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Kun Tian

This spring, American graduates did something commencement audiences rarely do: they booed the future being sold to them. At several universities, students jeered speakers who praised artificial intelligence (AI), so often that a National Public Radio report advised this year’s orators to avoid the subject altogether.
That reaction is too easily dismissed as technophobia. These are among the most digitally fluent graduates ever. What they reject is not AI; they reject a version of it in which the rewards belong to companies while the risks land on the bottom rung of their careers.
A technology one can build on feels like possibility. A technology being built on one’s prospects feels like fate. That, more than any technical difference in the machines, is what now separates many young Americans from many young Chinese in their attitudes towards AI.
I watch this from Europe, caught between America’s frontier labs and China’s application economy, perhaps seeing both more clearly for it. Writing in this newspaper recently, Wei Wei attributed the gap to economic outlook and differing levels of trust. That is right as far as it goes, but the deeper divide is one of agency: whether institutions invite the young to build with AI or mainly ask them to absorb its consequences.
Young Americans hardly lack access. They have coding assistants, open models, campus AI labs and the world’s deepest start-up culture. The United States still leads at the “zero to one” frontier, but frontier leadership is not the same as broad agency. Much of that capability sits inside a few large firms, and to a new graduate it appears first through an anxious labour market: fewer junior openings, more automated hiring and employers reluctant to train for tasks software might soon do.
The graduate labour market was weakening before every effect could be blamed on AI: interest rates, overhiring and sectoral slowdowns all matter. Still, the experience is real. Recent US college graduates have faced unemployment above the overall workforce rate, with underemployment hovering above 40 per cent in recent data. For a 22-year-old, the question is not whether AI will transform productivity but whether the first job that once taught them how an industry works still exists.
Cheerful talk of AI as an industrial revolution can then sound less like inspiration than eviction notice. When a speaker praises a tool linked to lay-offs, automated screening and vanishing entry-level work, booing is not irrational. It is a demand to be seen.


In China, the same technology reaches the young through different institutions and stories. Open-source models from DeepSeek to Alibaba’s Qwen and others have lowered the cost of experimentation. The state, meanwhile, frames AI as a national application project, not only a research race. Beijing’s “AI Plus” agenda pushes it into manufacturing, healthcare, education and finance, and employment-first policies cast new AI-related jobs as part of the answer to youth unemployment, not only a source of it.
That framing is attached to visible routes into use. Within months of DeepSeek’s release, some 90 of China’s leading hospitals had built it into doctors’ workstations to speed up diagnosis. One-person, AI-enabled businesses are emerging even in a difficult job market, and training schemes are steering graduates towards AI, robotics, drones and adjacent skills.
This is not because China has solved its youth employment problem; it plainly hasn’t. The point is that the dominant public script casts the young as participants in a national buildout, not the workers to be replaced.


Narratives matter because they allocate roles. In the American telling, AI is a disruptive force a few companies impose on everyone else, bringing lay-offs, surveillance, copyright fights and concentrated power. Many of those concerns are legitimate, and frontier leadership breeds its own anxieties, from existential risk to systems no one fully controls.
In the Chinese telling, AI is a strategic technology to diffuse through the real economy. That story flatters the state and hides plenty of costs, but it also tells a young graduate: this is where your country intends to build, and you can help carry it into clinics, factories and classrooms.
Neither story is innocent. China’s optimism can encourage waste, inflated claims and deeper surveillance. Automation will displace Chinese workers too, whatever policy documents promise. Young Chinese are not naive about this; their sharpest worry is shifting from job loss to a fear that leaning on AI could dull their own skills.
American scepticism, meanwhile, is not a failure of imagination. It is what an open society sounds like when it argues seriously about labour, copyright, safety and power. The problem is not caution, but caution without a convincing construction project for the young.




That is the lesson Europe should absorb. Regulation is necessary, but it does not give graduates a first job, a toolbox or reason to believe they can shape the technology. If Europe merely polices American platforms and buys Chinese applications, it will produce neither frontier confidence nor application agency, only spectators.
A society’s mood towards AI is not handed down by the machines but built by institutions, labour markets and stories. Tell the young that AI is inevitable and will delete the first rung of their career, and they will boo. Give them open tools, visible uses and a story in which they are builders, and many will build.
The machines are similar. What differs is whether young people are invited to become their authors or left to feel like their subjects.


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Giving young people a chance to help build the future with AI is more effective than a narrative in which they are its inevitable victims


Giving young people a chance to help build the future with AI is more effective than a narrative in which they are its inevitable victims.


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Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Why Chinese youth aren’t booing AI, unlike American graduates

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Giving young people a chance to help build the future with AI is more effective than a narrative in which they are its inevitable victims

Giving young people a chance to help build the future with AI is more effective than a narrative in which they are its inevitable victims