Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：17  发布时间：2025-02-12

Although any period of history has its irreplaceable uniqueness, China from 1978 to 2008 is the most unlikely to be repeated. In a country with a population of nearly 1.3 billion, the rigid planned economic system has gradually collapsed. A group of small people have turned China into a huge testing ground. Under the watchful eyes of the public, it has irreversibly transformed into a commercial society.

In the past 20 years, the magnitude of the changes in the world often makes people feel like they are in another world. Many facts seem so absurd and incredible today. Before 1983, the government explicitly prohibited private individuals from buying cars for transportation. A term for economic crimes that has disappeared today - "speculation and profiteering" was a very serious crime at the time. In the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, if you ride a bicycle from one village to another, and there are more than three chickens and ducks in the basket on the back seat, if you are discovered, it is considered speculation and profiteering, and you will be arrested and criticized, or even imprisoned. In Wenzhou area, we also found such a material that a woman was sentenced to death for speculation and profiteering. By the end of the 1980s, short selling was still a bad term, and the businessmen vividly described by Mao Dun in his novel Midnight left a deep impression on people. By around 1992, commercial banks still stipulated that loans to private enterprises should not exceed 50,000 yuan, otherwise it would be considered "discipline violation".

Throughout the 1980s, in many cities, working in a private factory was a very shameful thing, and opening a small shop to do a little business would be scornfully called an "individual business owner", that is, an "unorganized person", an unprotected vagrant outside the system. This social impression did not change until the term "ten thousand yuan household" appeared, from contempt to secret envy, and then to excessive praise from the whole society. 20 years ago, state-owned and collective enterprises were terrible behemoths. Many large state-owned factories had almost all social functions, "except for crematoriums, everything". A job was very precious and could be "hereditary". After retirement, the father could immediately designate one of his children to replace him. For a family, the enterprise was as important as "a larger family". Zong Qinghou, now a wealthy man, was a farmer who "settled down" in the countryside. In order to return to the city, he asked his mother, who worked in a district school-run factory, to retire early. She gave the job to her son, who rode a tricycle to the gates of various schools to sell exercise books and pencils. After raising enough money, he founded the Wahaha Children's Health Products Factory, which is now China's largest beverage company.