Liu Qiangdong: Robots Will Eventually Replace Delivery Workers; JD.com Plans to Retrain 700,000 Blue-Collar Workers for Maintenance Roles
Claire Weston
JD.com founder Liu Qiangdong told the APEC CEO China Forum that couriers will "basically no longer be needed" once robot delivery scales — and JD.com has signed up roughly 120 schools to retrain 700,000 blue-collar workers in robot maintenance, one of China's largest corporate-led retraining bets, arriving as the gig workforce nears 320 million.
What exactly did Liu Qiangdong say?
At the 2026 APEC CEO China Forum, he stated outright: once delivery robots go mainstream, couriers are "basically no longer needed."
JD.com has launched an internal program called "Nirvana Plan" (涅槃计划), pointing displaced workers toward robot repair and maintenance. His logic: "Robots are machines — they will always break down."
The company has signed agreements with roughly 120 schools to put its 700,000 couriers and other blue-collar staff through technical training.
Can the retraining math actually work?
Liu bets that "robots always break" is a durable source of jobs. This means → he is assuming maintenance demand scales linearly with robot deployment.
He gave no timeline for when robots will replace couriers at scale, nor any detail on whether 120 schools can absorb 700,000 trainees.
In plain terms = the direction is sketched out, but the gap between vision and execution — the timeline, the capacity, the funding — is still blank.
How severe is China's employment pressure?
China's "flexible employment" workforce — gig workers, platform laborers, and other non-traditional arrangements — is set to hit 320 million this year, up from 200 million five years ago. That is roughly 40% of total urban employment.
Youth unemployment stood at 16.3% in April. Robots are displacing blue-collar jobs; AI is displacing white-collar ones. Both trends are running in parallel.
This reflects a labor market under structural pressure, not just cyclical stress — technology is squeezing both ends at once.
What are policymakers and civil society saying?
Minister of Human Resources Wang Xiaoping said in March the government is "exploring effective pathways" to extend social insurance to gig workers, and is watching emerging roles like drone pilots and AI trainers.
Beijing's 15th Five-Year Plan, approved in March, designates robotics as a pillar of the modern industrial system. The International Federation of Robotics notes China aims to channel AI research into "physical-world applications with robotics as the primary driver."
Human Rights Watch urged China to back its new commitments with enforcement, noting the country voted this month for the ILO Convention on Decent Work in the Platform Economy — but warned that "commitments on paper are meaningless if workers cannot organize, speak out, and hold platforms and the government accountable."
What competitive pressures does JD.com itself face?
JD.com is one of China's largest online retailers, competing directly with Alibaba and Meituan, and operates the Joybuy platform across the UK, France, and Germany.
In May, the European Commission opened an in-depth foreign-subsidies probe into JD.com's €2.2 billion bid for German electronics retailer Ceconomy.
This means → JD.com is pushing robot substitution at home and M&A expansion abroad — two capital-intensive fronts at once. How much resource the retraining plan actually gets is a real question.
Content is for reference only, not financial advice.