Why China's AI enthusiasm reads more like anxiety

Surveys keep showing a striking gap. Stanford's 2026 AI Index found 85 percent of Chinese respondents call AI beneficial, against 45 percent of Americans. A KPMG and University of Queensland study put trust in AI at 73 percent in China and 52 percent in the United States. In Asterisk, Zilan Qian argues that reading this as optimism gets the picture wrong.

The argument runs through China's recent history. When state enterprises were restructured in the late 1990s, about 24 million workers lost their jobs by the end of 1999, with seven to nine million laid off each year between 1998 and 2000. In Shenyang's Tiexi district, half of 300,000 industrial workers were let go. Qian draws on the anthropologist Xiang Biao, who described a mindset born from that period: you either catch the bus toward success or you are left behind for good. Each new wave, from English schooling to the mobile internet to AI, gets treated as the last bus.

So a Chinese respondent saying AI is good can mean three things at once: genuine appreciation, a belief that AI is inevitable and nationally necessary, and a fear of being shut out if they hesitate. Qian's comparison is cashless payment, which people adopted partly because refusing it meant being unable to buy things. One figure captures the tension: 49 percent of those surveyed expect AI to take jobs and say they will accept it anyway. As Qian puts it, enthusiasm and fear are not mutually exclusive.

Why it matters

If you track AI adoption to decide where to build or sell, high approval numbers from China are not a clean signal of demand. Defensive adoption and willing adoption look identical in a survey but behave very differently once the product disappoints.