Alex Colville
In the run-up to the annual gathering of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) legislature in March, reporters from a top state-run media platform engaged citizens on the street about how the political meetings, known as the “Two Sessions” (两会), were relevant to their lives. Instead of asking questions directly, the People’s Daily Online journalists invited sources to direct their questions to DeepSeek R1, the country’s latest large language model (LLM) (China Brief, February 11, March 19).
One young woman asked, “I’m about to graduate, what kind of job opportunities can AI help to provide?” (我即将毕业，AI能帮助提供什么工作机会)—a timely question as legislators touted artificial intelligence (AI) as a solution for future development (People’s Daily Online, March 2).
DeepSeek replied that there were “abundant employment opportunities” (广阔的职业发展空间) thanks to AI, listing multiple roles, such as data annotators, and noting the high salaries these roles get paid. When this author asked DeepSeek the same question, it also responded by providing the same assurances and advised fresh graduates to combine their pre-existing skills with AI to “grasp the career opportunities in the AI era” (把握AI时代的职业机遇). Such an answer makes no mention of the social turbulence AI is creating in a job market in which youth unemployment remains high. For example, over the past three years, machines moved to fill 60 percent of all data annotation in the PRC, pushing the role of data annotator closer to obsolescence (CCTV, January 13). Omitting such concerns, the People’s Daily Online story focused instead on the idea of DeepSeek as a “happiness code” (幸福密码)—a technology displaying what the Party-state is doing to address the national concerns of the day and reassuring the people that they are in safe hands. In other words, this new technology is being harnessed to serve the needs of a much older system: The “public opinion guidance” (舆论导向) system that aligns the public with state policy through propaganda.
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