A top theoretical journal of the Communist Party has acknowledged that a stark economic divide exists between China’s booming AI sector and its struggling traditional industries. And while arguing that this divergence was not unique to China, the Qiushi Journal stressed that rapid technological advances must not leave ordinary citizens behind. In a commentary published on its website on Sunday, the journal conceded that there was an obvious “gap in temperature” in the world’s second-largest economy. “Macroeconomic data serves as the economy’s ‘thermometer’, while micro-level experiences represent the public’s ‘feels-like temperature’. It asserted that such a gap was a long-standing challenge for major economies, noting that “the larger the economic scale, and the greater the number of market participants, the more frequently such a gap appears”.