Meituan, Baidu Workers Fear AI Will 'Optimise' Them Out of Jobs

The word "youhua" (Chinese for "optimisation") has long served as corporate shorthand for layoffs in China's tech sector, often masked by phrases like "organisational restructuring." According to the South China Morning Post, it now carries an additional meaning: the increasingly urgent question in office corridors is no longer whether a worker is performing, but whether their job can be done by artificial intelligence.

Meituan, Baidu, and Xiaomi are among the companies named in the reporting, with internal sources and tech recruiters describing ongoing headcount reductions. Meituan denied social media claims that it planned to slash up to half of its product roles by the end of June, but the denial has not quieted worker anxiety. One Meituan employee was quoted as saying: "I don't know whether it will be me next."

Corroborating coverage from Rest of World puts some scale to the broader pattern: Alibaba reportedly cut its headcount by 34% in 2025, refocusing on AI and cloud infrastructure, while Baidu ended the same year with nearly 7% fewer employees. Sun Zhongwei, a public administration professor at South China Normal University, offers a check on the AI-displacement framing, arguing the organisational changes are "much more about adjusting to a downturn after that cycle of growth than being about AI displacing jobs."

That distinction is real and hard to resolve. Chinese companies avoid announcing layoffs openly, in part because of political pressure around stable employment, which makes separating AI-driven cuts from post-boom contraction genuinely difficult. Claire Deng, a Shenzhen-based headhunter, noted that "some jobs on the frontline are already being replaced by AI," but added that she does not think AI "has had a systemic impact on the labor market yet." What the reporting does not give you is a verified count of roles eliminated specifically because of AI versus cyclical right-sizing.

Workers who can move toward building or managing AI systems, rather than competing with them in product and operations roles, have the clearest near-term path. Whether the talent displaced from incumbents like Meituan, Baidu, and Alibaba ends up seeding the AI startups producing those same tools is the longer question worth tracking.