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China’s agrarian system is unjust in the extreme. Speaking of general conditions, landlords and rich peasants who make up less than 10 per cent of the rural population hold approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the land, cruelly exploiting the peasantry. Farm labourers, poor peasants, middle peasants, and other people however, who make up over 90 per cent of the rural population, hold a total of approximately only 20 to 30 per cent of the land, toiling throughout the whole year, knowing neither warmth nor full stomach. These grave conditions are the root of our country’s being the victim of aggression, oppression, poverty, backwardness, and the basic obstacles to our country’s democratisation, industrialisation, independence, unity, strength and prosperity. In order to change these conditions, it is necessary, on the basis of the demands of the peasantry, to wipe out the agrarian system of feudal and semi-feudal exploitation, and realise the system of ‘land to the tillers’.
How Asia Works
Joe Studwell
All modern attempts to stabilise the sociopolitical order have had no choice but to rely on either of two unscientific methods: Take a scientific theory, and in opposition to common scientific practices, declare that it is a final and absolute truth. This was the method used by Nazis (who claimed that their racial policies were the corollaries of biological facts) and Communists (who claimed that Marx and Lenin had divined absolute economic truths that could never be refuted). Leave science out of it and live in accordance with a non-scientific absolute truth. This has been the strategy of liberal humanism, which is built on a dogmatic belief in the unique worth and rights of human beings – a doctrine which has embarrassingly little in common with the scientific study of Homo sapiens. But that shouldn’t surprise us. Even science itself has to rely on religious and ideological beliefs to justify and finance its research.
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari
95. Some types of sophistication won’t make you enjoy the object more, they’ll make you enjoy it less. For example, wine snobs don’t enjoy wine twice as much as you, they’re more keenly aware of how most wine isn’t good enough. Avoid sophistication that diminishes your enjoyment.
100 Tips for a Better Life
ideopunk.com
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