A Beijing People's Court ruled in December 2025 in favour of Liu, a worker hired in 2009 for manual map data entry and dismissed when his employer switched to AI-based collection 1. The court found that the employer's AI pivot was "a deliberate, predictable strategy, not unforeseeable", and therefore did not satisfy the Labor Contract Law test for terminating an employment contract on a major change in objective circumstances 2.
The Beijing court did the doctrinal move that Hangzhou later industrialised. Chinese employment law since the 2008 Labor Contract Law tightened employer dismissal rights significantly compared with the older 1995 framework; the "objective change" clause was already narrowly construed for cyclical economic conditions like a sudden loss of contracts or a regulatory shutdown. Applying it to deliberate AI strategy is consistent with the law's text but novel as application, and Beijing's December ruling did the work of saying so. Five months later, the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court picked up the same logic in the Zhou case and added the appellate weight that turns one judgment into guiding precedent. Beijing's MOHRSS recognised 42 new AI occupations in April , giving the state planning route a parallel to the judicial one.
For lower courts across China, the practical effect is that Liu and Zhou now read together as a doctrinal package: Liu establishes that AI redundancy is the employer's strategy, Zhou establishes the procedural remedy of mandatory retraining and reasonable reassignment before any termination. For multinationals, the practical effect is that an employer-side defence built on "AI changed our circumstances" no longer works in a Chinese labour court, regardless of which province the dispute lands in.
The Liu case did not make international headlines in December because no one had built the AI-displacement story into a frame that recognised it. The Hangzhou release was timed to that frame, on Workers' Day eve, with state media coverage attached. The Beijing court did the law; Beijing's media did the politics later.
