Man Selling Goods on the Street in Hunan Mocked by 'Unit Young Master': My Father Can Arrange a Place You Can't Enter With One Phone Call

On May 25, a man in Hunan province set up a street stall to sell broccoli steamed buns. It was a completely ordinary scene of making a living, the kind of bottom-feeders' struggle that couldn't be more mundane, yet it unexpectedly detonated a classic species of the Chinese internet: the "work unit young master."

According to publicly circulated chat logs, a netizen suddenly opened fire on the stall owner, his tone filled with the unique sense of superiority belonging to a system-affiliated family:

"My local work unit income plus housing fund totals 20,000, so I don't need to go to the south to work like you."

"I've seen officials and wealthy people; you might never see them in your lifetime."

"The work unit you can't get into can be arranged with just a single phone call from my dad."

Subsequently, this netizen even deliberately flaunted his salary and tax records, showing his monthly salary was about 17,000 yuan, as if terrified that others wouldn't know he had successfully evolved into a "reserve socialist aristocrat."

What had the most entertainment value in this whole incident was not his flaunting of salary, but that sentence: "A single phone call from my dad." Just a few short words instantly laid bare everything that Chinese society has spent these years covering up and refusing to admit.

Many Chinese people are educated from childhood to study hard, work diligently, and believe in fair competition.

Only when they grow up do they realize that some people are taking the civil service exams, some are testing for institutional compiled posts, and some are taking graduate entrance exams; while others were born with the answers already provided ahead of time.

You compete on academic credentials; he competes on his dad.

You study interview skills; he studies which leader is playing golf tonight.

You think you are playing "Life Online," but others start off with an internal beta test account.

Netizens quickly began using sarcasm: "I suggest abolishing the gaokao in the future; just compare the thickness of whose dad's phone book is thicker." "The successor of socialism has finally made an appearance." "So 'common prosperity' means common exploitation, where we all work for the young masters."

Some even joked that China has now formed a brand-new social structure:

The bottom layer is responsible for delivering food, setting up street stalls, and driving ride-hailing cars; The middle layer is responsible for competing in the rat race of civil service exams and taking out mortgages to buy houses; The upper layer is responsible for arranging positions, inheriting resources, and by the way, lecturing the bottom layer not to complain.

The most magical part is that all of this still happens in a country that shouts every day, "The people are the masters of the country."

In recent years, similar incidents of "second-generation power-flaunting" have become increasingly common on the Chinese internet.

Some people show off dozens of houses in their families, some flaunt that their parents are senior executives of state-owned enterprises, some constantly drop the phrase "I know the leaders," and others directly shout "Do you know who my dad is?" after getting drunk, turning it into a fixed program on the Chinese internet.

From the "Arctic Catfish" flaunting family wealth, to various "small-town test-takers" being publicly humiliated by the children of the powerful, to the intergenerational inheritance of children's positions, resources, and connections by families within the system, Chinese society is increasingly resembling a new version of a hereditary aristocracy society wearing the skin of socialism.

The only difference is that previously people competed on landlord families, but now they compete on the civil service establishment system; previously it was called gentry clans, now it is called system resources; previously it relied on genealogy charts, now it relies on address books.

In recent years, officials have less and less proactively published sensitive data such as the Gini coefficient, and continuously emphasized "common prosperity" and "social fairness." But ordinary people in reality have become increasingly clear: the real gap between rich and poor is not just the numbers on a bank card, but whether one has "the qualifications to contact the rule-makers."

People selling steamed buns think every day about whether they can sell a few dozen more yuan today; while the "work unit young master" thinks about how to show others that he is already standing inside the rules.

What is even more ironic is that such people are often not even at the very top.

Truly big figures usually do not personally step down to show off, because the entire social machine is already running for them. Only those "out-of-system aristocrats" who have just touched a bit of the sweetness of the system and just smelled the scent of power are impatient to run onto the internet and perform for ordinary people: "I know who someone is" and "My dad can arrange it."

This is also one of the most dangerous signals in Chinese society today: more and more young people no longer believe that "hard work changes destiny," but have begun to believe that "connections determine destiny."

When ordinary people find that no matter how hard they work, they are only getting a little closer to the phone books of the "young masters" rather than getting closer to fairness, social fragmentation will continue to expand.

As for the so-called iron fist of socialism, in the end it did not smash down on the powerful capitalists, but instead precisely smashed down on those setting up street stalls, delivering food, losing their jobs, and demanding unpaid wages.

As for those who can "arrange things with a single phone call," of course they do not understand the bottom layer.

Because they have never truly needed to enter society.

When they were born, they already had a seat inside society.