Lu Xun’s madman opened the history books and found, between the lines of “benevolence, righteousness, and morality,” two words repeated on every page: eat people (吃人). A century later, the mechanism has not changed — only the language has been updated. The following ten commandments are written as satire, but every Chinese child recognizes them as autobiography.
The Ten Commandments of Harmony
1. Your body belongs to the family. “身体发肤，受之父母” — your body, hair, and skin were received from your parents and must not be damaged. You are not living for yourself. You exist for the family’s face, glory, and retirement. Refusing to obey is betraying your ancestors.
2. Eat bitterness. 吃得苦中苦，方为人上人. While young and healthy, work more, endure more. Do not calculate short-term losses. Every drop of sweat now prevents tears later. Every act of endurance serves the family’s respectability. When bitterness fails to produce sweetness — when the gaokao graduate delivers packages — the system’s cooling mechanisms (下台, face-saving, karma rhetoric) must absorb the betrayal, or the mark lies flat (躺平).
3. Continue the bloodline. 不孝有三，无后为大. A family without grandchildren is desolate, incomplete. Marriage and children are not choices but sacred obligations imposed by genetics and ethics. Produce many high-quality offspring for the nation and the family tree.
4. Gratitude as guilt. (Lu Xun demolished this a century ago: reproduction is a biological impulse, not a favor — the child owes nothing.) Look at other people’s children, then look at you. Your parents gave everything — how can you bear to disappoint them? Everything they do is for your own good. Do not be selfish. Repay their labor with your achievements.
5. The universe ends at a government post. The outside world is dangerous. Do not pursue frivolous things like entrepreneurship or art. Take the civil service exam. Get an iron rice bowl. Stability is the highest filial piety — do not make your parents worry.
6. Buy property with six wallets. Empty the savings of parents, grandparents, and maternal grandparents to buy an apartment. This is not parasitism — it is “integration and transmission of family resources.” The mortgage is not pressure but motivation: it keeps you alert and hardworking.
7. Conform or perish. 木秀于林，风必摧之. The tree that stands above the forest will be broken by the wind. Follow the crowd. If everyone around you marries, you marry. If everyone has a second child, you have one. Being too individual never ends well.
8. Women depreciate. A girl’s youth is fleeting. Do not be too picky. Lower your standards. Past a certain age, your value drops. Find a reliable man and marry — love can be cultivated later, even if it does not exist now.
9. Parents are never wrong. 天下无不是的父母. Your elders have eaten more salt than you have eaten rice. Even if they are wrong, it was for your own good. Never talk back. Giving face to elders is accumulating virtue. A home is not a place for reason — it is a place for love.
10. The individual serves the collective. 大河有水小河满. When the great river is full, the tributaries are full. Personal interests must submit to collective interests. Do not fixate on your own grievances. Sacrifice for the family’s prosperity is glorious and necessary. Without the nation, where is the family? Without the family, where are you?
The Mechanism
Every commandment is locally-optimal. Each one solves a real problem: financial security, family cohesion, social stability, elder care. The system works — for the system. The cost is borne entirely by the individual who is consumed.
China’s economy runs the same pattern at the national level: financial repression traps savings, capital controls block exit, and the system sustains itself by consuming household wealth to fund state investment. The family operates as what Hirschman would call a totalitarian organization: exit is branded as betrayal (abandoning your parents), and voice is silenced by the ninth commandment (parents are never wrong). With both feedback mechanisms destroyed, the system cannot correct itself. It can only demand more sacrifice.
Pirsig’s hierarchy applies directly: social patterns feeding on biological ones. The family is a higher organism consuming the lives of its members for purposes that transcend any individual — but the individuals are told this consumption is love. The moralism is precise: when we take innocent children and train them to be moralists, we train them to be liars. The child learns to perform gratitude, perform filial piety, perform ambition — and loses contact with what they actually feel.
The Cannibalism
Lu Xun’s insight was not that Chinese culture is uniquely cruel. It is that the system consumes people while calling the consumption virtue, and the consumed learn to call it virtue too. The person who has internalized the ten commandments does not feel oppressed. They feel responsible. They feel grateful. They feel guilty when they want something for themselves — which is exactly how the system perpetuates itself.
This is childhood emotional neglect with Chinese characteristics. The parents are not absent — they are hyper-present, but their presence is organized around the family’s needs, not the child’s. The child is fed, housed, educated, and utterly unseen. In the wealthy variant the consumption spans generations — 富不过三代 is the proverb the culture uses to mark the statistical rate at which the phantom generation finally cannot continue holding the family’s silence. Their feelings are not validated because feelings are not the point — performance is. In the one-child variant, this dynamic intensifies into the phantom child trap — where parental sacrifice becomes an irrefutable invoice and the child is triangulated not against a sibling but against an idealized version of their own future. The result: adults who are competent, dutiful, and profoundly empty, running on a fuel they were never taught to recognize.
Bourdieu’s habitus operates here at the cultural level: the body learns to suppress individual desire so deeply that the suppression reads as natural character. The person who conforms does not feel they are conforming — they feel they are being mature. The submissive orientation is not chosen but installed, and it comes with a built-in defense against questioning: questioning is selfishness, and selfishness is the one unforgivable sin.
The Displacement
identity-through-displacement is what happens when someone raised inside this system gets transplanted to a culture that runs on different commandments. The collision strips away the operating system. What felt like identity turns out to be environmental fit. The question becomes: who am I when the system that defined me is no longer present?
The answer, for many, is a long period of emptiness followed by the slow construction of something genuine. The courage-to-be-disliked is harder for someone who was taught that being disliked by your family is the moral equivalent of death. But it is also more necessary — because the alternative is a lifetime of performing someone else’s idea of who you should be.
Common Misread
The dimwit take is “Chinese culture is oppressive — Western individualism is better.”
The midwit take is “every culture has expectations — this is just how families work everywhere.”
The better take is that the satire is not about China versus the West. It is about any system that consumes individuals while calling the consumption love. The strong gods operate in every culture — the specific commandments change but the mechanism is universal: social patterns feeding on biological ones, demanding sacrifice, and branding the refusal to sacrifice as moral failure. The Western version replaces filial piety with productivity, replaces family honor with career achievement, and produces the same emptiness through different means.
Main Payoff
The madman in Lu Xun’s diary has one hope: “Save the children.” Perhaps there are children who have not yet been taught to eat people. The system reproduces itself through each generation that internalizes the commandments and passes them on — and it breaks when someone recognizes the consumption for what it is and refuses to consume or be consumed, even at the cost of being called selfish, ungrateful, and unfilial.
The hardest part is not the refusal. It is the grief that follows — the recognition that the love was real and the harm was real and they were the same thing.
References:
- Lu Xun, A Madman’s Diary (狂人日记), 1918
- Satirical “新和谐礼记” (New Harmony Ritual Code), contemporary Chinese internet