Self-defeating landlords - a tale as old as landlords

Explanation: In the 1930s, even the right-wing authoritarian Kuomintang (perverted by Chiang Kai-shek from the original, socialist dream of Sun Yat-Sen, the founder of the Republic of China) recognized that landlords in China had outsized power, and attempted to negotiate some amount of land reform to give their own government legitimacy. The landlords, of course, threw a fit until it threatened the stability of the Kuomintang, at which point the plans for a rationalized, modern (if still private and hierarchical) system of land ownership and land reform were effectively put on hold, as the Kuomintang could not fight Japan, Communists, and it’s own power base at the same time.

When the Republic of China was pushed out of the mainland, in no small part because they had failed to set down roots in the peasantry, who made up the majority of China at the time, the Communist People’s Republic of China took over. And the Communists were… not accommodating. In fact, they were downright excessive, catching a lot of innocent people in the crossfire of ‘class warfare’.

… but if the landlords in the 30s had enough sense to give up some small sliver of their profits for a government that was clearly out for their interests, and not the interests of the peasantry it sought to placate… all that butchery could have been avoided.

Short-term profits cause long-term problems.