Today, Master Chi wants to talk with you about the continuation of bloodlines within powerful, wealthy families. The inspiration for writing this piece came from hearing the news of He Youjun welcoming a precious son — and I hope today’s article gives you something meaningful to consider. However, this topic requires that you, as a reader, possess a certain capacity for rational thought and a degree of social ambition. So if you identify purely as a “pastoral feminist” (someone who demands equal rights while retaining traditional female privileges) or as a “passive male” without drive or ambition, then frankly, this article is not for you.
If you are one of those casualties of the “lower-middle-class mindset” so prevalent online, this piece likely won’t serve you well either. The true intended audience is the kind of “great woman” who aspires to stand above her peers — one who can hold her own in any arena and command a family enterprise with equal authority. And it’s for those men who have already built something, or who burn with iron ambition — the kind of man who demands both achievement and a dynasty of his own making.
Supplementary reading: Mother of the Realm: The Qualities of the Woman at the Top / Conquering the Kingdom: The Qualities of the Man at the Top
So why does Master Chi explicitly advise ordinary people or those lacking ambition to stop here? Because though we may all walk this earth as human beings, the “hearts” and “natures” hidden beneath our skin are fundamentally different species. A snake or a rat trying to copy the dragon and the phoenix is nothing but a farce — like attempting to paint a tiger and ending up with a dog. So if you are content with mediocrity, please step away from this article. It’s better for everyone.
But if you are someone who wants to carve out a name in this world and build a powerful clan from scratch — then let us begin.
Before anything else, I want you to understand a concept that only the truly powerful and wealthy know well: children, when you have just one, are naturally your only one — your heart, your deepest love. But once you have four or five children, you come to understand that a child is not your sole anchor. They are your heirs, your legacy, your bloodline. And what you must do is identify the strongest among them to carry your empire forward.
It’s like real estate. A poor man, because he typically owns only one property, treats that property as his life — as his so-called “home.” But once your stack of property deeds grows thick enough, you realize that home is wherever your family is. Those properties are just concrete and steel arranged into spaces. Of course, the reason the lower and middle class cannot grasp this concept is simply that they lack the capacity to have and raise children at scale. One child already runs them ragged — they have no foundation from which to discuss anything at a higher level.
Now, because this topic will immediately inflame many pastoral feminists, let me first pull the discussion back to ancient times and the more traditional, conservative rural China of the past — so you can understand at the root how the logic of bloodline and succession formed among the powerful.
(Note: Master Chi has the deepest respect for women — but we must see through to the facts, precisely so that our female readers can acquire greater wisdom for their own lives.)
So for my female readers in particular: remember this. Once you marry into a great family, or once you and your husband have built something together — you are no longer a fragile woman. You are not simply a child’s mother. You are the steward of this family’s bloodline, the architect of this clan’s stature, and the decision-maker of this family enterprise as a community of shared interests.
We all know that in the eyes of the world, the Chinese countryside has long been the clearest mirror of son preference. Many people cannot understand why even mothers-in-law — themselves women — and even biological mothers pursue the birth of sons with such relentless fixation.
And so a crowd who have never known real hardship begin to howl: “This is discrimination! This is unfair! This is gender inequality!” — and pile on with endless condemnation.
Remember: never underestimate anyone’s intelligence. They may not be as educated as you, may not be able to articulate things in sophisticated ways — but their customs exist because generations of lived history have told them that these practices work.
In the countryside, the pursuit of sons was rooted in enormous practical benefit.
Take daily life: if your family has two daughters, and your neighbor has five sons, then in the rural areas of the past — where law and order were unreliable — your family was essentially a target. The neighbors might quietly steal a chicken now and then, or push their plowed boundary a few feet into your land. You’d have no recourse. You’d have to swallow your grievances in silence. You had to. Why? Because the moment conflict broke out, five young men from next door would stand at your gate — and what could three women and one middle-aged man possibly do against them?
Worse still, you’d be afraid to trigger conflict at all. Because once bad blood formed, the surrounding villagers wouldn’t come to your defense — their first move would be to watch how the neighbors tormented you, then follow the lead and pile on together. Don’t say such things couldn’t happen. In the rural China of the past — and even just twenty-some years ago — this played out every single day.
There’s no arguing around it: in many places, especially where legal and moral accountability were weak, raw fist strength and sheer numbers ruled. There was no space for pastoral feminism to operate. Remember — the reason we can live free from violence today is precisely because we have a sound social order. The moment violence goes unchecked, every fine principle becomes a joke told to the powerless.
And looking at the long game: even if you had five daughters, or eight, you would discover a sobering reality once they grew up. Daughters get married out. What then? As they leave one by one to start their own families, you are left with nothing but two people in an empty house.
Don’t speak of depending on sons-in-law to stand up for you. That’s water too far away to put out a nearby fire. Unless he is a man of exceptional loyalty and conscience, who is going to go out of their way every day for their wife’s parents? Meanwhile, your neighbor’s five sons have all brought wives into the household — every one of them a real laborer, a concrete gain in strength and population.
Yes, we hear many stories today of daughters-in-law who berate and humiliate their in-laws. But if you had walked through the actual countryside in those days, you would know that is only part of the picture. The larger reality: five families living close to their parents, helping each other easily, lending a hand to the elderly — one drops off eggs today, another washes the bedsheets tomorrow. Even with the occasional family friction, it is far, far better than an elderly couple sitting alone — for whom the only visitor is a daughter returning for a holiday, with no one to even quarrel with on a normal day.
This is why the most cutting insults in the countryside — the cruelest curses leveled at another person — all revolve around having no men in the family: dig up the graves of those who die out without heirs; kick down the door of the widow. Because if your family lacks enough hard fists, it means your line will eventually wither — and what follows is absolute misery.
So now let us speak directly to the heart of it: why do powerful, dynasty-building families place such enormous weight on having sons?
The reason is the same as it was in the old countryside: “Only through sons does the possibility exist to pass your clan’s power down to the next generation.”
At this point, many middle- and lower-class readers will immediately jump up and shout: “Nonsense! Daughters can do it too! If I leave my apartments and money to my daughter, isn’t that the same legacy?!”
With respect — if all you’re passing on is a few apartments, you can give those to anyone. No need to get worked up.
But if what you hold in your hands is a commercial empire worth billions in market value, the problem becomes clear. Unless your daughter is exceptionally brilliant, the kingdom you broke yourself building will sooner or later be swept away entirely by your son-in-law.
Why? The reason is rawer than you can imagine. Don’t listen to those small-time office workers and self-styled elites dissecting this endlessly online — all that analysis is pure fantasy. Let them actually build something great and they’ll slap themselves in the face. Master Chi spends his days moving among the truly wealthy and the old power clans. I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count.
The reason is this: there is no man — or almost no genuine man — who will willingly endure, over the long term, the feeling of living under another’s roof and another’s shadow.
You will never keep an unbroken, capable man in a permanent state of submission. Don’t talk about others — would you be willing? If your wife or her family ever threw the words “you freeloading trash” at you — wouldn’t your blood pressure spike?
So perhaps when he first marries in, he plays the dutiful underling to gain advantage. He may ride it out that way for a stretch. But the moment he finds his footing — the first thing he does is execute a complete hostile takeover of the wife’s family enterprise and make it entirely his own. In capital markets, they call this a clean reverse shell acquisition. We always say a dragon must coil and a tiger must crouch — but that’s always a temporary accommodation. No dragon or tiger willingly stays caged for a lifetime.
Examples of exactly this are everywhere — you only need the faintest brush with capital circles or the top-tier legal world to know. From last year to this year alone, at least three or four such cases have unfolded. There is no “principle” to invoke here. It is pure human nature.
As the saying goes — the seeds of the ambitious man who eventually seizes everything were not planted suddenly. They were there from the very beginning of his story.
Human nature is more terrifying than reason. With reason, you and I can each hold our own position and maintain our own views. But human nature? As long as you are human, you cannot escape its hold. Almost impossible to transcend.
So let us bring the discussion back around to the central question: why, for the dynasty-building class, are sons more important than daughters?
That said — daughters are equally important. And here, you must fix what Master Chi is about to say firmly in your mind, because there is a very simple truth at the heart of this:
For a great family, sons are the weapons that seize empires and the swords that guard the gates. Daughters are the bridges that build alliances and the minds that command the inner household.
Many people, because their own family has no real influence or social standing, simply cannot fathom how formidable a clan network actually is.
And of course, this also stems from the fact that for a long stretch of modern Chinese history, single-child policies were in force — and for the lower and middle classes, one child already brings them to their knees.
But if you are among the powerful, you will understand: given two equally brilliant heirs — one a son, one a daughter — the son will access social resources and support that far exceed the daughter’s, by several multiples.
Yes, even with equal ability, a man today still receives more assistance than a woman. I find this unfair. I find it discriminatory. But Master Chi does not have the power to overturn social tides or rewrite collective consensus — and there is no way to change the prevailing perception that “daughters, after all, will get married off someday, so why not just deal directly with the son-in-law.”
Could you endure that? For many people — they have to. Because their social standing is insufficient; they have no other option. But for the powerful? Adding another child is as simple as adding a pair of chopsticks at the table. Why would they endure it at all?
Take a couple I consulted with just last week. Their family destiny chart session left Master Chi genuinely exhausted — because they had the resources to pursue IVF combined with surrogacy. Both partners had a quick, minor procedure, and the wife didn’t have to bear the pain of pregnancy or the inconvenience of recovery. Truly straightforward.
And do you know how many pregnancies they prepared? Five.
Combined with the son already in the family, that means by July of next year, five children will arrive at once in their household — three boys, two girls.
Just mapping out the destiny charts for all six children took so much out of me I needed half a day to recover.
As for why so many of today’s established power players are themselves only children — there are a few reasons. The main one is that those who are prominent today were busy grinding through their youth and never anticipated the scale of success they’d achieve, so they made no such preparations. Don’t believe it? Look at the new generation of newly ascended wealthy — they are uniformly running multi-child configurations.
Having many children naturally produces small family frictions. Perfectly normal. But this is precisely why many from the lower strata take such delight in watching powerful clans tear each other apart internally — they see it as just punishment, as heavenly retribution for the rich.
Their favorite line to crow is: “Look at them — all that money, all those children, and in the end the siblings are at each other’s throats. Ha.”
But what they utterly fail to grasp is that this internal competition is, in fact, extraordinarily beneficial for a clan’s growth and endurance.
Moderate competition does not produce uncontrollable disaster. It is healthy rivalry. Every heir who participates, through continuous competition, undergoes a comprehensive upgrade in capability and power.
What — you ask why the lower and middle class can’t see this? Simple: they can’t afford to raise enough children to find out.
So from the outside, the children of the powerful may appear to be in mortal combat. But the actual outcome? As the eldest son throws himself into conquering new territory to win the parents’ favor, the eldest daughter pivots immediately to her own differentiated advantage — building her network of relationships with focused ferocity. Everyone finds their own ingenuity, each forging their own path.
As for the idea that “the parents won’t be able to watch this” — that is pure fantasy. From where I stand, the truly powerful parents are actually eager for their children to push the rivalry to peak intensity before their own retirement. The fiercer the competition, the stronger the result. These are all their own children — selecting the strongest as heir is simply the optimal outcome.
And that strongest heir, forged through sustained healthy competition, will be a cut above even the ordinary scion of a powerful family. The others who don’t inherit the top position will still be formidable — crushing the children of ordinary families several times over is effortless for them.
As for how to manage and cultivate children as assets, and how to select the right heir — that depends on the wisdom of each family’s parents and will vary accordingly.
In simple terms: once this model is established, that is when true class calcification arrives. Because the children of ordinary families have never even encountered the concept of genuine competition — how could they possibly outperform the children of the powerful in the years ahead?
At the close of this article, as is my custom, Master Chi wants to share a few personal reflections for those of you who are about to become parents, or who may be someday.
First: Master Chi is firmly opposed to you becoming one of those aimless masses lacking self-awareness and independent thought. Because once that habit takes root, no matter how capable you are, it becomes nearly impossible to reverse.
And to build yourself into someone truly powerful — beyond all the ascension principles and worldly strategies I often speak of — the pivotal moments of life, such as when and how you have children and how you raise them, matter enormously.
Many truths sound correct when we hear them, but may not actually yield results when applied. Conversely, choices that seem cold or unfeeling often deliver extraordinary returns.
Master Chi does not want you to be someone consumed entirely by calculation. But I genuinely hope you become someone who can clearly see where your own interests lie. Only then can choices and trade-offs be made with true freedom and ease.
Take this entire question of children — on the surface, reading this piece from start to finish, it appears steeped in son preference. But is that really the logic at play here? Master Chi hopes you will arrive at your own answer through your own reflection.
Finally, I wish you — future builder of power — an early arrival of the empire and legacy that is rightfully yours.
Let us strive together, so that one day, in that circle of the top 0.00001%, fate will bring us face to face. Master Chi is waiting for your arrival.
P.S. A great drama is set to unfold this year among our “New Four Noble Sons” — whether it erupts this year specifically remains uncertain. But the prelude will be a lawsuit and coordinated assault against the number-one heir’s company. Let us watch with anticipation.