China's State Council General Office issued Guobanfa [2026] No. 29 on 23 October, dated 16 October, setting out how ministries and provincial governments should adapt to AI adoption while keeping employment the priority. The directive asks regions to expand AI-related work: the core AI industry in the east, and data labelling and intelligent-device manufacturing in central and western regions. Small firms are to be supported through open-source projects and low-cost, lightweight digital tools.
It calls for faster recognition of new occupations, naming AI trainers and digital management staff among those in demand, and for universities and vocational schools to add AI majors and micro-credentials, with companies joining course design and teaching.
On the protective side, the directive says the scope, intensity and pace of AI adoption in labour-intensive industries should be handled cautiously. It encourages firms to set up an unemployment buffer period: tell affected workers in advance, and pay for retraining and redeployment. AI application projects that could cause significant job disruption would carry an employment-risk assessment alongside market-access review; other sectors are to be assessed as needed.
The rest of the document asks for cross-department sharing of industry and employment data and regional monitoring models, a set of AI employment research centres, AI job risk folded into existing mass-unemployment response plans, rules on AI use in human-resources management, and action against algorithm-driven hiring discrimination, fake recruitment and privacy violations.
Our takeThe design point worth noting is where the check sits: an employment-risk assessment attached to project review, before deployment, not a principle stated afterwards. That makes workforce impact an input to approval. But the text names no metric, baseline or reviewer, so two provinces can satisfy it with numbers that cannot be compared. The buffer-period clause is also a constraint on rollout speed rather than on capability, since notice plus retraining implies staged deployment. The thing to watch is whether a ministry publishes a template detailed enough to make the assessment reproducible.