Make money doing the work you believe in
Chinese enthusiasm for AI is overwhelmingly defensive. The mood on Bilibili and Xiaohongshu, where urban youth actually talk to each other about work, is far from anything "excitement". It is dread about being automated out of entry-level white-collar jobs that were already the contested terrain of a brutal post-COVID labor market. The same cohort cycling through AI tutorials is also driving the 考公 boom, the 灵活就业 euphemism, and the visible withdrawal captured in 躺平. People are learning AI workflows because they are afraid, not because they are enthused.
There is also a performative layer the survey cannot read. In Chinese workplace and platform discourse, declaring oneself excited about AI in front of your boss, coworkers, and friends — and of course in an international public survey — is the socially required posture for not appearing reactionary, not falling behind, or simply for appearing fashionable 赶时髦. Anonymous channels and personal sharing could tell a different story.
The op-ed's framing inverts. American pluralism is treated as the disease, with snake-oil hype and doom narratives crowding out reasonable middle-ground analysis. The doomer current the authors dismiss is doing real work. It gives ordinary Americans a vocabulary to articulate existential concerns, and it builds the elite-mass conceptual linkages that translate diffuse anxiety into public argument.
China's AI anxiety is at least as intense but remains fragmented. It has not produced an equivalent elite-public framework, partly because the political environment does not reward elite figures who would construct one. (See my essay attempting to introduce the American AI backlash to Chinese audiences have been ordered to be removed from domestic platforms) , What looks like national consensus is in part the suppression of the conceptual machinery needed to dissent coherently.
This matters for the op-ed's claim that American skepticism is a strategic liability. If Chinese enthusiasm is part defensive adaptation, part performance, and part the absence of legitimate channels for the concern to surface as elite discourse, then American publics resisting the HAI framing are doing something analytically reasonable.
American policy researchers should not flatten China's social fabric into a morale benchmark for domestic consensus-building.
