China’s middle class has a house and a car but no sense of security.

On April 2nd, Nandu Weekly published a survey-style news with the title "China's middle class has a house with a car but no sense of security." It details the various aspects of China's "middle class" anxiety, such as the lack of "social security", the increase of "competitive pressure", the difficulty of "security" and so on. The Chinese middle class, which has been labeled with beautiful labels by the fashion media, also had this difficult experience.

When it comes to the middle class, its first impression is "happiness," and various investigations break the illusion with solid facts. Some people may ask: If they are not happy because they are "respected and more gold," then ordinary people still do not live in hell? not like this. The unfortunate classes have their own misfortunes. Happiness and materialism are two different things.

Both our people and our government are accustomed to defining happiness as “material desire”, so we only worship GDP in the same way and squeeze into the metropolis. In our traditional notion, we simply equate human happiness with the escalation of material enjoyment. In the opinion of the author, this is one-sided. Although happiness requires a certain material security as the basis, the two are by no means identical.

For example, the "Life Satisfaction Index" survey released by the Journal of Happiness Research recently showed that South American countries such as Colombia and Uruguay and Ghana in African countries are among the best. In contrast, the United Kingdom has been far from the top 20. Although Uruguay has not yet removed the hat of poverty, high crime rates and inequality, the happiness of Uruguayan people has grown by nearly 10% in recent years. In this way, we can easily understand why the middle class in the Mainland does not feel happy.

First of all, the lack of "social security" of the middle class and the difficulty of having a "security" point to "social public goods." The lack of social security mechanisms and the arbitrariness of policy adjustments may deprive the middle class of all wealth at any time, and they involuntarily give rise to worries. Secondly, their "competitive pressure" has increased. They are constantly pursuing high wages. This is related to individualism and material desire expansion. So they live like ants. How can they feel "happiness"? On the one hand, it is the social environment, on the other hand, it is the individual cause. It seems to be very different. In fact, the cause is the same—that is, the material desire is equated with happiness. The government cannot change the previous concept of governance that only pays attention to efficiency. It does not pay attention to increasing investment in “social public goods”. It does not carefully examine the living conditions of citizens, and its vision only stays at the level of the giant society. At the same time, individuals are bound to live in the midst of fear and constant pursuit of wealth and security. What is reflected from the living conditions of the middle class is also the crux of this society—over-emphasis on the satisfaction of material desires, while ignoring social public life and personal spiritual satisfaction.

This problem seems to be able to find some inspiration from the "Bhutan model" that has been widely concerned by the international community in recent years: their government's ruling philosophy is "governance should focus on happiness, and should aim at achieving happiness", the total value of national happiness The indicators are composed of the government's good governance, economic growth, cultural development and environmental protection. Although Bhutan’s per capita GDP is only over 700 US dollars, the people are very happy. The unhappiness of our middle class is rooted in our ruling philosophy and mainstream concept of equating materialism with happiness, thus neglecting true happiness, that is, social public life and personal spiritual satisfaction.

Wealth must have "certainty" to bring happiness, life must have "guarantee" to be happy, and society must be "harmonious" to be happy. What the middle class lacks may at least include the three most urgent needs.