Survival Strategies in an Age of Great Transformation

Humanity has entered an age of great transformation. Over the past two or three hundred years, the development of human society has been shaped by science and technology more than in any earlier period. Deng Xiaoping once said that science and technology are the primary productive forces; this statement captures the essential character of our era. In the decades after World War II, scientific and technological progress drove rapid development of human society. After these years of rapid growth, our human society has also met with unprecedented challenges, and it is these challenges that have placed us in an age of great transformation.

In 2023, 713–757 million people worldwide were hungry, lacking even the basic food to fill their stomachs. Moreover, in recent years the total number of hungry people has risen year by year. What does this number mean? The world's population in 1900 was 1.6 billion; in other words, today's hungry population is equivalent to half of the entire population of our planet in 1900. The world's population in 1800 was about 906 million; today's hungry population is roughly equal to the entire world population of 200 years ago.

These years, global wealth has in fact been growing. Logically, as global wealth grows, the number of hungry people should be falling. But unfortunately, the number of hungry people has risen right along with it, which shows that the progress of science and technology has not brought benefits that reach everyone.

Advances in science and technology have, while creating wave after wave of new rich whose wealth rivals that of nations, also created more impoverished people. The increase in hunger proves that knowledge and technology do not raise the conscience of the wealthy in step. Conscience is unreliable; around the world, the share of total social wealth held by the elite keeps rising, and the number of people in poverty will, in the foreseeable future, grow rather than shrink, sharpening social conflict.

People with empty stomachs will do anything; nearly a billion hungry people are nearly a billion time bombs. Why has terrorism spread like wildfire across the globe in recent years? Fundamentally, it is because the number of the extremely poor is rising; both organized terrorism and lone-wolf terrorism grow from the common soil of extreme poverty. There is only one real road to counter-terrorism, and that is to eliminate poverty.

I was born in 1979. In my more than forty years of life I have witnessed many major social transformations; huge numbers of people in our country, including myself and my family, have escaped poverty during this period—a remarkable advance.

When I entered university, most of my classmates still dressed plainly and lived frugally. Few households then had a full set of home appliances; personal computers were still rare. I remember that in my freshman year, several dormitories shared a single 386 PC. When we married, the standard "three big items" were a color TV, a motorcycle and a refrigerator, and most people married bare—with no home of their own and no savings.

I witnessed the shift of many people from not having enough to eat to having enough to eat. Though we weathered several economic crises, for a long stretch my generation basically believed with confidence that we would keep growing more prosperous throughout our lives. So although our childhoods were generally poor, an optimism pervaded my peers.

Moreover, that optimism was global. But in recent years things have changed greatly, and worldwide pessimism is on the rise. Some traditional intellectuals in the West bemoan that neoliberalism is losing out to populism; some scholars argue that today's world politics is an emotional politics. Hence in the US presidential election, an outsider candidate like Trump could win twice, to the indignation of the establishment elites.

This is merely an egocentric illusion of the elitists. Worldwide, the past few decades have been the best rentier era for elites in every field, and they naturally assumed this rentier era would go on forever. What they could not see was the toil of those at the bottom, nor empathize with the plight of the growing numbers sinking into extreme poverty; thus their research and predictions have been contradicted by reality.

Now the voices of the impoverished class grow louder, and those who govern must bend down to listen. For unless extreme poverty is eliminated, social peace will remain as unattainable as a mirror flower or a moon reflected in water. We must set aside ideology and look at the global commonality: in every country, the conflict between the new rich who rose on the dividends of technology and the ordinary people who keep losing ground as technology advances has grown ever sharper.

Several years ago I read two very well-written books: one is the Chinese scholar Mr. Hsu Cho-yun's Hsu Cho-yun on America, and the other is Hillbilly Elegy by J. D. Vance, who has just been elected US vice president. I suggest people take off their ideological glasses and read both carefully. What these two books reflect is precisely the social pain brought by technological progress. I am not opposed to technological progress; I am reminding us to face the other edge of this double-edged sword—the predicament of the great many who fall behind in an age of rapid development. Every round of technological revolution costs a batch of once-respectable middle-class people their jobs, after which their lives go from bad to worse.

Hillbilly Elegy describes in detail how middle-class people in America's Rust Belt, in the environment of technological innovation, lost their respectability and sank into the dependent poor. Vance is a thoughtful young man; his hard experiences in the Rust Belt mirror the real situation of many Americans, which is why his book moves so many of them. We must look past our emotions at this phenomenon.

Mr. Hsu Cho-yun is a sociologist who emigrated from China to the United States. Polio left him disabled for life, which in turn allowed him to focus on sociological research. Our famous writer Mr. Wang Xiaobo studied under Hsu when he went to the US.

Hsu is versed in both Chinese and Western cultures; his decades of life in America let him experience firsthand the country's changes. He watched American society step by step reach its present state, watched Americans' kinship-based social ties disintegrate, and watched, at the same time, the growing spiritual emptiness of younger Americans who had lost emotional support.

Why do I recommend these two books about America? Because America is a microcosm of global society, and both authors write with depth, very truly reflecting the character of our times. Americans and Chinese are not fundamentally very different; the great majority of ordinary people do not care about ideology—what we care about is the lives of ourselves and those around us.

Elites talk ideals; common people care about livelihood. In my twenties I did international trade for a few years and dealt with ordinary people in many countries around the world, discussing business and chatting about family. My own experience taught me that ordinary people everywhere care first and foremost about the basic necessities of life, and that most people are mild, polite and peace-loving.

Reading these two books, my feeling was that the common people of every country on earth have, in recent years, been going through the same social changes as ordinary Americans. Technological progress has eliminated many people; those who were riding the wave at the frontier a decade ago are now the left-behind, anxiously worrying that in the next round of layoffs their family's standard of living will be downgraded. Today's wave-riders, five or ten years on, will most likely fare the same.

In Vance's and Hsu's writing, the old elites of once-great cities like Detroit, the motor city of America, have lost their former dignity; life has grown tight, their dress no longer smart, their faces no longer bright. As technology updates, new "rust belts" keep appearing. Human beings cannot evolve as fast as science and technology, so the number of people today who are anxious and depressed about survival is rising rapidly.

Thus today's global crisis is really a watershed. It is forcing everyone worldwide to face this question: how do we safeguard the quality of life of every social stratum, and how do we ensure the new tech-rich do not crowd out the living space of those at the bottom? If the bottom's living space grows narrower and narrower, the phenomena Mr. Wu Si described in Hidden Rules and The Blood-Consummation Law—the desperate bottom risking their lives in desperation—will grow more frequent.

Throughout this essay I keep stressing the new tech-rich, because our age is indeed one controlled by technology. Worldwide, humanities majors in universities are now shrinking sharply while STEM majors' share rises rapidly, because our society has tilted overwhelmingly in the direction of technological progress.

In fact, there are large differences in human brain structure; genes doom a great many people to a natural disadvantage in learning technology. Math, physics, chemistry, biology and computer science are for them no better than an incomprehensible scripture. For this kind of person, surviving in our age is extraordinarily hard.

We are driving them into a corner where survival is hard, marginalizing them, and this marginalization is accumulating more and more impoverished people. These people too need to eat and hope for respect; their human dignity likewise needs defending. When their numbers grow large enough to affect world politics, an age of great transformation will have arrived.

We are now in exactly such an age. Many of today's social problems share the same root cause. Some nations and ethnic groups are declining, and large numbers of individuals are sinking; all this is making social stability worse worldwide, and ordinary people more and more restless. We cannot expect the general public, in adversity, to possess outstanding skills in managing and stabilizing their own emotions, for emotional management is itself a sophisticated skill. Against this backdrop, the so-called emotional politics arises naturally, and the excessive emotional expression of self-media is also a product of this fundamental contradiction.

Therefore, for at least the next generation, an urgent problem facing every country on earth is resolving the social imbalance brought by technological progress—and these problems, for any country, are first and foremost internal ones. Fairer wealth distribution, more balanced development opportunities, and more ways for ordinary people to make a living are the common task facing people everywhere.

Our educational policy over the past decades has had a major flaw: we have all been cultivating so-called high-end, elite talent. We overvalue a person's specialized ability in one field and neglect the cultivation of adaptability and flexibility. Why, once Detroit's auto engineers were laid off, could they not find suitable work again? Why did the once-middle-class elites in Vance's book end up relying on drugs to numb their disappointment? Why did once-mild, loving parents become irritable? Because they were trapped by their own over-rigid abilities, unable to flexibly adjust the course of their lives in a rapidly changing society and find a second or third way out.

The ancient Chinese long ago put forward the ideal that "the noble person is not a mere vessel." These four characters mean that a person should not be like a utensil with only a single use. We need many-sided abilities; only with them can we, after losing one livelihood, find another. And only when most people in society have many-sided abilities will our society be more resilient.

Over the last two or three hundred years, the social division of labor has grown ever finer. This broad historical backdrop has forced many people into being a screw in one spot of the social machine; when that spot is eliminated, many are stunned. Unfortunately, technological innovation is so fast that more and more spots face elimination. Society, in pursuit of development efficiency, has adopted a deformed educational philosophy, and in the end it will inevitably bear bitter fruit.

Education worldwide now needs major reform. I do not think any country's education is superb, because we have failed to teach the new generation how to survive sustainably in a changing age—that is education's greatest failure. Our education should take improving human adaptability as its ultimate aim, not specialized skills.

People too must adapt to a new educational philosophy, no longer deforming themselves in pursuit of today's single-direction specialized education. Profession-oriented education aimed at making a living should, as far as possible, move toward short, fast and practical forms. An undergraduate spends four years taking many padded courses; cutting those and letting them master two or three extra skills may help them more over a lifetime. Now and in the future, most people will need this kind of short, fast skill education several times in their lives just to survive.

Society cannot tilt toward technology alone; the whole of society has a duty to create living space for people without a gift for technology, otherwise we are essentially driving them to desperation. The previous generation may have been suited to technology; the next may be a tech washout. We cannot, like colonialists treating native peoples, strip away the survival rights of those without a gift for the natural sciences.

Each of us should also gradually develop this sense of adaptability. Does a civil engineer really have to do civil engineering for life? Does a mechanical engineer really have to spend life with machines? Of course not. Even supposedly stable professions now favored by the public—doctors and teachers—will face unemployment crises ten years from now; fierce competition will ultimately leave only those at the top able to survive.

I think our society and enterprises may, in future, need to keep pace with the times and open more channels to create conditions for re-employment—including providing, during employment, education programs that build new vocational skills, lowering the risk that laid-off workers cannot find new work. I believe people of insight will take this step ahead of the public. Everyone should have some crisis awareness, prepare for a rainy day, and cultivate themselves into a "noble-not-a-vessel" person. If we do not stockpile knowledge and skills early, after losing one means of livelihood we will be unable to make a living.

Walking on several legs gives better balance and lower risk. We often say our society lacks versatile people; but is that not precisely because today's education is not designed to cultivate them? We manufacture wave after wave of specialists and then discard wave after wave of them; it is cruel. What most people need is not great wealth, but a predictable and stable living space. The great majority of people cannot become lifelong leaders in some technology. So creating more survival opportunities for ordinary people is the common task of all humanity today.

Worship of diplomas and of technology will eventually become outdated. I suspect that before long we may realize that, for most people, a master's or doctorate is worth far less than three or four short vocational qualifications. Even today's vocational programs are too long; learning a skill to entry level needs no three years at all, and a three-year vocational student could easily learn two extra specialties.

The idioms "a skill is never a burden" and "the noble person is not a vessel" contain rich survival wisdom. Escaping specialized thinking and once again valuing many-sided survival ability and adaptability is a good key to today's social problems. Modern people too much despise ancient wisdom; an over-deformed, hyper-refined development exacts a price.

Making a living is humanity's most basic need and the most basic skill people should master. If across the globe great numbers of people have no opportunity to make a living, or lose their livelihoods in a technological revolution and henceforth struggle simply to survive, then such a model of social development is deeply flawed and is bound, under various pressures, to undergo enormous change. After all, survival comes first. Nuclear weapons are terrifying, but their threat is less than that of hundreds of millions of hungry people, because pressing the nuclear button requires passing through many steps, while a person tormented by hunger cannot be expected to think that far.