Introduction: The dissolute heirs who only knew fame and fortune are already yesterday’s outdated almanac. Today’s powerful and wealthy have begun cultivating “virtue” — because the raw brashness of the first generation is passé. The future belongs to compassion and noble bearing.
As someone who, by virtue of position and connections, occasionally moves within circles of near-elite families — I have always held it as my absolute duty and responsibility to share truly valuable educational perspectives with my readers.
“Perhaps our generation is not yet among the most exceptional winners — but that doesn’t mean we cannot pass the finest understanding on to our children.” This is my guiding intention.
Yet many parents, who have no real grasp of what education means, continue to take scenes from trendy dramas as their model of “elite-class parenting philosophy.” What they don’t realize is that every second they spend watching is a product of an entertainment industry driven by return-on-investment. It doesn’t seek rationality or truth, let alone quality or correctness. It only wants to hook your eyeballs with sensational strangeness and absurd dramatic conflict — to make you click and watch.
Unfortunately, slavishly imitating what one has never truly understood — drawing a tiger and getting a cat — is the eternal affliction of the middle class. They cannot perceive that the actual hierarchy of educational understanding works like this:
The ever-evolving near-apex nobility → The constantly imitating high-elites → The beginning-to-distort mid-elites → The completely-off-track pure middle class
If the speed of knowledge updating between each tier is roughly six months, and comprehension of core insights diminishes by 15% at each tier — then in practice, the pure middle class, who make up the majority today, will forever trail the apex nobility — who hold the most cutting-edge educational understanding — by at least three years and roughly 50% in cognitive accuracy.
To put it in an example: The near-apex nobility began realizing around 2020 that “moderate physical exercise is good for children’s health.” The pure middle class, by 2023, under the influence of TV dramas and online fiction, will have erupted into the grand trend of: “Children must train in the bitter cold of winter and the scorching heat of summer!”
You and your children deserve better than that. Every parent sacrifices enormously for their child. So today, Master Chi wants to share with you how the established aristocracy — families already settled for at least two generations — approached child-rearing against the backdrop of 2020. I won’t claim my account is definitive, but I can guarantee that what I have witnessed is real.
Last weekend, Master Chi gathered with several friends of considerable standing in Shanghai at Jing’an Temple. These friends are not traditional Shanghai tycoons — their parents once held prominent positions within the system, and the children simply left politics for business. In other words, these individuals — now past thirty, approaching forty — are second-generation themselves.
The occasion was almost comical: it was because all their children insisted — “Summer break is almost over! The Jing’an Temple night market is closing soon — if we don’t go now, we’ll miss it!” Indeed, this particular holiday had kept these little ones cooped up at home, unable to travel abroad as usual. At this time in any normal year, they would already have checked in at two or three international cities on Instagram.
So the second-generation parents had no choice but to abandon their air-conditioned comfort and summer retreats on a sweltering day, pile into their cars, and make their way to Anyi Night Lane — accompanying their little lords and ladies of the third generation.
After wandering the full length of Anyi Night Lane, our group paused at a small charitable organization at the entrance. It was an institution dedicated to helping impoverished children with heart disease. The way to contribute was simple: buy one of their handmade teddy bears, and the money would be donated in full — no deductions — to help children in need.
At this moment, all four children in our group simultaneously insisted they wanted to contribute — and firmly refused to let their parents pay. They would use their own “little treasury.”
This is a small custom in our circle: children under fourteen receive no regular pocket money. Any extra funds must be earned through housework, activities, academic performance, and self-discipline. So for them, one little bear wasn’t cheap at all — essentially representing two or three months of effort.
Even so, the children were completely resolute.
Did they really want a teddy bear that much? Hardly. These little spending machines had been to North America, Europe, Japan and Korea until bored, with mountains of exquisite handmade toys at home. Even their Disney magic cards were often bought and left unused. From their eyes you could see — they genuinely felt, from the heart, that they should do something for this world, for those less fortunate than themselves.
There’s an interesting phenomenon worth noting here. For us parents, switching between Mandarin and Shanghainese in daily conversation is perfectly normal. But children, being young, still have that innocent little impulse to show off — so when they’re together and one starts speaking English, the rest will switch entirely to English for the rest of the conversation. Don’t talk about habits — children are human too, they have that small competitive streak. Who doesn’t have a touch of vanity? Perfectly normal.
Just as we were paying, a group of older children arrived nearby — about thirteen or fourteen years old — accompanied by their parents, who were thoroughly typical local Shanghai types: all Loewe bags and Chanel tweed. (I’ve always suspected Shanghai housewives have their own unique social channels, with a collectively designated uniform for every few years.)
Perhaps assuming our children were ABC (American-Born Chinese) or CBC (Canadian-Born Chinese) — little foreign-influenced types — upon seeing the children pooling their own money to make a donation, one parent murmured at a volume just loud enough to hear, in Shanghainese: “Look at those kids — aren’t they silly? People will think they’re fools. How can you fall for something like this? Better to keep the money and spend it on yourself!”
Upon hearing this, the children remained completely unruffled. The conviction that “the swan need not heed the sparrow’s judgment” — along with a confidence etched into their very bones — had long since made them immune to such remarks.
And looking at the older children nearby — they had, in fact, also expressed a desire to donate, and one had already begun asking a volunteer how to do so. But they were stopped by another remark from their parent: “Donate what? You can’t even feed yourself properly — shouldn’t you be saving money for your parents instead?”
At this, I glanced between the two groups of children. The most striking difference was that the latter group lacked that ineffable quality of quiet nobility — and that raw yet sincere “sense of compassion.”
We adults naturally understand: these are precisely the qualities that will one day make a child truly great. That single comparison tells you everything you need to know about who will win.
Let us go a step further and examine an important idea.
“Because we are capable, charity is something we live — not merely preach.”
As a life pattern consultant who regularly encounters middle-class families, Master Chi is certain of one thing: the children from those families are also very kind — but their understanding of kindness is thin. They know, for instance, that one shouldn’t do bad things and that one should care about society. But the source of that kindness and goodwill? They cannot say.
The reason is simple: their charitable giving usually amounts to taking a hundred or two hundred yuan from their parents, handing it over, and calling it done. They have never come face-to-face with people broken by circumstances beyond their control — and so they have no deep experiential understanding, no genuine awakening born from it.
Children from exceptional families are different. I won’t claim this applies to all or even most — but in recent years a very clear trend has emerged: a significant portion of elite children between the ages of twelve and twenty spend their free time being taken by their parents to contribute to various social welfare organizations.
Especially since a couple of years ago, friends in Master Chi’s circle have begun regularly organizing charitable volunteer activities during summer and winter breaks and holidays — taking their children along, dressed simply and cleanly, riding in their Alphard vans, to participate in public-service work. The parents thoughtfully change into something like Uniqlo — never letting a hint of the expensive brands they wear on weekends show through.
They don’t go merely to perform a gesture and hand over a check. They truly spend an entire day accompanying people in need — talking with them, providing care.
Yes, initially these activities were partly motivated by building better community-service records for elite university applications. But why have they become a genuine cultural phenomenon among the upper tier in recent years?
Because parents discovered: when children help others, compassion and goodwill arise naturally within them — bringing enormous growth and insight.
“I see now that I am fortunate. I see now how fragile life can be. And since I have been given such a strong foundation, I should not only cherish what I have — but also offer what help I can to those less fortunate.”
This empathy and goodwill — born from direct, lived experience — becomes a tremendous driving force in a child’s emotional and intellectual maturation.
Because you have seen, you understand. Because you understand, you empathize. Because you empathize, you mature.
It really is that simple. Many children, after a summer of charitable volunteer work guided by their parents, will suddenly mature enormously. Master Chi has long believed that emotional intelligence is forged through continuous experience — and so is empathy.
So when children from exceptional families have witnessed and participated in enough charitable work, they will inevitably develop a far deeper emotional understanding of this world.
By the same logic, I have always maintained: families with children who have the means to do so should consider raising a pet — because watching a life pass teaches children the preciousness of all living things.
Have you ever noticed that many warm and exceptional families often include cats or dogs as important household members alongside the humans? One reason they do this: a pet’s companionship and eventual passing is the finest lesson a child can receive about life and death.
For a child, from the very beginning of their life, there is a deeply intimate little companion — warm and gentle. Friends, parents, relatives may occasionally cause small emotional friction — but this companion is their most faithful guardian. Both grow up side by side, accompanying each other.
Then one day — perhaps when the child is eleven or twelve — they discover that this long-tailed friend, who shared their every day, is suddenly fading.
Once so lively and mischievous, so warm and devoted. Now all it can do is lie quietly on the ground, gazing at you — saying without words:
“My dear little master — I am glad to have had your companionship through this life. Having you as my owner is my greatest pride. But I am not human — I cannot walk with you the rest of the way. I must go now. Goodbye. I love you — very, very much.”
It cannot speak, but the love in its eyes says everything.
After that, the child will grieve with a heartbreak that cuts to the core — perhaps lying awake through the night. But this is growing up.
Master Chi has encountered many children from exceptional families. Many of them, after accompanying a pet through its passing, seemed to grow up almost overnight.
In that process, they came to understand: there are so many things in this world that neither their parents nor their wealth can hold onto. Among them — life, warmth, and companionship — are more important than material things, yet also more precious and more fragile.
Why do so many children remain stubbornly self-centered despite their parents’ repeated attempts to correct them? At the root: they have never experienced “loss.” They believe everything is their due; they believe they must be the center of the universe, held in their parents’ hands.
In their early understanding, even parents who aren’t particularly capable or wealthy would still give them the best of everything first — and over time, this becomes assumed as natural. Never having lost anything means never learning to cherish. Not cherishing means never developing the patience to work for what one wants.
It is for exactly this reason that children from impoverished homes can so easily become spoiled — they are often the most thoroughly indulged.
Closing:
In recent years, the Shanghai and Jiangnan families Master Chi has encountered — along with a significant portion of Beijing families — have all begun steering their children toward “virtue” (贤德 — benevolence, righteousness, and moral cultivation).
What is virtue? It is ren, yi, li, zhi, xin (benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and integrity) — warmth, gentleness, respect, frugality, and humility.
So when you see a young person of twenty-one or twenty-two who carries themselves with natural ease and speaks with quiet confidence in social settings — they almost certainly come from a very substantial family background. And if not from wealth, then certainly from parents who put deep thought into their upbringing.
These are capacities their peers, chained to desks, will find very difficult to match.
On this, Master Chi sometimes catches his breath — because it means these children are not only broader in vision, richer in resources, and deeper in expertise than ordinary children. More importantly, their character and refinement will be superior as well. And this gap will continue to widen with each passing generation — what starts as a difference between parent and child will eventually become an insurmountable gulf spanning three or four generations.
As for how to reverse this?
There are still weeks before summer ends. Rather than forcing your children to channel all their energy into schoolwork, why not take them along to participate in the charity events organized by various welfare organizations?
You may come to realize just how much high-quality “cultivation” — and how much karmic merit (福德) you could have been accumulating — both you and your child have been missing all along.