It takes me a while to realise that: I hate my cousin. But it takes me years to say this out loud to my friends and eventually to confess it to my parents.

When I use the word « hate », I mean I don’t wish anything best to this person. It may sound mental, but it’s a kind of feeling that if her life’s successful, it would prove my life’s wrong. Perhaps this is my most deeply rooted bias.

But now, I summon up curage to recognise this fact that: I don’t like her.

I’m sharing my story, because I want you to have a glimpse on what’s real Chinese family like. As Tolstoy said, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. My unhappy family represents one type of Chinese characteristic unhappiness : the ideological conflict.

I always think in my mind that I wouldn’t dislike her that much if she hadn’t worked for the Chinese communist party. I would be more tolerant to her if she hadn’t believed and defended the propaganda made up by that totalitarian regime. In normal life, she would just be a boring person in my eyes, not my type, that’s all. She doesn’t worth my attention at all.

But due to the fact that we’re family, my father and her mother forced us to be looked like close sisters. She took it granted to meddle in my life since I never speak up for myself in that depressive Chinese feudalistic family culture. I was abused by the violence in the name of « for your own good » since the moment I didn’t even have a memory. [When you’re dragged into a war you’re not prepared, you’re the underdog at the start.If you never realise it’s a war you need to fight for your life, you’re already devoured.] For your own good, repeat this phrase to your Chinese friend, they’ll explain to you why. It took me almost ten years to get out of this shit, it’s too traumatising to recall, so I save my words on this side point.

My real point is as follows:

Well, to understand family ideological conflict, I have to give you a crash course on Chinese working system. When I say, someone works for the Chinese communist party, I mean he is either working for public institution or state-owned enterprise. Public institution means jurisdiction, administration, execution plus army, state-owned enterprise is literally how the name tells. One thing different from your understanding of SOE in China is that one major task for those state companies is political task. And employee in state enterprise could all of a sudden be sent to work for public institution, they use the jargon « borrow », like I was borrowed from this unit to that unit because as a whole it’s communist system. That’s why you see CEO of one enterprise overnight become a minister, that can happen in China. If you read the book Red Roulette by Desmond Shum published in 2021, you’ll know how this system functions at the highest level.

So my cousin works in one district level SOE, her mother works in the same district-level public institution, her father works in national level SOE. That’s in my eyes a family 100% work for Chinese Communist Party.

There are some features that you can tell them apart from common Chinese.

1. They use Huawei
2. They call Xijinping « Xi DaDa »
3. They watch CCTV everyday
4. They check XUEXIQiangguo Application as a daily basis as they have quota on it (episode 16 if you wanna get more info)
5. Often time, they prefer to speak dialect than mandarin
6. They are basically xenophobe, a chauvinist inside
7. They believe foreign force theory