Hi, everyone, Klaus again,
The other day a friend said that
people in upper class must be bad and evil.
I’m sure that’s what most people believe.
After all, most of us are at the bottom of the social ladder.
We can only imagine what the upper class is like.
Thus, conspiracy theories are easily spread.
Since we are at the bottom, we tend to accept that the upper class is more evil.
This issue is somewhat similar to the millennium-old debate between elitism and populism.
Today let’s talk about it.
Let's start with my own personal experience.
In the US, white people are relatively in the upper class.
I believe that those of Chinese descent living in the US will agree that
we seldom face racism from white people in our daily life,
and that racism comes more from ethnic minorities.
White people are generally very polite and friendly.
Also, they are generally law-abiding.
White people generally cannot be bribed.
You’d have to bribe someone else.
In the US, white landlords generally do not accept cash.
Landlords of ethnic minorities (especially Chinese landlords)
generally only take cash to evade taxes.
It makes sense that those receiving a better education
and growing up in a quality environment become better people.
Of course, we do not have access to high society,
so we can’t draw conclusions based on our own experience alone.
History is the best teacher. History can always give us answers.
Look at China’s millennia-old history,
excepting foreign invasions such as the Yuan and Qing dynasties,
the turmoil of the lower class has always caused the greatest harm.
Every peasant rebellion in history was basically by bandits,
who robbed, killed and burned everywhere they went.
This anti-China netizen summed it up pretty well,
“Mass murderers of the Chinese were mostly from the lower class.”
Huang Chao, the leader of the peasant rebellion in the Tang Dynasty,
after failing in the imperial exam, wrote the following poem,
“On the eighth day of the ninth month when autumn arrives,
my flowers will bloom whilst a hundred flowers wither.
My fragrance will penetrate Chang'an and reach the sky,
and the entire city will be wearing golden armor.”
Later, he indeed led a peasant rebellion and slaughtered the city.
Li Zicheng, the leader of the peasant rebellion in the late Ming Dynasty,
Zhang Xianzhong, who composed the poem "Seven Killings”,
and the Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan, who also failed in the imperial exam, etc,
all caused mass extermination of the population during their rebellions.
The Chinese Communist Party also belonged to this category.
In the early decades of its ruling
the CCP caused tens of millions to hundreds of millions of deaths in China.
The rise of Communist China was, in essence, a peasant uprising at the bottom.
The only difference is that it was augmented by foreign forces (the Communist International).
Thus, in the history book written by the CCP,
all those mass murderers in history are talked about positively.
Memorials have been built for them everywhere
as a tool to teach the people patriotism.
By contrast, unrest caused by the upper class usually didn’t involve mass killings of the people.
After all, the upper class is relatively more educated and cultured.
They consider their reputation and have a moral compass.
But when peasants do evil, morals can be entirely thrown out of the window.
For instance, during the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Cultural Revolution,
as instructed by Mao Zedong, 0.5% of the nation was labelled as “rightists”.
When Mao’s order was executed, perhaps that number became 5%,
aka, the historical expansion of the Anti-Rightist Movement.
Even though the Central Committee had rules and regulations,
if you so much as rolled your eyes in front of your superior,
you would be labelled as a “rightist”.
Besides, the central government was not likely to teach you how to kill people.
However, people at the bottom were killing each other in all kinds of colourful ways.
Nowadays, regarding how the Chinese were tortured during the Japanese invasion,
many Chinese people gnash their teeth in hatred.
However, the Chinese have done a far better job at torturing Chinese people.
Thus, the idea that people at the bottom are kinder,
that there is a paradise somewhere in the world
where a group of innocent people, untainted by society, dance together,
where a kind little girl pick mushrooms in the mountains,
is merely a fairy tale.
I myself grew up in a rural area.
I’ve seen siblings waging wars on one another, nobody wanting to look after their aging parents.
People at the bottom can fight to the death over scraps.
How could people of the lower class be viewed as kinder?
Only with material satisfaction can we enrich our spiritual life.
Elitism and populism are both extreme views.
But if I have to pick a side, I will stand in the middle slightly in favor of the elite.
Historical facts, logic, and my personal experience have taught us that
people are inherently evil (that's why we need the rule of law, not the rule of man).
Everyone is evil, but generally speaking, the upper class is better.
Of course, the elites here not referring to fake snobs like Xi(he only graduated from primary school)
Now let's delve deeper into this issue,
which reminds me of the question posed by Musk earlier.
Is capital more exploitative or power more exploitative?
Nowadays, many Chinese people are always criticizing capital.
Let’s discuss.
The pursuit of profit is an essential part of the definition of capitalism.
In other words, capitalism is profit-seeking.
Capital and power are both scythes.
In front of the two, we ordinary people are all lambs to be slaughtered.
Capital seeks to maximize profit and will at least leave you alive.
Power which is ever-hungry, however, will skin you alive if you dare to resist.
Why is communism successful in China?
Of course, there are many reasons,
one of being that for thousands of years,
China’s autocratic society has always emphasized agriculture and suppressed business.
This coincides with communism, whose ultimate goal is to eliminate capitalist private ownership.
Cracking down on commerce and eliminating capital both enable those in power to better exploit.
Commerce and capital create equality, expand freedom and increase social mobility.
Commerce was born out of bartering.
It is about equality, mutual benefit and the pursuit of a win-win situation,
everything the small-peasant mentality produced by China's millennia-old autocracy is not.
Peasants crave self-sufficiency, no collaboration and no exchange.
This has led to the selfishness of the entire nation,
who lacks cooperation and win-win awareness, not to mention the spirit of contract.
In addition, capital must be mobile. Without mobility, there is no capital.
Thus, China has been restricting the movement of goods and people for thousands of years.
In ancient China, people needed a permit to leave a county.
Most people could spend their entire lifetime never leaving their birthplace.
If capitalism shears, then power butchers.
By contrast, the flow of capital promotes the flow of social class.
That's why China's reform and opening up has created a large middle class.
That's why there are so many stories of people
building their wealth from the ground up through hard work.
For millennia, there was no class mobility in China.
Once a slave, always a slave.
The poor could never get ahead in life.
Therefore, power and capital are essentially in competition with each other.
It can even be said that the entire history of civilization is a struggle and compromise between power and capital.
Many Chinese people do not realize this.
Many people in China condemn capital.
So many people hold the view that capitalism has hijacked power.
If you feel that the social ladder is harder and harder to climb,
that is because capital has lost to power,
and has become the puppet and scythe of power.
The core of a capital-led market economy is competition.
Capital's exploitation will at least give you options.
Power, however, forces you to buy and sell.
You do not even have the power to say no.
In the future, as the totalitarian dictatorship in China strengthens,
I believe more and more people will feel the change
from being exploited by capital to being exploited by power.
Well, that's it for this video.
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This is Klaus. See you next time.