Where is the way out for ordinary Chinese people?

Teacher Ma simply said, there's no way out.
Ordinary people just live like this, waiting to die, but the advantage of modern society is that if you don’t self-destruct, you won’t be unable to survive; this is the biggest difference from ancient society today, and also a reflection of modernity.
The reason ancient society was so hopeless was never just because of poverty, nor just because of hardship, but because no matter how hard people tried, it was often very difficult to turn their suffering into truly belonging to their own life.
This sense of despair does not come from laziness; it precisely comes from diligent but useless effort.
A person clearly has exhausted their physical strength, time, and patience to the limit, yet still cannot maintain their family’s basic needs, cannot keep a few acres of land, or even themselves.
This is the most suffocating part of old society.
Many today imagine ancient times and mistakenly think that the reason the people were poor was because of low productivity and backward tools, so it’s normal for everyone to have a hard life.
That statement is only half correct.
Low productivity is indeed important, but what truly made ancient society predatory was not just the scarcity of total wealth, but that this limited wealth was fundamentally out of reach for ordinary people within the institutional structure.
In other words, the core issue was not just a small cake, but that ordinary people often couldn’t even hold onto the piece they made themselves.
The typical situation of farmers in ancient times was that they worked around the land all year, but ultimately did not truly own the security that land represented.
On the surface, they were cultivating their livelihood, but in reality, they were transfusing blood into an entire chain of oppression.
Above them were taxes and levies from the state, local requisitions, corvée, military service.
Beside them were landlords, powerful clans, kin groups, officials.
Outside, there were famines, wars, banditry.
The labor成果 of an ordinary person was not first kept for themselves, then from the surplus taken out, but was first scrutinized by layers of oversight, and only what remained could be considered their own.
In other words, ordinary people in ancient society did not live in a chain of labor, accumulation, and improvement, but in a cycle of continuous labor, forced collection, more labor, and more collection.
This is why ancient people were so diligent yet still found it so hard to turn things around. Because in that structure, personal effort was difficult to accumulate into personal wealth, let alone long-term family stability.
Today, producing a few more bushels of grain doesn’t necessarily mean you’re closer to a good life; instead, it might attract more scrutiny, additional levies, or even confiscation.
Saving some grain could lead to requisitions; having some savings might attract powerful clans’ attention; experiencing a bad harvest could mean being robbed outright.
The more a person can endure, work, and produce, sometimes the easier it is to become a target for extraction.
Effort is no longer a channel for improving one’s fate but becomes fuel for maintaining the operation of the oppressive system.
So, the phrase “predatory old society” accurately captures the essence of the old system.
It doesn’t just occasionally eat people; it operates by consuming people.
What it devours is not only life but also time, labor, hope, and the future.
The most painful part for people in this structure is not just today’s exhaustion but the uncertainty of tomorrow.
Farmers don’t know how much they can save after autumn; workers don’t know when they’ll be drafted; small business owners don’t know when they’ll be stripped of everything; ordinary families don’t know which famine, war, or requisition will break their household apart.
People are alive, but living without expectation.
Without expectation, life is even more terrifying than poverty.
At least poverty still means there’s a low point you can endure; lack of expectation means you have no ground beneath your feet at all.
The cruelty of ancient society was also that it almost had no real safety net.
Today, people say that even the poorest have some wages, aid, hospitals, schools, roads, markets; if not, they can still move, change jobs, borrow, do odd jobs, or seek information.
Most of the time in ancient times, these didn’t exist.
Once a family falls below the survival line, it’s very hard for the system to protect them well; they can only rely on fate, luck, kinship, or charity.
A good harvest might barely keep them afloat, but a poor harvest could turn them from poverty into vagrants, from vagrants into starving people, from starving into bandits, tenants, or people selling their children or daughters.
In other words, ancient society didn’t just let you gradually become poor; it could drop you at any moment, and once you fell, there was almost no ladder to climb back up.
This is why the lives of ordinary people in ancient times often evoke a profound sense of despair—because it’s not a life where effort might eventually lead to better days, but a life where effort is only to avoid immediate death.
Living itself exhausted all strength; there was no room for development, choice, or self-fulfillment.
Today, many say that ancient people were simple, patient, and thrifty. That’s true, but behind these qualities, there’s often not calmness but a survival instinct driven by necessity.
Someone with no way out can only desperately save, endure, and hold on.
Deeper still, the most terrifying aspect of old society was not just material poverty but that it turned all social relationships into parts of the oppressive structure.
Family should be a mutual support unit, but under high survival pressure, it also became a labor force organization and risk transfer mechanism.
In ancient times, raising children was not just for kinship and happiness; often, it was to increase labor, provide for old age, prevent disasters, continue the family line, and cope with high mortality.
Marriage was not necessarily a matter of personal choice but a form of exchange and bonding between families.
Kin groups could protect you or also bind you.
The local community was not only a society of acquaintances but also a place of mutual supervision and pressure.
Even ethics and morality often served to legitimize this high-pressure order: obedience, endurance, submission, acceptance of fate—repeatedly packaged as virtues.
Thus, the entire society appeared orderly, but in reality, this order was maintained through the repression and sacrifice of countless individuals.
This explains why the despair in ancient society was so intense. It wasn’t because everyone was living in moments of violence, but because even in normal times, the entire social operation logic was not on the side of ordinary people.
Even if you didn’t rebel, you could still be completely consumed.
Even if you didn’t make mistakes, you could still be ruined.
Even if you were honest, diligent, thrifty, and accepting your fate, you might still end up losing everything.
Because what determines your fate is not just what you do but the institutional environment you are in.
Modern society also has oppression and exploitation, and places that can be suffocating.
Today, ordinary people are still squeezed by high housing costs, low wages, debt, layoffs, performance targets, platform algorithms, and organizational discipline.
Many feel that no matter how hard they try, they can only stay in place, or even become more anxious the more they work.
Modern society has not eliminated suffering; it has only changed its form.
Today’s people may not be whipped by landlords, but they are gradually drained by long working hours, assessment goals, mortgage payments, and uncertainty.
The naked deprivation of old times has not completely disappeared; it has mostly transformed into soft controls within systems, contracts, interest rates, platform rules, and organizational management.
Yet, even so, there remains a fundamental difference between modern and ancient society: it’s not that today is happier, but that today at least there is a relatively stable chain of effort and reward.
Wages can be settled, labor can be monetized, property is generally protected, famines are no longer a regular death mechanism, public health has greatly reduced the devastating impact of disease on families, modern transportation and markets prevent localized poor harvests from immediately causing mass starvation, and the education system at least theoretically offers some upward mobility.
Social assistance and public services, though imperfect, have established a bottom line: people shouldn’t fall into irreversible despair just because of a bad harvest, illness, or local upheaval.
This bottom line is especially important.
The true meaning of modernity is not that it guarantees everyone success, but that it at least does not assume that ordinary people should be abandoned by fate.
You may not become better through effort, but you can usually maintain your life through effort.
You might not afford a big house, but most of the time you don’t have to worry about dying of hunger tomorrow.
You may find it hard to turn your life around, but your labor income can usually be converted into some stable income, not easily taken away by military service, corvée, powerful clans, or famines.
Today, you can work yourself to exhaustion—this pain is real—but it’s not the same as the suffering in ancient times, where a natural disaster could wipe out your entire family and leave you with nothing after a year of hard work.
Ultimately, what’s valuable about modern society is not that it eliminates inequality, but that it at least establishes a basic recognition of human dignity.
This recognition is reflected in many small but decisive ways: individual labor can be priced, personal property is protected in principle, human life should not be easily discarded, children should receive education, health outcomes should not depend entirely on luck, hunger should not be a regular societal mechanism, and individuals have at least some formal rights and procedures when facing organizations and authority.
Taken alone, these are imperfect and often flawed, but when viewed together, they explain why modern society, no matter how bad, is fundamentally different from ancient society.
Many people still feel despair today because they see the effort and improvement promised by modern society as guarantees of upward mobility.
But what modern society mostly guarantees is not upward mobility but a bottom line.
It allows most people to sustain their lives through work, avoid sudden collapse through the system, but it does not automatically promise everyone a turnaround or success.
When housing prices, education, healthcare, and job competition keep narrowing this upward path, people feel intense pain because they realize they are not living in the old society, but also not in an ideal society.
Their efforts are not entirely useless, but they are far from enough to change their social position.
This pain is real, so today’s people say they are exhausted, competitive, and hopeless.
But it’s crucial to understand that much of modern suffering is built on the premise that the bottom line already exists.
Because there is a bottom line, people ask about the upper limit.
Because basic survival is relatively assured, people demand more dignity, fairness, and opportunities for development.
Most people in ancient society didn’t even have the资格 to ask these questions.
They weren’t unwilling to be decent; they simply had no energy left to live.
They weren’t without dreams; their fate didn’t even give them space to dream.
Ultimately, the reason ancient society was so hopeless was not just because of poverty, but because it prevented people’s labor from accumulating, lacked a bottom line for life, deprived them of future expectations, and involved all relationships in the squeeze for survival.
Its most terrifying aspect was turning effort itself into a resource to be extracted, and living into a cost to sustain the order.
In such a society, people don’t rely on striving to build a life but on overextending themselves to delay collapse.
The despair of old society was that even your best efforts might not keep you alive.
The pain of modern society is that even your best efforts might not lead to an ideal life.
Both are painful, but they are not on the same level.
The former questions whether people have the资格 to live; the latter asks whether they can live better.
Distinguishing these two questions is key to truly understanding the meaning of modernity.
It’s not sacred, nor perfect, but at least it pulled people one step away from the situation where the whole world could tear them apart.
That step, in history, has already been very hard to take.
After all, a more advanced society—yours, ours, or future generations—probably won’t be something we will see.