Three years ago, by chance, I got a chance to enter the system and started working in a municipal state-owned enterprise under the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of BJ City, due to my old colleague’s strong recommendation. Such an opportunity, for a northern drifter like me, who had no background in the imperial city, was like being hit by a pie falling from the sky, which could not be expected.
After graduating from university, I have been working in private enterprises outside the system, for ten years, although I have changed a few companies, but also rely on their own skills to make ends meet, day after day to save shallow experience. Looking back on that year, I could stay up for two days and nights for a bid proposal, but also because of the preparation of a public relations campaign, two months of work without rest, but also in order to get a thousand more bonuses, forcing themselves to rush a market research report in a day, can be described as suffering from years of socialist capitalist exploitation, so much so that at the moment of getting the opportunity to enter the system, I was not too much hesitation. And old colleagues at the Time also repeatedly persuaded, said that both past the age of the body and mind fatigue, can not be too neglected, but also can not be too cold Family and human feelings, state-owned enterprises system of the preparation of the post opportunities are few, “stable “than what is important, so finally took advantage of the water to push the boat, semi-submissive half to enter the system.
When the initial process of entry, neither experienced the tedious and complex recruitment assessment, nor by the company’s party organization to do background interviews, after a simple negotiation of salary to sign up to start working, and this is all because of acquaintances for endorsement, will be all the way to the green light, this is my first time on the “relationship This is the first time I have a personal and concrete feeling of the importance of the word “relationship” in the system. When I talked with the person in charge of personnel about the salary position, I was told that state-owned enterprises have a relatively “strict” salary structure system, and it is best not to ask for a lot of money just after joining, which will reduce the The leadership’s impression score, after each year will have the opportunity to increase salary and promotion, do not need to be too anxious moment. At that time, I did not think much about it, I thought that with my work ability and experience, I would not have a problem to get a promotion and salary increase in a short period of time, but unfortunately, I came to understand that in such state-owned enterprises close to the center of the government system, if you want to “climb up the ladder ” – the proverbial promotion and salary increase in the system – if there is no absolutely excellent nepotism background relations, is not even think about, so the initial idea of promotion and salary increase. Things have now become dust.
Above the interests of sitting on the ground for prison
Just entered the system, everything is new, and as a system of white people, I can only rely on some of the past rumors, slowly feel the way of survival in the system. Those who are familiar with the system of Chinese state-owned enterprises should know that some large-scale state-owned enterprises are characterized by a large and comprehensive enterprise structure – in addition to the normal business operations department, it also covers a number of internal security departments that provide basic services for employees, just like a small self-sufficient society. This is naturally the case in the state-owned enterprise I work for, which is backed by the resource system of the municipal SASAC.
For example, every year in summer and winter, each employee receives several sets of uniforms of the same style, and the cycle repeats year after year, so that in the company’s locker room, there is always a corner full of uniforms without owners. In addition, the company provides free dry-cleaning service for its employees. Every Friday, an outsourced service company comes to the company regularly to pick up and deliver clothes that need to be cleaned.
There are four restaurants in the company, one of which can accommodate more than 1,000 people at the same time, and three meals are provided every day with the standard of four meat, six vegetables and eight main dishes. One of the four restaurants is prepared for senior leaders, ordinary employees generally do not have the opportunity to enter, according to other colleagues who have been to talk about the decoration and tableware are luxurious, but also has a team of not less than one meter six and a half tall, quite beautiful female waiter team.
Many of the company’s older employees over the age of fifty were given welfare housing on the edge of Beijing‘s Third Ring Road in the early years, and after the abolition of the housing welfare system for state-owned enterprises in the last century, the company would also seek to facilitate various types of welfare housing for its employees, including internal pooled funds, targeted policy housing, subsidies for the purchase of commercial housing, corporate staff dormitories, etc. Employees were able to rent and buy these welfare apartments at a lower standard than the normal market price. Of course, not everyone is treated equally, and the harder the relationship is, the better the house will be.
The company’s vice-president-level leaders will be assigned cars, most of them are domestic brands, not infrequently there will also be Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai brand (mainly benefited from the capital’s local factories). The company also has special agreements with some geo-automotive brands, and ordinary employees will have special discounts (as low as 65% off) for purchasing cars of these brands on the market, in addition to a monthly vehicle cost subsidy of varying amounts. In addition, the company also provides commuter shuttles, which employees can ride for free to and from work on weekdays. In addition to these basic daily security, the company also has a separate recreation and sports center, supermarket, coffee bar, logistics center, clinic, sports venues, etc. Medical insurance, housing fund, holiday gifts and other benefits, naturally, are not in the picture. For these nine cows of the tip of the welfare protection, the company’s grass-roots employees just sit back and enjoy their convenience, many people will not ask why they can have so many privileges, and a little know the hidden rules of these people also think that these are good for self and altruism – ordinary employees can enjoy a constant stream of various benefits, and those background The relationship between the security department leaders, can use their positions, bridging all kinds of external resources, to get a considerable amount of gray income. Such a situation has been maintained for a long time, even after the recent years of discipline inspection, but also some originally belong to the leadership of the personal decision to condolences welfare behavior, institutionalized into the welfare system of the normal behavior. It can be seen that under the wings of the system, the grey space for rent-seeking interests has always existed.
Strictly speaking, these daily routines within SOEs are the historical legacy of the collective planned economy decades ago, and many people’s inherent thinking is that SOEs, which symbolize class dominance, should maintain such a norm, and because it is seen as a norm, it maintains rigidity and stubbornness for years, and makes the system based on collective consciousness solid for a long time. And it is this impression of a widespread consensus in the whole society that makes people in the system gradually fall into a common state of paralysis, because everyone can have a similar standard of living and working, so the dormant laziness of the mind and the comfort of the body become commonplace and consume people’s minds. This is a pattern of crowd control through the creation of a common environment in the crowd, a phenomenon that Edgar H. Schein, a professor at MIT, described in his book Brainwashing and Totalitarianization in Modern Society (1959). Society (1959), Edgar H. Schein has made a straightforward analysis – in order to achieve “brainwashing” of the individual, it is necessary to place him or her in a position where he or she can be “brainwashed”. In order to “brainwash” an individual, he or she must be placed in a stable “peer group” (peer group), using the same standards of others around him or her to create a certain pressure to influence him or her. In order to achieve “brainwashing” of an individual, he or she must be placed in a stable “peer group” (peer group) that uses the same standards of others around him or her to create a certain pressure to influence the individual. Such “peer groups” include the same ideological organization, the same workplace, and so on. The whole process of “brainwashing” depends on these interpersonal relationships to convey to each individual the psychological impression that he or she cannot be different from others, and to induce the individual to The process of “brainwashing” relies on such interpersonal relationships to convey to each individual the impression that he or she cannot be different from the other, and to induce the individual to have a strong desire to conform to the other, regardless of the circumstances, and eventually to form a desirable, institutionalized group mind.
The Strange Daily Life of Separation of Body and Mind
In fact, before I entered the system, I had more or less heard various rumors about the ideological clamping down of individuals in the system, the most typical one being that everyone must keep their mouths shut and say what they should say in public, but never mention a word of what they should not say. “Political awareness”. I work in a unit divided into three levels of control, respectively, the company headquarters, headquarters group, municipal SASAC, each level has an independent party committee organization department, the matter of political thinking style, ideological construction, organizational discipline and wind control work, are responsible for vertical management by this line of department, the specific work includes party building, discipline inspection, ideological review and so on. The work of these work depends on the various party discipline management system on the table, but also will depend on the private personal reporting supervision. Usually in the company, all employees will keep a vigilant eye on their own words and actions, and will try to avoid certain red lines that cannot be expressed. In early June of the previous year, I needed to take leave from the company for personal reasons, but it happened to be on the sensitive date of June 4, so a simple leave approval triggered suspicious interpretations by some leaders, so much so that the disciplinary department even confirmed with me individually before finally agreeing to grant leave. After that incident, I began to realize that the ideological control in the system is actually close to everyone, from the top leaders to the ordinary employees.
All the middle-level leaders of the company, regardless of whether they are party members or not, are required to regularly attend the expanded monthly meetings of the party department, and are also required to complete the learning content in the “Learning Power” App. The learning content of the app. When ordinary employees communicate and chat with each other on a regular basis, they will occasionally express their dissatisfaction with some topics that have aroused public opinion in society, but every time there are words of criticism of the system, all of them will subconsciously stop the topic and discuss other contents. No one would like to not control their own mouth, and be watched behind some ears as a reporting material, and eventually by the discipline inspection department on the record.
All ideological manipulation in the system is top-down, whether in government departments, institutions or state-owned enterprises, it is the same. After each meeting of the Politburo and the State Council, the company will immediately organize all kinds of so-called “instructions from the general secretary”, “instructions from the central government”, “instructions from the spirit of the meeting”, “instructions from the central government” and “instructions from the spirit of the meeting”. “Central instructions”, “the spirit of the meeting instructions “downward layer by layer to convey. The busiest people in the company at this time are probably the assistant secretaries of the leaders and the colleagues of the party group department, who must organize all kinds of materials and documents advocated by the central meeting as quickly as possible. The secretaries are busy preparing speeches for the leaders to convey the spirit of the central government, and the party department is busy preparing different learning materials for each level of employees. But in fact, everyone understands that these things are a self-indulgent and absurd drama, we just do a good job of formalism routine work, do not need to care about the so-called “spirit of the Central Committee The “central spirit” will really work. This is a process in which everyone is quietly shaped into the same type of person by the system, and everyone needs to maintain a calm patience to perform this absurd play to the extreme. But at the same time, everyone’s role is different, so everyone has more than one mask and more than one book of lines, and in many cases, everyone no longer distinguishes between inside and outside the play.
In such a stage, what impresses me most is that everyone maintains a set of peculiar language expression habits. One of the more common features is that in some formal workplace, many people in order to maintain a seemingly cordial relationship between colleagues, it is impossible to express their clear ideas through normal speech. Many people in the exchange of expression, deep down in the heart wanted to express a critical opinion, but after the brain thought logic, it became and mud ideas, and when finally said, but completely turned into a true affirmation of praise. Some people think this is modesty and prudence, but I believe it is just a kind of false pretense that has long been tasteless.
Another common linguistic feature is the habitual abuse of ideological language within the system, resulting in many public speeches in which everyone follows a kind of detachment from self-awareness after constantly repeating the “authoritative view “, the empty slogan-like accent characteristic. This long and boring habit of expression is as drowsy as chewing wax, in which the logic of vocabulary is both lacking, absolute and confusing, and very often the whole text is a cartwheel in place, in which the logical system of language seems to be redesigned, and many phrases have become extremely vague, and some normal contexts and rhetorical combinations that express specific meanings are either abandoned or abused. In the absence of factual arguments, the arbitrary use of “the highest, fastest, strongest,” “no retreat”, “in-depth implementation “, “vigorous development” and other exaggerated and uncompromising assertive words, as if this is the only way to add enough weight and security to the speech. and a sense of security. This is a kind of destruction of the normal Chinese language system, reminding me of the new language created by Big Brother in 1984, which compresses the space of language expression and the scope of common sense, ultimately castrating everyone’s thinking and making it subservient to the slavery of power.
The company’s administration subscribes to some party organ periodicals for the top leaders every month, such as “Frontline”, “Red Flag” and so on. I had never come across such Marxist-Leninist-communist ideological publications before, so I was full of curiosity when I first looked through them. It is undeniable that, although I am particularly uncomfortable with the vague rhetoric of Marxist-Leninist political concepts, I must admit that the texts compiled by ideologists from various party schools and universities do conceal a set of discursive logic that has both brainwashing and inciting effects. It’s just that these brightly printed ideological journals are, for many company leaders, reduced to desk decorations that show they have not forgotten the party’s original intention.
The company’s ordinary employees in their spare time outside of work, from time to time will also be flirting with some company leaders obscure and nonsensical lace embarrassment. In my impression, it seems that almost every senior leader has one or two paragraphs that can be used for everyone’s after-dinner entertainment, which are nothing more than small stories of male adultery and female sexuality, many of which are semi-open secrets within the company. I once thought nonsensically, these unspeakable little stories, should be the company’s leadership used to pinch each other, the dirty bargaining chips. I remember two years ago there was a senior executive of another state-owned enterprise, caught in a power struggle within the company, his peacemaking with a young female subordinate, was exposed to the media by other executives, followed by a series of reviews from the municipal disciplinary committee to the company’s internal disciplinary department, in order to restore the system’s reputation and status, the two protagonists of the incident finally in an absurd way, for the whole farce to do the end –Divorce their respective original husbands and wives, and then they get a Marriage license together, thus proving that they are free to fall in love, in public and private, in virtue of the law, it is logical to explain.
The lifeblood of the country that is strong from the outside
Since Xi Yizun put forward the call for bigger, stronger and better state-owned enterprises, the evolutionary vein of the state into the people has become an established and indisputable fact of China’s economic structure in recent years. In this macroeconomic context, a large number of effective resources in society have become paving stones for the inefficient and redundant operation of SOEs. People familiar with the recent situation of the Chinese economy should understand that the real estate industry in recent years has been the pillar of China’s economic pathological high-speed development representatives, the previous few years to Beyoncé Garden, Huaxia Happiness as a typical private real estate giants, had opened a brief period of high turnover mode of real estate development, rapid and large-scale land acquisition and development, creating a huge amount of sales book data, as a way to support the high market value of enterprises in the financial market. The basis of all this is based on the high cost of financing (according to personal knowledge the lowest financing rate for Chinese private real estate companies was 18% in 2017, with subsequent year-on-year increases).
In contrast, state-owned real estate developers in the same period, but can almost zero interest rate advantage, long-term access to huge amounts of development funds from state-owned banks. So only to the real estate industry as a representative, compared with the financing conditions of private enterprises and state-owned enterprises, you can see the difference between the two in the business environment, and it is in such a causal path, the current frequent and issued by the private real estate corporate bonds burst tide, will also be so raging non-stop.
In mentioning this topic, perhaps it should also be understood that, due to financial policy control, limited investment channels and a series of institutional reasons, the average Chinese resident a large part of the free money, are state-owned banks to low interest rates, high savings “cut leeks The majority of these savings are eventually converted into nutrients for long-term blood transfusion to inefficient and redundant state-owned enterprises.
Because the system is a top-down control model, so the system of state-owned enterprises will naturally form a work vein responsible only to the top, not to the bottom, in such an internal Culture, each person’s ability to work is not important, whether to choose the right leader, whether to stand in line correctly, whether it will be beautiful words tend to serve, whether it will be eight-sided is the key to everyday. This is true all the time, and everything is true, and when the table tops of the slap on the horse, and the table tops of the deceitful become the norm, the cooperation between people will lose the basis of dedication and righteousness, and the goal of work will lose its substantive meaning. When all this finally comes down to each person, the so-called “work” becomes a set of comfortable or promotion, or for the vanity of others, or to live in peace. The body.
In such a background of inaction, when we have to put into the actual work, from company leaders to ordinary employees, almost everyone is holding a mentality of avoidance, thinking that if they do not do something, they will not make mistakes. Although there is no shortage of meetings and conferences to study various business development in daily life, every participant is actually pushing things to avoid responsibility. The senior leaders of the corpse believe that there is no merit and no demerit, the middle leaders who avoid taking responsibility are good at shifting the blame and perfunctory, and the ordinary employees who have no direction can only take care of themselves. After all of them have lost their professionalism and integrity, the whole company seems to be like an idling engine, rumbling, but spinning in place. In this way, it is impossible to expect this kind of golden jade table of the institutional enterprise group, can have the real market competitiveness, and some look forward to bigger, stronger and better state-owned enterprises to revive the Chinese economy after the will, may also end up just a thirsty mirage of the sorghum dream.
The cage and people in one
There are three kinds of people most commonly found in the company system, the first is the smallest proportion of people, but the most influential, their Parents either originally worked in the municipal district-level party and government agencies, or is the company group of retired veteran leaders, with their fathers for many years to build a wealth of contacts. To some extent, they can be classified as the “second generation of officials” within the system and “This kind of people will generally serve as important high-ranking leadership positions, and the upside is also guaranteed, career as long as they do not stand in the wrong team, or make very serious political mistakes, generally will be smooth and prosperous. Of course, there are some extremely ambitious people in this category, all the time spying on the greater power, hustling power to seize the power to touch the brutal fight for them, just a routine.
The second type of people also have a solid nepotism, but generally will not participate in a variety of heart-to-heart and power struggle, they do not have a huge pride of ambition, nor long-term pursuit, most of the time, they just see the system as a place of privilege, stable and ordinary through the life of the salary can be. Of course, but as long as the opportunity to rise in the career, they will not turn a blind eye, will also put down the humble and cheap pride, around the wandering around the side of the executive leadership, exquisite self-interest coquettish words.
The third kind of people are basically young people, usually they are the most energetic and dynamic, but at the same time they know the way of the city, they are not too long away from the university campus of a group of people, in order to seek a stable job, do not want to fight in the competitive market in the volume, through deep or shallow relationship into the system, and enjoy the easy daily routine of 9 to 5. Many of them, when they first entered the system, had the initial intention of changing the established rules and being able to make a difference, but the final result is predictable, even though the newborn calf is not afraid of death, but also can not shake the huge melting pot of dirt. When they find that their most precious ideals and values have been completely reduced to the logic of survival, they have no power to struggle against it, and can only get used to using the words “be more stable” and “be more realistic”. ” and “be more realistic” to accept the The only way to accept the discipline of power is to say “be more stable” and “be more realistic”. After getting in touch with these young people, I occasionally find that some of them are tired and anxious about their lost direction, but in essence, it is just a vain pretension and restlessness. I always think that people who want to redeem themselves have actually left the system long ago, and those who remain are only those who are afraid of being swept up in the tide outside the system and are unwilling to make changes, even if they have doubts and doubts, they still choose to listen to their inner compromise.
Until now I still remember, when I first entered the system, some friends around me have used an exaggerated tone to tease me “this time you can always retire”, yes If I can put down the heart that has been sharpened to lose enthusiasm, I can look at everything, the years quietly watching the last trace of numbness, but the price of this is to give up my most cherished personality and freedom. In the system under the giant curtain of the cage, there may have long ceased to exist the breath of the will to live, the huge system of the road, perhaps itself is a tower of obscure and unknown pontoon, each after the reverse elimination of the hide in which have been chaotic exile of their souls, will no longer be full of self-doubt and torture, leaving only such as I staggering lonely ghosts, still in the boundless wilderness to linger Only a stumbling, lonely ghost like me is left in the boundless wilderness, still clinging to earthly lusts and grievances.
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