According to recent reports by Fortune and Wall Street Journal, and court testimonies, the 48-year-old entrepreneur aims to father at least 20 US-born kids specifically to inherit his video game fortune. Bo wants to leverage US-based surrogacy to bypass domestic birth restrictions and secure American-born heirs.
Citing Xu’s video game company, a Wall Street Journal reported that Xu has more than 100 children born through surrogates based in the US, and has been allegedly seeking “50 high-quality sons,” as per accounts linked to Xu on Chinese microblogging website Weibo. One of the accounts also claim that according to Xu, “having more children can solve all problems.”
The distinguishing feature of capitalism, in contrast with feudalism with banks, is that under capitalism there is a tradable promise of social mobility and a competition for the same top of the pyramid instead of inheritance of it.
The "free market" phase of capitalism is just an early, and pretty brief stage of capitalist development. For most of its life cycle afterward, the promise of social mobility is a scam.
The Cold War was a state of exception in which capitalism temporarily distorted itself to survive a strong international labor movement, embodied by the USSR; conditions favoring greater social mobility were tolerated as a concession then. Only the appearance of another militant labor front on that scale has even the remotest chance of bending the capitalists that far ever again.
Even back in their time, Marx and Engles observed that capitalism's liberatory role was limited and short-lived, and that if it outlived its time, the result would be "the common ruin of the contending classes;" and the prosperity capitalism opens the way for could only be completed by the production mode to come: socialism.
This is exactly the kind of reasoning that "capitalism built your iphone" people use. Capitalism doesn't open the way for anything; human technology builds upon earlier human technology largely independently of who controls the profits and how.
It's not unambiguously liberatory compared to its coincidental historical predecessor in Northwest Eurasia, its full development is not a prerequisite for building socialism, and as you've acknowledged, it does have the ability to turn humans into permanent subordinates that are structurally stripped of virtually all consequential agency.
During the Industrial Revolution, neither the feudalists nor the socialists were prepared to build the social organization to make 'iphones'. Maybe there are timelines where they were, but in this one the feudalists lacked the incentive to drive change and the socialists had not matured to the point of making a USSR yet, and so the capitalists were able to capture the space. Socialists have certainly since demonstrated that they can spoof whatever parts of capitalism might have been needed, to transition out of feudalism directly, and it's only more so now with the availability of computers to solve distribution problems.
Something feudalists and monopolists have in common is that they have little reason to build or improve capital, they'd prefer to just collect rents on what there already is. As long as there are any socialist or industrial capitalist powers on earth, they will have the advantage of the actual production and reproduction of capital, which shows sooner or later.
To address the present state of affairs more specifically, it seems a matter of time before the erratic decline of the US drives countries to abandon or weaken copyright treaties made with it. All my digital rental properties gone!
Under feudalism and even/especially under slave societies, it was possible to build large buildings requiring many divisions of skilled labor, and to command armies in the hundreds of thousands, all equipped with the most advanced technology that was available. The fact that they didn't produce the technology we have today is more a matter of the sequential progression of technology than of the users of technology. The march of technological development is mostly independent of what state structures are in place. The linear development of "slave society > feudalism > capitalism > socialism" is largely a post hoc ergo propter hoc heuristic in the Western European perspective, much like "savages > barbarians > semi-civilized > civilized" and "Stone Age > Copper Age > Bronze Age > Iron Age" that were dominant in Marx and Engels' time but have been superseded.
The interest under socialism of making physical improvements with less redundancy, to better peoples lives, is a good point. And I fully agree with it. But it doesn't directly have much to do with the more backward/reactionary modes of social development.