Investing

Student Question Current situation: I own a 75 sqm two-bedroom apartment in Shanghai, built in 1998, located outside the outer ring. I want to sell and upgrade for my two kids. Context and challenges: I’m looking to take advantage of Shanghai’s current “property-recognition, not loan-recognition” policy to upgrade. Two specific concerns: a. I’m hesitant about taking on more leverage because I’m uncertain about my future career income. b. I’m torn between a newer property in a less desirable location versus an older second-hand property in a better one.

I’ve been traveling around North America lately — looking at assets, catching up with friends, handling various matters — and I happened to catch a cold along the way. So just a quick note to my readers: the longer pieces will have to wait until I’m back in the country and recovered. Give me a few days. Today, let me share one simple yet profoundly effective principle. That principle is: flowing water brings wealth.

I’ve been traveling these past couple of days, but I found a moment to jot down some thoughts — consider this a gift to you. When you’ve experienced enough in life, you’ll come to realize something. Whether you can become wealthier and more capable ultimately comes down to one thing: whether you can handle what gets thrown at you. To be honest, almost all of it will be trouble — messy situations, bad developments, difficult problems. But you still can’t run from them. You have to learn to meet them head-on, because these are the test questions Heaven itself has arranged for you. Pass the test, and your rank goes up.

Student Question: Master, recently the collapse of the Zhongzhi Group has been an even bigger shock to the market than the real estate crash. With four major wealth management subsidiaries failing to honor multiple products, Zhongzhi Group has been swept into a full-blown redemption crisis. A massive wave of high-net-worth investors have been left devastated. Over the years, we’ve seen one dazzling investment scheme after another — P2P lending platforms, abandoned property projects, restaurant franchise chains, crude oil structured products, rural and township banks — yet the outcome is always the same: investors get hurt. For middle-class people with a bit of savings, how do we protect ourselves and hold on to what we have?

Most importantly — when the era is favorable and the environment is right, even ordinary people can ride the wave to prosperity. For ordinary people, no investment is more significant than buying property. Most people won’t put hundreds of thousands into stocks, but they will put hundreds of thousands into real estate. Property is the investment tool most capable of widening the wealth gap among ordinary people — because in investment terms, this is a heavy-position, leveraged play.

Picking up from my last piece — let me talk about why my mindset has stayed solid despite everything. This is a bigger topic, so let me be clear upfront. First: I remain personally optimistic about the future. Not a naive, head-in-the-sand kind of optimism — but a considered judgment reached after careful analysis and observation. Second: I’m deeply bullish on what I call the “industrial crown” sectors — new energy, precision manufacturing, electric vehicles, aerospace, energy storage, semiconductors. These are industries that generate real, powerful economic momentum. The progress they’ve made over the past five years has been nothing short of remarkable — a dominant, leave-everyone-in-the-dust kind of lead.

Student Question Hello, Master. What’s your take on the gold-digger phenomenon? And as a woman, how does one develop a strong winner’s mindset? Master Chi’s Response Honestly, the gold-digger lane is already way too crowded. I’d rather my female followers not squeeze themselves down that narrow alley. Most people simply don’t have what it takes — neither the looks nor the skills — to pull it off. And chasing that path ends up derailing your normal relationship prospects and scaring off the genuinely solid, reliable men.

This evening I’d like to share a particularly representative reader question — one that I believe speaks to the hearts of many during these difficult times. Student Question: Dear Master Chi, as a reader who follows your articles every day, I’m taking the liberty of writing to you with a question. This is something I’ve thought over carefully — I spent a long time typing it out, working up the courage to finally send it. And I believe it also speaks for many of our brothers and sisters who’ve been feeling the same way lately.

Since 1998, in order to address the insufficient pull of an export-oriented economy and the lack of local development funding following reforms to the fiscal system, real estate — under official guidance, planning, and promotion — gradually became the core industry driving urban development. The industry’s vigorous growth resolved a series of social problems: including but not limited to local development financing, residential asset appreciation, housing needs during urbanization, the migration and employment of surplus rural labor, and the stimulating effect on related upstream and downstream industries. When a single sector can benefit all major stakeholders across society, it earns unanimous enthusiasm from society’s key participants. Behind this enthusiasm lies not only a concentration of resources, but also policy favoritism and lagging regulation. This creates a spiraling, self-reinforcing surge — and in the process, forges new social power structures and new coalitions of shared interests. These become internal forces resisting change. As a result, any reform that touches deep-seated interests is difficult and delayed — and that delay often gradually ferments into a bitter outcome for society as a whole.

Student Question Hello, Master. Recently I’ve been reflecting on investment, and on something deeper — we want to live authentically, to leave no regrets. We want to live freely. We want people who can support each other when loneliness comes. We want to live with greater meaning. But we’re also bound to face certain hard truths of life: Each of us becomes, to a far greater degree than we realize, the designer of our own life and the creator of the reality we inhabit. We are born as meaning-seeking creatures, yet thrown into a world that contains no inherent meaning. So we must set about constructing the meaning of our own lives — a meaning powerful enough to carry us through. These questions bleed into various layers of our daily lives.