How Disease Impacts a Family in China
The author has been working for three or four years, making around 6,000 yuan a month. But for quite a while, the income was under 4,000. Currently, he works as a university teacher in a remote area (where university teachers typically make about 6,000 yuan a month).
When his father got sick, the treatment cost 130,000 yuan. The rural cooperative medical insurance could only cover 35,000, leaving 100,000 to be paid out of pocket—just for the initial treatment phase.
Ordinary clinic visits aren't covered either. When the author and his mother got sick, they spent 2,000.
All of this has already pushed a rural family to the point where they'd need to sell their house and even their land just to scrape by. (So I really don't understand what people clamoring about living with COVID are thinking—how exactly do they expect families like these to survive? Just accept death?)
China is divided into three major groups:
One group has decent actual incomes and spends all day online advocating for the protection of workers like themselves.
Another group, for various reasons, has the power and wealth to influence things but dares not and will not speak their minds online.
These two groups牢牢 dominate the online discourse.
The last group lacks both the ability and the time to voice their opinions online. These people are often labeled as "disruptive factors" affecting the city's image and sent back to the countryside. Beijing and Shanghai have already done this. They are the silent majority.
How many people have ever considered the vast number of底层 residents who can't use mobile payments, don't know how to use ATMs, and can even be talked into buying insurance instead of making deposits at banks? How many think about the huge number of families whose initial treatment costs of 100,000 would mean bankruptcy?