwhile, state-run research institutes advocated strategically integrating AI across “news collection, production, distribution, reception and feedback” to comprehensively enhance “public opinion guidance capabilities” — in other words, to improve the party-state’s capacity to control information.

In recent months, as developments in AI have accelerated, there have been rising concerns about the future of the journalism profession in China — which has already been jeopardized, something far less talked about, by stringent political controls under Xi Jinping. When AI can ask questions, correct grammar, find information, and even write articles, many wonder if journalists will become obsolete. Writing earlier this year in China Youth Daily (中国青年报), a paper under the Chinese Communist Youth League that from the 1980s through the 2000s was known for its sometimes breakout reporting, journalist Zhang Tiankan (張田勘) voiced the hope and the anxiety: “Machine and robots free people from heavy physical labor and boring work, to do more important work, or let people become supervisors — and this beautiful prospect has today been partly realized,” he said. “But other worries have also arisen.”

Et tu, Graphic Designers?

It remains to be seen what the changes at Southern Metropolis Daily will mean for its visual designers and photojournalists. But the paper, which has been known through the years for its sometimes stunning page ones, has clearly not given up on its visual team entirely. 

Since January the newspaper has continued to feature strong news photography on the front page, such as its vivid full-page images during the Myanmar earthquake last month, or its stark cover back on April 5 showing then just-removed South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol in profile. 

Still, one wonders if the writing is on the wall. 

Since the start of the year, a total of 36 front pages at the Southern Metropolis Daily have been generated with the help of AI, accounting for 35 percent of total covers. The vast majority of these have been produced by staff with the help of Jimeng AI, an AI image generation tool developed by Faceu Technology, a subsidiary of ByteDance — meaning these visuals were brought to you by the same company that gave the world TikTok. 

Other images are produced using YuanBao AI (元宝AI), an AI assistant developed by the technology giant Tencent. A few were also made using Doubao AI (豆包AI), another Bytedance creation that until the DeepSeek burst onto the scene was regarded by some as the country’s number-one chatbot, with more than 60 million active monthly users by November 2024.

On average, Southern Metropolis Daily is producing two to three AI-generated front pages per week. One perhaps revealing gap occurred from March 5-11, corresponding with the “two meetings” of China’s parliament and political advisory body. During that period, none of the covers in the newspaper dealing with the political meetings in Beijing were generated using AI. In fact, they retreated into conservatism, using all-red backgrounds and stiff images from the Great Hall of the People. Even as the paper strained at its chains to provide visual interest, it was clear that the aesthetic from on high was all about sticking to the austere.

The transition to AI is certainly the order of the day, and media across the country will continue to harness the technology to save time, cut costs, and remain on the cutting edge. But for media whose role is focused through the lens of Chinese Communist Party control, certain optics will remain impervious to change. 

Don’t expect AI-generated images of Xi Jinping — authorized ones, at least — any time soon. 

As a 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck Myanmar and Thailand last Friday, the temblor rattled buildings across the sprawling Thai capital of Bangkok, home to an incredible 142 skyscrapers. When the shaking ceased all were standing strong — with one very notable exception. The State Audit Office (SAO) building in Chatuchak district, a 30-story skyscraper still under construction by a subsidiary of a Chinese state-owned enterprise, collapsed into a heap of rubble, trapping nearly 100 people inside. 

As of this week, 15 have been confirmed dead in the collapse, and a further 72 remain missing. Thailand announced over the weekend that it was launching an investigation to determine the cause of the collapse, and the prime minister said the tragedy had seriously damaged the country’s image. 

As emergency teams sifted through the wreckage in the immediate aftermath, the building’s primary contractor, China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group, came under intense public anger and scrutiny. Anger was further fueled by clear efforts by the company, and by Chinese authorities, to sweep the project and the tragedy under the rug. 

Shortly after the collapse, the China Railway No. 10 Engineering Group removed a post from its WeChat account that had celebrated the recent capping of the building, praising the project as the company’s first “super high-rise building overseas,” and “a calling card for CR No. 10’s development in Thailand.” Archived versions of this and other posts were shared by Thais on social media, including one academic who re-posted a deleted promo video to his Facebook account — noting with bitter irony that it boasted of the building’s tensile strength and earthquake resistance. 

Trying to access news of the building collapse inside China, Taiwan’s Central News Agency (CNA) reported that queries on domestic search engines returned only deleted articles from Shanghai-based outlets such as The Paper (澎湃新闻) and Guancha (观察网). In a post to Weibo, former Global Times editor Hu Xijin (胡锡进) confessed that the building “probably had quality issues.” Even this post was rapidly deleted, making clear that the authorities were coming down hard on the story.

Searches on Weibo today for “Bangkok” and “tofu-dreg projects” (豆腐渣工程), a term often used in Chinese to describe shoddy and dangerous construction, return almost entirely results prior to March 18, ten days before the collapse in Bangkok. One rare post from March 28, however, shares the screenshot of a social media post that day by Beijing Youth Daily (北京青年報), an outlet under the capital’s local chapter of the Communist Youth League, that apparently included street-view video of building collapse in Bangkok. A hashtag on the post reads: “#A building under construction in Bangkok collapses during earthquake#” (曼谷一在建高樓地震中坍塌).

The still image appears to capture an early moment in the building’s collapse, which was recorded at the same moment from another angle by a dashcam — footage shared in a report by the BBC. The Weibo user reposting the image from the Beijing Youth Daily account takes care not to directly mention the Chinese construction company, commenting only: “The earthquake was strong, but this was clearly a ‘tofu-dreg project,’ no? The relevant construction parties should be held to account!”

Several news outlets in the region have also reported, citing the commissioner of Bangkok’s Metropolitan Police Bureau, that an investigation has been launched into the alleged removal of 37 files from the building site, now a restricted zone, by four Chinese nationals. Bernama, Malaysia’s national news agency, reported Monday that one Chinese national, identifying himself as project director at the site, had been apprehended.

Meanwhile, the machinery of propaganda continued to turn out feel-good news on China’s response to the quake. The Global Times reported that emergency assistance for Myanmar embodied Xi Jinping’s foreign policy vision of a “community of shared future for mankind.” In Hong Kong, the Ta Kung Pao (大公報) newspaper, run by the Liaison Office of China’s central government, twisted the knife into the United States as it reported on the earthquake response, noting the absence of USAID, recently dismantled by the Trump administration. Behind the news, the paper declared, “China’s selfless response demonstrates the responsibility of a great power.”

On Tuesday, China’s military released a propaganda video called “Vanquishing Evil” (降妖除魔) that framed military exercises encircling Taiwan in a show of military force as a blockbuster of mythic dimensions. Complete with video game references, the propaganda spot, promoted widely by state media, made it all seem like a testosterone-fueled game for adolescents — rather than drum-beating about aggressive actions that could set off a deadly regional conflict.

Staged by the Eastern Theater Command of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the video — released as China announced joint military drills in waters around Taiwan — employed supernatural imagery from the Chinese classic “Journey to the West” (西遊記) to depict the military operations as an epic battle morally justified.

Slicing through bellicose montages of naval vessels, jetting aircraft, descending parachutes, and hustling ground forces, were title cards with martial arts terminology — overlaying video of the mythological Monkey King (孫悟空), the chief protagonist of the above-mentioned novel. These appeared to have been lifted directly from a popular video game, “Black Myth Wukong” (黑神话：悟空), which last year became the first major Chinese game to achieve breakthrough success in the West.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, audiences were not enjoying the theater.

Taiwan’s Presidential Office responded swiftly to the PLA’s exercises, with spokesperson Kuo Ya-hui (郭雅慧) saying that President William Lai (賴清德) had directed national security and defense agencies to monitor the situation closely. “In the face of external threats, our government will continue to defend our democratic and free constitutional system,” Kuo said. “We have the confidence and ability to safeguard national sovereignty, protect people’s safety, and maintain social stability.”

The PLA video made the rounds on midday news shows across Taiwan, and the country’s Central News Agency quoted China’s Global Times newspaper as saying that “the film seamlessly connects Sun Wukong’s demon-slaying abilities with the PLA’s powerful combat capabilities, highlighting the PLA’s aim to fight against and eliminate independence movements.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In recent weeks, Taiwanese President William Lai has faced a torrent of criticism from China after he characterized Beijing as a “hostile foreign force” (外部敵對勢力) during a March 13 national security meeting. This rhetorical escalation came alongside Lai’s announcement of plans to restore military trials​​​​​​​​​​​​ amid a surge in Chinese espionage cases, with official data showing 64 people in Taiwan were indicted for spying for China in 2024 (three times that in 2021).

China’s official state media have portrayed Lai as a “parasite” gnawing away at Taiwan’s well-being and future — another theme featured in propaganda from the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command on Tuesday.

The PLA video’s five title cards all draw from “Journey to the West” mythology, repurposing supernatural abilities from China’s literary heritage as modern military capabilities. The first, “Vanquishing Evil” (降妖除魔), frames military action as a sacred duty to eliminate demonic forces, while the last, “Immobilization Technique” (定身术), represents the ability to paralyze an opponent’s defenses through electronic warfare and precision strikes.

While Beijing frames its military posturing as fantasy-inspired heroism, Taiwanese citizens face the sobering reality that these metaphorical “demon-vanquishing” techniques represent actual missiles, blockades — and presumed plans for invasion. The gamification of conflict may entertain mainland audiences. But across the strait, the consequences could not be more real.