The most striking paradox of the contemporary world may be unfolding in China. For much of modern political and economic thought, economic prosperity, technological innovation and political liberalisation have been seen as developments that reinforce one another. The assumption is that an open society, freer exchange of ideas and political pluralism create the conditions in which innovation flourishes. China complicates that assumption. From the political perspective, China remains a highly centralised one-party state, with a political system fundamentally different from Western democracies. Yet economically and technologically, it has emerged as one of the world's most formidable competitors, from electric vehicles and solar panels to artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing and robotics. The contrast has become increasingly visible in the country's extraordinary push into humanoid robots. At the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, more than 2,000 robots from 666 teams competed in 51 events. Chinese robots have also been setting remarkable performance benchmarks. One Chinese humanoid, Tiangong Ultra, recently ran 100 metres in 8.86 seconds– faster than the human men's world record of 9.58 seconds. The spectacle is fascinating, but the more important question lies beyond the robot races. If machines are becoming increasingly capable of doing human work, how does a country with hundreds of millions of workers continue to create employment? That is where China's experience becomes particularly relevant for big population countries such as Pakistan. China is not simply trying to stop automation. Nor is it treating technological unemployment as an unavoidable consequence that society must simply absorb. Instead, its emerging approach is to push automation and artificial intelligence while simultaneously trying to create new industries, expand services, retrain workers and generate employment elsewhere. Khalid Mansoor, former Special Assistant to the Prime Minister on CPEC Affairs and Minister of State, argues that the interesting Chinese lesson is not that technology has somehow failed to destroy jobs. Rather, it is that China is attempting to create new sources of employment faster than technology eliminates old ones. "There is an important irony: China is one of the world’s most aggressive adopters of robots and AI. Yet it is simultaneously pursuing an explicit ‘employment-first’ strategy," he said in a comment to the ET. That distinction could become one of the most important economic questions of the AI age. The robot and the worker China's employment challenge is enormous. According to the figures cited by Mansoor, China had around 725 million employed people at the end of 2025, including about 475 million urban workers. The country created 12.67 million new urban jobs during the year, while its migrant-worker population reached roughly 301 million. At the same time, China's demographic structure is changing rapidly. Its population declined by 3.39 million in 2025, while people aged 60 and above already represented around 23% of the population. This creates a contradiction. China needs automation because its workforce is ageing and shrinking. But it also needs employment because hundreds of millions of people continue to depend on work and income. "The Chinese policy concept increasingly emphasises human-machine collaboration," Mansoor said. The objective is not necessarily to ask how many workers can be eliminated by a robot. It is to ask how much more productive an individual worker can become when equipped with AI, robotics and advanced machinery, he highlighted. That distinction matters enormously. A textile worker assisted by automation is not necessarily the same economic proposition as a textile worker replaced by automation. If technology raises the productivity of the first worker, the economy can potentially use the additional productive capacity to expand output, exports and new businesses. Mansoor points to China's employment-first approach as an example of this thinking. Rather than treating automation as an argument for abandoning labour-intensive sectors, China is simultaneously seeking to sustain employment in areas such as manufacturing, construction, trade, tourism, catering, elderly care, childcare, logistics and community services. The logic is straightforward: if one category of work becomes more automated, employment has to expand somewhere else. From factory jobs to employment ecosystems China's most interesting achievement may therefore not be the robot itself but the industrial ecosystem built around technology. Consider an electric vehicle. The employment question is not simply how many workers assemble an EV on a factory floor. The wider ecosystem includes batteries, charging infrastructure, power electronics, software, dealerships, logistics, maintenance, financing and recycling. The same logic applies to solar energy. There are manufacturing jobs in polysilicon, wafers, cells and modules, followed by installation, grid integration, storage and maintenance. Artificial intelligence produces another chain: chips, data centres, cloud computing, software applications, robotics, maintenance and AI-enabled businesses. In other words, the factory may become increasingly automated while the economy around the factory becomes more complex. This is one reason China's industrial strategy deserves attention. Mansoor argues that China is deliberately creating entire employment ecosystems around emerging industries instead of focusing only on the number of workers employed directly by a particular factory. There is, however, a necessary qualification. China has not solved technological displacement. Research cited in the supplied analysis suggests, said Mansoor, that robot adoption can reduce employment and wages for some categories of workers while increasing demand for higher-skilled workers. China's rapidly developing gig economy also provides work but raises questions about job security, benefits and human-capital development. Even China's humanoid-robot boom illustrates the gap between technological achievement and commercial reality. Reuters reported in August that Chinese humanoid manufacturers had produced world-leading hardware, but many machines remained too slow, unreliable or insufficiently adaptable for broad factory deployment. The lesson, therefore, is not that China has defeated the job-loss problem. It is that China is experimenting with how to manage it. Local govt system secret for booming economy Dr Muhammad Farooq Afzal, founder of the Economic Diplomacy Forum China-Pakistan, identifies China's local-government system as a major factor behind its development and public-service delivery. According to his assessment, around 75 per cent of China's budget is spent locally, with roughly 25 per cent going to the central or federal level. Whether every element of this model can be transferred to Pakistan is a separate question. But the contrast raises an important issue about devolution. China's economic story also becomes more complicated when viewed through its provinces and regions. A visitor arriving in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, encounters a very different China from the high-tech image projected by Beijing, Shenzhen or Shanghai. In Xinjiang, Muslim communities include Uyghurs, Hui, Kazakhs and Kyrgyz. Rural areas contain orchards and farms, while urban Urumqi combines Chinese Hanzi with Uyghur script and bustling commercial areas such as the Grand Bazaar. China’s development has been equitable across all segments of its society, including its Muslim-majority provinces. However, many Muslims there appear less connected to their faith, with some holding traditional Muslim names while expressing indifference to religion. This may stem from China’s focus on material development over abstract or theological pursuits, a pragmatic approach that carries significant weight when viewed from the perspective of someone living in Pakistan. A visit to the Wu Yi Tongxiangdong Mosque in the 12th Division of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps offers another picture of China: agricultural land, orchards, local communities and a mosque serving the surrounding population. In Urumqi's urban commercial areas, meanwhile, the Erdaoqiao Mosque sits alongside the Grand Bazaar, where traders and shopkeepers interact with visitors from different countries. This provincial diversity is important because China's development has not been built only from Beijing. It has involved an extraordinary degree of experimentation at local and regional levels. And perhaps the clearest example is Shenzhen. From a small economy to global hub Shakeel Ahmad Ramay cites, in an article, the Shenzhen experience as a case study that Pakistan should examine carefully. Shenzhen's transformation began after it was designated as a special economic zone and received extensive infrastructure and administrative support. The city was subsequently given greater authority over financing, investment and trade decisions. The result was an economic transformation that turned what was once a relatively small economy into one of China's most important economic centres. The lesson, however, is not simply to copy Shenzhen's label and establish another special economic zone. It is to understand the institutional architecture behind it. Shenzhen introduced faster government approvals, a one-roof model for public services and mechanisms designed to reduce the administrative burden on investors. Authorities facilitated electricity, water, taxation, trade and other business requirements. The local government also invested in roads, sewerage, telecommunications and other infrastructure. More importantly, government services expanded beyond conventional administration. Investors could receive assistance related to accounting, legal services, business planning, marketing, import-export procedures, skills training and management consulting. The state, therefore, did not simply announce an investment zone and wait for investors to arrive. It attempted to make the zone function. That distinction is highly relevant to Pakistan. The China-Pakistan institutional gap Pakistan's 18th Amendment transferred substantial political and financial responsibilities to the provinces. Yet, as Afzal argues, provincial governments have not always passed comparable authority and resources down to local governments. The issue is particularly important for economic development because businesses do not operate at the federal level alone. They need roads, water, electricity, municipal services, permits, local infrastructure, skills and functioning markets. A federal government can announce an industrial policy. A provincial government can establish an economic zone. But the investor ultimately encounters a local administration. That is where policy becomes either reality or paperwork. The Chinese experience suggests that the central question for Pakistan should not be whether it wants technology or employment. It needs both. The first requirement is to make employment a macroeconomic objective. Every major industrial, trade, investment and technology policy should be examined through a basic question: how many productive jobs can this policy create, and what kind of skills will those jobs require? The second is to avoid protecting obsolete employment indefinitely. A more sustainable model is to move workers from declining activities into new ones through retraining, productivity improvements and industrial expansion. The third is to build labour-intensive export industries while using technology to raise productivity. Pakistan has potential in textiles and apparel, food processing, agriculture, engineering, surgical instruments, sports goods, construction, IT and business-process outsourcing, among other sectors. The objective should not be to choose between workers and AI. It should be to create AI-enabled labour-intensive exports. The fourth requirement is vocational training. China's employment approach increasingly links skills development with labour-market demand. For Pakistan, that means producing technicians, electricians, mechanics, machine operators, software specialists, healthcare workers and other vocational professionals alongside university graduates. The fifth is to think about ecosystems. An EV plant is not merely an assembly line. It can become the centre of an ecosystem involving suppliers, batteries, charging, software, finance, logistics, dealerships and repair services. That is the difference between attracting a factory and building an industry. The road from Karachi There is also a more basic lesson in infrastructure. Afzal points to Pakistan's transport network as an example of misplaced priorities, arguing that stronger north-south connectivity could reduce logistics costs and integrate markets more effectively. For an economy seeking exports, the question is not simply how many kilometres of motorway are constructed. The question is whether the road network connects factories to ports, farms to markets and cities to each other at competitive cost. This is where the experience of China's provinces becomes relevant. Economic transformation did not happen because China discovered one magic policy. It happened through the accumulation of infrastructure, local experimentation, industrial policy, administrative reform, investment facilitation, skills development and export-oriented production. The larger question The political structure of China remains fundamentally different from that of Western democracies. Its approach to political freedoms, expression and governance cannot simply be separated from any assessment of its development model. But economic systems should also be examined on their own terms. China presents a particularly difficult case for simplistic assumptions because a country that is politically centralised and restrictive in ways that differ sharply from Western liberal democracies has simultaneously become a major centre of technological innovation and industrial competition. Its robotics drive is an especially vivid illustration. But the deeper story is not a robot running 100 m in less than nine seconds. It is what happens after the race. Can technology move from demonstrations into factories? Can it raise productivity? Can new industries absorb workers displaced by old technologies? Can ageing societies use automation to compensate for shrinking workforces? And can developing countries adopt technology without abandoning the millions who still need productive employment? China is still working through these questions itself. That may be precisely why its experience matters. The real contest of the AI age may not be between machines and workers. It may be between economies that can successfully reorganise work around technology and those that allow technological change to outrun their ability to create new productive opportunities. For Pakistan, the lesson is less about copying China's political system or replicating Shenzhen. It is about understanding the machinery underneath China's economic transformation: technology plus industry, industry plus infrastructure, infrastructure plus local implementation, and all of it tied to employment and productivity. The robot may be the most visible symbol of China's technological rise. The less visible story is how the country is trying to ensure that there is still an economy around the robot, and work for the people living in it.