In November 2020, my research partner and I met Jessica, an agent at a major domestic services company in Shanghai. As an agent, her job involved matching domestic workers with clients, and she spent most of her days sitting side by side with other agents in front of a row of computers, waiting for the phone to ring.

The matching process does not always go smoothly: Clients and domestic workers can cancel their agreements at any time, and agents may spend an entire day fielding calls but fail to convert a single lead — or work late into the night trying to placate an angry client over the phone. But when I asked Jessica if she thought her job was too demanding, she merely smiled and said that if she was able to one day earn a million yuan ($138,000) a year, then this little bit of hardship would be worth it.

I was surprised. An annual income of 1 million yuan is quite high even by Shanghai standards, where the average annual income of full-time urban workers was 147,700 yuan in 2023. After working in the domestic services industry for five years, Jessica’s annual income was still far from the million-yuan mark, but when she mentioned this figure, her expression was serious.

Jessica was less ambitious when she first came to Shanghai. In her late 30s when we met her, she hailed from a happy and reasonably well-off family in her hometown in the eastern Fujian province. She originally came to Shanghai in search of opportunities to earn the money needed to afford an apartment in a better school district for her children back home and planned to return as soon as she’d earned enough to make that happen.

The woman who sat next to her at work, Lily, had a similar story: A 32-year-old mother from nearby Anhui province, she initially only wanted to work in Shanghai for a couple of years to pay off her mortgage in her hometown before moving back. But now she plans to stay for a few more years and buy an apartment in Shanghai. Another employee, 35-year-old Mary, used to sell cosmetics in a small town in the central province of Hunan before coming to the city to help cover her two children’s kindergarten fees. She, too, now hopes to bring her kids to study in Shanghai — once she manages to earn 1 million yuan a year.

Of the 20 domestic service agents my research partner and I observed, most were married women from small towns who had moved to Shanghai out of a desire to help financially support their families. Their initial goals were modest: They wanted to use the greater economic resources available in the big city to meet their practical needs back home, such as housing, child care, health care, and elder care.

Now, however, they all seemed to share the same goal: Making 1 million yuan a year. How did these women from small towns go from building a nest egg to dreaming of membership in China’s 1%? This question prompted us to take a closer look at the management system and cultural atmosphere of the companies where they work.

To start, we wondered how domestic service companies stimulated their employees’ aspirations for the future. An agent’s income is mainly reliant on commissions, which means their monthly income can be unpredictable, ranging anywhere from just 3,000 yuan all the way up to 50,000 yuan. Companies generally avoid discussing the lower end — and encourage those who fail to meet the minimum performance standard for three consecutive months to quit. Instead, they place more emphasis on the outliers earning tens of thousands a month, leading other agents to harbor unrealistic expectations for their own earnings. This is exemplified by the mantra Jessica and her colleagues are required to chant every morning: “Seize opportunities and close big deals! Seize opportunities and earn a million yuan a year!”

This mindset extends to the agents’ working environment. Jessica and her fellow agents have furnished their desks with decorations featuring Lucky Cats and the God of Wealth — even their screensavers feature gold bars. Jessica told us that she spent 500 yuan to have a God of Wealth statue consecrated at a temple. It now sits next to her computer, and she prays to it every day for luck.

Companies also cultivate the desire for material goods in their employees through free consumption experiences. Agencies organize activities for workers that are normally favored by middle-class consumers in Shanghai, such as paid-for trips to music bars and beauty salons, providing novel experiences to these small-town women. Management also recommends that the agents download apps commonly used by middle-class white-collar workers, such as Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, encourage them to learn about makeup and fashion from popular influencers, and even push them to purchase cosmetics and clothing brands promoted by vloggers. Companies will also organize group purchases of branded cosmetics, guiding employees to spend their money directly. And during training sessions, companies constantly cultivate the desire for a materialist lifestyle in their employees — not for the sake of luxury, but in order to “take control of their lives.”

At first, Jessica wasn’t interested in buying luxury goods, but she noticed that her attitudes had changed under the guidance of her company. “Once I started, I couldn’t stop,” she said. “I basically spend my entire monthly income on these brands and cosmetics, telling myself I need to earn more to fund my shopping,” she said. After internalizing this new consumption concept, agents gradually abandon their small-town lifestyle and begin longing for the consumption lifestyle of middle-class cosmopolitan women.

Finally, companies organize activities such as staff training and commendation meetings to make employees feel that an income of 1 million yuan per year is attainable. At one training session, Lily expressed her hope of earning a modest sum, only to be chastised for having a narrow mindset. “The trainer said that I should be as ambitious as (my boss) Ms. Wang,” Lily said. Nowadays, her ambition is to make a lot of money and become what she calls the “main character” in her own life.

In the last week of every month, their company holds a meeting to commend high performers. At one such meeting in 2021, the department head announced that the top performer that month had brought in 70,000 yuan, calling her “a role model for all of us.” Amid thunderous applause, the agent took to the stage and delivered a speech in which she encouraged other agents to strive for a “million-yuan annual salary.” After her speech, she posed for photos holding cash-filled red envelopes presented to her by the general manager. She was then given a basket of red envelopes with contents ranging from 50 to 200 yuan, prepared by the company, which she threw out to the other agents, drawing cheers from the audience.

Stories like these not only stimulate a competitive mentality among agents but also convince them that such high salaries are attainable. Originally, Jessica was skeptical about whether she could close deals worth even 20,000 yuan a month, but seeing a colleague make more than triple that convinced her that she could do the same — and perhaps even surpass it. This way of thinking helps her put up with the hard work demanded by the job, while at the same time keeping her loyal to the company.

The cultural theorist Lauren Berlant has referred to the state of holding on to an optimistic belief in the future while facing a difficult reality as “cruel optimism”: People get relief from the pain of their current jobs or lives by imagining their future self-development and investing their personal human capital into coping with the instabilities and uncertainties of existence. But cruel optimism does not eliminate instability and inequality in contemporary society. Instead, it legitimizes the latter, creating people who are willing to be controlled by the system.

For domestic service agents, uncertainty remains a constant. This year, when we revisited this domestic service company, we found that some of the agents we’d observed had been promoted to management, while others had left to set up their own businesses. The majority, however, continued to work as agents. An annual salary of 1 million yuan may not be an impossible goal, but for most, it remains a far-off dream.

To protect the identities of my research participants, I have given them all pseudonyms.

Translator: David Ball.

(Header image: Visuals from Shijue Select/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)