Diary

On Pensions and the Power Dynamic with the Party

During dinner, the topic of pension stability came up. One friend confidently argued that because pensions tie directly to public livelihood, the Party would never let the system collapse. In a normal democracy, that logic holds up. But under a totalitarian cult like the Communist Party, that’s another story entirely. Look at history: during the Great Chinese Famine, millions starved, yet grain requisitioning continued as usual.

It all comes down to leverage between the people and the regime. The Party will only continue honoring its pension obligations if the political cost of breaking those promises outweighs the cost of keeping the system going. If people accept whatever narrative they’re fed without critical thought—much like during the famine—the state has no incentive to pay up. They could simply let inflation erode the real value of pensions, while using propaganda to convince people that the system was still functioning. It’s not about promises; it’s about whether the public is immune to the regime’s propaganda and willing to push back.

The Core Paradox

This creates a paradox: the rights and benefits you enjoy exist because others fought for them, yet you turn around and look down on the very act of resistance that made them possible.

On Anti-Japan Sentiment and Systemic Memory

The conversation then turned to traveling to Japan, and he adamantly refused, claiming 'Japan is inherently bad.' I tried to unpack his logic: is Japan bad forever because of its wartime past, or is it bad today because of current geopolitics?

If it’s about past atrocities, it reminds me of Louis Cha (金庸). The Communist Party executed his father, yet decades later, when he met Deng Xiaoping, he treated it as something that belonged to the past. Ironically, the Party operates under the exact same authoritarian system and ideology today as it did back then. Modern Japan, by contrast, is politically and ideologically very different from the militarist Japan of eighty years ago. Its political system, governing institutions, and underlying values have fundamentally changed.