‘New humanities’ signals Beijing’s bid to recast traditional disciplines as a strategic resource in the AI era. MoE (Ministry of Education) is retooling ethics, culture and critical thinking into interdisciplinary programs integrating big data and AI. The aim is to anchor technological development in PRC values and strengthen discourse power (话语权) in global governance.
All tertiary studies are broadly categorised as either ‘humanities’ (including social sciences) or STEM. Unlike Western universities with their market-driven interdisciplinary research, the ‘new humanities’ are state-led, interdisciplinary, and explicitly aimed at building a distinct PRC ‘knowledge system’ that serves national development needs.
The restructuring is not limited to the humanities, though they bear the brunt of it. Resources flow to majors serving strategic emerging industries including AI and semiconductors. STEM fields aligned to national strength priorities take precedence.
The ‘new humanities’ answer an urgent need: high-tech talent adept at using AI. At the same time, the appeal of a university degree translating into a white-collar job and a foothold in the middle class is rapidly fading. Graduates are returning to vocational schools for ‘catch-up schooling’, in search of practical, tradeable skills that humanities degrees no longer reliably provide.
labour market myths and realities
Labour market evidence complicates the conventional story. Demand is splitting: routine humanities roles are contracting while AI-augmented, high-level humanities work is rising in value. Spring 2026 recruitment data show demand spiking for humanities graduates in AI-related roles: AI narrative designers, large-model humanities trainers, ethics researchers and data evaluators, with the humanities share in new-economy jobs rising from around 2.3 percent to 26.2 percent year-on-year.
Demand in these sectors already outstrips qualified candidates, creating an ‘AI dividend for humanities graduates’. Yet such roles remain a minority within the overall job market and the structural loss of humanities programs continues. There is no imminent reprieve for humanities graduates.
Students are required to choose between physics and history as core subjects Under the gaokao 3+1+2 exam format (three compulsory subjects, one choice between physics and history, two electives), students who pick history over physics find their university options sharply narrowed. This entrenches the tilt toward STEM. Physics-centred curricula open a wider range of university majors, pulling students away from history and related humanities tracks. Shrinking class sizes and growing stigma frame the humanities as the fallback for those who cannot handle STEM.
History-track enrolments have declined in many regions while physics-track numbers surge, with ratios in some areas approaching 2:8. Universities closed over 3,600 humanities majors 2024–25, with cumulative cuts reaching over 30 percent since 2021. Under the national undergraduate major guide, 65 of 92 major categories require physics, 56 chemistry, giving STEM-oriented paths a clear institutional advantage.
policy response
Xi Jinping called for ‘four new disciplines’ in 2021: ‘new’ engineering, medicine, agriculture and humanities. The goal was to shift from narrow, isolated disciplines to broad, problem-oriented interdisciplinary thinking serving state strategy. MoE followed with a first batch of projects to research and reform the ‘new humanities’. Party-linked research centres argue that advancing them builds cultural confidence, supports ideological work and strengthens soft power. In a digital-driven era, single-discipline research can no longer cope with global competition; ‘new humanities’ must be interdisciplinary, rooted in PRC realities, and oriented directly to national resilience.
The ‘new humanities’ are framed as a restructuring, not removal, of traditional disciplines. This is a ‘positive self-revolution’ argues Beijing, integrating humanities with policy needs and STEM to build a distinct PRC knowledge system, aiming to anchor PRC-led narratives on global governance.
At top universities, the ‘new humanities’ are taking shape through new curricula and cross-disciplinary programs that pair the humanities with AI and data science. Renmin University introduced its I-STAR smart curriculum, offering AI research courses and honours minors including AI and Digital Society. Fudan University launched a university-wide humanities data hub; AI tools tailored to humanities research and teaching are under development. Universities are reluctant to cut humanities majors despite MoE pressure, and actively work to prove that humanities graduates are employable. Practical confusion has resulted. AI integration, report lecturers, has become mandatory before the pedagogical case has been made. Integration paths remain vague.
anchor or instrument?
The ‘new humanities’ may be Beijing’s pragmatic response to a problem it cannot ignore. AI now performs tasks that once entailed humanities skills: translation, summarisation, research synthesis, text analysis. The case for humanities graduates in a job market that already favours STEM is eroding. Retooling the humanities to fuse ethics, culture and critical thinking with big data and AI serves two ends: it gives humanities graduates a foothold in an AI-driven economy while embedding humanistic guidance at the core of technological development.
The goal is a PRC-led knowledge system that serves state strategy while projecting discourse power globally. This approach, however, carries a contradiction. The instrumental logic that makes the ‘new humanities’ viable, measuring value by utility to the state, may leave no room for the critical inquiry they are meant to provide.
Critics warn that recent cuts reflect not only technological change but the spread of an instrumental logic into higher-education governance, where calculation, efficiency and output become the central criteria. People ever more feature as data points rather than moral agents.
AI-enabled governance is reshaping universities by extending metric-based management into classrooms, aligning teaching and research with quantifiable outputs. Courses are ever more standardised, recorded and evaluated via AI systems. The humanities resist being measured and quantified in such terms. Enrolment, funding and institutional support decline because they lack, not value, but quantifiability.
Rather than a rupture with the past, the ‘new‘ humanities flag a shift in educational philosophy, argues Jiang Yi 江怡, philosophy professor at Shanxi University, ‘seeking innovation from continuity‘. In her view, new humanities guard against the purely instrumental use of AI, ensuring that technological self-reliance is paired with ethical and social responsibility. They promise a reordering that values critical thinking, ethical framing and human-machine collaboration over memorisation.
Blanket funding cuts to humanities risk ‘cultural self-castration’, warns Yu Jianxing 郁建兴, director of Zhejiang University’s Institute for Social Governance (and veteran ‘civil society’ expert). The humanities are ‘anchors and compasses’ for social development, cultural confidence and national cohesion. As technology advances, embedding humanistic guidance and ethical stewardship at the core of AI governance becomes critical; without it, tech becomes a hollow, powerful tool without moral direction.
humanities teachers
Tong Dezhi 佟德志 I Tianjin Normal University vice president
The current wave of cuts and restructuring in humanities programs is part of a broader global trend. While acknowledging the risks identified by critics, Tong maintains that universities are justified in adjusting programs to better align with the job market and industry demand. Tong frames this not as the abolition of the humanities but as a necessary ‘self-revolution’, calling for a redesigned ‘new humanities’ more tightly integrated with the PRC’s social and policy agenda, aligned with development goals, and explicitly oriented toward building an independent PRC knowledge system and autonomous talent training capacity. The path forward is to embed the humanities in interdisciplinary formations that cross with STEM, incorporate digital tools and AI into teaching and research, and directly serve national governance and modernisation priorities.
Professor in the Department of Political Science at Tianjin Normal University, Tong also serves as dean of the School of Politics and Administration and director of the National Governance Research Institute. He is also a member of the State Council’s Discipline Review Group, a member of the Ministry of Education’s Professional Teaching Steering Committee for Political Science, and vice president of the Chinese Political Science Association. He has been recognised with several national honours. Tong earned his PhD in law from Tianjin Normal University in 2003 and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Peking University’s School of Government (2005–08).
Li Xin 李昕 I Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences Institute of Philosophy and Culture deputy director
Recent cuts to humanities funding reflect the deeper penetration of an instrumental logic into education, one that prioritises calculation, efficiency and measurable output. This mode of thinking treats humans as data points and risks reducing the humanities to skills that can be simulated or replaced by AI. When education management worships efficiency, it undermines the humanities’ role in sustaining value-anchored, ethical reasoning and in safeguarding what it means to be human in an age of deepfakes, algorithmic control and opaque technologies. Li calls for a ‘new humanities’ that integrates AI tools into research and teaching while refusing to subordinate its mission to instrumental logic. The humanities do not compete with AI on utility. They provide the ethical and philosophical direction.
Concurrently, a researcher at the Nanjing Massacre History and International Peace Research Institute, Li took her PhD in Literature from Renmin University in 2007, after which she completed her postdoctoral research at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 2012.
Yu Jianxing 郁建兴 I Zhejiang University Institute for Social Governance director
The PRC’s long-term competitiveness depends on integrating technical capacity with human judgement, rather than privileging one over the other. Yu rejects the narrative of a general decline in the humanities as oversimplified; cuts may reflect weak programs, but blanket reductions risk a short-sighted loss of cultural capacity, amounting to what he calls ‘cultural self-castration.’ Yu warns against shallow ‘humanities plus code’ mixes and calls for deep integration of human insight and technology across values, curriculum and assessment. Education must shift from rigid disciplines to interdisciplinary, problem-solving models focused on critical thinking and adaptability. Yu proposes structured human–AI collaboration in learning, defining green, yellow and red zones for AI use, while cautioning that data-driven education may create new hidden standardisation and erode creativity.
Yu’s research focuses on government management and innovation, digital governance, public policy and social governance. He is a leading academic interpreter of intelligent governance reforms. He is the director of Zhejiang Gongshang University’s Common Development Statistical Monitoring and Intelligent Governance Laboratory. He served as Party secretary of Zhejiang Gongshang University from 2023–26. He earned a PhD in Philosophy from Fudan University in 1999. He has held visiting positions at the University of Edinburgh (2004), Arizona State University (2006–08) and others.