Had a lovely WeChat conversation with my 96 year old revolutionary grandfather a couple days ago and at one point he hit me with the “You should buy property over there to rent out, it’s very lucrative, and you should take the 老外’s money and spend it in China”
I actually had no idea how to respond to this financial advice. Like at face value, the housing market is a bubble and could collapse at any moment, and also I’m not sure how moral being a parasite would be even if you’re leeching off of the benefactors of colonialism and western hegemony.
There are lots of ways in which it’s fairly difficult to survive under capitalism without being at least somewhat complicit in exploitation in an abstract way. Landlording, at least for residential property, feels like a conscious choice to be directly responsible for exploiting some of the most vulnerable people you’re likely to interact with in real life in one of the most impactful ways possible.