Across China, people are gathering to learn AI tools while businesses sell courses and communities promising a way to keep up. The story is not simply that AI is popular: anxiety about being left behind is helping build an industry around learning it.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
In an account published by New York magazine, journalist Afra Wang describes a small gathering near Hangzhou where a young instructor showed attendees how to use Codex and Figma to build websites and apps. Wang says similar self-organised classes have become common in Chinese towns and cities over the past three years.
The paid end of that market is more organised. Wang visited Shengcai Youshu, a company offering online classes, in-person training and co-working space. The article says it had more than 80,000 paying members to date and hosted over 2,000 offline events a year. Membership cost ¥3,365, which Wang compares with an average monthly private-sector salary in Hangzhou of ¥7,671. The account also describes cheaper imitators selling courses with titles such as “DeepSeek 101” and “Get Wealthy With AI”. Read Wang’s report.
Why it matters
This is a useful view of AI adoption beyond product launches and investment figures. Wang describes young people trying to learn tools they believe could help their work, alongside a market selling instruction and the promise of economic advancement. The article also reports warnings from Chinese state media that some course sellers exploit people’s anxiety about new technology.
The stakes are practical: learners may be paying a substantial sum for training in a fast-changing field, while sellers can make money from the urgency to keep up. A class can teach useful skills; the promise that AI will transform someone’s prospects is a much bigger claim.
Our read
There is real value in helping people learn to use new tools. But when the sales pitch starts to sound like “learn AI or be left behind”, the student deserves evidence about what a course teaches and what its graduates can actually do. The ladder may be useful; check who is charging for it.
What to watch
- Whether course providers publish clear curricula, prices and evidence of learner outcomes.
- Whether the courses teach practical skills or mainly sell reassurance about an uncertain future.
- How learners distinguish useful training from expensive promises of upward mobility.
Discussion spark: When AI courses sell both practical skills and hope of escaping economic insecurity, what evidence should learners demand before paying?
Sources and evidence
- Source update (15 October 2026, 09:00 UTC)
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