When "Self-Interest" Becomes the Referee: The China-West Employment Puzzle and a New Solution under the Symbiosis Points System

AbstractThe employment patterns of China and the West are often attributed to differences in institutions and stages of development. This article argues that both have, in fact, collided with the same wall — the structure of capital concentration has never been broken. Europe takes the path of the "pump circulation": it acknowledges capital concentration, then uses high taxation and welfare systems to hedge against the consequences after the fact, ultimately falling into the inverted-pyramid trap of "the few supporting the many." China, on the other hand, takes the path of the "reservoir circulation": it uses a vast surplus of labor to dilute the contradictions, allowing enterprises to perpetually refresh their workforce within blurred legal boundaries. Though free from the heavy burden of welfare, deeper social risks steadily accumulate. These two paths, despite their apparent differences, lead to the same destination — both are merely patching the old system, rather than rebuilding the operating system.The Symbiosis Points System offers a third possibility: it relies on neither regulatory coercion nor welfare redistribution, but instead prevents capital from concentrating at its source. It employs four mechanisms to restructure the rules of the game — preserving the essence of expansion to ensure efficiency, introducing long-term/short-term hedging to break monopolies, retaining the energy of gaming to maintain vitality, and setting a self-satisfaction ceiling to induce spontaneous yielding. This system does not seek to eliminate self-interest; it merely ensures that every profit-seeking move by every market participant must undergo a precise trade-off between "earning more now" and "paying a long-term price later." In the end, enterprises stop exploiting trial periods, not because regulation has tightened, but because the cost of a points collapse outweighs the wages saved; individuals stop expanding without limit, not because of moral elevation, but because the long-term cost of pushing further upward is simply too high.When self-interest itself becomes the referee, the public good no longer needs to be advocated. This is precisely the "second invisible hand" — Smith's first hand guided resource allocation through price signals; this hand calibrates the direction of behavior through points signals. The respective dead knots of China and the West find their common resolution under this system.