FOBO instead of FOMO: 996 was yesterday – Why China's AI boom is actually pure career panic

The AI ​​agent "OpenClaw" is causing panic in China: A cautionary harbinger for our working world?

Artificial intelligence is often seen in the West as an exciting opportunity, a driver of innovation, or simply a welcome way to make work easier. In China, however, a completely different, far more sinister dynamic is currently unfolding: Here, the rapid spread of AI tools is not driven by the fear of missing out on a lucrative trend (FOMO), but by FOBO – the existential fear of simply becoming obsolete in the job market (Fear of Becoming Obsolete). In a society that has always been characterized by extreme performance pressure and the infamous 996-hour overtime culture, technology adoption is becoming a ruthless struggle for survival.

Autonomous AI agents are not being installed by employees out of pure enthusiasm for technology, but rather out of sheer career panic. While the state is massively subsidizing this new "productivity miracle" with millions of euros, reports of security risks and so-called silent layoffs are piling up behind the scenes. The following text illuminates the psychological, economic, and social abyss of an AI hype that testifies less to a spirit of optimism than to sheer existential fear – thus providing an instructive, but also cautionary, look at the future of the global working world.

FOBO instead of FOMO: China's fear of becoming obsolete

When existential fear becomes a business strategy – why China's AI boom is less of a new beginning than an escape reflex

For years, Western debates about artificial intelligence have been dominated by the term FOMO, the fear of missing out. However, technology analyst Rui Ma, founder of the research and consulting firm Tech Buzz China, has suggested a more precise term for the Chinese version of this phenomenon to the news portal Semafor: FOBO, the fear of becoming obsolete. The difference between the two terms is not merely a play on words, but marks a fundamentally different psychological starting point. FOMO describes the fear of missing an opportunity, while FOBO describes the deeper, more existential concern of simply no longer being needed in one's life. This distinction gets to the heart of a phenomenon that has been observed in recent months surrounding the explosive spread of the AI ​​agent OpenClaw in China, and it explains why the Chinese reaction to new AI tools differs so fundamentally from that in Western societies.

A country in a permanent state of emergency of performance

For decades, China has been a society built on competitive selection, and this structure begins long before professional life. The Gaokao, the national university entrance exam for which some 12.9 million students registered this year, determines a young person's entire future in just a few days, creating a pressure of expectations that permeates the entire education system. Those who pass this exam then enter a job market long known in the technology sector for its culture of overtime. The acronym 996, which stands for a workday from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, gained notoriety in 2019 through the online initiative 996.ICU, with ICU being a reference to the intensive care unit for burnout cases. Alibaba founder Jack Ma publicly described the 72-hour workweek as a great Segen for young people, sparking nationwide outrage but simultaneously revealing the deeply ingrained belief among many entrepreneurs that uncompromising dedication to work was the only path to success. Even the People's Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, later took a stand against excessive overtime, though this did little to fundamentally alter the industry's competitive logic. Entrepreneurship in China operates within this environment according to an almost Darwinian principle of selection, where only the most uncompromising survive, and it is precisely into this already overstretched horizon of expectations that the new technology of autonomous AI agents now enters.

From tool to competitor: How OpenClaw became a cultural phenomenon

In November of last year, Austrian developer Peter Steinberger released an open-source project called OpenClaw, an AI agent that can be controlled via messaging platforms like Slack, WhatsApp, or the Chinese work tool Feishu and independently performs multi-stage tasks—from searching the internet and writing code to managing calendars and emails. Within about 100 days, the project became the most favored repository in GitHub's history, surpassing even reference projects like Linux, which took more than three decades to achieve comparable popularity. According to monitoring platforms, almost half of the more than 142,000 publicly visible OpenClaw instances originated in China, and according to the American cybersecurity firm SecurityScorecard, usage in China had already significantly outpaced its adoption in the United States. In Shenzhen, queues of nearly 1,000 people formed outside Tencent's headquarters, waiting for a free installation of the program on their own devices, some carrying network storage devices, others with used MacBooks. This scenario was repeated in numerous major Chinese cities, accompanied by its own vocabulary: The installation of OpenClaw was colloquially referred to as lobster farming, and enthusiasts appeared at meetings wearing specific lobster hats, while in parallel an informal industry of installation service providers developed, offering remote configurations for amounts between seven and forty US dollars and on-site visits for up to one hundred US dollars.

When career panic appears as enthusiasm

At first glance, this mass movement appeared to be an enthusiastic, almost playful adoption of new technology, similar to a viral trend on social media. However, closer examination paints a far more sobering picture. Beijing-based technology analyst Poe Zhao summed it up perfectly when he observed that what initially seemed like a grassroots movement of technology adoption was, in reality, closer to a grassroots movement of career panic. Installers who spoke with Chinese journalists reported that many of their customers didn't have a clear use case for the software; they installed it first and only discovered its true purpose later. The driving force was less a concrete increase in productivity than a vague fear of falling behind colleagues, competitors, or their own employer. A particularly striking example is the experience of Cindy Weng, a product manager in Shenzhen at one of China's largest financial corporations. Her company encouraged employees to participate in a competition to demonstrate their use of OpenClaw during the Chinese New Year holiday, with supervisors making it unequivocally clear that employees who did not use the tool could be replaced immediately. Weng described the atmosphere as increasingly grueling and characterized by a competitive pressure that completely overwhelmed the workforce.

The state as an accelerator of an uncontrollable dynamic

Contrary to what one might assume, this phenomenon is by no means merely a private, grassroots movement. Local governments and technology companies have actively fueled its development, seeing it as the fulfillment of a national strategy. Last summer, the government in Beijing announced a program aimed at integrating artificial intelligence into 90 percent of all industries and areas of society by 2030. The rise of so-called one-person businesses, in which a single individual uses AI agents to replace an entire organization, is officially considered an integral part of this vision. Shenzhen's Longgang District, which established China's first Office for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics last year, announced plans to support an ecosystem built around OpenClaw, and similar initiatives emerged in the technology zones of Wuxi, Hefei, and Suzhou. Authorities there provided grants of up to 10 million yuan (approximately 1.4 million US dollars) to companies developing significant applications based on the software, supplemented by free computing power and subsidized office space. The topic of one-person businesses was also prominently discussed at the National People's Congress, and competitions were organized at universities like Soochow University in which students were tasked with developing the most successful one-person business. This dynamic presented a direct economic interest for cloud providers such as Tencent Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, Baidu Cloud, and ByteDance's own Volcano Engine, because every actively run OpenClaw instance generates a continuous stream of queries to the underlying language models, thus generating direct revenue for the infrastructure providers. It was precisely for this reason that Tencent engineers set up folding tables in front of their corporate headquarters to help passersby with installation free of charge—a practice that is far less altruistic than it initially appears.

Safety risks and the downside of enthusiasm

The rapid, and in some cases uncontrolled, spread of a software tool that grants deep access to personal devices, files, and browser sessions has inevitably raised security concerns. Chinese regulators warned state-owned enterprises and government agencies against installing OpenClaw on service systems and required existing installations to be reported for security review. State-owned banks, in particular, were instructed not to allow the program on either company-owned or employees' personal devices. A similar directive was issued in Hong Kong, prohibiting the use of the AI ​​agent on all devices connected to government networks. The authorities' concerns are well-founded, as a system that communicates automatically with external model interfaces several hundred times a day, can access local files, and control browser sessions potentially opens up significant attack surfaces for data theft, espionage, or sabotage. At the same time, industry experts believe the software remains technically immature, further increasing the risk for users who, out of fear of being left behind, install an experimental tool on sensitive devices. This contradiction – state support for the spread on the one hand and growing safety warnings on the other – reflects exactly the ambivalence with which the Chinese leadership generally reacts to technological acceleration: The economic benefits are to be maximized, but control over the social side effects is not to be completely relinquished.

A labor market under double pressure

The deeper economic reality behind the FOBO narrative is most clearly revealed in labor market data. Youth unemployment among 16- to 24-year-olds reached nearly 17 percent in March of this year, almost four times the rate for the core workforce. For the 25- to 29-year-old age group, traditionally the transition from education to stable employment, the unemployment rate climbed to 7.7 percent in March, the highest level since the national statistics agency began tracking this age group separately just over two years ago. At the same time, the recruitment portal Zhaopin recorded a 31.1 percent year-over-year increase in job postings for AI engineers aimed at recent graduates, while postings for algorithm engineers in robotics surged by 57 percent. At Alibaba, AI-related roles accounted for more than 80 percent of the internships planned for 2027. This seemingly contradictory coincidence of high youth unemployment and an explosively growing demand for specialized AI professionals points to a structural mismatch between the existing qualifications of young professionals and the skills actually needed, not merely a cyclical economic downturn. In its own research of 1,800 respondents, Citigroup warned that China is approaching a tipping point in the adoption of artificial intelligence and that the resulting displacement of workers is increasingly becoming a structural headwind for already weakened consumer demand. Analysts at Capital Economics added that while the industrial sector accounts for roughly 30 percent of China's economic output, it provides only 20 percent of employment because production is becoming increasingly automated, systematically weakening the employment impact of manufacturing growth.

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Quiet layoffs in the shadow of the AI ​​narrative

A particularly revealing detail of this development concerns how companies are operationally implementing staff reductions. Reports of so-called silent layoffs indicate that several Chinese companies are initially requiring their workforce to use AI tools like OpenClaw and then gradually reducing both contract and permanent employees in the following months without officially communicating this as AI-related layoffs. One contract worker from Hangzhou reported that her employer began quietly laying off contract workers in March after the mandated rollout of OpenClaw. This practice aligns with an internationally observed pattern that former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself termed "AI washing," in which layoffs that would have occurred anyway for economic or strategic reasons are publicly presented as technology-driven modernization to impress investors or legitimize restructuring. The Chinese government itself is caught in a clear contradiction: On the one hand, it is actively promoting automation with its strategy for widespread AI integration; on the other hand, it has warned employers, particularly in the technology sector, against large-scale job cuts citing the use of artificial intelligence. A ruling by the Hangzhou Intermediate People's Court on April 28 of this year exemplifies this tension: The court ruled that a technology company had unlawfully dismissed an employee named Zhou after his quality assurance position was replaced by a large language model, citing Article 40 of the Chinese Labor Contract Law. However, the ruling does not prohibit the replacement of human labor with AI in general, but merely clarifies that the mere availability of an AI alternative does not, in itself, constitute a sufficient legal basis for dismissal.

The restructuring of the educational landscape as a symptom

Another, often overlooked indicator of the extent of this uncertainty lies within the higher education system itself. During the last five-year plan between 2021 and 2025, Chinese universities established more than 10,200 new undergraduate degree programs while simultaneously suspending or completely discontinuing admissions to 12,200 existing programs, representing a cumulative adjustment rate of over 30 percent. This year, for the first time, this adjustment rate exceeded 10 percent in a single year—a pace of structural realignment virtually unparalleled in any other modern education system. This unprecedented acceleration of curricular adjustment is itself an expression of the FOBO dynamics, transposed to the institutional level: universities fear releasing entire cohorts of graduates into a job market with outdated curricula, qualifications for which are already obsolete before they have even completed their studies. The British Guardian recently aptly described the situation as one in which record numbers of young people are encountering a job market that has little use for their skills, because entry-level positions in the technology sector in particular are increasingly affected by automation and AI systems.

Why Western and Chinese AI adoption follow different logics

A comparison with Western societies reveals why the force of the FOBO phenomenon is specifically Chinese, without making the underlying problem of automation any less real there. In the United States and Europe, the adoption of AI tools is often dominated by an exploratory, experimental approach, where users try out new applications without their own professional livelihood seeming to be directly at risk. In China, however, the proliferation of agents like OpenClaw encounters a society in which one's individual position in a competitive system perceived as a zero-sum game has been ingrained from childhood. Government advisor and economist Rui Ma succinctly captures this difference when she observes that the Chinese reaction is not about the fear of missing an opportunity, but rather the deeper fear of becoming fundamentally redundant in one's own life. This shift from an opportunity-oriented to an existential perception explains why many Chinese people install AI tools without knowing their specific benefits, simply because inaction is perceived as the greater risk. Consultant Tom van Dillen of the consulting firm Greenkern aptly summarized this observation when he stated that China was transforming an open-source tool into a national productivity framework at a speed that was unparalleled worldwide.

Economic ambivalence between innovation boost and social dynamite

From a purely economic perspective, the current development cannot simply be categorized as positive or negative, but must be understood as profoundly ambivalent. On the positive side, there is an enormous boost in productivity that sole proprietorships and small teams can achieve through the use of AI agents, automating administrative, accounting, and marketing tasks that previously required several full-time employees. For the Chinese economy, which has been struggling for years with weak consumer demand and a strained real estate sector, the multiplication of individual productivity offers an attractive growth impetus, especially in conjunction with the pronounced cost leadership of Chinese open-source language models, whose favorable pricing structure further increases the intensity of use and thus the utilization of domestic cloud infrastructure. On the negative side, however, there is the risk of an accelerated displacement, particularly of those young professionals who have traditionally gained access to the formal labor market through entry-level positions, coupled with a structural increase in the already high savings rate of private households. Savings reached its highest level in three years in the first quarter of this year, at 38 percent of disposable income, as consumers become increasingly cautious in their spending due to uncertain employment prospects. This propensity to save, in turn, weakens the government's efforts to boost domestic demand and increases the Chinese economy's dependence on exports, thus contributing to further trade tensions with key markets.

A look at the longer-term structural consequences

The question of whether the current uncertainty proves to be a temporary transitional phenomenon or heralds a permanent shift in the labor market structure cannot yet be definitively answered. Economists at the consulting firm Gavekal Dragonomics point out that part of the recent deterioration can be attributed to seasonal effects surrounding the Chinese New Year, as well as external shocks such as the ongoing disruptions in the energy market resulting from the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which makes a direct attribution to artificial intelligence difficult. At the same time, it is undeniable that the combination of an unprecedented speed of AI adoption, a cultural environment already characterized by performance pressure, and a working-age population of more than 700 million people makes China one of the most significant test cases for how modern economies deal with the automation of large parts of knowledge work. Estimates suggest that the increasing penetration of AI could potentially alter or displace up to 70 million jobs in China in the long term—a scale that would require considerable societal adjustments even for an economy of this size. The parallel observation that since the introduction of publicly accessible language models, no systematic increase in unemployment among particularly exposed occupational groups has yet been demonstrated suggests that the adjustment processes have so far been rather gradual than abrupt, which, according to observers, gives cause for both reassurance and concern, because structural shifts are often only reflected in official statistics with a considerable delay.

A society in a permanent state of emergency

Ultimately, the term FOBO (Fear of Obsolescence) provides a more accurate diagnosis of current Chinese conditions than any purely technology-centric explanation. What appears from the outside to be an enthusiastic mass movement toward new digital tools, on closer inspection reveals itself as an expression of a deeper societal condition in which competition, selection, and the constant fear of becoming obsolete have become the everyday reality. In this context, artificial intelligence does not primarily appear as a liberating tool that saves arduous work, but rather as an additional front in a competition that was already considered exhausting before its arrival. The state's promotion of this development, combined with the simultaneous security warnings and the first labor law restrictions imposed by Chinese courts, demonstrates that even the political leadership itself is torn between the desire for technological leadership and the fear of uncontrollable social consequences. For observers outside China, the real lesson of this phenomenon lies less in the technology itself than in the realization that the speed and form of a country's AI adoption are deeply rooted in its cultural and institutional structures. And that a society which encouraged its members to engage in permanent self-optimization even before the age of artificial intelligence recognizes the threat in this new technology before it recognizes its benefits.

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