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By Root 1286 0

importing of clothes, electronics, and hardware, since they and their small communities benefited from the trade. As a result, small market centers began to spring up as an important source of goods intended for sale in China’s interior. Buyers were those small peddlers brave and tough enough to take on products and sell them as itinerant peddlers in the countryside. These savvy traders formed the very first contingent of private businessmen in China. By 1980, there were more than 3,000 ge-ti-huor small-time private businessmen conducting trade. The business was most active in places where people from different villages converged, and small workshops began to appear in these business nodes as well. Generally, they specialized in a specific product.

By 1983, more than 100,000 such home-based small businesses operated in Wenzhou, employing some 400,000 people. In most years, a sales force of 100,000 Wenzhou peddlers would spread out over the

A ge-ti-huowned by a couple, enjoying brisk business. G L O S S A RY 1 . 3

Ge-ti-hu

A tailor stall on the street.

This refers to a form of economic activity that was prevalent until recently in China, but which is fast disappearing today. The term ge-ti-hu is the abbreviation of three Chinese characters that mean “individual, industrial, and commercial household or entity.” There are three different forms of ge-ti-hus: those managed by an individual, by a household, and by a partnership. Ge-ti-hus are permitted to operate under state laws within a certain policy-permitted scope of operations. They are allowed to carry on business in industry, handicraft, services, and repair businesses, as well as other trades. The word “individual” implies that a person is generally self-employed and owns his business, as opposed to the state owning the business. Since ge-ti-hus bear their liabilities and are not legal entities, they are different from a limited liability form of entity in China, known as a “privately managed enterprise.”

entire country, selling goods and purchasing raw materials. Later, people described the hardships these people endured as the “spirit of those who have been through the four ‘thousands.’” This referred to enduring a thousand hardships, giving a thousand sales talks, traveling a thousand hard miles, and dreaming up a thousand schemes and tricks to get people to buy their wares. Today, you can find people from Wenzhou doing business in every part of the world. Their organizational network, based on blood ties and allegiance to their local turf, is global and highly effective.

It is worth pointing out that people who engaged in small private enterprises in the early days came, almost exclusively, from the lowest levels of the Chinese society. Frequently, they were the unemployed, people who had committed crimes, and people with a low level of education and literacy. Young intellectual people, or “zhi-qing,” who were returning to cities after being “sent down to the countryside,” were an exception to a certain degree, but all these various groups including the last had been excluded from the “warmth” of the system. They were forced to take a different route in order to survive, and the route they took meant that there was no turning back. Many among these people had especially acute entrepreneurial instincts. Their adaptability was astonishing. One tiny ray of light, coming through a crack in the wall, would be enough to allow them to grow upward like a tree.

The victorious Chinese women’s volleyball team in the 1980s.

G L O S S A RY 1 . 4

Zhi-qing

This Chinese term is an abbreviation referring to young people with a certain degree of education; specifically, it refers to a unique group of people who experienced a particular chapter in China’s history. Around sixteen million young people were sent from their urban homes to farming villages in the 1960s and 1970s, to join either collective “troops” or government-operated farms. Most had primary or middle-school education.

In contrast to these private enterprises, growing in a disorganized fashion, the concurrent