The growing popularity of driverless taxi services in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, and other cities in mainland China has led Chinese policymakers to question how quickly they should embrace a technology that threatens to eliminate many jobs in traditional industries. For Chinese consumers, robo-taxis are a safer, if not safer, alternative to traditional taxis driven by drivers. Fares for robo-taxis are relatively low due to reduced operating costs, and in theory, these autonomous vehicles could operate 24/7. According to the South China Morning Post, there are about 500 driverless taxis currently operating on the streets of Wuhan, making them the preferred mode of transportation for young consumers in the city of 13.7 million people. These vehicles currently operate on 35% of the provincial capital’s road network.
For those in favor of robotaxi deployment in mainland China, short-term pain is seen as a price to pay for introducing a technology that will benefit more people: There’s no point in resisting the advancement of smart, driverless vehicles, just as there was when cars replaced horse-drawn carriages on roads.
Baidu’s self-driving ride-hailing service Apollo Go begins operation in Wuhan, capital of central China’s Hubei province, on July 12, 2024. Photo: Coco Feng China’s transition to robotaxi services comes at a time when the country is racing to lead the world in the development and adoption of self-driving cars and artificial intelligence technologies. It would be foolish for a country to intentionally slow down innovation. Many once-important sectors have already disappeared in China, thanks to high-tech innovation. Pagers were once a thriving business that created hundreds of thousands of jobs from manufacturing to retail to call centers from the mid-1980s to the 1990s. With the steady rise of feature phones and then smartphones, few would have regretted the disappearance of pagers.
Still, taxi drivers and other interested parties in mainland China have strong reasons to push for a more cautious nationwide rollout of robotaxis. Taxi drivers, and those working in China’s gig economy ride-hailing and on-demand delivery services, are often middle-aged men who work long hours to make ends meet, and whose families are likely to fall into poverty and despair if they lose their jobs to robotaxis and other driverless transportation services.
Tech job losses, if left unchecked, could worsen China’s unemployment rate. In the taxi industry alone, there are about 1.4 million licensed taxi drivers in mainland China, compared with a total of 7 million registered ride-hailing drivers.
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Baidu gets permission to offer fully driverless robot taxi service in Beijing
Baidu gets permission to offer fully driverless robot taxi service in Beijing
In theory, the introduction of advanced technologies could create new jobs. But the reality is more complicated. For example, it would be too hard for a 45-year-old taxi driver in China to hone his skills and become a software engineer. Meanwhile, in Hong Kong, Uber Technologies’ services remain in a legal grey zone because the government wants to protect the local taxi industry. The loss of millions of jobs to benefit robotaxi companies would be a classic social problem of capitalists profiting at the expense of workers. This would run counter to the Chinese government’s common prosperity agenda at a time when the overall economy is weakening. Policymakers therefore need to decide whether they are adequately prepared to overcome the disruptions that may be caused by innovative technologies. Beyond robotaxis, robots and system automation are replacing human labor on China’s manufacturing assembly lines. Super factories across the country no longer employ tens of thousands of workers for production because they have been transformed into so-called unmanned factories with only a few skilled workers. While many low-skilled Chinese workers worry about being left behind by the country’s economic growth, mainland Chinese authorities continue to support the adoption of new technologies and the digitization of industries — which is the right choice in the long term.
In an ideal scenario, the adoption of technology will increase productivity, create new jobs, and generate prosperity by giving less-privileged sections of society greater access to resources.
