Making Friends Plentiful, and That Silent Bill

The founding leader once uttered an incredibly insightful maxim, one that captures the raw essence of political warfare: "What is politics? Politics is about making as many friends as possible, and making as few enemies as possible."

Decades have passed, but if you look closely at society today, you'll realize this baseline code has not aged a bit. On the contrary, those in power are executing it with ruthless perfection. Except, their way of "making friends" today isn't about forming alliances or building ideological coalitions. It's much simpler and more transactional—they are using the massive state budget, national credit, and comprehensive privilege nets to shove millions directly into the pockets of the state system, turning them into screws on the massive state apparatus. These are the people on the public payroll.

Vested Allies and an Unprecedented Public Payroll

According to recent academic estimates, China's broad public payroll—including registered civil servants, public institution staff, auxiliary forces, contract workers, and retirees drawing state-funded pensions—has ballooned to an astronomical 68.46 million people. If you include the shadow personnel dependent on state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and quasi-fiscal allocations, this figure easily breaks 80 million.

What does that actually mean? Roughly one out of every twenty ordinary citizens is feeding someone on the public payroll. That is an officer-to-citizen ratio of 1:20.

This is an incredibly exaggerated, unprecedented ratio in history. In ancient China, the officer-to-citizen ratio in the Han Dynasty was about 1:7,945; in the Tang Dynasty, it was 1:2,927; and even in the Qing Dynasty, notorious for its bloated bureaucracy, it was only 1:911.

Looking at other developing nations, India (a fellow giant of 1.4 billion people) adheres to a "small government" model with a broad public payroll of only 18 to 20 million, resulting in a ratio of 1:70 to 1:80 (which leaves its grassroots public services severely understaffed). Brazil's public payroll size is comparable to China's at 1:18 to 1:20, but the vast majority of its personnel are concentrated in purely service-oriented frontlines like healthcare and education.

In contrast, our massive 80 million consists of a unique party-state dual-track bureaucracy, layered administrative approval bodies, and an all-permeating stability maintenance and grid-management army. In the underlying game of politics, they form an impenetrable fortress for the regime. These millions, along with their families, have their social status, comfortable lifestyles, and tomorrow's dinner completely bound to the uninterrupted survival and stability of this giant state machine.

Whenever controversial policies are pushed or power acts with total arbitrariness, this army of vested interests instinctively and actively rises to defend the absolute authority of the system. Protecting the machine is, after all, protecting their own iron rice bowl. They are the "most loyal friends" fed by the state using taxpayers' hard-earned money.

Invisible Bills and the Disappearance of Taxpayer Consciousness

Since this massive "circle of friends" consumes astronomical amounts of public funds daily, why aren't ordinary citizens—who serve as the ATM—furious? Why do they habitually stay silent?

The root cause is that the vast majority of ordinary people completely lack "taxpayer consciousness." They simply do not realize that they are the ones paying the bill for this grand feast.

This lack of awareness is the finest masterpiece of the tax system's designers. Unlike countries like the United States or Canada that implement "sales tax" at checkout (where you see the tax added separately, feeling the immediate bite of every transaction), we rely heavily on "indirect taxes" hidden inside prices. When a consumer buys a bottle of water, a phone, or even a pack of cigarettes, the receipt only shows the final price. The Value Added Tax, Consumption Tax, and local surcharge taxes are all safely "invisible" inside the price.

Because taxes are hidden, ordinary people go their entire lives without receiving a single bill that explicitly shows how much tax they have paid. People are even brainwashed by absurd propaganda into believing that "only those whose monthly salary exceeds the personal income tax threshold are taxpayers." They develop a submissive gratitude, feeling that the roads under their feet, the bridges overhead, and any tiny public service provided by the local authorities are "charitable gifts" from the state. They do not know that every bag of instant noodles they buy is funding those decent state offices and fat retired pensions. This ignorance breeds unlimited leeway for power, allowing the state to quietly drain the marrow of ordinary citizens to feed its "friends."

A 25-Fold Disparity and Worry-Free Luxury Cadre Wards

To keep this massive army of "friends" happy and loyal, the allocation of state resources exhibits a suffocating degree of favoritism. Nowhere is this difference more brutally exposed than in the pension and healthcare systems.

In terms of pensions, retired civil servants and public sector employees draw an average pension of 6,000 to 6,241 RMB per month, accompanied by high-tier supplementary corporate annuities. Meanwhile, the rural elderly and farmers draw a meager average of around 240 RMB per month.

That is an absolute chasm of 25-fold! What’s more sarcastic is that the state budget subsidizes retired public sector employees at an average of 2,265 RMB per month per capita, while subsidizing ordinary rural residents at a stingy 183 RMB per month per capita—a 12-fold disparity in state-sponsored favoritism. The farmers who handed over their grain for decades to build the foundation of industrialization receive a pension that cannot even buy two bottles of cooking oil, while public officials who spent their lives drinking tea and stamping papers draw 25 times more, spending their retirements in elegant comfort.

If the 25-fold pension gap is a distribution of spoils, the privilege in healthcare is a direct matter of life and death.

While ordinary citizens face the "Execution Line" of financial ruin due to a 27.3% out-of-pocket health expenditure share and expensive out-of-directory medicines, mid-to-high-level officials and retired cadres enjoy near-total 100% reimbursement under public health schemes, along with exclusive, highly luxurious "cadre wards."

In these cost-is-no-object special wards, the highest-quality medical experts, the most advanced imported equipment, and the scarcest ICU resources are permanently deployed to keep comatose, vegetative privileged cadres breathing. A single day of care can cost tens of thousands of RMB—fully billed to the taxpayers who themselves cannot afford hospital beds. Those who hold power face illness with absolutely zero worries, because their shields are forged from the very livelihoods of ordinary citizens.

The Silent Abyss and the Breeding Ground of Power

This absurd game continues to run day after day not just because of the state's endless pampering of its "friends," but because those outside the system have grown accustomed to silence.

There is a highly dangerous, cynical mindset among the public: as long as the blade hasn't touched my neck, as long as I can still put food on my own table, I will close my eyes to the rampant injustice and systemic theft. But history has proven time and again: when ordinary people use silence to protect themselves, they are merely using their own flesh to indulge and feed the very monster that is devouring them.

You think the low pension of a farmer has nothing to do with you, but the result is that your own social security contributions skyrocket every year while your future pension faces the threat of devaluation or default. You think the ballooning public payroll is none of your business, but the government, needing to feed those 80 million mouths, begins inventing new taxes, launching arbitrary inspections, and issuing massive fines, ultimately pushing the wave of bankruptcies right to the doorsteps of private business owners and workers.

When ordinary people in a society spend their lives scrambling for crumbs and choosing to be silent bystanders in the face of privilege, they are effectively granting power the blank check to loot their own resources.

The underlying game of politics goes on. In this grand feast of spoils, the well-fed "friends" are laughing and dining at the table, while the silent, ordinary taxpayers, who are paying the bill, are being callously devoured underneath it.