The four little boxes in the monthly summary are all zeroes
In October my Alipay recorded total spending of 2640.65 yuan across 54 transactions. Of that, 373.20 yuan went through reimbursement and sits under the car-care line, which leaves 2267.45 yuan that actually came out of my own pocket. Add the 4000 mortgage and a family of three pushed 6267.45 yuan out the door in one month, and 63.8 percent of it went straight back to the bank; the remaining thirty-six percent is what living costs.
I read the four little boxes in the monthly summary one by one: large purchases 0, buy-now-pay-later 0, instalments 0, automatic deductions 19 transactions. Those four boxes laid out side by side are a medical report - not one purchase in the whole month that stepped outside the everyday, 19 of them went off on their own, and only 35 were actual acts of spending on my side, an average of 1.74 a day - less than two keystrokes a day.
That 676.16 under top-ups and bills is really two sums: Hangzhou opened the 2027 collection window for resident medical insurance on 15 October, running to 25 December. Children’s cover costs 340 yuan a year against a government subsidy of 750, so my child’s entire year of medical cover is 340 yuan that I pay on his behalf. The remaining 336.16 is water and electricity. The 600 under account withdrawals is my child’s living allowance. Food and drink is 352.44 over 12 transactions and daily necessities 107.06 over 10, which works out at 29.3 yuan a sitting and 10.7 a run. A family of three ate out twelve times in a month and bought household goods ten times. You call that living frugally? That is what it looks like when nothing is left over.
One Chinese person spends 2456 a month; my three of us spend 756 a head
The statistics bureau’s 2025 communique puts annual per-capita national consumption expenditure at 29476 yuan - urban 35869, rural 20259 - which spread over twelve months is 2456 a head nationally, 2989 in cities, 1688 in the countryside. My 2267.45 divided by three people comes to 755.82 yuan.
What my family of three spent in one month is less than what one average Chinese person spent in one month. Our per-head monthly consumption is thirty percent of the national average and a quarter of the urban one. My three people spend 27209 yuan over a year while one average person spends 29476, so my whole family, for a full year, comes to 2266.6 yuan short of one stranger’s year. And that gap of 2266.6 is almost exactly the 2267.45 I spent in a single month.
That same month the three of us took a trip to Shanghai. Shanghai’s per-capita consumption expenditure for 2025 was 57076 yuan, 4756 a month, and our 756 a head is less than a sixth of that - the three of us spent a day in Shanghai at a sixth of what a local spends.
This 2267 is only the Alipay page
The 4000 mortgage is not inside this 2267. School fees, tutoring and insurance are not all inside it either - my child’s tutoring for one year covers three months of this. Nothing on WeChat Pay, in cash, or deducted at the payroll reaches those 54 transactions. I had to count these expenses out of Alipay page by page, and everything left over is a bill I had no choice about.
Transport is 159.96 over 6 transactions, 26.66 each. That cannot cover a Shanghai round trip for three people, and those tickets did not go through Alipay. The bar for July, 8563.39, is 3.24 times October - that is a different account. August at 2169.22, September at 2777.42, October at 2640.65: those three bars are my normal now.
Who actually buys a 1.2 million necklace in Lujiazui
In the mall under that financial tower in Lujiazui I saw a necklace priced at 1.2 million yuan. What I stood there working out was not whether it looked good. Who can afford it? Where did the money come from?
Who buys them has a definite answer. The 2025 Hurun wealth report, published 30 June 2026, counts 5.06 million households with assets above 6 million and 126,000 above 100 million, and the wealth in those 5.06 million households totals 145 trillion yuan, which is 1.07 times national GDP. China has roughly 494 million households on the census count, which means one percent of households hold seven percent more than everything this country created in a whole year. Those 126,000 households are two and a half in every hundred thousand in China. For them 1.2 million is not a big purchase, it is small change.
Something runs the other way: the 6 million tier, the 10 million tier and the 100 million tier are all falling, down 68,000 households, 2.9 percent and 4,000 households respectively. The people standing at that counter are no longer the 2021 people - the wealth has shrunk, the price tag has not.
Where their money comes from - the report answers it itself
The sharpest line in that same report is this: among households above 100 million in assets, 80 percent are business owners, and business assets make up more than 70 percent of what those families hold. That answers where the money came from outright: it was not saved out of a salary, it was priced into existence.
Set three rules beside it and you see why the estimate keeps climbing. Individuals pay no income tax on what they make trading A-shares, an exemption that has run since 1994 and is still called temporary. A home held five years and owned as the family’s only flat is exempt on sale, and there is no recurring property tax anywhere in the country. Inheritance tax and gift tax have never been introduced at all. My salary at a 45 percent top marginal rate and their untaxed valuation run on two sets of rules. Is that fair?
The tax authority’s own filing data draws the same line: people declaring over 1 million a year are about 1 percent of filers and pay over half of all personal income tax. The top 10 percent by declared income pay over ninety percent of it. After the threshold rose to 5000 yuan a month in 2018 the share of urban workers paying income tax fell from 44 percent to 15 percent - the line now is that on comprehensive income under 100,000 yuan a year you basically owe nothing. The top ten percent pay ninety percent of the income tax - the number is the mechanism.
As for whether their spending comes out of somebody else’s wage - in October’s debt piece I wrote that one person’s cost saving is exactly another person’s lost income. The other half is this: the income of those 126,000 households comes from no one’s wage, it comes from the quoted price of what they own. The circular flow does not bind them. What binds them is this: you pay 1.2 million for it today, and only then is it worth 1.2 million tomorrow.
Why 500K a year was never about effort
An ordinary person earning 200,000 yuan a year is already doing extremely well, 300,000 takes a great deal of effort and a great deal of grinding, and beyond that it stops being something personal effort can reach - you have to lead a team.
The official thresholds back the 200,000 claim: below 100,000 you basically owe no income tax, and only 15 percent of urban workers pay any at all, so in the years I earned 20,000 a month I was inside that remaining 15 percent. What percentile 200,000 sits at, nobody publishes. The state marked 100,000 and 1 million and left the whole space between them unmeasured.
All 5516 A-share listed companies have filed for 2025. Market-wide output per worker reached 660,000 yuan, and the statistics bureau’s own comparison puts that at a 3.6 times advantage over the whole economy. Divide 66 by 3.6 and the whole-economy average is roughly 183,000 yuan per person. In the same year listed companies paid 7.35 trillion yuan in staff compensation and added 530,000 employees. During my probation I took home 12,000 a month, 144,000 a year. The average person in this country creates 183,000 yuan of value in a year, and those two numbers sit almost on top of each other. So on the average line my wage and my output are close to the same thing - that is not even refined exploitation. The 500,000 threshold is not one you cross by working a bit more: sell your own output to its absolute limit and you are still in the 183,000 range. 500,000, a million, 39.98 million - all of it has to come from outside output.
This table of pay per head has no column called effort
Take the most glaring lines of average pay per employee in the 2025 filings - not the highest paid, per head - and follow where the money comes from. ST Xinchao in oil and gas extraction at 4.06 million yuan is resource rent, not cleverness. G-bits in gaming at 1.4811 million is IP and cash flow. Montage Technology at 943,100 and Moore Threads at 718,900 in semiconductors is valuation. Thirty brokerages pay over 500,000 per head, sixty percent of the sector, and that is licences. Banking and insurance are the floor to compare against: China CITIC Bank at 594,700, Ping An at 344,000.
These sectors are not paying high wages - they are dividing the yield on one asset by headcount. So the accurate version is not “people earning over 500,000 are leveraged by capital”: it is that earning over 500,000 almost never happens on the personal-effort road. It happens wherever you are hooked onto an asset. The same pair of hands writing the same code is worth 943,100 in one company and 120,000 in another. What has that got to do with effort?
The top band is blunter still. Rongzheng sampled 5463 companies and found 18 executives earning over 10 million a year, the highest at 39.98 million. Output cannot explain 39.98 million. That is 110,000 yuan a day, every one of 365 days - who believes it. That is equity cashing out, a valuation landing once on somebody’s bank book.
The share did not fall; the door did
The statistics bureau read the flow-of-funds accounts in June 2026. The household sector’s share of primary distribution gross income in GNI went from 62.6 percent in 2020 to 63.5 percent in 2024, and labour compensation from 52.4 to 54.4 percent. So in the macro accounts the claim that labour’s slice keeps shrinking is not true. The share did not fall; it rose a little.
So where does my anger get to sit? Somewhere else: the share is still there, and the door has changed - from years served to scarcity. Those thirty brokerages and those semiconductor firms do not ask whether you can do the work when they hire. They ask whether you can be hooked onto the asset.
The ratio is fixed before anyone is rated
Leading a team means creating the most value for the least outlay. How is that done - incentives? Many companies do not. They use 271 to make you grind on your own. Grind or leave.
Alibaba’s 3.75, 3.5 and 3.25 correspond to 20, 70 and 10 percent, internally also called 361, and what matters is the order: the ratio is locked in before anyone is assessed. That makes it not an evaluation result but a distribution rule. Once the team is big enough, somebody has to take that 10 percent. You do not have to actually be bad - you only have to be on a team of the right size. The ancestor of that ratio is General Electric’s vitality curve, 20-70-10. So “capital rigs the game” is not an emotion; it is a traceable institutional transplant, from Jack Welch’s boardroom onto my appraisal sheet.
The courts got there first: Supreme People’s Court Guiding Case No. 18 - ZTE Communications Hangzhou against Wang Peng, published November 2013 - holds that ranking last in an assessment is not the same as being incompetent for the job, and dismissal on that basis was ruled unlawful with compensation payable.
The grind, measured: enterprise employees worked an average of 48.3 hours a week in September 2026, and 48.6 across 2025. The legal standard, set by a 1995 State Council rule, is eight hours a day and 40 hours a week. Eight extra hours a week over 52 weeks is 431.6 hours a year, which at eight hours a day is 54 extra working days. So the full version of grind or leave is this: work 54 extra days for one of the seats in that 10 percent, a number of seats fixed before you walked in the door.
I am not without capital. I have one kind, and it is going down
The People’s Bank of China’s 2019 survey of urban household assets covered 30 provinces and over 30,000 households. Mean total household assets came to 3.179 million yuan, the median to 1.630 million, and the PBoC wrote that 1.549 million gap into its own report as showing “the uneven distribution of household assets”. Housing takes close to seventy percent of household assets, 1.878 million yuan per household on average. Ordinary urban households in China are not without capital - they have exactly one kind of capital, and it is a flat - and that one kind has been going down since 2021.
My own account sits right here. Bought at 2 million, worth 1.6 million now. The 600,000 down payment has already evaporated into the price, and 600,000 of debt is left to pay over eighteen years. Other people’s capital levers their income up; my capital levers eighteen years of my income away. Same phrase, leveraged by capital, two opposite directions. Hurun’s 5.06 million households and the PBoC’s 3.179 million mean are not looking at the same population or on the same basis - one counts only households above 6 million, the other every urban household.
That necklace is worth forty-four years of my family
Put the 1.2 million back into my own account. It is 73.6 percent of a median urban household’s entire estate, which is to say roughly seventy percent of everything an ordinary urban family owns if they sold the flat, the savings and the car. It is 59.2 times rural per-capita consumption expenditure of 20,259 yuan for a year. My three people spend 27,209 yuan a year, so it is 44 years and 3 months.
How many years separate it from my mother’s pension of just over 200 yuan a month from the resident scheme - I worked that out in the piece about her 200 and my 5160 a month.
You have to spend or the machine stalls
They say every public holiday exists to make you spend. I took that for rage. It is written in official documents, and it is dated 1999.
The phrase “holiday economy” was coined that year, the year the State Council revised the rules on national holidays and memorial days and created the Golden Week, because domestic demand was still weak after the Asian financial crisis. The standard account is that it was “given the hope of expanding domestic demand”. In that same year total annual rest including weekends reached 114 days for the first time. From 2025 statutory holidays went from 11 days to 13, adding Lunar New Year’s Eve and 2 May. The same document states that holidays may be combined with paid annual leave to form longer breaks. Longer holidays are not the problem. The problem is: do they have anything to do with your income? No. They have a great deal to do with your spending.
Now the other end of my October account: total retail sales of consumer goods in 2025 passed 50 trillion yuan while growing only 3.7 percent, and final consumption expenditure contributed 52.0 percent of economic growth. The machine only turns if you spend.
As for our cheap goods subsidising other countries - the Ministry of Finance and the tax authority admit it themselves and are winding it back. In the first nine months of 2024 domestic VAT revenue was 5.05 trillion yuan, down 5.6 percent, while export tax rebates over the same stretch ran to 1.57 trillion, up 10.4 percent. Across the 14th Five-Year Plan period, export rebates processed nationwide exceeded 9 trillion yuan. From the cancellation of rebates on aluminium and copper on 1 December 2024 the rates on solar and batteries have been trimmed year after year, and batteries are cancelled outright from 1 January 2027. My anger has been confirmed, document after document.
The phrase industrial reserve army is a hundred and fifty years older than me
I said capital will do anything to wreck your job and keep unemployment waiting, so that whoever is left can be hired cheap. That line sounds like a conspiracy theory. It is the text of Chapter 23 of Capital.
Marx’s own words are that capitalist accumulation “continually produces, in proportion to its own power and scale, a relative surplus population - that is, one exceeding the average needs of capital’s self-expansion, hence a surplus or additional working population”. He gave that population two names: relative surplus population, and the industrial reserve army. What I said on instinct, somebody wrote up as a law a hundred and fifty years ago. The unemployment figures are in the August piece.
The spending creed at 35: with no money, buying a damn thing is a joke
When you are young and able to earn you really should save and stop spending carelessly, because you will not always be able to earn. A lot of people simply stood where the wind blew, myself included. Once you get older and the wind drops, you find out how deep into the bones capitalist extraction goes.
My creed about spending changed after thirty-five, and it is this: with no money, buying a damn thing is a joke. I do not believe a single advertisement or pitch any more; I look only at what I actually need. About immunity, I wrote in the debt piece that it is no elevated state of mind but an organ that grows on you once your pocket is empty. Once my basic material needs are met I am free, and everything beyond that is paid for with my time, my energy and the selling of my own soul.
The programmers who dropped dead at their desks after 996 wanted too badly to climb, and they ground themselves to death doing work of very little value: fifty-four extra days for one of the seats in a 10 percent whose size was set before you arrived. I can do that arithmetic, which is why I am not climbing.
Especially the people who took out loans for a car, a home, a marriage, a child - we are the ones squeezed cleanest, because being single costs almost nothing and once you marry and have a child every direction is an expense. I bought in 2019 and signed the loan in January 2020. The payment comes out on the tenth, my child is at school now. I am that fool: 63.8 percent to the bank.
Living for myself
At thirty-five I no longer believe any grand narrative. I follow only what I actually want, and I live for myself.
Fifty trillion in retail sales, 52 percent contribution, 145 trillion in the hands of one percent of households, 126,000 households who could afford that necklace - put together they say one thing: keep running.
I am not running.
In October my family of three spent 2267 yuan, and we still took a trip to Shanghai. That number is not my report card. It is my boundary.
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