My institutional experience

By chance three years ago, due to the recommendation of my old colleagues, I got an opportunity to enter the system and started working in a municipal-level state-owned enterprise under the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of BJ City. Such an opportunity, for me, a Beidiao with no roots in the imperial city, is like being hit by a pie falling from the sky, something that comes only once but unexpectedly.

After graduating from college, I worked alone in Beijing and worked hard in private enterprises outside the system. In the past ten years, although I changed to several companies, I still relied on my own skills to make a living, and accumulated a small amount of experience over time. Looking back on those days, I could stay up late and work overtime for two consecutive days and nights on a bidding proposal, or I could work non-stop for two months to prepare for a public relations event, and I would also force myself to get an extra thousand yuan bonus. To produce a market research report in one day can be said to have been tortured by the socialist capitalists for many years, so that when I got the opportunity to enter the system, I did not hesitate much. Moreover, old colleagues also repeatedly persuaded me at the time, saying that as I was thirty years old, I couldn’t ignore my physical and mental fatigue too much, and I couldn’t neglect my family ties too much. There were very few job opportunities in the state-owned enterprise system, and “stability” was more important than anything else, so in the end I decided to Taking advantage of the situation, I entered the system half-submissively and half-obediently.

When I first joined the company, I did not go through complicated recruitment assessments, nor did I have to be interviewed by the company’s party organization for background interviews. I simply negotiated the salary and then signed the contract and started working. This was all because of the endorsement of acquaintances, and I was able to work all the way. The green light was given. This was the first time that I had a personal and concrete feeling about the importance of the word "relationship" within the system. When discussing the salary position with the person in charge of human resources, I was told that state-owned enterprises have a relatively "strict" salary structure system. It is best not to start talking like a lion when you first join the job. This will reduce the impression of the leadership, and there will be salary increases every year in the future. Don't be too anxious about job opportunities. I didn’t think much about it at the time. I felt that with my work ability and experience, promotion and salary increase would not be a problem in the short term. However, unfortunately, I gradually understood that in such state-owned enterprises that are close to the center of the government system, if you want to “climb up” ——The common saying about promotion and salary increase within the system-if you don’t have an absolutely strong nepotistic background, you don’t even have to think about it, so the initial thoughts about promotion and salary increase have all turned into dust by now.

Being in jail before profit

When I first entered the system, everything was new. As a newbie in the system, I could only rely on some past rumors to slowly explore how to survive within the system. People who are familiar with China's state-owned enterprise system should understand that some large-scale state-owned enterprises have the characteristics of a large and comprehensive enterprise structure - in addition to normal work and business operations departments, they also include a number of back-office support departments that provide basic life services to employees. , just like a small self-sufficient society. The state-owned enterprise I work for is backed by the resource system of the municipal State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, so this is naturally the case.

The daily routine in the company almost covers the basic necessities of life for employees. For example, in summer and winter every year, each employee can receive several sets of work clothes of the same style. The cycle repeats year after year, so that in the company's dressing room, there is always one. There are piles of work clothes without owners in the corner. In addition, the company will provide free dry cleaning services for employees. Every Friday, the outsourced service company will come to the company regularly to collect and deliver the clothes that need to be cleaned.

There are four restaurants in the company, one of which can accommodate more than 1,000 people dining at the same time. Meals are provided for three meals a day with four meat, six vegetarian and eight staple foods. Employees can eat for free in the restaurant with banners hanging with food conservation slogans. You can eat whatever you want with your belt open, and the leftover food will be dumped and disposed of by dedicated service staff. One of the four restaurants is specially prepared for senior leaders. Ordinary employees generally do not have the opportunity to enter. According to other colleagues who have been there, the decoration and tableware inside are luxurious. There is also a team of people with a height of no less than A team of waitresses who are 1.65 meters tall and pretty.

Many employees in the company who are over fifty years old were allocated welfare housing located on the edge of the Third Ring Road in Beijing in the early years. After the housing welfare system of state-owned enterprises was abolished in the last century, the company will also provide employees with the convenience of various welfare housing in disguise. Including corporate internally funded housing, targeted policy-guaranteed housing, commercial housing purchase subsidies, corporate employee dormitories, etc. Employees can rent these welfare apartments at a price lower than the normal market price. Of course, not everyone is treated equally. The harder the employees, the better the house you end up with.

The company's deputy general managers will be equipped with cars, most of which are domestic brands, including Mercedes-Benz and Hyundai brands (mainly benefiting from local factories in the capital). The company also has special agreements with some regional car brands. Ordinary employees will receive special discounts (as low as 35% off) when purchasing cars of these brands on the market. In addition, there are monthly vehicle fee subsidies of varying amounts. In addition, the company also provides commuter shuttle buses, which employees can ride for free on weekdays when commuting to and from get off work. In addition to these most basic daily guarantees, the company also has separate wellness centers, supermarkets, coffee bars, logistics centers, clinics, sports venues, etc., as well as benefits such as medical insurance, housing provident funds, and holiday gifts. Not a problem. For these low-level welfare guarantees, the grassroots employees in the company just sit back and enjoy them. Many people will not delve into why they have so many privileges. People who are familiar with the hidden rules also think that these are self-interests. An altruistic good thing - ordinary employees can enjoy a steady stream of various benefits, while those leaders of the security department with unpredictable backgrounds can use their positions to connect various external resources and earn considerable amounts of gray income. This situation has been maintained for a long time. Even after strict disciplinary inspections in recent years, it has only institutionalized some condolence and welfare behaviors that were originally personal decisions of leaders and transformed them into normal behaviors within the welfare system. It can be seen that under the wings of the system, gray profit-seeking space has always existed.

Strictly speaking, the daily life inside these state-owned enterprises is a historical legacy of the era of collective planned economy decades ago. Many people’s inherent thinking believes that state-owned enterprises, which symbolize class advantages, should maintain such normality. It is precisely because they are Only by treating it as a normal state can it maintain its rigidity and stubbornness for several years, and only then can a system based on collective consciousness be stable for a long time. It is this kind of cognitive impression that has formed a broad consensus in the entire society, which makes people in the system gradually fall into a common state of paralysis, because everyone can have almost the same living and working standards, so the ideological Dormant laziness and physical complacency have become commonplace and engulfing people's minds. This is a mode of crowd control by creating a common environment among the crowd. Regarding this phenomenon, MIT professor Edgar H. Schein discusses this phenomenon in his book "Brainwashing and Brainwashing in Modern Society". The book Brainwashing and Totalitarianization in Modern Society (1959) once made a straightforward analysis - in order to achieve "brainwashing" of an individual, it must be placed in a stable "peer group". , using the same standards of others around them to form some kind of pressure to affect the individual. This type of "peer group" includes the same ideological organization, the same work unit, etc. The entire process of "brainwashing" must rely on this type of interpersonal organizational relationship to convey to each individual a psychological impression that cannot be different from others, and prompt the individual to have a strong desire to be consistent with others at all costs, and ultimately form A kind of people's ideological concept that is taken for granted and solidified in the entire system.

The bizarre daily life of separation of body and mind

In fact, before I entered the system, I had heard more or less various rumors about individuals within the system being suppressed by ideology. The most typical one is that everyone must control their mouth and what they should say in public. It can be said that you should never say a word of what you shouldn't say. This should be regarded as the most basic "political consciousness." The unit where I work is divided into three levels of management and control, namely the company headquarters, the headquarters group, and the municipal SASAC. Each level has an independent party committee organizational department, which is related to political and ideological style, ideological construction, and organizational discipline and risk control. , all departments in this line are responsible for vertical management. Specific tasks include party building, disciplinary inspection, ideological review, etc. The implementation of these tasks relies on various party discipline management systems on the table, and also relies on personal reporting and supervision in private. Normally when in the company, all employees will remain vigilant about their words and deeds, and will try to avoid certain unstated red lines. In early June of the year before last, I needed to ask for leave from the company due to personal reasons, but it happened to coincide with the sensitive date of June 4th, so a simple leave approval aroused suspicious interpretations from several leaders, so much so that the disciplinary department even questioned me. Confirm and understand individually before finally agreeing to approve the leave. After that incident, I began to realize that ideological monitoring within the system is actually close to everyone, from senior leaders to ordinary employees.

The company's middle-level leaders and above, regardless of whether they are party members or not, are required to regularly attend enlarged party meetings every month, and are also required to complete the learning content in the "Study Powerful Country" app. When ordinary employees communicate and chat on weekdays, they will occasionally express their dissatisfaction with some topics that have attracted public attention in society. But every time there are words criticizing the system, everyone will subconsciously stop the topic like an electric shock and turn to other topics. Content. No one wants to be treated as reporting material by some eyes and ears watching behind them because they fail to keep their mouths shut, and will eventually be penalized by the disciplinary inspection department.

All ideological control lines in the system are top-down, whether in government departments, public institutions or state-owned enterprises, they are the same. After every Politburo meeting and State Council meeting held by the Central Committee, the company will immediately organize various so-called "General Secretary's instructions", "Central Committee instructions" and "Spiritual instructions of the meeting" to be conveyed to the lower levels. At this time, the busiest people in the company may be the assistant secretaries of each leader and colleagues in the party group department. They must sort out various materials and documents advocated and called for by the Central Committee as quickly as possible. Secretaries are busy preparing meeting speeches for leaders to convey the spirit of the Central Committee, and party organizations are busy preparing different learning materials for the spirit of the Central Committee for employees at each level. But in fact, everyone understands that these things are just ridiculous dramas for self-entertainment. Everyone can just do formalistic routine work and do not need to care about whether the so-called "central spirit" will really work. Therefore, in many cases within the system, ubiquitous ideological supervision and commonplace formalism coexist for a long time. Everyone must learn to behave in the subtle gaps between the two. This is a situation where everyone is quietly shaped by the system. In the process of becoming the same type of person, everyone needs to maintain a kind of peace and patience to perform this absurd play to the extreme. But at the same time, everyone's role is different, so everyone has more than one mask and more than one script, and in many cases, everyone no longer distinguishes between on-screen and off-screen.

On such a stage, what impressed me most was that everyone maintained a unique set of language expression habits. One of the more common features is that in some formal workplaces, many people are unable to express their clear thoughts through normal speech in order to maintain a seemingly harmonious relationship among colleagues. When many people are communicating and expressing, deep down in their hearts they want to express critical opinions, but after thinking about the logic in their brains, they turn into conciliatory opinions. When they are finally spoken out, they turn into true and positive praise. This conditioned reflexive habit of expression often leads to a huge gap between the true viewpoint and the actual expression. Some people think that this is modesty and caution, but I believe that this is just an excuse that has long since changed.

Another common language feature is that the habitual abuse of ideological language within the system has resulted in many public speaking occasions where everyone will follow a method of repeating "authoritative opinions" and empty slogans without self-awareness. Characteristics of accent. This long and boring expression habit makes people feel like chewing wax and making them sleepy. The vocabulary and logic in it are lacking, disconnected, and confusing. Many times, the whole Chelugluan talk goes around in circles, and the language logic in it is The system seems to have been redesigned, and many terms have become extremely vague. Some normal contexts and rhetorical combinations that express specific meanings have been abandoned or abused. In the absence of factual evidence, exaggerated and uncompromising assertions such as "the highest, fastest and strongest", "never give in", "deep implementation" and "vigorous development" are used at will, as if this is the only way to achieve success. The speech adds enough weight and security. This is a kind of destruction of the normal Chinese language system. It reminds me of the new language created by Big Brother of Oceania in "1984", which compresses the space of language expression and the scope of common sense of thought, and ultimately affects everyone's thinking. Castrate and submit to the servitude of power.

The company's administrative department subscribes to some party organization journals for senior leaders every month, such as "Frontline", "Red Flag" and so on. I had never come into contact with this type of Marxist-Leninist communist ideology publication before, so I was full of curiosity when I read it for the first time. It is undeniable that although I am particularly disdainful of the vague remarks about Marxist-Leninist political concepts, it must be admitted that those texts compiled by ideological scholars from various party schools and universities do contain a set of brainwashing tactics. and the discursive logic of incitement effects. However, for many company leaders, these glossy ideological journals have become nothing more than desk ornaments used to decorate their desks to show that they have not forgotten the original intention of the party.

Ordinary employees of the company, in their spare time outside of work, would occasionally make fun of some of the company’s leaders’ obscure and embarrassing stories. In my impression, it seems that almost every senior leader has one or two jokes that can be used to amuse everyone after dinner. They are nothing more than some gray and yellow stories about cheating men and raping women. Many of them are half-hearted stories within the company. An open secret. I once thought unreasonably that these unspeakable little stories should be dirty chips used by company leaders to manipulate each other and collude. I remember that two years ago, there was an executive of another state-owned enterprise. Because he was caught in a power struggle within the company, his reconciliation with a young female subordinate was exposed to the media by other executives. What followed was A series of reviews from the municipal discipline inspection commission to the company's internal disciplinary department, in order to restore their status and status within the system, the two protagonists in the incident finally ended the whole farce in an absurd way - - Divorce their respective original husbands and wives, and then the two of them receive a marriage certificate together to prove that they are in free love, both public and private, and moral and legal. This can be explained logically.

The lifeline of a country that is strong on the outside and cadre on the inside

Since Xi Yizun put forward the call to make state-owned enterprises bigger, stronger and better, the evolution of national advancement and private retreat has become an indisputable fact in China’s economic structure in recent years. Under such a macroeconomic background, the large amount of effective resources in society has become a stepping stone for the inefficient and redundant operation of state-owned enterprises. People who are familiar with the current economic situation in China should understand that the real estate industry has been the pillar representative of China's morbid and rapid economic development in recent years. In the past few years, private real estate giants such as Country Garden and China Fortune Land Development briefly started a boom in real estate development. The turnover model and rapid and large-scale land acquisition and development have created a huge amount of sales book data to support the company's high market value in the financial market. The foundation of all this is based on high-cost financing (according to personal knowledge, the lowest financing interest rate for Chinese private real estate companies in 2017 was 18%, and it has increased year by year).

Correspondingly, state-owned real estate developers during the same period were able to obtain huge amounts of development funds from state-owned banks at almost zero interest rates over a long period of time. Therefore, taking the real estate industry as a representative only, and comparing the financing conditions of private enterprises and state-owned enterprises, we can see the vast differences between the two in the business environment. It is precisely under this causal path that private enterprises are currently experiencing frequent That's why the real estate corporate debt explosion is so turbulent.

In addition to mentioning this topic, perhaps you should also understand that due to a series of institutional reasons such as financial policy controls and limited investment channels, a large part of the idle money of ordinary Chinese residents is used by state-owned banks at low interest rates and high savings rates. The "cutting leeks" model was absorbed, and most of the capital savings were eventually transformed into long-term blood transfusion nutrients for inefficient and redundant state-owned enterprises.

Since the system is a top-down management and control model, state-owned enterprises within the system naturally form a work context in which they are only responsible to the top and not to the bottom. Under such an internal atmosphere, everyone's work ability is not important. The key to daily life is whether you choose the right leader, whether you are on the right team, whether you can speak kind words to others, and whether you can be versatile. This is always the case, and everything is the same. When flattery on the table and intrigues below the table become the norm, cooperation between people loses the foundation of sincerity and sincerity, and the goal of work loses its substantive meaning. When all of this is ultimately attributed to everyone, the so-called "job" becomes a comfortable shell for promotion, vanity in front of others, or a comfortable life.

In this context of doing nothing, when everyone has to get involved in actual work, almost everyone from company leaders to ordinary employees has an escape mentality, thinking that if they don't do something, they won't make mistakes. Although in daily life, there are many large and small meetings to study the development of various businesses, in fact, every participant is trying to push for exemption. The top leaders who are indifferent believe that nothing can be done without making any mistakes, the middle leaders who avoid taking responsibility are good at passing the buck, and the ordinary employees who have no direction can only fend for themselves. After everyone lost the connection between professional ethics and ethics, the entire company seemed like an idling engine, rumbling but spinning in circles. For this reason, it is impossible to expect that this kind of institutional enterprise group with a lot of gold and silver in it can have real market competitiveness, and some people hope to revitalize the Chinese economy by making state-owned enterprises bigger, stronger and better. Maybe in the end it's just a sweet dream longing for a mirage.

The cage and the person merge into one

There are three most common types of people in the company system. The first type of people has the smallest proportion but the greatest influence. Their parents either originally worked in municipal-level or district-level party and government agencies, or they are retired leaders within the company group and have the same influence as their parents. We have a wealth of connections built up over many years of business. To a certain extent, they can be classified as the "second generation of officials" and "individuals" within the system. Such people generally hold important high-level leadership positions, and their room for advancement is guaranteed. As long as they are not standing in the official position during their official career, If you join the wrong team, or make serious political mistakes, you will generally rise to success and have good fortune. Of course, there are also some extremely ambitious people among this type of people who are always looking for greater power. For them, fighting for power and fighting are just commonplace.

The second type of people also have solid nepotistic connections, but generally do not participate in various intrigues and power struggles. They have neither arrogant ambitions nor long-term pursuits. Most of the time, they just regard the system as a way to pamper themselves. In this place, you can just spend your life receiving a salary in a stable and ordinary way. Of course, whenever there is an opportunity for career advancement, they will not turn a blind eye. They will also put aside their humble and cheap self-esteem and hang around senior executives and leaders, using clever words and self-interest.

The third type of people are basically young people. They are the most energetic on weekdays, but at the same time they are well versed in the ways of the city. They are a group of people who have not been away from the university campus for too long. In order to find a stable job, they do not hesitate to work. I am willing to work hard in the fiercely competitive market, enter the system through deep or shallow relationships, and enjoy the relaxed daily routine of nine to five. When many of them first entered the system, they had the original intention to change the existing rules and make a difference, but the final result can be imagined. Even if the newborn calves are no longer afraid of death, they cannot shake the hidden A huge furnace of dirt and grime. There is always an unbridgeable tension between what should be in dreams and what is in the system. When they find that their once most precious ideals and values ​​have been completely reduced to a supported survival logic, they have no choice but to struggle and resist. We can only get used to using the rhetoric of "be more stable" and "be more realistic" to accept the discipline of power. After having many contacts with these young people, I will occasionally find that some of them are tired and anxious about losing their way, but in fact, it is just a kind of empty pretentiousness and restlessness. I always think that people who want to redeem themselves have actually left the system a long time ago. Those who are left are just people who are afraid of being caught up in the wave of involution from outside the system and are unwilling to make changes. Even if they have doubts and incomprehensions, In the end, they still chose to listen to their inner compromise. They were still unwilling to take the first step in taking the initiative to control their own destiny.

To this day, I still remember that when I first entered the system, some of my friends used to tease me in an exaggerated tone, "This time you can always take care of yourself." Yes, if I can tolerate it, I have been tempered. If I lose the passion in my heart, I can be pessimistic about everything and watch the last bit of numbness quietly over the years. However, the price of this is to give up my most cherished personality and freedom. Under the huge cage of the system, perhaps there is no breath of will to life. This huge system with many connections may itself be an obscure tower of pagoda. Every skin that has been eliminated and hidden in it, They have all chaotically exiled their souls, no longer full of self-doubt and torture. Only a staggering lonely ghost like me is left, still lingering on the lusts and sorrows of the world in the boundless wilderness.