Prisons Are Not Nursing Homes? That Sentence Is the CCP's Diagnosis! Inmates' Medical Care Will Be Picked Up by the Treasury While Rural Elderly Receive Only 163 Yuan a Month, From the Sui and Tang "Fortunate Hands and Feet" to Japanese Elderly Fighting to Go to Prison, the Real Interest Rate on Social Security Is 1.5%, the Longer the Dishonesty Blacklist Gets the Less It Hurts, and the Cost of Rule Is Surging Squared!

Recently, Chinese citizens have been hotly discussing the phenomenon of "prison eldercare," reflecting a severe social and pension crisis. With the newly revised Prison Law incorporating basic medical care and social security continuation for criminals into fiscal guarantees, it forms a stark contrast with rural elderly people receiving a pension of only 163 yuan per month, leading to a "penal inversion." From historical self-mutilation to evade corvée labor and the British Poor Law to elderly Japanese people rushing to get themselves imprisoned, when survival pressure crushes the lower classes, punishment is reduced to a form of welfare. In addition, the low rate of return on social security and the inflation of the defaulter blacklist are causing the governance costs of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to skyrocket quadratically.

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Observe things as they are, reject fragmented cognition. A while ago, I was browsing Douyin, and plus a few days ago, a friend sent me this. I never expected that a particularly niche retirement track would be discovered by Chinese citizens. This niche track is none other than prison eldercare. After seeing this comment, I burst out laughing. Chinese citizens nowadays are truly not so easy to fool anymore. Who are the ones posting all these things? Well, they are all those law-popularization accounts of the CCP, and recently everywhere you look there are things saying "prison is not a retirement home." But I think this reply is epic, and it hits the nail on the head: when the CCP has already started attacking this behavior, it proves that this track is already getting crowded. Then, I went to check the materials to see what kind of treatment is inside. Well, upon checking, in just under ten days, which is October 1st of this year, the newly revised Prison Law will come into effect. This law has three new things worth looking at. Among them, Article 79 has written a sentence for the first time, what does it say?

It says the state guarantees basic medical care for criminals, with all three directories executed based on local medical insurance. Then Article 64 is written regarding the management of elderly and sick prisoners, stating that their physical and psychological characteristics must be taken care of. The most fucking ridiculous part is that Article 80 states that prisoners' social security must be continued after they are released from prison. The CCP has been truly fucking obsessed with this social security thing lately; even if you make it big, you still have to pay social security. So we can make a comparison. The average rural subsistence allowance standard announced by the Ministry of Civil Affairs is 629.1 RMB per person per month, while the national minimum standard for urban and rural residents' basic pensions is 163 RMB per month. When you put these two things on the table and look at them, what do you see? That is, the CCP is confirming one thing through legislation: people inside prison will have their medical care covered by the state budget in the future, while elderly rural people outside prison can only receive 163 RMB a month. This is a typical inverted punishment. What does inverted punishment mean? It means that when a person's life outside is harder than inside, criminal law is no longer a punishment; what does criminal law become? It becomes a welfare benefit. Recently, in the popular science articles by this bunch of CCP running dogs, these past two years everywhere you look there is the same sentence: “Prison is not a nursing home, do not have illusions in your heart.” When a system has to repeatedly tell the common people this sentence, what does it mean? It means that enough people are actually calculating this math. And what is the result of the calculation? Um, this is not criminal law, this is welfare. First of all, let's put this calculation on the table. The CCP does not have statistics on how many people committed crimes just to get inside. The vice president of the China Prison Work Association, named Li Yuqian—maybe his father is from Henan and his mother is from Guizhou, given a name like that—already admitted back in 2021 that relevant statistical data on elderly prisoners is very scarce. However, the aging of prisons is an inevitable trend; data may be lacking, but cases certainly exist. First, let's talk about this old man named Fu Daxin, who was a wubao (five-guarantee) recipient from Qidong County, Hunan Province. On September 8, 2008.

Well, for what reason? Ah, because at the Beijing Railway Station square, he attempted robbery with a fruit knife; that year he was 69 years old. The judge sentenced him to two years, and he was displeased right there in court, directly slamming the table and saying, “Can you fucking judge properly? The sentence is too light,” directly starting to furiously retort to the judge, and then even suggesting to the judge, “Do you want to re-try this properly?” He also said, “My purpose in taking it was to constitute a crime.” His pension at the time was only 50 RMB a month, meaning not even 1.7 RMB a day. In 2010, he was released early from prison and entered a nursing home, and what did he say? He said life here doesn't even compare to prison! Looking again at July 22 of this year, the CCP's Central Social Work Department itself published an article, and in the article, who did it talk about? An old man named Lao Fan, 70 years old, from Yangpu, Shanghai. Ah, he never married, had no children, and was sentenced to seven months for stealing an electric bicycle. When he was released from prison, his retirement procedures had been pending for seven years and still weren't completed, and he owed 20,000.6 RMB in social security arrears. That social worker wrote this sentence in the assessment: “If lacking assistance, elderly criminals will easily commit crimes again due to survival problems.” This is something written by the CCP's own social workers in government work reports. Ah, and then there are the reverse examples, which are so funny. Still in Hunan, in Shaoyang, Hunan, there was an old man born in 1931 who was sentenced to 15 years in October 2024. The detention center or whatever—the detention center fucking chickened out, refusing to accept him on the grounds that he was unable to care for himself, and directly giving him...

What is the current situation? What is the current situation? It's that prisons have started to become selective. Why is there an inversion? Let's look at the data. What is the meal standard for each person in prison? I checked the relevant regulations, which stipulate that each person receives 17 to 25 kilograms of grain per month, 15 to 25 kilograms of vegetables, and 1.5 to 2.5 kilograms of meat, plus some eggs, fish, and oil. If you calculate it based on this year's food prices, it adds up to 256 yuan per month, while the basic pension for rural elderly is only 163 yuan per month. In other words, the market value of that basket of food in prison is already 1.5 times more than what a rural elderly person receives outside in a month. And that's just for food; there's also accommodation, heating, water and electricity, and custodial staff. Of course, at this age, these people are no longer just guards; they are practically caregivers. Because if someone dies inside, these staff members are also punished. So these old men are like their living ancestors. And in ten days or so, medical care will also be a matter for the treasury. Outside, let's look at the data. I found a figure from the Fifth Sample Survey on the Living Conditions of the Urban and Rural Elderly. The CCP says the median annual income for rural elderly is 5,640 yuan, and the daily annual expenditure is 6,734 yuan. This means that more than half of the rural elderly cannot cover their daily expenses with their own income, so the gap is either filled by their children, by continuing to work in the fields, or simply by not seeking medical treatment.

So, let's look back at the Criminal Law. What is the Criminal Law? The essence of the Criminal Law is the deprivation of freedom, using the deprivation of freedom to inflict suffering. But there is a premise here, which is that life outside must be more comfortable than life inside, right? For someone who has a job, a home, and friends, going inside is certainly a punishment. But for an elderly person who has no job, no home, no social security, and a body full of chronic illnesses, and who only receives 163 yuan a month, the hunger outside and the unattended pain of illness are more painful than the custody inside. And for someone to whom freedom is of no use, freedom is not worth much. When all three conditions are reversed, the punishment becomes a negative value. And a negative punishment is a welfare benefit. So you see, the charges in these cases are almost all petty theft. Why? Because the parties involved want the prison sentence; they don't consider it a level of punishment. Carrying a knife is just to constitute a crime; it's not to hurt people. This is someone calculating their sentence precisely. Is this old man committing a crime? This is just actuarial work. And what can the CCP's judicial system do? It can't do anything, because it can't let the people in prison starve, nor does it have the fiscal capacity to let people outside be well-fed. The CCP, with its glib talk, can repeat that slogan ten thousand times, but nothing will change.

Actually, this matter is not unique to the CCP. Every system that squeezes its people to the limit will eventually reach this point. In 1834, Britain enacted something called the Poor Law Amendment Act. What did the British government do at the time? It stipulated by law that the lives of the poor receiving relief must be worse than those of the worst-off free laborers. But what the designers of the law didn't expect was this: if a person couldn't find work and entered a workhouse, they would turn their eyes to another place supported by the state. In 1851, the magistrate of Bedfordshire wrote to the Home Secretary, saying what? He said that the food standards for short-term imprisonment were higher than those of any workhouse in the county. And then a famous figure appeared here, a man named Blount, who said to that magistrate: I want to go to prison, not to that workhouse. The most brutal part is an archival record: a person named Andover, back in 1845, when the British government sent the poor in the workhouse to do the work of crushing bones for fertilizer, a large group of people began to testify. What did they testify? They said that the poor in the workhouse were digging out bone marrow to eat. So everyone, just watch. Watch what? If the state treats poverty relief as a punishment, then there will surely be poor people who see punishment as a welfare benefit.

Although China does not have statistical data, Japan does; Japan has complete official statistics. The Ministry of Justice of Japan introduced this in the 2005 edition of the White Paper on Crime. Let's look at the age changes: among prisoners in custody, the proportion of those aged 65 and over was 3.9% in 1995, and by 2024, it had become 21.4%. Furthermore, among elderly female prisoners, 90% were there due to theft. Why steal? Because the full amount of the Japanese national pension is only 69,308 yen per month, while the livelihood protection for a 70-year-old in the Tokyo metropolitan area is 76,750 yen per month. Elderly people receiving the full pension are poorer than the poor who are on welfare. Meanwhile, the total annual cost for one prisoner in jail reaches 4.5 million yen, which is more than five times the national pension. Bloomberg once went to the Tochigi Women's Prison in 2018 for an interview. The person interviewed was an old lady in her 80s, and it was already her fourth time inside. Her words were very direct: I don't want to go home, and I have nowhere else to go. Everyone here is my family, and my life in prison is much easier. So what did the Japanese government do? They assigned caregivers to the prisons. The Japanese government has no other choice now; while saying that prisons are not nursing homes, they are turning prisons into nursing homes.

Actually, in Chinese history, this kind of thing happened even earlier, and it was something the emperor personally wrote into the imperial edicts. In the 16th year of Zhenguan, which was July 642 AD, Emperor Taizong of Tang issued an edict. What was this edict? It stated: From now on, those who self-mutilate shall be punished according to the law and still be required to perform labor. Why? Sima Guang explained it this way: at the end of the Sui Dynasty, the corvée labor and military service were very heavy, so people often broke their own limbs, calling them 'fushou' (broken hand) and 'fuzu' (broken foot). Because if they were disabled, they wouldn't have to go to war or perform labor. And what was the emperor's solution? He didn't reduce the labor burden; instead, he stipulated that even if one self-mutilated, they still had to perform labor, and he added a criminal charge on top of that. Furthermore, he did not reduce the quotas, only blocked the escape routes. By the second year of the Shunzhi reign in the early Qing Dynasty, which was 1645, the Qing court allowed the poor to flee and register as slaves under the Eight Banners. The result? A large number of landowners also brought their land to register as slaves, with free people offering themselves and their land to the Bannermen to become servants, just to avoid having to perform the labor required after the land enclosure as free citizens.

Actually, if you put the UK, Japan, the Sui and Tang dynasties, and the early Qing Dynasty together, the path is the same. The starting point is: the quota is priced according to the ruler's needs, not according to the people's income. When the people run away, the rulers don't lower the quota; they lock the people up. Whether it's organizing household registrations, the laws against fugitives, or the current tax collection, it's all to block those who try to leave this path. But once you block it, the only road left is to return to the cage. And you can't let the people in the cage starve, so there is food inside the cage, but no food outside. As a result, the punishment becomes ineffective. In the final step, you don't even need anyone to push; the people will come on their own. At that time, whether it was smashing windows, stealing bento boxes, breaking arms, or bringing land to register as slaves, the rulers were also very embarrassed because what they were facing was not a rebellion. You can suppress a rebellion, but you can't suppress this kind of thing, because these are the very results people want. Alright, we've finished talking about history; let's return to China's accounts today. Why do I judge that China is walking this path? Because the pay-as-you-go social security system, plus this fucking social security, is extremely unfair.

We have calculated the social security accounts quite a bit before, so today we won't go into detail. Let's take a real person as an example—a thirty-year-old flexible employee. Suppose he earns thirty to fifty thousand a year, and we take a basic lower limit of four thousand three hundred yuan, taking the level in places like Shanxi, Anhui, and Hebei as an example. How much does he have to pay? Every month it is four thousand three hundred multiplied by twenty percent, which equals eight hundred sixty. Then for the year, he has to pay ten thousand and thirty-two. If he also joins the employee medical insurance, another five thousand yuan or so is added for the year, making a total of fifteen thousand a year. A person who earns thirty thousand a year gives away half of it, and a person who earns fifty thousand a year gives away thirty percent. Furthermore, the base amount increases every year along with the social average salary as determined by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). When discounted to today's purchasing power, the pension insurance paid over twenty years amounts to two hundred six thousand. What does he get in return? According to the current calculation method, discounted to today's purchasing power, it is only about one thousand seven hundred yuan a month. So how does actuarial calculation work? According to the CCP's version—let me first clarify that this is the CCP's version—if he starts collecting money at the age of sixty-three, he will only break even at seventy-three. And what on earth is the speed at which social security returns money? I have laid out all the money between this person and social security throughout his life: you pay for twenty years from age thirty to fifty, and then collect from sixty-three to seventy-nine. We will calculate it item by item; let's just do the math.

The speed at which social security returns your money, according to the CCP's description—well, according to the CCP's description—is equivalent to depositing your money in a place with an annualized interest rate of four point six percent. Moreover, this place has two conditions: the first condition is that the money must be locked for thirty-three years before you can withdraw it, but whether you can withdraw it or not depends on whether the CCP honors it at that time. Out of this four point six percent, three percentage points come from wage growth, because pensions follow the social average salary, meaning the social average salary. In other words, the premise for this four point six percent to hold true is that the social average salary must actually be able to grow by three percent every year. However, given the current comatose state of China's economy, the most ideal reference point is Japan. Well, this is the most ideal one! Japan's social average salary growth rate over the thirty years after the asset price bubble burst was zero. If you subtract wage growth, the real interest rate is only about one point five percent per year. And this still requires guaranteeing that the average age reached is seventy-nine; if you live to seventy-nine, this one point five percent interest rate actually holds true.

Now here comes the interesting part. Once you know whether to pay into social security based on how it returns money, it all comes down to just one question: if you keep that one yuan in your hand instead of paying social security, how many percentage points can it roll over in a year elsewhere? As long as it is higher than this 1.5 percent, you shouldn't pay it. And that's not even all of it yet. Let's take the flexible employment worker who earns 30,000 per year as an example: is the money in their hands enough to live on? Absolutely not enough to live on. That 10,000-plus yuan they pay for social security is either squeezed out of their food money, or it is squeezed out of the money used to pay off credit cards or online loans. When they hand this one yuan over to social security, what are they gambling on? First of all, they are gambling that they can live to 79 years old, and that the Chinese Communist Party has not collapsed by then. With both of these conditions simultaneously met, they can get this 1.5 percent return. Of course, I hope everyone lives a long and healthy life, but the problem is, do you dare calculate the CCP's pension based on this full amount? Look at the fucking things they've been doing lately, like delayed retirement, lengthening the contribution period, and suppressing benefit increases—these are all unannounced defaults. If I calculate a 30 percent default rate, that is already very conservative. Then, at this point, every single yuan you receive is now discounted by 30 percent. What does this line drop to? It drops to 1.05 percent. What does that mean? It means that if your money is placed elsewhere, as long as it can generate an annualized return of more than 1.05 percent, or if your debt interest exceeds 1.05 percent, then social security should not be paid. Of course, if you think the probability of default exceeds 40 percent, or even 50 percent, then basically any channel with a deposit interest rate exceeding 0.95 percent means you don't need to pay it. As a result? Coincidentally, China's one-year fixed deposit annualized interest rate happens to be exactly 0.95 percent. I don't know if this is a coincidence or if the CCP's social security and banks are pricing each other. Meanwhile, online loans and credit card installments both carry double-digit interest rates. So the conclusion is very simple: as long as the interest rate on the money they borrow is higher than 1.5 percent, this money should not be paid from an actuarial standpoint. Therefore, this is a mechanism that causes poverty through contributions. What does that mean? It means forcibly extracting a long-term asset with an internal rate of return of only 1.5 percent from someone whose capital cost is in the double digits. This is forcing them to replace high-interest debt with low-interest claims. Why do you lose more the more you pay? We can understand this by looking at the scissors gap. From 2015 to 2025, the average wage in urban non-private units—that is, the gross contribution base—rose all the way from 62,000 to the current 129,000, a surge of 108.7 percent. What is this part? These are public institutions, these are civil servants. Over that same decade, the average monthly income of migrant workers reportedly rose from 3,072 to 5,075. Well, let's just believe that for now. Even then, it only rose by 65.2 percent. The contribution base is determined by the former number, while incomes grow according to the latter number. Therefore, in terms of the proportion of contributions to income, low-income earners are bitten into a little more every year. This is not a parameter drift; this is institutional design.

Looking ahead twenty years, we are talking about a generational debt. The current social security system of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can only pay out benefits under one premise: there must be more people getting on the bus than getting off. Last year, the number of births was only 7.92 million, while deaths reached 11.31 million. The population over 60 already accounts for 23% of the total, whereas in 2016, the number of births was still 17.86 million. It has been cut in half in just ten years. This means the potential support ratio will drop from 2.7 in 2025 to 1.0 by 2060. Keep in mind that after accounting for the payment compliance rate, it will be down to just 0.89. This means that by that time, less than one working young person will be supporting one elderly person. Let's look at this again: the number of people born between 1980 and 1989 exceeds 220 million. This cohort will retire en masse between 2043 and 2052, and the people paying for them are those born after 2016. This is simply a division problem based on the number of people already born. Under this division, what is the CCP's calculation? The number of young people entering the system is decreasing, but they cannot change that. The only things they can manipulate are the money and the people currently paying into the system. So, what is the CCP's plan? To lock those still paying in even tighter, make them pay for a few more years, make them wait a few more years to collect, and when they do collect, pay them less. Then, they want to force the 200 million flexible workers who were not originally in this pool into it, using various forms of coercion, such as tying it to children's schooling. However, coercion has never been a one-way street. The CCP can use rules to force people to pay, but people can also use the CCP's own rules to force the CCP in return. A complex individual can take a fruit knife and force the fucking CCP to support them for two years. A veteran street vendor in Shanghai can go out and force social workers to come to their door to offer condolences. If tens of millions of people stop paying, the gap can only be filled by the treasury. The subsidy budget for 2026 has already reached 3.1 trillion. The situation of not having children means that by 2045, there will be no one entering the system at all. And for this generation being coerced into paying, their current pressure has reached its limit, and it is even more unrealistic for them to rely on their children for retirement in the future. Let's look at this: a couple who are both only children from the 80s and 90s generation has four elderly parents above them and a market below them with a youth unemployment rate of over 30%, where their children simply cannot find work. The cash flow of this family cannot sustain this. Therefore, without sustainable cash flow, without a family to rely on, and without a credible state promise, just like those elderly people mentioned at the beginning who are standing in this position today, the calculation now boils down to a game of strategy.

Faced with this system, an individual has three choices: pay or not pay, or perhaps retirement in prison. When is it more cost-effective not to pay? Look at this: what are you exchanging? You are exchanging money for a discounted IOU thirty years from now. If you don't pay, you keep the money in your own hands. At worst, you live on the minimum subsistence allowance, or at worst, you end up on the blacklist of untrustworthy persons. You choose whichever is more valuable. We have already done the math: as long as the discount rate is higher than 1.05%, the present value of the pension is lower than the present value of the contributions. As long as the discount rate is higher than 1.05%, there is no need to pay this money at all. What about the punishment? Punishment also has a cost, and this is the most interesting part. Punishment also has a characteristic: the more it is used, the less valuable it becomes. For example, when there are a few hundred thousand people on the blacklist, being on the list can be a badge of identity. When this list exceeds 80 million, being on the list is just a statistical fact. If it exceeds 20 million, people can just greet each other: "Oh, you just got on the list? I've been on it for a long time. By seniority, you should call me a senior." That's about it. It's the same principle: for anything with symbolic nature, whether positive or negative, as long as the symbol experiences inflation, neither your reward measures nor your punishment measures will achieve any purpose.

Looking at this data recently, the fucking CCP is also a bit panicked. As of April this year—well, the later data hasn't been released yet—the number of "dishonest judgment debtors" in China is now 8.506 million. Last year, 2.34 million people were newly added to the blacklist, which is 117,000 fewer than in 2024. Does this mean the economy is better? Uh, definitely not. There is another very interesting data point. At the same time, the number of people who underwent "credit restoration" in 2025 is 2.67 million, which has exceeded the number of new additions for seven consecutive quarters. What the CCP calls the "highest fine" or what they call "good-faith civilized law enforcement" is just pure bullshit, because the deterrent power of this list has already been exhausted; they have created inflation of the symbol itself. Now the CCP is unilaterally cooling down this list, while their enforcement costs are accelerating along with the number of cases. Last year, the number of enforcement cases in national courts exceeded 10 million for the first time, and the enforcement rate was less than 50%. This has created a very interesting situation: the stronger the pressure, the longer the list; the longer the list, the less painful it is to be on it; the less painful it is to be on it, the more people refuse to pay, eventually turning into a positive feedback loop. If more people stop paying social security, the CCP's ledger will leak from four places at once, because for every yuan you don't pay, the Ministry of Finance has to subsidize one yuan. In this year's budget report, the Ministry of Finance wrote in black and white that the subsidy budget for the social security fund has reached 3.11 trillion, accounting for 23.8% of the total revenue of the national social security fund. In other words, at least a quarter of social security revenue is no longer premiums, but taxes. And tax revenue itself is shrinking; not getting married and not having children means the paying population twenty years from now is also disappearing simultaneously. In the first half of this year, marriage registrations were 264,000 pairs fewer than the same period last year. Furthermore, there is a very interesting data point: as of the end of September this year, the cash in circulation (M0) rose by 10.6% year-on-year, which is faster than the 7.2% growth of the broad money supply (M2). What does this mean? It means the Chinese people are not fucking stupid; they know that cash transactions can avoid these poverty-stricken "internet police" and tax authorities, and transactions are extending into places invisible to the tax authorities. And what about treating prisons as nursing homes, directly recording pension costs on the judicial fiscal ledger? This year, the central government's public security budget expenditure is 258.27 billion. This is just the central level expenditure, not counting local governments, and this item alone rose by 6%. So we can see that the CCP is spending more money to get back a bunch of people who are even less willing to cooperate, and the CCP's reaction is naturally to escalate—things like judicial interpretations declaring unpaid social security invalid, plus a triple fine, all these have come out. But every new regulation is actually increasing its own enforcement costs. So what is my conclusion? The shape of the CCP's governance cost curve has undergone a sudden change. Previously, there were benefits to remaining in normal society, and obedience was correspondingly spontaneous; at that time, punishment was effective because it was sparse. Now, this benefit has been squeezed dry by the CCP itself. Your obedience relies either on buying or on coercion; now it mainly relies on coercion, because it's very simple: buying requires fiscal resources. The treasury is now running a deficit, so coercion relies on punishment. When punishment is used too much, it becomes worthless, and punishment itself also generates huge costs. From now on, governance costs are proportional to what? They are proportional to the square of the proportion of disobedience. Can you, the CCP, solve the problem of poverty among the common people by using stricter collection, longer lists, and denser propaganda? You can't solve it, because these three things are precisely the pushers that drive the curve into the squared zone. When a system hangs a sign at the prison gate saying, "This is not a nursing home," what it is saying is not a warning against crime; I fucking think it is an evaluation and a diagnostic report of itself. It no longer has the ability to make the elderly outside the prison live better than those inside. Everyone look, from the "Treatise on Governance" in the 16th year of Zhenguan to the Poor Law of 1834, and then to the Prison Law of the CCP this October, they are actually just copies of the same evaluation in different eras. You can copy the manuscript infinitely, but the disease itself will not change.