Core Conclusion: This Is Not an Individual Tragedy but a Systemic Predicament
At 35 I was laid off. In two months I sent out nearly 800 résumés and in the end got only one outsourcing position with my salary cut in half. My old employer was willing to take me back—on the condition that I return my severance. When I complained to the regulators about age discrimination, the reply was “this company is very powerful, we can’t intervene.”
This experience made me see one fact clearly: a worker’s survival predicament is never the evil of any single company, nor simply a matter of human nature. It is a systemic result layered from industrial structure, population structure, stage of development, and the logic of governance. The letter of the law is the ideal; survival is the reality. Rules are written on paper, but interests are hidden underneath.
Seeing through this logic is not about being cynical—it’s about stopping the inner exhaustion and finding the most pragmatic way to conduct yourself within the rules that exist.
The First Conflict: The Split Between Law-on-Paper and Its Enforcement
The Statutes Themselves Have No Loopholes—the Loopholes Are in Enforcement and the Cost of Defending Rights
The Labor Law and the Employment Promotion Law have clear prohibitions on age discrimination, forced overtime, forced ranking (bottom elimination), and salary/social insurance—written clearly in black and white. But the vitality of law never lies in how perfect its provisions are; it lies in how low the cost of enforcement is and how high the cost of violation is.
The reality is a triple predicament stacked together:
First, the cost for workers to defend their rights is extremely high. Labor inspection is passive enforcement—it won’t proactively patrol a company’s employment details. To defend their rights, workers must first spend time gathering evidence—overtime records, discriminatory remarks, dismissal evidence—all of it in the company’s hands. Then they must spend energy running around; arbitration and litigation take months at the least and years at the most. More fatal is the hidden cost: industry blacklisting, background-check smears, losing your job, cutting off your livelihood. Ordinary people can’t afford a gap of unemployment, so most choose to swallow it.
Second, the cost for companies to violate the law is extremely low. Minor violations mostly just result in rectification or a verbal warning, and the fines are far lower than the labor cost of compliant employment. Forced ranking, free labor during probation, paying social insurance at the minimum base, withholding wages—these clearly illegal practices have become industry rules. The essence isn’t “not knowing it’s illegal” but that violating the law pays, and complying loses out.
Third, supply and demand are inverted, and the right to choose the rules lies with capital. Given a labor surplus, job seekers can only passively compromise to make a living. If you won’t do 996, someone will; if you won’t accept age discrimination, someone will compromise. That’s how hidden rules come to replace written statutes in reverse.
So the 35-year threshold, “under-30 preferred,” excessive demands during probation, minimum social insurance, unpaid overtime—it’s not that the law can’t govern these; under this cost structure, the law has been hollowed out.
The Second Conflict: The Industrial Backdrop Determines the Inevitability of Labor Involution
In Low-Value-Added Industries, the Only Compressible Cost Is People
Most of our domestic companies have long sat at the middle and low end of the industrial chain—not technology-driven or innovation-driven, but labor-driven, scale-driven, and involution-driven. This is the underlying code for understanding all excessive demands.
First, a lack of core technological barriers. High-end core technology, foundational industrial software, high-end chips, and basic architecture have long depended on imports and external technology input. Without a technological moat, companies can’t profit from technology premiums or patent monopolies, so competition can only come down to price and cost.
Second, compressing labor becomes the most direct means of survival. Companies without a technological moat have razor-thin margins. To survive, the most immediate way is to keep labor costs down: extend working hours, screen for young and cheap labor, lower the social-insurance contribution base. This isn’t one company being cruel; it’s the survival instinct of a low-margin model.
Third, the share of high-end innovative companies is too small to absorb massive employment. The vast majority of small and medium private enterprises, the lower and middle reaches of the internet, and traditional industries all survive on thin margins. Top American companies profit from technological barriers, patents, and high-end monopolies and don’t need to cut costs by over-demanding employees’ hours or blocking by age; for many of our companies, the only compressible cost is people.
When the entire industry is stuck in low-value-added competition, age discrimination, overtime culture, and excessive salary demands aren’t moral problems—they’re economic rationality determined by industrial structure. Cruel, but true.
The Third Conflict: The Buyer’s-Market Logic Under a Huge Population
To Low-End Industries, Older Employees Are Just a “High-Cost Burden”
A massive population base plus a homogeneous ordinary labor force forms a natural buyer’s market. Companies hold absolute bargaining power in the labor market—this is the fundamental soil for ever-intensifying age discrimination.
First, young people are more “cost-effective” labor. Better physical stamina, able to do unpaid overtime, lower salary expectations, no family burdens, easier to manipulate (PUA). In the labor-cost accounting of low-end industries, accumulated experience isn’t worth much; immediate output and how much can be over-demanded are what count.
Second, companies won’t pay for aging. The workplace doesn’t look at accumulated experience, only at immediate cost-effectiveness. Dropping from 35 to 30 isn’t the bias of some HR person; it’s a further cost-cutting involution after intensifying industry involution, economic downturn, and margin contraction. The age threshold will only get stricter—it won’t loosen on its own.
Third, the imbalance of labor supply and demand strips workers of bargaining power. Few positions, many job seekers—companies are naturally in a strong position. This structural imbalance leaves workers without even a bargaining chip.
Unless the population structure changes, the nature of the buyer’s market won’t change. Age discrimination isn’t something morality can solve; it’s the inertia of the labor-structure demographic dividend period continuing on.
The Fourth Conflict: The Realistic Trade-offs of Local Governance
Protect Corporate Survival or Protect Labor Rights? Local Governments Chose the Former
The core assessment metrics of local governments are GDP, tax revenue, employment rate, and corporate survival. Under this assessment system, strictly enforcing harsh labor laws directly raises local companies’ operating costs, and some thin-margin small and medium enterprises will go bankrupt, relocate, or cut positions—which instead leads to more unemployment and economic decline.
Thus a tacit balance forms: prioritize protecting corporate survival and the overall employment picture, and let the details of labor rights give way.
When I complained to the regulators about a company’s age discrimination, the staffer’s remark—“this company is very powerful, we can’t intervene”—isn’t a matter of personal attitude; it’s the most blunt logic of local governance. To the grassroots, a big company is a source of tax revenue, a pillar of GDP, a showcase of employment, a “hot commodity” that can directly affect performance evaluations; whether an ordinary worker defends their rights hardly affects assessment. Offending a major taxpayer might mean lost tax sources, a relocated company, deducted points; offending an ordinary person is just a word of apology—or not even that.
Labor inspection departments have no strong enforcement power; facing big companies, they can only mediate and persuade—daring not to fine hard or investigate strictly. A company’s cost of violating the law is extremely low: a small fine, a few words of admonishment, and they can keep acting brazenly. When the gains from violating the law far exceed the cost, why not do it?
This isn’t the local government’s dereliction of duty; it’s a helpless compromise under an overall weighing of interests. Economic development > business environment > corporate interests > ordinary workers’ rights. This priority ranking is written into every local official’s assessment sheet.
A Historical Mirror: The Same Fateful Logic Across the Ages
“In Prosperity, the people suffer; in decline, the people suffer”—the essence never changed
These four conflicts stacked together made me understand the underlying logic of Zhang Yanghao’s line: “In prosperity, the people suffer; in decline, the people suffer.” In any centralized governance system, those at the bottom are forever the bearers of cost and the suppliers of resources. When a dynasty flourishes, there are grand construction projects and harsh taxes and corvée, and the cost is apportioned to the people; when a dynasty collapses, with war and displacement, the people are the first to be crushed.
This rule of “keep them if useful, discard them if useless” doesn’t apply only to ordinary people. Chao Cuo, who cut the feudal lords to strengthen the court, was executed at the marketplace when crisis came; Zhang Juzheng, whose reforms prolonged the dynasty, had his house ransacked and his family purged after his death; Hu Xueyan helped the Self-Strengthening Movement, and when the times shifted he lost everything. Those in high positions are tools of imperial power and the system, and ordinary people are tools of the city and the economy—different levels, but the fateful logic runs through all of it.
Applied to today: when the economy is rising, companies desperately over-consume labor for growth; when it declines, salary cuts, layoffs, age discrimination, and intensified involution follow—and the first to be sacrificed are still ordinary people. Dynasties change, systems rotate, but the rules are always made by those at the top, and the cost is always shared by those at the bottom.
The only difference between ancient and modern times is that today there is a basic floor. In ancient times it was the crushing of life and death—starving corpses everywhere, human life like weeds; today, however helpless and involuted, there is still food and warmth, order, and basic security. What we endure is the “suffering of involution,” not the “death of survival.” That is the greatest progress of the age.
After Waking Up: The Most Pragmatic Way for Ordinary People to Conduct Themselves
Seeing Reality Clearly Is Not About Lying Flat but About Stopping the Bleeding
Talking about these things isn’t about peddling anxiety, still less about denying everything. Clarity about the world is never cynicism; it’s being able to conduct yourself well even after seeing reality clearly.
First, stop fantasizing about corporate conscience. Against the backdrop of involution in low-end industries, expecting companies to voluntarily give up excessive demands and consciously employ people compliantly is an unrealistic expectation. It’s not that some company is evil; the whole cost structure determines that “violating the law pays.”
Second, stop agonizing over the fairness of the rules. The gap between law-on-paper and enforcement, the trade-offs of local governance, the limitations of industrial structure—these are system-level variables that can’t be changed in the short term. Agonizing over fairness only causes continuous inner exhaustion and solves nothing.
Third, focus on irreplaceable core capabilities. Reduce the entanglement of debt, preserve your room to survive, expand diversified income, don’t be bound to a single city or a single industry, and hold the bottom line of health and emotions. The mistake of ancient famous ministers was binding themselves entirely to the imperial system; the most important thing for modern people is to learn to distinguish “attaching to a system” from “preserving oneself.”
Fourth, acknowledge the reasonableness of emotions but don’t wallow in them. Anger, grievance, powerlessness—all very reasonable. Encountering injustice and finding no one to turn to isn’t an individual’s fault, isn’t a lack of effort—it’s the gap between law-on-paper and enforcement. But wallowing in emotion changes nothing.
Conclusion: Within the Given Rules, Guard Your Own Rhythm
No need to complain about the world’s injustice, and no need to wallow in grievance and anger. The road of rule of law is still long, and the enforcement of labor rights still needs time. We may never live to see the day when the rules are fully fair, but we can make ourselves stronger.
See reality clearly, accept it, and then guard your bottom line, do well what you can—within the given rules, guarding your own rhythm, health, and right to choose. This is the most sober way for a worker to live in the world.
After all, the meaning of our effort was never to change the world, but to not be easily changed by it.
评论
0 条评论