• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1277 0

economy” now began to circulate. The general thinking behind this was that any given enterprise was like a bird and you could not keep it alive if you tied down its wings. At the same time, the overall economic system of China was like a large cage in which these birds should be allowed to fly. They should not, however, be allowed to escape from the confines of the cage. In the end, this way of thinking got the upper hand in policy circles, and the theory ruled over enterprise-reform throughout the remainder of the 1980s. Debate about reform itself became a kind of “reform within a cage.”

Thehaltingnatureofthestate-ownedenterprisereformwastocontinue for the next twenty years. Until around 1998, no one was willing to grapple withthehypersensitiveissueofownership.Asaresult,state-ownedenterprises remained moribund, which paradoxically and fortuitously provided room for a very vital grassroots movement of private enterprise to grow.

Shooting Stars in the Countryside

Nian Guang-jiu and his Sha-ziGua-zistall.

I

n 1979, an incident in the Wuhu region of Anhui Province presented China’s theoreticians with a very tricky

problem. This incident was initiated by a man with the sobriquet of Sha-zi, which in Chinese means the fool.

The fool made his living by stir-frying melon seeds, which are known as gua-zi in Chinese. The case of the Fool’s melon seeds was to plague policymakers for years to come. Since his melon seeds were delicious and the name of his food stall, Sha-zi Gua-zi, was also appealing, the fool was soon employing twelve workers. According to

proper Marxism as described in Das Kapital, if an employer hires more than eight persons, he can no longer be considered as a small enterprise but instead should be thought of as someone who is exploiting the masses. He should be considered a capitalist. The authorities were now faced with the question of whether or not the Fool was exploiting the masses.

Should he be considered a capitalist and dealt with accordingly? An extremely ideological debate ensued. It continued up to 1982, by which time

The first group of “individual small-time entrepreneurs” on the streets of Shanghai in July 1980. This photograph was allowed to be taken but not to be published due to regulations that allowed only certain things to be shown “to an appropriate degree” in the media. The photo was stashed away in the drawer of the photojournalist.

The technique for making hand-made woks was almost lost, when small-time free enterprises resumed their operations in the Zhabei District in Shanghai. This photo shows a father teaching his son the trade. They were able to make nearly RMB 200 per month in 1980.

Deng Xiaoping in a meeting with the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher.

the Fool’s factory was employing 105 people, producing 9,000 kilograms of melon seeds per day, and making a sum of money that was said to exceed RMB 1 million. As for how many people a small-time operator could hire without being considered exploitative, the debate simply raged on. In the end, it was Deng Xiaoping who brought the case to a close with typical political finesse. In front of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he declared that with respect to judging privately managed enterprises, the government should adopt a posture of “wait and see.”

It is difficult to imagine today that a small-time vendor could stir up such a huge controversy. However, in the early days of reform and opening up, many people considered any privately operated business as the very incarnation of a “capitalist tail.”

In fact, while this debate about the fool’s melon seeds was going on in China’s interior, the kindling of a privately operated economy was igniting along the coast in places such as Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang.

In the Wenzhou region of Zhejiang Province, a continuous stream of smugglers was at work, guiding fishing boats piled with consumer goods into tiny ports along the coast. Local officials adopted an attitude of “one eye open, one eye shut” toward this