Country Story

China

A guided country diagnostic on automation exposure, trade-facing intensity, and upper-middle-income scale.

China sits well above the current East Asia & Pacific median on average task exposure and leans clearly more toward substitution than augmentation. The strongest signals concentrate in tellers, billing, postal clerks, brokerage clerks, and other transaction-heavy routines, while a strong goods-facing automation proxy keeps the country from reading like a service-only case.

Where it sits

Where does China sit?

China sits well above the current East Asia & Pacific median on average task exposure and leans clearly more toward substitution than augmentation. The strongest signals concentrate in tellers, billing, postal clerks, brokerage clerks, and other transaction-heavy routines, while a strong goods-facing automation proxy keeps the country from reading like a service-only case.

Peer comparison

Compared to the peer group

East Asia & Pacific peers plus the regional median.

Exposure profile

What kind of exposure?

High-exposure tasks account for 19.3% of China's task bundle. Substitution-oriented exposure is 25.6%, while augmentation-oriented exposure is 4.9%. This matters for how the results are interpreted: The current country profile tilts more toward substitution than augmentation, while still remaining a descriptive measure of task exposure rather than realized adoption or labor-market displacement.

Top occupations

Which occupations stand out?

The strongest modeled signals in China sit in Tellers. These are the occupations with the strongest modeled exposure signal after transporting tasks through the weighted SOC-to-ISCO bridge.

Technology mix

Which technology channels dominate?

These shares describe the dominant technology channel across exposed tasks in the country bundle.

Key takeaways

What does this mean for China?

China is the first East Asia country diagnostic and a natural complement to the existing United States-China comparison. It shows how a large upper-middle-income economy can rank high on both the task layer and the goods-facing proxy without collapsing into a single manufacturing-only story.

Keep exploring

Ready to go deeper?

The full interactive case study lets you explore peer comparisons, switch metrics, and browse occupations, industries, and skills in detail.

Where China sits

Regional medianChinaLog GDP per capitaAverage exposure

Average task exposure summarizes the country task bundle under the shared atlas framework.