How Can Those of Us in the Petty and Micro Bourgeoisie Connect with the Proletariat’s Unpretentious Truth, Goodness, and Beauty?

In response to my earlier articles, “The Chinese People and Chinese Internet Users Are Different Groups and Classes” and “Petty and Micro Bourgeois Encirclement Syndrome,” quite a few readers said they had indeed realized that their lives and social circles as members of the petty and micro bourgeoisie lacked a connection with the unpretentious truth, goodness, and beauty of working people. What can we do?

I. Online

(1) See

The hardships of the working class at the bottom:

Watch documentaries about assembly lines, manufacturing in Hebei, nonferrous metals in Jiangxi, jeans production in Guangdong, and coal mines in Shanxi;

See cleaners and sanitation workers working hard at three or four in the morning, their pay and working conditions, and the surveillance they are subjected to;

Watch documentaries about workplace injuries, unpaid wages, scams, and selling blood;

After seeing the hardships, look at:

The unpretentious truth, goodness, and beauty of working people at the bottom:

Couriers and food delivery riders helping and rescuing people—mutual aid within the class;

A food delivery rider comforting a girl who is running a milk tea shop alone, counting out grains of rice for an order, crying as she works.

Those porters, manual laborers, and people hauling heavy sacks are fathers and sons, not mules or horses.

The orderliness, solidarity, and willingness of ordinary people to head toward danger during disaster relief efforts in different places, such as the Wenchuan earthquake and the Chongqing wildfires;

The charitable actions of people at the bottom, and their honesty in returning lost money and valuables.

The arts of working people at the bottom:

Poems written by miners; dances performed by migrant workers on construction sites;

“Literature in Pinduoduo’s Review Sections and Healing at the Food Market”;

Farmers’ handicrafts, baskets woven from bamboo strips; the decorative dough foods made by rural women in Shanxi;

The vegetables and fruit arranged in neat rows at food markets.

They are living, breathing people.

(2) Remove the stigma attached to people at the bottom

1. Watch documentaries about secondary vocational schools. Contrary to what exam-taking specialists imagine, the students are not all dyed-blond delinquents. Most are thin, quiet, bewildered rural children.
2. Watch the documentary about the Shamate subculture, *We Were Smart*: these kids with their outlandish clothes and multicolored hair work twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, on assembly lines operating in two shifts. Shamate is the only splash of color in their lives, their only sense of being someone and having an individuality of their own.
3. Watch documentaries showing how farmers actually work, eat, and drink;
4. Look at records from the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in the less-developed provinces you usually discriminate against the most.

See how they supported the front and the Eighth Route Army, how they sent their children to the front, and how they were repeatedly ravaged by landlords, local militias, bandit troops, the Japanese, and hardline anti-Communist Nationalist forces. See how these supposedly most backward farmers in China saved the country at its most difficult moment, how they redeemed its so-called national character and saved the rotten middle and upper classes.

(3) Do not assume that, because you are an elite, you could easily rise out of the bottom through hard work and self-education:

*Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America*: so busy you can barely breathe, physically and mentally drained.

*My Students at Second-Tier Universities*: do not be smug about attending a Project 985 university, Tsinghua, or Peking University. Much more of it comes down to statistical patterns and class divisions. As one answer on Zhihu put it: How do you overcome the worship of Tsinghua and Peking University? The key is to overcome your arrogance and contempt toward people you consider beneath you. At its core is your own enjoyment of superiority and hierarchy.

Lu Xun: The other face of the despot is the lackey: when in power, there is nothing they will not do; when they lose power, they are servile through and through.

(4) People truly at the bottom have neither a voice nor power

The 996 work schedule has attracted enormous attention, yet actual assembly-line factories have operated twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in two shifts—or even longer hours—for so many years, without anyone speaking out for their workers.

For many people, a monthly income of 3,000 yuan is a marker of poverty and life at the bottom. But figures from a few years ago showed that 600 million people had monthly incomes below 1,000 yuan, and nearly one billion had incomes below 2,000 yuan.

Many small shopkeepers and street vendors spend every day confined to a tiny space of one or two square meters. They get up before dawn to make breakfast foods, braised meats, and noodles or other flour-based foods, then tend their shops until night. Their only entertainment is their phone, day after day, year after year. These are the users in the lower-tier markets for Kuaishou short videos whom so many petty-bourgeois intellectuals look down on. They do not have much inclination, time, or energy to argue and debate online. Nor do they know how to make attractive, fresh-looking pictures and videos accompanied by sophisticated, witty writing. They have no followers and no public voice.

“The Chinese People and Chinese Internet Users Are Different Groups and Classes,” “Petty and Micro Bourgeois Encirclement Syndrome”

II. In Real Life

(1) Go to food markets, public squares, and public sports grounds

Return to the company of real working people, real ordinary people—they do not even have to be people at the bottom.

Instead of living only within campuses, office buildings, large shopping malls, indoor sports centers, commercial streets, and middle-class residential communities.

From my earlier article,

“Literature in Pinduoduo’s Review Sections and Healing at the Food Market”:

The moving words in Pinduoduo’s review sections often come from ordinary people at the bottom or in the countryside: very unpretentious, happy praise, or mild complaints. The accompanying photographs often show very rustic, poor, run-down surroundings alongside cheap yet fashionable Pinduoduo products. Unlike members of the petty and micro bourgeoisie who are adept at navigating the internet, they rarely get a chance to make themselves heard. So they take writing a review seriously. It is one of their few connections with the written word, and in that sense it really can be called literature. The suffering and philosophies of life that emerge unintentionally make it all the more poignant and arresting.

Sometimes I browse Pinduoduo reviews to see photographs of the actual products, only to find people doing their best to keep their impoverished lives going. There is a beauty to it like that of Van Gogh’s *The Potato Eaters* or Käthe Kollwitz’s prints. Van Gogh and many other painters often painted stooped figures in bulky, ill-fitting clothes. Gradually, I came to realize that this is what the people at the bottom around us look like too; they also grin awkwardly and shrink back timidly. But in seeing them, you also see a strength—the strength of wild grass growing.

Food markets bring you closer to unpretentious, lively working people, to simple ingredients and the natural world. So this, too, is a way to live. It can be very healing for petty-bourgeois malaise. Simply seeing more ways of living—seeing the world, seeing other beings, seeing yourself—can broaden your outlook.

Watch the trucks and vendors busy before dawn; watch the elderly women who sit with their baskets from morning until night; look at the neatly bundled and stacked vegetables. Behind them are farmers busy at work in the suburbs and countryside.

“Healing in a County-Town Square”:

Here you can see and feel the joys, anger, sorrows, and pleasures of ordinary adults and ordinary children. It is a space of shared experience. And you realize that for many years you have been far removed from this world, confined to your own little world, to your own emotions and those of a handful of people, treating most ordinary people merely as symbols. You have become distant from a connection with ordinary people and working people. This experience and its healing quality differ from the experiences, spaces, and atmospheres of sports grounds and food markets that I wrote about before.

Here, I can empathize with ordinary adults: how they keep going through life’s hardships, what they look forward to. Unlike the petty bourgeoisie, they are not looking forward to getting rich overnight or achieving financial freedom. Their hopes are concrete. Reuniting and having fun with family, seasonal vegetables and crops, a piece of clothing. Many people work away from home and have only brief periods to return and be with their children. The adults excitedly take pictures of their children beside the fountain, while the children are clearly unaccustomed to it, shyly and stiffly positioning their limbs. Some families, simply dressed, sit together in a circle, watching quietly, occasionally talking and laughing.

For many rural people, going to the county-town square to see the fountain already offers the poetry and faraway places they long for. On the other side, a large screen is showing a film. Many people stand there watching, though the film may not be particularly good, or any more enjoyable than something on their phones.

“I Saw Order and Civility at a County-Town Sports Ground”:

The sports ground has two basketball courts, or four half-courts, which naturally and in an orderly way divide into four areas.

One is the primary-school arena: fifth- and sixth-graders shouting, spouting all the latest memes, striking all kinds of poses, full of energy and enthusiasm that are highly infectious. Beside them, a four- or five-year-old clutches a ball, grinning away and imitating their shouts. One is the easygoing exercise court, with middle-aged men, young men, young women, and young boys too. One is the serious court: four-on-four, with all kinds of fadeaways, pull-up jumpers, and three-pointers, plus teams waiting to rotate in. One is the family court, with older women bringing boys and girls.

What I see is civility, order, and rules, all arising spontaneously. I hold out no hope for Chinese internet users, but the Chinese people never disappoint me. The serious court may have its share of worship of strength, conceit, and elitism, but the other three courts are simply about sports, exercise, recreation, health, and courtesy.

(2) Go to the gates of a primary school

Return to the company of unpretentious, innocent children, and to the unpretentious innocence you once had yourself. Go to a snack street and buy something. Spend time around people who deal with children year-round, like Feijuan, Nanchang’s Fried Chicken Guy, and the young women working in fast-food shops.

Instead of loathing children and thinking of them as little demons.

(3) Get to know the ordinary manual workers around you

The people you regularly encounter in daily life: food delivery riders, couriers, water delivery workers, and so on.

Even if you do not strike up a conversation, look at their youthful or weathered faces, the cartoon stickers and toys on their electric scooters, the child riding on the back as they make food deliveries.

Talk to them as equals, without arrogance, as you would to a neighbor.

(4) Get to know special education schools

At the end of 2010, China had a total of 85.02 million people with disabilities. There were 12.63 million people with visual disabilities and 20.54 million with hearing disabilities. Yet we do not see these people in our “everyday” lives. Their disappearance is similar to the voicelessness of proletarians.

People with disabilities at the bottom are the proletarians among proletarians. To empathize with them is to empathize with how helpless human beings so often are in life.

(5) Go to Yunnan

See unpretentious ordinary people working hard on the red earth while still retaining their truth, goodness, and beauty. Spend time in beautiful natural surroundings.

Experience the Torch Festival, the bonfires and simple dances. Rediscover the most elemental artistic rhythms of being human, and the dance in which people exist together as equals.

III. The Question of the Supposedly Low Standards and Poor Morals of People at the Bottom

When many members of the petty and micro bourgeoisie talk about workers and farmers at the bottom, all they mention is spitting, smoking, loud voices, and swearing: “Barren mountains and foul waters breed unruly people.” They see them as lacking manners, morals, and ability, inferior to elites, intellectuals, and civilized people.

1. What kinds of people, in what occupations, actually engage in these supposedly uncivilized behaviors? Proletarians fall into different categories: the proletariat, peasants, the lumpenproletariat, bankrupt members of the petty and micro bourgeoisie, and so on. Poor people include both the micro bourgeoisie and proletarians. These distinctions need to be made.
2. Who defines what counts as uncivilized? Rural people speaking loudly is a matter of habitual ways of life.
3. The cleaners who actually maintain cleanliness and sanitation are proletarians. What class do the people who let their dogs defecate everywhere belong to, and what class do the people who clean the dog feces off the streets belong to?
4. Does being uncivilized equal being immoral, or causing great harm to society? Which classes are more involved in prostitution, gambling, drugs, and illegal or criminal acts that cause serious social harm? Does sexual harassment occur more often among workers or at universities?
5. I have lived in a county town in Yunnan for two years. The overwhelming majority of ordinary people I have encountered have been unpretentious, well-mannered, gentle, and courteous. The occasional person spitting is hardly a major fault. The uncivilized behaviors that truly bother me are walking large dogs without leashes and failing to clean up their feces, roaring through the streets on motorcycles, dangerous driving, barging into people while walking, and disturbing the neighborhood with noise. You can well imagine which classes are responsible. And what class do those people belong to who dig up and repair roads day after day and leave construction projects unfinished?

First see the evil and decay of the upper classes. Do not start by fixating on whether people in the lower classes spit.

IV. Healing and Cultivating the Mind

(1) The fear, disgust, and rejection that the petty and micro bourgeoisie feel toward the lower classes

As discussed in my earlier articles, “The Chinese People and Chinese Internet Users Are Different Groups and Classes” and “Petty and Micro Bourgeois Encirclement Syndrome”: “ordinary people”—meaning the petty and micro bourgeoisie who control public discourse, the “people of modern society”—are often too far removed from the proletariat and from peasants. Their understanding of proletarians and peasants is unfamiliar, imagined, and even hostile.

The rejection and fear of the lower classes felt by the petty and micro bourgeoisie is one of the issues involved in petty-bourgeois malaise. Behind it lie complex issues of class divisions, superiority and belief in a just world, the sense of existence and existential crises, fear of one’s family of origin and issues within the extended family, regional discrimination, self-loathing, and the projection of internal conflicts. In turn, this rejection and fear of the lower classes, this rupture with the proletariat, society, and history, intensifies their unease, anxiety, and existential crises. It is a vicious cycle; taken to its extreme, it becomes German Nazism.

(2) Petty-bourgeois malaise

Petty-bourgeois malaise is like diabetes: no one is begging you to treat it. If you do not, it makes no difference whatsoever to other people, society, or history.

This is no longer an era of assigning class labels and conducting denunciations. I, along with many others, do not shy away from the fact that we belong to the petty and micro bourgeoisie.

Diagnosing, identifying, and healing petty-bourgeois malaise is for the sake of our own physical and mental health, so that its manifestations—elitism, competitive comparison, speculation—do not destroy us. It is so that we do not place ourselves in opposition to history and the people, sever our connections with the proletariat, society, and history, and lose ourselves in nihilism.

(3) From the small ego to the true self

See that everyone suffers; see your class brothers and sisters. Break through indifference and the small ego, break free and emerge from self-pity and self-hatred, and deepen awareness, empathy, wisdom, and compassion. Return to your original heart: the mind itself is Buddha. Ultimately, everyone must look inward for awakening. It is not a matter of finding truth, goodness, and beauty outside yourself, but of finding your own.

Everyone has innate wholeness; human nature is fundamentally good; everyone is ordinary and limited; everyone can exist unconditionally and be at ease in their own being; the proletariat has an advanced character; and so on. These are foundations of Marx, Zhuangzi, and psychology. They are the foundations of healing.