The Linguistic Economy of AI Tokens: Tokenization and Linguistic Capital in China’s Tokenomics

This article examines how “tokens” have emerged as a new unit through which language, labor, and value are being reorganized in China’s rapidly expanding AI economy. Building on debates on linguistic capital, language commodification, and AI labor, I argue that tokenization marks a significant shift from communicative competence as an embodied human resource to linguistic capital as computationally quantifiable, allocable, and infrastructurally governed. While tokens are technical units of model computation, in contemporary China they have also become public signs of national infrastructural power, corporate productivity, and individual employability. Drawing on digital ethnographic analysis of viral social media interactions on the topic of tokens produced between February and March 2026, the article traces how tokens are translated, debated, and contested across three scales: national imaginaries of “token export,” corporate struggles over token allocation and AI-driven workplace control, and workers’ self-reflections on deskilling, dependence, and the erosion of labor subjectivity under “vibe coding.” I show that tokenization is not merely a technical protocol imposed from above, but a hybrid cultural process through which Chinese users reinterpret AI infrastructures using everyday metaphors, parody, and occupational gossip. In this emerging linguistic economy, tokens function simultaneously as units of computation, pricing, governance, and self-evaluation. The article contributes to AI and labor studies by showing how tokenization reshapes linguistic capital itself: no longer simply a human capacity accumulated through education and social experience, but a resource increasingly externalized into priced infrastructures that workers must strategically access, manage, and contest.