Thirty Years of Turbulence - Chinese Enterprises

作者：admin  点击次数：20  发布时间：2025-10-30

The liberalization and loosening of prices for small commodities have brought possibilities for the circulation of goods and the rise of private enterprises. In the following description, you will see that the emergence of China's first generation of private enterprises is closely related to the circulation and manufacturing of small commodities. It is in these inconspicuous fields that are despised by large and medium-sized state-owned enterprises that the elf like active private capital has completed its primitive accumulation.

Now, we need to shift our focus to some remote and impoverished areas in central and southern Zhejiang. It is difficult for people in the future to imagine why there would be distribution centers for Chinese goods in places without railways, factories, scarce resources, and low knowledge.

Before 1980, few people knew about Yiwu, a small county town located in the central Zhejiang Basin, surrounded by mountains on three sides, narrow streets and alleys, low wooden houses. The county had a labor force of 280000, with a surplus of 150000, and an average annual income of 88 yuan per capita. In the past century, Yiwu has been most famous for its "tapping sugar to exchange feathers". This place produces brown sugar, but the land is barren. In order to increase grain production, there is a habit of using chicken feathers to fertilize the fields, commonly known as "stuffing feathers". In order to collect chicken feathers, farmers can easily carry sugar goods on their shoulders during the winter and spring off-season, shake the drum with their hands, and travel from village to village to "tapping sugar to exchange feathers".