Dreaming of the Future

Using dreams as the vehicle, blend human nature, technology and the future — human nature, greed, love and hate — to stir people’s thinking and desires.

In the mindset of poor people, they don’t know what is truly valuable. For example, ten years ago it would have cost 500,000 yuan for me to study abroad, but my family didn’t see this as truly valuable, when in fact it was something of enormous value that could have changed my social class.

And a few years ago, when I bought a home, I really just wanted a secure place to live. That should have been something very cheap, yet it cost me over a million.

The key problem is that poor people don’t know how to spend money. They don’t know how to spend it where it counts. They know how to save, but they don’t know how to think.

Very often a person’s success is not because of how excellent they are, but because they stood at a higher starting point and enjoyed the dividends of their era. And once they succeed, all their shared experience becomes the truth. But there is a lot in this that I didn’t know before I turned 30.

Let’s take Mr. Jack Ma as an example. He was born in 1964 — and what a coincidence, so was my father. As one of the chosen-by-fate working class, I’d even question him: why aren’t you Jack Ma? Have any of you ever thought about this question — why isn’t your dad Jack Ma?

In 1982, Jack Ma was 18, in the prime of his youth, and took the college entrance exam (gaokao) for the first time. Those of you born in 1964 — did you even have the means to take the gaokao? There were roughly 300 million people born in China in the 1960s, and 99% of them faced the pressure of survival. Put simply, that meant staying alive: they had to feed themselves, and also support the eating, entertainment and development of the upper classes. Nobody wants to be ranked into tiers; it’s because they don’t want to face the brutal truth. In the past there was the bourgeoisie, the working class, and also feudalism and imperialism. Now there’s none of that, only tiers. The bottom is the first tier, which is the farmers like my father — the most populous group under heaven. I don’t mean to belittle anyone; the working people are the most glorious.

That said, in that era at most 3 million people could take the gaokao. Mr. Ma scored just one point in math. If someone scored one point in gaokao math today, you know very well how things would end up for them. Mr. Ma took the gaokao three times in that era, and for an ordinary family, the financial pressure of each attempt would have been unbearable. Every additional attempt put him ahead of 99% of his competitors. In the end, only about 300 people could take the gaokao three times. Mr. Ma did have some talent and ability, and in an era of little competition and great opportunity he achieved unprecedented success, leaping all at once to the ninth tier — while his parents, when Mr. Ma took the gaokao, were at least in the sixth tier.