Why tuhao year-end bonus matters

Indeed, nearly half of the respondents to a 2012 Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Project Survey on China said the gap between the rich and poor was a very serious problem, while 87 percent said it was at least a moderately big problem. Besides, fewer than half of all middle-income (45 percent) and low-income (44 percent) respondents said that "most people can succeed if they work hard".

One could argue that the tuhao themselves are the victims of their worship of money and material things. As Thorstein Veblen noted in his classic, The Theory of the Leisure Class, such individuals define their well-being in comparative terms, that is, by the ability to buy more expensive and novel goods and experiences than the fellow next door.

But in a highly unequal society, this quest is self-defeating, because in such societies, most relatively rich individuals will be less affluent than the top 0.01 percent. Such societies will also scorn at simple but worthy pleasures like riding a bicycle or other recreational activities - as a woman participant on the dating show, If You are the One, famously proclaimed that she "would rather cry in the back of a BMW" than ride happily with her husband/boyfriend on a bicycle.

In fact, the best recent empirical research on happiness, done by London School of Economics sociologist Richard Layard, finds that the happiest countries are those with close-knit and highly equal societies. This equality, Layard argues, makes people less likely to define their well-being in comparative terms.

Likewise, one can argue that the relatively harmonious labor-management relations in European and Japanese companies are related to the much lower gap between executive and rank-and-file compensation. These companies also give bonuses to their employees, but do so based on good performance and are discreet about it. This contrasts sharply with the stratospheric packages given to American corporate heads, even the ones presiding over badly performing companies.

Chinese companies, rather the country as a whole, would therefore be wise to follow a solidaristic social model. If that is not done, tuhao stories will become a permanent fixture on China's blogosphere.

The author is an American corporate trainer.

(China Daily 01/30/2014 page9)