"Regulators issue guidance, courts reinforce and highlight it through selected rulings, and state media outlets explain the new line to the public." [state media outlets]
This sentence names the exact three-institution mechanism — regulators, courts, state media — by which the party-state processes AI grievances without independent labor or electoral channels.
Reasoning from this article
The article documents a repeating pattern across autonomous vehicles, AI companions, and actor likeness rights: public complaints surface, courts elevate 'representative cases,' regulators formalize rules, and state media sets the narrative. This is structurally different from democratic AI governance (union contracts, legislation, elections) and will produce systematically different AI labor protections — ones calibrated to regime stability rather than worker power. The same mechanism would apply to any future AI-related social tension in China.