Liu Qiangdong’s pledge to safeguard JD.com’s workforce from automation sits uncomfortably with his own ‘unmanned era’ vision and a flagship warehouse already running on four employees.
Liu Qiangdong, the founder of Chinese e-commerce giant JD.com, vowed in an internal speech this week to protect the company’s 900,000-strong workforce from AI and robotics, according to a Bloomberg report on Thursday citing a video circulating on Chinese social media.
JD.com will, on Liu’s telling, “do everything possible to safeguard employment for hundreds of thousands of staff, including blue-collar workers,” even as it accelerates the deployment of AI and autonomous logistics across the business.
The vow lands in a Chinese policy environment in which it would be unwise for a major employer to say anything else.
The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!Chinese courts ruled twice in six months in 2026 that companies cannot fire workers simply because an AI can do their jobs, holding that a strategic decision to adopt AI is not the kind of unforeseeable circumstance the Labour Contract Law contemplates as legal grounds for termination.
