Party A is unable to directly terminate employees, but that does not mean other indirect methods cannot be used to achieve the same result.

First you get demoted to a corner-office nobody, loving video games—so you stay holed up in that corner gaming alone. Then the private sector lures you out with high offers and fancy tactics, you hand in your resignation, and once you're in, you fall right into the classic "fail probation" game.

Even holding onto an iron rice bowl until retirement requires its own set of skills.

You have to work hard to make your boss like you, avoid offending coworkers, and flawlessly complete your assigned tasks—nothing in the paperwork should raise eyebrows. You need to maintain this painstaking precision day in and day out for decades. Since you're so careful, don't cause any trouble. Watch what you say. Swallow your grievances. Tuck your tail and behave. Don't make mistakes.

Client-side hierarchy is maintained through authority.

If you cause a scene on the spot, you're no longer fighting him—you're fighting the system itself. You become the disruptor, the one destroying the environment. Do you really want to wear that label? How big is your ego, anyway? Nobody can challenge the ultimate authority of the system, or you won't last long at that company.

He can humiliate you because he caught you in a mistake. He weaponized his authority to break you. He wants you to lose it. If you don't crack, he can't touch you—he'd just be making an enemy of another iron-clad employee. But if you do crack, you're done. You've positioned yourself against the system, and you're out. Even if you're suffering in that moment, you keep smiling. Even if they're pointing at your face and cursing you out, you smile. You endure, waiting for the next round—until you can find your own opportunity to leverage the system and even the score.

Street vendors handle it differently. What do they do? They hit the ground, slapping their thighs and wailing: "They're assaulting me! They're confiscating my cart! They're trying to starve me!" Because if you don't throw a public tantrum on the spot and force a resolution, the next time you go begging for your cart back, good luck—internal procedures are complicated, they'll pass the buck, and you'll lose weeks of income. Can you afford that?

Most people are here to take advantage, not to be taken advantage of. Ninety-nine percent of people can't make money without the platform. Only those types—the ones who got上岸 (made it)—can squeeze profit from you. When your boss knows you have no ability to earn without the company, how will he treat you? Will he still indulge your lack of social grace?

Firing you is one thing, but there are other options. They can ignore you. They can signal to everyone else in the unit to give you the cold shoulder—mobbing you. They can relegate you to humiliating or miserable tasks. They can ship you out to some remote location you'd never choose. Your bowl is still full, but they're just mixing sand into your rice until you can't stand it.

The bowl is iron—the contents aren't. The rice inside could be grain, chaff, or sand.