A 38-year-old Chinese man was held at gunpoint, forced across a river, and sold into a telecom-fraud compound in Myanmar. He was held for 79 days; his sister spent over 300,000 yuan to get him back.
By rights, this should be a story about kidnapping, trafficking, violence, and rescue. But after reading through the reports, the detail that stuck with me was something else: inside the compound, people under 35 are easier to sell. He was 38, already over the line, classified as “hard to sell” — ultimately bundled as a “buy one get one free” add-on just to get him through the gate.
A place that lives on violence, fraud, and human trafficking also uses “35 years old” as a selection criterion.
What made me even more uncomfortable: the moment I saw those four characters, they felt not the least bit unfamiliar. Because the exact same language I’ve seen thousands upon thousands of times on domestic job sites.
He Escaped Because He Could Take the Boss’s Pulse
Let me lay out the facts first.
According to media reports, Liu Xiuhong from Mianzhu, Sichuan, flew from Guangzhou to Bangkok on June 9 to collect a business payment. The day after landing, he was blindfolded, gagged, forced across a river at gunpoint, and taken into Myanmar. He was then shuffled through three militia stations before being sold into a telecom-fraud compound — trapped for 79 days in total.
Inside the compound there’s an unwritten rule: people under 35 sell well. He was 38, over the line, in the “hard to sell” category — treated as a bundled item, sold along with someone else as a “buy one get one free” deal.
In that place, what saved him from a few extra beatings was that he’d studied traditional Chinese medicine and could take the compound boss’s pulse and treat illnesses.
Ultimately his sister rescued him — running around, pleading for help from every direction, spending over 300,000 yuan in total.
The news source is the Weibo topic “Man sold to compound, sister spends 300K+ to rescue him”; the subject narrated the entire ordeal in an interview (video link: http://t.cn/AXO3Ra5U).
The Compound Never Selects for Age — It Selects for “Extractability”
If you treat the compound as a company, its hiring logic is terrifyingly clear.
People must endure twelve-plus hours of high-intensity work daily; must be able to absorb training and quickly learn new scripts and tactics; must be controllable — not daring to run, not daring to report, preferably with no one at home who’ll come looking; and if something goes wrong, ideally leaving no traceable clues for the outside world.
Under these criteria, “age” is an extremely convenient proxy metric. It requires no verification process — no interviews, no capability assessment; one glance at an ID card suffices.
Young people are assumed to have better stamina, be easier to domesticate, have fewer attachments, and be “cheaper” when things go wrong. People over 35 are assumed to cost more, be harder to manage, and yield less.
So age here has nothing to do with ability. It’s merely a line used to estimate “how much more can be squeezed from this person.”
In this logic, people aren’t people — they’re inventory. Inventory has a shelf life; once expired, it gets discounted, liquidated, bundled. “Buy one get one free” stings precisely because it’s the language of supermarket shelves.
We’ve Seen This Logic in Office Buildings for Years
What truly made me sit up straight is this: that line was drawn in our own workplace long ago.
On job sites, “under 35” is the default configuration. Some phrase it more subtly — “35 and above need not apply,” “age 22 to 35,” “must be able to handle high-intensity work pace” — but translated, it’s all the same thing.
Lose your job once after 35, and your resume suddenly becomes worthless. You’ll find that many positions you clearly qualify for — even exceed requirements — don’t even grant you an interview. It’s not “you’re not suitable”; they won’t even give anyone the chance to judge whether you’re suitable.
And it rarely appears as “I think you’re too old.” Companies are far more dignified: contracts expire without renewal, called “business restructuring”; renewal but with role change and pay cut, called “new room to grow”; performance targets set impossibly high, forcing you to resign; and if all else fails, the vocabulary of organizational optimization, team rejuvenation, and management-pipeline renewal packages the age issue as a managerial decision. At no single step can you prove it’s about age — but you know it in your heart.
For women, the line is doubled. Age 35 plus marital/childbearing status — two sieves stacked. Many women over thirty find that the first interview question isn’t about project experience but “do you plan to have children in the next few years.” This isn’t one HR person’s malice; it’s an entire screening playbook in open circulation.
Re-entering the job market after 35, you clearly feel the corridors narrowing. What ultimately catches people tends to be a few remaining paths: ride-hailing, food delivery, security guard, insurance agent, livestreaming, or franchise stores. Many people genuinely earn money on these paths — I don’t intend to disparage any profession. But they share one trait: the professional experience, industry judgment, and project history you accumulated over ten or twenty years gets largely zeroed out. You didn’t switch jobs; you’re required to restart as “a person with no past.”
The origin of this line is quite specific. The 1994 “Interim Provisions on National Civil Service Recruitment” set 35 as the upper age limit for applicants. This was later codified in the “Civil Service Recruitment Regulations” and persists to this day — the general application age remains 18 to 35. An administrative rule originally targeting only government agencies gradually became the default hiring threshold for all of society, spreading to tech, manufacturing, services — into the hands of everyone writing a job description.
What’s even more twisted is its conflict with another timeline. Starting January 1, 2025, gradual retirement-age extension has been implemented — male workers’ retirement age will progressively extend to 63. In other words, institutionally we’re expected to work into our sixties; in reality, at 35 we’re already “hard to sell.”
Those twenty-odd years in between — the official term is “flexible employment.”
Legally, it’s also very hard to cover. Article 3 of the Employment Promotion Law states that workers shall not be discriminated against based on ethnicity, race, gender, religious belief, etc. That “etc.” leaves a loophole, but age isn’t explicitly listed. In practice, age discrimination in hiring is virtually zero-cost: one “the position isn’t suitable” and you can’t even find a direction for evidence.
In recent civil-service recruitment, some provinces have indeed relaxed the age cap to 40 for certain positions. But look closely and you’ll see: most relaxations are for fresh master’s and doctoral graduates — what’s being relaxed is education level, not age.
Why Companies Love Outsourcing: One Word — Sweet
If “no one over 35” is the selection action, outsourcing is the execution mechanism of that selection.
Many company positions today aren’t “hiring” anymore. They hire outsourced workers: the person sits at the big company’s desk, uses the big company’s computer, does the big company’s work, attends the big company’s morning meetings and sprint planning — the badge color might differ from permanent staff, and the employment relationship belongs to another company.
Why are companies so willing to do this? Frankly, one word: sweet.
Sweet because it dodges responsibility. The legal “employer” becomes the outsourcing company; the big company is the “client.” Business restructuring doesn’t require layoffs — just terminate the project and return the people to the supplier. Severance, N+1, seniority, non-competes, unions — none of these headaches land on them.
Sweet because it’s hassle-free. Recruitment, payroll, social insurance, workplace injury, disputes, termination — all handled by the outsourcing company. All the big company needs to do is say one sentence: “We don’t need this person anymore.”
Sweet because of cost. Same work, but a permanent employee’s total cost is much higher: salary, social insurance and housing fund, benefits, stock options, training, management overhead all add up; outsourcing requires only a service fee. Output looks identical; the bill differs enormously.
Sweet because of flexibility. Business grows — add people. Business shrinks — return people. Labor becomes on-demand inventory — and again I must return to those four characters: people are not inventory.
A word on the institutional detail. Legitimate labor dispatch has constraints: it can only be used for temporary, auxiliary, or substitutive positions, and the number cannot exceed 10% of total workforce. So massive numbers of positions get repackaged as “business outsourcing” — same people, same desks, just a different company in the legal relationship. The outsourcing company earns the labor cost differential; its business model is inherently “cheaper than permanent staff” — so you can’t expect it to fight for your benefits.
When something actually goes wrong, you sue in arbitration court against an outsourcing company with registered capital of a few hundred thousand, possibly only three employees, and随时可注销 at any time. The big company stands in the “client” position — not even a defendant.
So I say outsourcing companies are big companies’ white gloves: what they take on isn’t business — it’s the employment risk the big company doesn’t want to bear itself. What they earn isn’t a service fee — it’s the price of shielding others from risk.
And the fundamental reason all this works: too many people. If labor were scarce, no one would accept “same desk, same output, half the compensation.” The system only functions when replacements are a dime a dozen — when “using you” and “replacing you” are the same thing.
After Layer Upon Layer of Outsourcing, You Can’t Even Find “Who’s the Boss”
The real consequence of this system isn’t slightly less money — it’s that when something goes wrong, you can’t find anyone to hold responsible.
Just these past few days, several media outlets reported the same story: a delivery rider who’d been doing the job for twelve years was injured in a fall, removed from the work group chat, and when he tried to claim compensation, discovered he didn’t know “who the boss is.” The platform says you’re not my employee; the crowdsourcing service provider says we’re merely in a cooperative relationship; there are several more layers of companies in between. He wanted to apply for workplace-injury recognition but got stuck at the first step — he can’t even determine whose name to write in the defendant field.
Beijing News and Haibao News ran commentary with very direct headlines: “Crowdsourcing” must not outsource away responsibility; crowdsourced riders shouldn’t be trapped in the embarrassment of “who’s the boss.”
This isn’t an isolated case. Similar stories haven’t stopped over the years: a rider dies of cardiac arrest during late-night delivery, and the family battles the platform and employment company in court for a long time before receiving compensation; another rider’s family still hasn’t received payment 300 days after his death. Some riders discover after signing contracts that they aren’t employees — they were first required to register as “individual business operators” — because individual operators aren’t workers, so the platform doesn’t even owe them social insurance.
Before something goes wrong, you think you’re working for a company. After something goes wrong, you discover your hours, social insurance, and employment relationship have been fragmented across multiple companies, none of which completely “employed” you — so each one can say “this isn’t my responsibility.”
What happened at the racetrack this month played the same logic out to its most extreme.
At a Shanghai China GT race, a race car suffered a severe collision and caught fire, trapping the driver inside. On-site rescue was reported to have been virtually useless — reports say rescue personnel fled the scene in fear, abandoning fire extinguishers. Afterward, multiple teams announced permanent withdrawal from China GT.
What truly exploded public opinion was the cost. According to leaked information, the event organizer budgeted 3,000 yuan per day for the “safety officer” position; after layer upon layer of subcontracting, the person actually standing trackside received 60 yuan per day. Multiple media reports confirmed: a temporary worker paid 60 yuan daily.
Sixty yuan a day doesn’t buy willingness to walk through fire. So netizens coined a phrase for this: “asked-pay-no-guilt” — at 60 yuan salary, his conscience was already clear.
Who should be questioned is never him — it’s why this position could be outsourced at all, it’s those several layers that turned 3,000 into 60, it’s the organization that treated “safety” as a procurement item to be price-squeezed yet still pulls it out for post-incident review.
These two stories are actually two versions of the same tale. The rider story’s ending: you can’t find the responsible party. The racetrack’s ending: you find precisely the person who should bear the least responsibility. Layer-upon-layer outsourcing’s true function has never been improving efficiency — it’s diluting responsibility to a place you can’t pursue.
So what outsourcing saves has never been cost — it’s responsibility. The cost hasn’t disappeared; it’s been transferred to the person who gets hurt, and to the family standing behind them who can’t recover anything.
Same Company: Won’t Dare Overtime in Serbia, Dares Break Contracts with 107 Fresh Grads Domestically
If everything before was my own experience, the Xingyu Corporation case isn’t individual — it happened publicly.
This August, Xingyu Corporation (an auto-lighting manufacturer) mass-terminated and pushed out 107 fresh graduates. Media reported that one master’s graduate was pushed out after just one month; those who refused to resign were reassigned to factory production lines. After the scandal blew up, the company issued an apology: immediate three-month job-search living subsidies for all 107, plus six months’ salary as compensation if they hadn’t found work by end of November. Executives were held accountable; overseas clients including Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen launched compliance investigations; reports say its HK IPO is short-term hopeless.
But what truly deserves scrutiny are two things that subsequently surfaced.
First: reports say 90% of employees in that industrial park are temporary workers.
Second: former employees revealed the overseas employment disparity — at the Serbia factory, local employees work nine-to-five, and the company doesn’t dare make them work overtime — because local labor law genuinely holds them accountable; but Chinese employees dispatched there work ten hours a day.
One company, one management team, the same “family culture” slogan — why does it behave properly in Serbia but dares to destroy 107 fresh graduates’ futures at home in one stroke?
The answer isn’t in character, isn’t in culture — it’s in cost.
In Serbia, illegal overtime gets penalized by local regulators, gets watched by unions and clients — so they don’t dare. Domestically, the cost of mass-breaking contracts with 107 fresh graduates is an apology letter plus a few months’ salary — and it even earns the narrative of “cutting losses in time.” It’s not that they can’t follow rules; they simply don’t need to.
What’s even more telling is the ending. How did this ultimately crack open? Not through any domestic rule — 107 fresh graduates escalated the matter to overseas clients: Mercedes-Benz issued an internal investigation memo, Volkswagen launched a compliance review, and only then did the company apologize and discuss compensation. What controlled them was someone else’s compliance department.
The most absurd part of this story: a group of young Chinese people, wronged by a Chinese company, ultimately able to make their own country’s enterprise bow and admit fault — through foreign clients’ compliance investigations.
Pitiable, lamentable, and infuriating.
Pitiable: a place that can’t protect its own young people must first wait for outsiders to speak up before its own enterprises acknowledge wrongdoing. Infuriating: “it only works when outsiders speak up” proves the rules aren’t nonexistent — they have force, they simply don’t normally operate on your behalf.
Why “filing complaints abroad” works isn’t complex: foreigners aren’t kinder — they care about different things. Compliance, brand, supply-chain risk — these are real costs that directly affect orders and valuations. What moves enterprises has always been cost, not principle; it’s just that this time, the ones calculating that cost were Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen, not our own regulatory departments.
Think one layer deeper and it gets colder. If even an event that trends on social media, makes BBC, and prompts two multinational automakers to issue formal letters can only be advanced by foreign clients — then what about the countless wage thefts, contract breaks, and malicious terminations happening daily in small companies that nobody reports, nobody knows about? What resolves those?
The answer: nothing.
So what’s truly uncomfortable about this case isn’t “this time people weren’t protected” — it’s that it exposed a default setting: for ordinary people, asserting rights on their own doorstep is harder than going abroad to file complaints.
Relying on other people’s rules to protect yourself — that’s not a victory. That’s a place’s failure.
So I don’t really believe the “it’s a corporate-culture problem” narrative. Culture on the wall is rhetoric; culture on the ledger is choice. Same company, polite where constraints are hard, impolite where constraints are soft — the only variable in between is how much it has to pay.
This is also why the intuition that “foreign companies have better treatment” often holds. Foreign companies aren’t kinder — they have a set of rules behind them that they must follow.
What we’ve always lacked isn’t kind bosses — it’s whatever makes bosses have no choice but to be kind.
And those 107 fresh graduates, just out of school, with no seniority, no bargaining power — they’re precisely the group most resembling “the charioteer”: last in line when the meat is divided, first to be thrown out when things go wrong.
I Myself Am on This Side of the Line
I don’t intend to stand on the shore commenting on this.
This April, I interviewed for a CDN-related position at Alibaba Cloud. After completing the process, the reason given was: age. I wrote about this in “Migrating Away from Alibaba Cloud,” and it directly prompted me to migrate ten years’ worth of cloud services away.
At the time I immediately filed a complaint. Result: useless. The local department’s response was essentially that this company is very powerful and difficult to deal with. I kept thorough evidence — interview times, communication records, that word “age” — all preserved. But before unequal power, evidence carries almost no weight.
First half of the year, I was unemployed; second half, my wife — a nearly ten-year employee — was forced out. Two people from one family exiting the workforce one after another: only then did I truly understand what “35 years old” means in the recruitment system.
In the first half of the year I turned down two outsourcing offers. The first was from my previous company: after being laid off, another department was hiring and offered me over 20K monthly — but required me to return as a “partner.” Sounds nice; it’s actually outsourcing: I’d pay my own housing fund and social insurance, leaving about 17-18K take-home; plus daily driving commute, 2,000 yuan monthly in gas and parking; and随时可能被退掉 at any time. I ran the numbers for a long time — not worth it. Didn’t go.
The second was Alibaba Cloud outsourcing at 15K, with talk of possibly reaching 16K. The office was very close to home, commute cost nearly zero — at my age, normally a rare condition. But I still couldn’t accept the “outsourced” identity, and ultimately declined. Plus it was a Wuhan-based company — if anything went wrong, asserting rights would be difficult.
Somewhat ironic: same company — can’t afford me as permanent staff, but outsourcing identity is always welcome. What’s being screened isn’t ability, it’s status.
The client I currently serve operates on the same logic. Hiring permanent positions, the reasons are given very presentably: education insufficient, they require 985/211 minimum, plus age is on the high side. But outsourced positions? They take those without hesitation. Same me, same ability — change the identity and the threshold disappears.
But I have no choice; I can only accept reality. Despite dissatisfaction, I can only console myself that it’s at least more reliable than those small companies I found in the first half — the ones with six-day workweeks doing all kinds of miscellaneous tasks that ultimately pay less than big-company outsourcing. Either way it’s wage labor; permanent or outsourced, both can be laid off.
Busy from morning to night every day, take-home after social insurance and housing fund deductions currently under 10,000 — half of my previous salary. Same desk, same output, only the employer on the contract has changed to another company; rights protection, salary, and benefits follow completely different standards from permanent staff; the day they don’t need me, I get kicked out without even needing to discuss compensation.
Let me clarify one thing: strictly speaking, I didn’t “join” this company. I was dispatched by the outsourcing company to be on-site — from day one I’ve been working at this company for this client. The desk is theirs, the computer is theirs, the sprint schedule is theirs, weekly reports go to them, but my employer is a different company. “My company” and “my client” are two different entities — this is the entire meaning of outsourcing, and also why they can simultaneously say I’m not qualified while taking me on to do the work.
The relationship between reasons and price becomes clear at this point. So-called education thresholds, age thresholds, “doesn’t meet our hiring standards” — all of it is price’s outer packaging. When hiring permanent staff, they need a narrative to explain why they won’t pay more; for outsourcing, no explanation is needed, because cheap is itself the reason.
So I’ve developed a habit: don’t watch what a company says — watch what it does. Recruitment requirements say “985/211 only,” yet their outsourcing team includes people who don’t remotely meet that bar — which means that statement isn’t a standard, it’s a bargaining tool. Values on the wall, high standards in the JD, “talent philosophy” from their mouths — all of it can exist; but only two things truly count: where they spend money, and whose name they put as employer on the contract.
This principle applies to any organization. Companies, government agencies, platforms — all the same: watch who gets the resources, who gets the risk; don’t listen to what they say.
It’s not that I won’t take a pay cut, won’t do basic-level work, or can’t learn new things. The problem is: often, the door closes before you even open your mouth. You submit a resume; they see the birth year; the rest doesn’t need to be read.
I’ve never asked anyone for “special treatment.” I just want one normal judgment: can I actually do this job or not. But the reality is that even the opportunity to be judged is shrinking.
Connecting the dots, I don’t think this is a luck issue. My wife graduated from Liaoning University (211), worked at a company for nearly ten years — at 35 she still can’t find work; and that company has been defaulting on her salary for a full year. Education, experience, diligence, rule-following — none of it works before this line.
I don’t want to summarize everything with one word “rotten,” but one thing I’m certain of: for ordinary people, this system is becoming increasingly unfriendly. And it didn’t turn bad one day suddenly — it was normalized piece by piece: first “under 35 preferred,” then “outsourcing is the same,” then “don’t talk money first, talk opportunity first.”
The 35-Year-Old Problem Was Never About Being 35
Think deeper: 35 became a barrier not because people suddenly can’t work at that age.
The real reason: when labor supply is sufficiently abundant, employers have no incentive to seriously identify specific “people.” What they need is a filter that’s cheap enough, convenient enough, safe enough.
Age perfectly fits all three conditions: visible at a glance, requires no explanation, carries no liability, and comes with society-wide default “legitimacy.”
Thus everything originally valuable about a 35-year-old — ten years of industry experience, knowing how to handle crises, having led teams, having seen cycles, possessing judgment, not collapsing over small things — gets repriced as negative assets: high cost, hard to manage, can’t work overtime, has family obligations.
A person’s value gets quietly converted from “what problems can you solve” to “how much per hour, how many more years can be squeezed.”
People and Inventory Are Two Different Things
The problem with scam compounds was never just violence. At its most fundamental, it doesn’t treat people as people — only as inventory and bargaining chips. That’s why it seriously calculates “easy or hard to sell,” why it bundles a living human being as a freebie.
Our workplace obviously isn’t this naked. Nobody’s holding guns, there’s no buying and selling, no ransoms. But “35 and above need not apply,” “cost-effectiveness isn’t high,” “leave opportunities for young people” — essentially the same language, just packaged in civilization.
The only difference is the tool: over there it’s guns, here it’s offer letters. Over there they sell you and then collect ransom; here they use you up and then have you “voluntarily resign.”
Once a person is treated as inventory, all questions of dignity become questions of cost. And cost questions can be optimized away.
Every Technological Advance Deepens the Squeeze on the Bottom First
Stretch the timeline and this pattern has repeated throughout history.
Marx wrote in Capital Volume 1, Chapter 13 “Machinery and Modern Industry”: “The most powerful means of shortening labor time becomes the most reliable means of converting the entire lifetime of the worker and his family into labor time at the disposal of capital for the valorization of capital.” It sounds convoluted, but says something quite simple — how much time technology saves and how much less work you personally do have always been two different things.
Before steam engines and textile machines entered factories, England first had the Enclosure Movement: people had to be driven off the land before they could be driven into factories. Then came sixteen-hour workdays, child labor, fingers severed by machines. England didn’t legislate limiting child labor to nine hours until 1833 — note, nine hours; that was already considered remarkable progress at the time. Workers certainly resisted — the Luddite movement of the early nineteenth century smashed machines and was cleanly suppressed. History textbooks call them “backward,” but they saw clearly: not one minute of the time saved by machines reached them.
In the twentieth century, Ford’s assembly line made this more refined. Taylorism broke every motion apart, timed it, standardized it; workers’ skills were fragmented into a pile of motions anyone could replace. Efficiency increased dozens of times; wages didn’t increase dozens of times. People were “deskilled” — after ten years, all you know is that one motion on the conveyor belt; a replacement learns it in two days.
Then came the telephone. After call centers appeared, customer service work was scripted, fully recorded, call duration in seconds posted on the wall. Then computers: office automation didn’t reduce clerical work — it just turned “typists” into “data entry,” with metrics shifting from quality to keystrokes per thousand.
Next came cameras and algorithms. Warehouse pickers are required to grab items within a set number of seconds, automatically timed by the system; reports say some companies even use algorithms to decide firings — no human makes the decision, so no human needs to take responsibility. Retail scheduling is sliced by algorithms into fragments: three hours today, five tomorrow, cancelled last-minute the day after — your entire day must be on standby for four hours’ wages.
Then it was the smartphone’s turn. After smartphones became ubiquitous, many people discovered for the first time that “clocking out” still exists physically but has become legally blurred. Don’t join the work group chat and you get marginalized; join it, and 10 PM, weekends, annual leave all become extensions of work hours. In recent years, courts have progressively recognized “handling substantive work on WeChat after hours” as overtime and awarded compensation — this itself is evidence: technology ran ahead of rules long ago; rules are playing catch-up.
So for 35-year-olds, there’s an additional layer of direct harm: technology keeps eating the premium on “experience.” The master craftsman’s skill gets learned by machines; the master craftsman becomes a cost item. A person working from their twenties to thirty-five should be at the point where experience is most valuable — but if that experience has already been codified into processes and SOPs by the system, all that’s left is age.
Food-delivery riders are the latest version. Algorithmic dispatching, real-time GPS, late-delivery fines — delivery times compressed again and again. But the system has no red lights, no rain, no elevator queues, no security guards blocking doors. Whatever the time says, that’s how fast you must run.
Next is AI. Many of the people training AI on the frontier are data annotators — reports say this role pays 3,000 yuan monthly for the most monotonous repetitive labor. Once the system matures, the first positions replaced are precisely the entry-level jobs that previously relied on basic and repetitive work. I myself am part of this story — AI didn’t reduce my workload; it left me unemployed for half a year, then took a pay cut of over half to do outsourcing.
These aren’t abstract trends; I’ve been through a round myself.
At a company I previously worked for, before AI, performance and ticket statistics were actually quite rough: ballpark estimates, everyone keeping a bit of margin. After AI was deployed, the algorithm quantified each person’s workload, response time, and ticket count — metrics so granular that slacking became nearly impossible. People didn’t become more relaxed; they became busier — because “you could still do a bit more” shifted from speculation to data.
What’s harsher is the evaluation system. It uses 2-7-1 forced distribution: even if the entire team performs well, they still rank among the good performers and pick one “worst.” This isn’t my speculation — my former manager explicitly told me: there must be one person who’s the worst.
I won Outstanding Employee three years running. But this system never looks at that: the moment one year’s rating drops, the previous three years become void. I later wrote about this in “Understanding ‘Outstanding Employee’: All Highlight Accolades Are Essentially Stage Narratives.” It also made me thoroughly understand one thing: this evaluation system doesn’t measure your contribution — it measures whether you can stably fulfill an annual elimination quota.
Technology’s role here is especially clear: it turns “controlling you” from vague to precise. Before, if a manager wanted to pressure you, they relied on impressions and rhetoric; now the system has already laid out the evidence — you just need to be calculated.
But I don’t believe this is “machines exploiting people.” Machines don’t exploit; exploitation comes from whoever takes the machines’ gains. The benefits of technological progress have never been automatically distributed — who gets them first, who bears the risk first, depends on distribution rules. And rules have never been written by the bottom.
Technology amplifies the same lever every time: making it easier to replace a person, making the cost of replacing a person lower. So with every technological advance, what the bottom feels first isn’t relief — it’s “you’re worth less now.”
Time Saved Has Never Become Your Rest
What I’ve felt most deeply these past two years is AI.
It hasn’t made me work less or sleep an extra hour. On the contrary, it’s made me more tired.
The logic isn’t hard to understand. Saved time doesn’t become idle time; it immediately gets converted into new expectations. You used to produce three proposals a day; now with AI you can produce ten. What the boss sees isn’t “you saved time” — it’s “you could have been producing seven more all along.” Once your capability ceiling is raised, the baseline rises with it — tools get faster, metrics multiply, people get more tired. And once you’re proficient, you discover this capability quickly stops being an advantage and becomes the expected default. You made yourself faster; all you got in return was a higher passing grade.
On this topic, someone made a prediction a century ago. In 1930, Keynes calculated in “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”: at the rate of productivity growth, a hundred years later — around 2030 — humans would only need to work fifteen hours per week.
We’re only a few years from 2030 now. We not only don’t have a fifteen-hour workweek; we’re still repeatedly arguing about whether to have proper two-day weekends.
Technically it’s entirely achievable. In the 1930s, America’s Kellogg Company tried a six-hour workday; it worked well, ran for decades, and was ultimately cancelled. After the 1970s, American productivity kept rising while ordinary workers’ real wages essentially stagnated — the surplus didn’t go into their pockets, didn’t become their vacation time.
Our version is called 996, alternating weekends, and invisible overtime. Now it’s AI’s turn.
Look at this year’s holiday arrangements and it becomes even clearer. “Compensatory rest days” trend on social media every year; the logic has never changed: it’s not about letting anyone rest — it’s about stitching holidays into a sufficiently long consumption window. The first “Golden Week” was assembled in 1999 with the explicit purpose of getting people to go out and spend money en masse. Holidays here are an economic tool, not a rest right.
There has been progress these past two years. Starting 2025, statutory holidays added Lunar New Year’s Eve and May 2nd — two extra days — and rules explicitly state consecutive workdays around holidays generally shouldn’t exceed six. But “should compensatory rest be abolished” still gets argued every year — because everyone knows in their hearts: those borrowed weekends have never been returned.
So technology’s saved time ultimately has only two destinations: higher KPIs, or longer consumption windows. It just very rarely becomes your own rest.
This also explains the 35-year-old problem mentioned earlier. When AI raises everyone’s output ceiling, a 35-year-old’s “experience premium” becomes even less valuable — it’s not that you can’t work anymore; it’s that the measuring stick above the line has been swapped again.
The real question has never been “can AI make us more relaxed” but “who decides where saved time goes.” If the answer is never “you,” then no matter how far technology advances, all we get is a faster pace: faster conversion of life into other people’s gains, then being told to happily go consume during that stitched-together long weekend.
Twenty-Six Hundred Years Ago, a Bowl of Mutton Could Destroy an Army
But this logic wasn’t brought by technology — it’s far older than machines.
The Zuo Zhuan, Duke Xuan Year 2, records an event. Song and Zheng states clashed at Daji. Before battle, Song’s commander Hua Yuan slaughtered sheep to reward his soldiers. The distribution list was long — but one person was left out: his charioteer, Yang Zhen. When battle began, Yang Zhen said:
“The other day’s mutton — you were in charge; today’s business — I’m in charge.”
That day dividing the lamb, you called the shots; today driving this chariot, I call the shots. With that, he drove the war chariot straight into the Zheng army’s formation. Hua Yuan was captured; the Song army was routed. The Zuo Zhuan’s recorded evaluation: “Yang Zhen was not a man — for personal resentment, he ruined the state and destroyed the people.”
What’s interesting is the angle of that evaluation. For over two thousand years, mainstream narrative has almost entirely condemned Yang Zhen — calling him petty, unable to see the bigger picture. But Hua Yuan was the one who left out his own charioteer — and the charioteer’s seat was precisely the position on which the commander’s life depended.
The same plot repeated in the Strategies of the Warring States. The Lord of Zhongshan hosted a banquet for the capital’s scholars; minister Sima Ziqi was present but there wasn’t enough lamb broth to go around — he didn’t get any. In fury, Sima Ziqi defected to Chu, persuaded the Chu king to send troops, and Zhongshan fell. The Lord of Zhongshan later lamented: “I lost a state over a cup of lamb broth, but gained two men willing to die for me over a pot of rice.”
Both collapses originated from that one bowl of undistributed mutton.
Conversely, the same thing can work in the other direction. During the Chu-Han Contention, Chen Ping presided over a village communal sacrifice, dividing meat with perfect fairness. The elders praised him: “Excellent — how well young Chen Ping distributes!” Chen Ping replied: “Alas, if I ever get to govern the empire, I shall do so as I did this meat.” He later became Chancellor of the Han Dynasty.
Confucius put it more directly: “Don’t worry about scarcity; worry about inequality. Don’t worry about poverty; worry about instability.” What he feared was never too little — it was unfair distribution.
So the problem isn’t the meat — it’s dividing the meat. Technology, production capacity, GDP — these only make more meat in the pot; once there’s more, how to divide it becomes even more important. Hua Yuan wasn’t short of mutton; the Lord of Zhongshan wasn’t either. What they lacked was noticing the person left out.
Twenty-six hundred years later, the “meat” has changed form but not essence. It’s now year-end bonuses, salary-adjustment quotas, permanent-position opportunities, government benefits and social insurance — the one link left out. The person left out is no longer the commander’s charioteer but outsourced workers, crowdsourced riders, temporary workers standing trackside for 60 yuan a day.
Ancient meat-division: one person left out, an army and a small state lost. Today’s meat-division: the chain has been stretched so long by technology that you simply can’t see who hasn’t been served — until the day something goes wrong, and you discover that the person guarding the last checkpoint, the only one present, is precisely the one who was left out.
When Dividing the Meat, Nobody Thinks of Me; When Sacrifice Is Needed, Suddenly They Do
Following this thread, I’ve grown increasingly averse to one thing: grand narratives.
Let me be clear: what I’m averse to isn’t “goals” themselves. People have collectives, have things to do together, have burdens worth carrying together — that’s normal and valuable. What I’m averse to is when this stuff shows up — it always appears when demands are being made of me, and disappears when things are being distributed.
When someone needs to work overtime, cover a shift, overcome difficulties, prioritize the big picture, understand the organization’s difficulties, or talk ideals before money — grand narrative arrives instantly: this is opportunity, this is training, this is a cause, this is responsibility, this is vision.
But when it comes to bonuses, stock options, permanent positions, promotion slots, resource allocation — the language switches: we must look at contribution, follow performance metrics, respect market forces, understand institutional arrangements, this isn’t personal.
All those stories above boil down to the same thing. When dividing the lamb, nobody thinks of the charioteer; when fighting starts, the charioteer should do his duty. The wall says “results won’t perform for you” — but the person being squeezed was never counted in “results.” When they need your sacrifice, you’re “us”; when it’s time to distribute, you’re “an individual.”
I’ve never believed people should only take without giving. What I want is simply reciprocity: include me in what’s being distributed, and I may include you in what I’m willing to bear. This isn’t about being noble or not — it’s the most basic parity. Requiring someone to accept one-sided expenditure long-term and calling it “awareness” — that’s not morality; that’s packaging unreasonableness as virtue. So now when I see “gratitude,” “vision,” “passion” used where money should be discussed, I instinctively furrow my brow.
Mencius settled this long ago: “Those with stable livelihoods have stable hearts; those without stable livelihoods have no stable hearts.” First let people stand firm, then talk spirit. Conversely, blocking every exit while demanding unconditional devotion — the endurance is always finite.
What sustains it has never been “awareness” — it’s ordinary people’s own safety nets: parents’ savings, family’s forbearance, bodies pushed past their limits, that breath silently swallowed. So it’s not collapse — it’s installment payments. What’s owed today will be collected from somewhere else tomorrow — from birth rates, from consumption, from trust between people, from one person’s health, from one family’s harmony.
I also don’t believe anything anti-human can last. Anything that must be maintained long-term through “you should” and “you must” rather than “what you’ll get” — it won’t hold. Because people aren’t abstract containers; people do the math.
So my standard for grand things is very simple: if this cause is truly worth doing together, then first put the meat-division rules on the table, let everyone calculate their own share. Truly achieve that, and nobody needs to teach me about seeing the bigger picture.
Don’t lecture me about awareness — settle the accounts clearly. That’s the best awareness.
Give What’s Owed; Sense of Responsibility Doesn’t Need Lecturing
The most realistic version of this today is outsourcing.
Same office, same project, same sprint board, sitting together eating the same overtime meal. But the accounts are entirely separate: permanent staff’s salary arrives at month-end; outsourced workers wait until the 15th of next month; permanent staff get full-base social insurance and housing fund; outsourced get minimum base, minimum percentage for housing fund; permanent staff have year-end bonuses, raises, promotion paths; outsourced have none; when something goes wrong, permanent staff get labor-law protection; outsourced get “returned to supplier.”
And the company’s narrative is usually the reverse. It pays these two identities completely different rates while saying outsourced workers “lack responsibility, have poor stability, aren’t suitable for core duties” — using the consequences of treatment as the evaluation of the group. This is the most unreasonable circular logic: first give the lowest compensation, then use that compensation to prove they don’t deserve higher compensation.
This is the same logic as dividing that bowl of mutton twenty-six hundred years ago, just with “lamb” replaced by social insurance, payday, and equal-pay-for-equal-work benefits. Hua Yuan didn’t lack mutton — he just felt the charioteer’s portion could be skipped; the company doesn’t lack money — it just feels the outsourced portion can be skipped.
And the scale of what “can be skipped” is long past individual cases. The previously mentioned Xingyu: 90% of one industrial park’s employees are temporary; look at major companies these past few years — many core business lines have outsourced headcount exceeding permanent employees. In other words, the “skipped” portion is no longer fringe — it’s the main force. You want the main force to do main-force work but only pay fringe prices, then turn around and complain the main force lacks responsibility.
Ask one level higher: where does the money ultimately go?
Today this person is the richest; tomorrow that person is. A company with hundreds of billions, even trillions in annual revenue and profit — who produced that? The people working overtime late into the night in office buildings, the people standing on assembly lines, the people running deliveries in storms — the most ordinary people on this land produced it together. It doesn’t belong to any one person’s genius, nor should it be credited to any one person’s ledger.
But the distribution result is concentrated: wealth aggregates to the very few, while risk and cost transfer to the furthest end. What’s more troubling: this aggregation process is often packaged as role models — the richest person’s story makes headlines more than the distribution problem; rags-to-riches legends are easier to tell than “how many people stand beneath them.” The louder the inspirational stories, the heavier the implication of “you’re not trying hard enough” — and structural problems get quietly rewritten as personal problems.
So stop saying today’s young people won’t endure hardship or lack responsibility.
The problem was never with them — it’s that this account has never been settled. Give what’s owed, and sense of responsibility doesn’t need lecturing; only talk about devotion and sacrifice while staying silent on money and returns — the fact that others still finish the work for you already counts as showing great face.
Responsibility isn’t lectured into existence — it’s cultivated by reciprocal treatment.
My Position in This System Is That of the Charioteer
I’ve been talking about structure all along; now let me return to myself.
From beginning to end, my position in this system is that of the charioteer.
Not the commander, not the one dividing the lamb, not even on the distribution list. I’m the one standing closest yet most easily overlooked — precisely because I’m always right there, they figure no special portion is needed; precisely because I’m nearest, they figure no courtesy is required.
I’m also the most easily replaced. The charioteer’s job — anyone can do it; any job that can be decomposed into processes and motions has plenty of people who can handle it. So when 35 arrives, I’m the first to be crossed off; when outsourcing needs to return people, I’m returned first; when cost-cutting comes, that knife always falls on people like me.
And I’m the first one thrown out when things go wrong. After defeat, history books condemn Yang Zhen — petty, unable to see the bigger picture, letting personal grievance override duty. But when the meat was divided, not a single line in the history books mentions him.
These past few years, I’ve experienced all of it in sequence: rejected in an interview for “age,” unemployed for half a year, pay cut by more than half to do outsourcing, busy from dawn to dusk every day, fully aware that I stand at the chain’s furthest end and can be returned to the supplier at any moment.
So I keep thinking of the ending of Teahouse. Chang Siye says:
“I love our country — but who loves me?”
This line has circulated for over sixty years not because it’s a complaint, but because it perfectly captures the gap in a relationship: one side is repeatedly asked to love; the other side has never responded to that love.
But I don’t really want to use the word “love” to discuss this anymore. Because once you talk about love, you place yourself on the giving side, the passive side, the waiting-for-response side. I prefer the businessman’s framing: this is an account. I contribute labor, time, health, loyalty; in return I get compensation, dignity, and a sliver of certainty. If the math works, I continue; if it doesn’t, I cut losses. No emotion needed here — just common sense.
So I no longer expect to be loved by anyone, no longer wait for anyone’s compassion. Expecting others to be kind has always been the least reliable expectation.
The only thing I can do: stop betting my entire self on this system’s evaluation. Skills, health, a second path that’s mine to control — these belong to me. Positions can be swapped; these things can’t.
I’ve never wanted to be the one dividing the meat. I just don’t want to be the charioteer who’s always left out anymore.
If this seat is permanently reserved for me, then at minimum I should leave myself a way to get off.
Put Both Sides’ Slogans Together and You’ll See They’re the Same Script
Recently, wall slogans exposed from inside Cambodia’s “No. 8 Telecom Fraud Compound” are this story’s most stinging footnote.
“Don’t pretend to work hard — results won’t perform for you.”
“Results only. Excuses rejected.”
“Attitude. Details. Targets.”
“Don’t work hard today — be last place tomorrow.”
Reports say Myanmar’s northern compounds hang roughly the same things. I read these lines twice; my first reaction wasn’t shock but familiarity — because on the Chinese internet, these aren’t remotely new sentences.
These words weren’t invented by the compounds. They originally grew out of legitimate companies. Conference room banners, factory wall slogans in red paint, whiteboards at OKR alignment meetings, sales team morning-meeting chants — all saying the same thing: only results count, no explanations accepted, process effort unrecognized, luck and external conditions nonexistent.
“Don’t pretend to work hard — results won’t perform for you,” translated into corporate-speak: “No wasted effort — let results speak.”
“Results only. Excuses rejected,” on a company wall: “Results-oriented. No excuses.”
“Attitude. Details. Targets,” virtually unchanged — the most common trio on corporate-culture walls.
“Don’t work hard today — be last place tomorrow,” in workplace language: forced ranking / up-or-out.
Compounds and companies use the same management language, the same motivational rhetoric, the same way of treating people. The only difference is the graduation on the enforcement scale: in office buildings, failing KPIs means non-renewal, pay cuts, being “optimized”; in compounds, the same failure means beatings, imprisonment, being resold, or being disposed of as a bundled freebie.
This is what truly sends chills down the spine: from “performance below standard” to “can’t hit targets so we replace people” to “can’t extract value so we sell them” — there’s no fault line in between. It’s a continuous scale; we just happen to stand at the lower end, still unable to hear the sounds from the other end.
“Results won’t perform for you” isn’t inherently dangerous. What makes “results” lethal is the unconstrained power behind them. When a person’s only way to avoid harm is hitting targets, “results-oriented” stops being a management method and becomes an instrument of control.
So we feel uncomfortable seeing these words. Not because they’re evil — but because we recognize them. They’re the same sentences we hear every week ourselves.
The Threshold of “Asserting Rights According to Law” Was Never in the Law
One more unwelcome truth: in this structure, local government and enterprises are naturally aligned. This isn’t about any individual official’s stance — it’s determined by incentive mechanisms: tax revenue, GDP, employment figures, investment-attraction achievements — all hanging on these enterprises. The company you’re complaining about isn’t called “labor-law violator” at the government window — it’s called “key enterprise,” “major taxpayer,” “major employer.” Asking a department to act against it is essentially asking them to act against their own tax base and performance metrics.
So “legal protection” — those four characters look civilized, but for individuals there’s a very high threshold: time, energy, repeated evidence-gathering, running back and forth, lawyer fees, and most realistically — whether you still want to find work in this industry. Most people don’t lack legal knowledge; they give up after doing the math.
My wife’s company has owed a full year’s wages with zero consequences to this day. Her boss was placed on a high-consumption restriction list — not because of unpaid employee wages, but because a supplier sued him. This detail reveals the priority: on the ledger, suppliers are counterparties; employees are costs.
Outsourcing companies’ malicious terminations follow the same logic. They dare do it not because they’re worse than other companies, but because they’ve calculated clearly — the cost of doing so is low enough to ignore.
And how high or low that cost is was never natural. Xingyu doesn’t dare make Serbian employees work overtime but dares mass-break contracts with 107 fresh graduates domestically — the difference is: over there, acting against them is expensive; over here, acting against them is cheap.
So the true threshold of “asserting rights according to law” was never in the statutes — it’s whether you can afford the cost of asserting them.
Lu Xun’s “Cannibalism” — Still in Effect Over a Century Later
Writing this far, it’s hard not to recall those words from over a century ago.
In 1918, Lu Xun wrote in “A Madman’s Diary”: “I opened the history books to check… only between the lines did I see the words — the whole book was filled with two characters: ‘eat people.’” A few years later, in “Random Thoughts Under the Lamp,” he put it more bluntly: what’s called Chinese civilization is actually nothing more than a cannibalistic feast arranged for the rich to enjoy; what’s called China is actually nothing more than the kitchen where this cannibalistic feast is prepared.
Many people interpret this as an indictment of old feudal ethics, thinking it was about feudal society — long turned the page. But every time I reread it, I feel he wasn’t writing about a particular dynasty — he was writing about a structure.
Over a century later, feudal ethics have been replaced by KPIs, the Three Bonds and Five Constants replaced by “results-oriented.” That feast hasn’t dispersed — only the tableware changed: before it was clan rules, ritual law, “starving to death is a small matter, losing chastity is a great matter”; now it’s forced ranking, the 35-year-old threshold, “if you won’t do it, plenty of people will.” The kitchen is still there — just renovated to look modern.
Zhang Chaoyang has a formulation, roughly: exploitation genuinely exists — capital’s exploitation of labor, and capital’s exploitation of capital. It sounds like stating the obvious, but it articulates a structure we normally don’t want to acknowledge: this is a food chain.
Big fish eat small fish, small fish eat shrimp. Capital eats enterprises, enterprises eat middle management, middle management eats fresh graduates; top-tier eats mid-tier, mid-tier eats outsourced workers, outsourcing companies eat their own employees once more. Every layer on the chain is being eaten from above and eating from below.
The telecom-fraud compound is this food chain’s most extreme form: compound bosses eat enforcers, enforcers manage the “dog pushers” (scam operators), dog pushers scam people back home, and the people scammed are then forced to scam their own relatives and friends. Same structure — just the end of the chain has guns and cattle prods instead of contracts.
I’ve written about Wu Si’s Blood-Reward Law in this blog: when the returns from plunder far exceed the costs and risks of plunder, plunder will inevitably occur. The compound’s math works this way; the company’s math works this way too. The only difference is the ratio of returns to risk — compounds face imprisonment risk, so returns must be extremely high; companies face virtually no risk, so they only need to push costs low enough.
The most uncomfortable point: on this chain, we’re simultaneously the ingredients and potentially the knife. People filtered out by the 35-year-old threshold, once they sit in a supervisor’s seat, will also conveniently filter by age; people squeezed by outsourcing, once converted to permanent, will also think “outsourced workers are just like that.” The structure remains stable precisely because people in every position have learned the same move.
But “the world is cannibalistic” used as a reason for resignation is its most dangerous application. Lu Xun wrote about “cannibalism” not so people would say “well, forget it then” — his final sentence after writing all this was “save the children.” The end of indictment has never been nihilism — it’s making people stop eating each other.
I can’t flip that feast table. But at minimum I can refuse to sit at it, and refuse to pass chopsticks down to the next layer.
So What Do We Do
I can’t offer a solution that prevents 35-year-olds from being filtered out, because this problem isn’t in individuals’ hands. But there are a few things I’m doing myself.
First, stop treating yourself as expired merchandise. 35 isn’t a capability expiration date, much less a life expiration date. What should expire is the lazy method of filtering people by age — not us.
Turn your craft into something directly exchangeable for money. Liu Xiuhong received fewer beatings because he could take a pulse. A skill that can be directly cashed in is hard currency in any environment. These past two years of mine — tinkering with self-hosted services, writing a blog, turning AI into actual output — all serve this purpose.
Don’t bet everything on one employment contract. A second income, a second path — prepare early, and unemployment becomes less desperate.
Don’t feel safe just because you hold “permanent employee” status either — the more outsourced workers on your team, the closer your layoff date.
The logic isn’t complex at all: every minute outsourcing is onboarded, it validates one thing for the company — this work can be done by someone cheaper. The more thoroughly it’s validated, the less necessary you (the more expensive person) become. Once processes, documentation, handoffs, and toolchains are polished to the point where “outsourced workers can run it,” you’re no longer the person; what you’ve left behind is a process that doesn’t depend on you.
So permanent employees often defeat themselves: you proactively decompose work, write clear SOPs, onboard new people quickly. And departments that have been proceduralized are often the first to be “optimized”; people who have been proceduralized are the first to be replaced.
Don’t place your security in identity. The difference between permanent and outsourced is often just the order on the layoff list.
What you can truly bet on has never been that employment contract — it’s how much you’re still worth after leaving that company.
Before signing a contract, look clearly at who the “employer” is. This isn’t about being mercenary — it’s about self-protection. Which company holds the employment relationship, what base is social insurance calculated on, how seniority is counted, what happens when you’re “returned to supplier” — these terms matter far more than the monthly salary number, because the day something actually goes wrong, they determine what you can get.
When you encounter job postings explicitly stating age limits, screenshot for evidence — but don’t expect complaints to solve the problem. After Alibaba Cloud rejected me for “age” in April, I immediately filed a complaint. Conclusion: useless. The local department’s response was essentially that this company is very powerful and hard to deal with. This grievance mechanism’s energy was never primarily directed toward the worker’s side.
I’m not telling anyone to give up filing complaints — whether to file is everyone’s right — just calibrate your expectations. And from the Xingyu case you can see clearly: what truly makes companies concede has never been principle — it’s cost. Those 107 fresh graduates didn’t get an apology and compensation by being right; they got it because Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen launched compliance investigations. So for individuals, the more practical approach is to position yourself where “third parties can apply pressure”: foreign companies, heavily-regulated industries, places with collective bargaining power. Meanwhile, still preserve evidence — at minimum don’t let them brush you off with “that never happened.”
If you have hiring authority, don’t filter by age. First ask “can this person get the job done,” then discuss everything else. Don’t complain about not finding talent while blocking the most capable people at the door.
If you’re still young, just out of school, I have a few more specific words.
Don’t get scammed. Everything that promises “low barrier, high returns, guaranteed profit” is a trap. In an environment where everyone’s desperate to make money, your probability of being scammed far exceeds your probability of profiting.
Don’t buy a house. Not because houses are bad — but a thirty-year mortgage mortgages away all your options in advance: can’t change cities, can’t be unemployed, can’t stand up and walk out when the boss slams the table. At a stage where you’re not even certain you’ll have a job next year, using thirty years of debt to acquire an immovable asset is an extremely dangerous bet.
I’m not saying this from the shore. I myself bought at the 2019 peak — my down payment has already evaporated, followed by unemployment, layoffs, and pay cuts. After that combination punch, life is really getting better and more fulfilling every day.
Mortgage payments don’t pause because you lost your job — this sounds like a joke but lands as a monthly reality.
Don’t buy a car, don’t make large consumption purchases. Cars are pure consumption; those things used to prove “I’m doing okay” are essentially selling future options in advance.
Bride price is the same. If marriage requires a sum of money as exchange, that money shouldn’t have been paid in the first place.
The true cost of these things isn’t the money itself — it’s that together they lock you into a job you could otherwise leave, a city you could otherwise depart. What’s truly valuable has never been assets — it’s options: cash on hand, luggage you can carry, the ability to earn the next paycheck at any time, and health. The more options you have, the harder it is to control you.
I’m not telling anyone to lie flat. Quite the opposite — before understanding the rules, don’t rush to mortgage yourself away.
Finally, back to Liu Xiuhong. When he was sold into the compound as a bundled freebie, the compound’s logic was: this person is 38, can’t squeeze much more, might as well throw him in as a bonus.
And what actually pulled him out of there was his sister spending over 300,000 yuan and running around begging for help, and his own craft — the skill of taking a pulse.
Neither of these things has anything to do with “under 35.”
People should never have been priced this way.
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