China Emerging_ 1978-2008 - Xiao-bo , Wu [31]
On August 9, more than one million people were lined up at the sales points, brandishing fistfuls of ID cards and currency notes, and with a wild look in their eyes. Order soon broke down when ticket sales began. At some outlets, tickets were sold out two hours after opening, since many had been sold earlier through “the back door” to insiders. Those who had been waiting for days and nights were now unwilling to leave. Some in the crowds began to shout in anger. The anger soon flowed into the streets in the form of demonstrations as a charged mass of people moved like water in the direction of the municipal government. Shops were smashed and police cars were burned. The government mobilized the police force with highpressure water hoses and the situation was brought under control.
Mobicom was just starting in China in 1992, and cell phones then were like small bricks.
A job seeker “selling himself” at a job fair in December 1992.
Su Ming-juan, a poor mountain girl, 1991. She became the poster child for the “Hope” charity project.
One unexpected result of this incident was that the government was alerted to the extraordinary potential of the capital markets. This directly led to the establishment of the China Securities Regulatory Commission and a more orderly way of handling new issues. The voucher system was eliminated. China’s markets faced a long bear market for some time after this, but the reforms prepared the way for eventual explosive growth.
If you were to divide China’s reform and opening-up process into two segments, the dividing line would fall in 1992, a watershed in China’s history. The speeding up of reforms in this year amazed many Western observers. It helped dispel an atmosphere of mistrust and misunderstanding that had pervaded the relationship between China and Western countries. Multinationals started moving in the direction of China again.
Jonathan D. Spence, a well-known Yale University Sinologist, has come to the conclusion that China’s history can be read in terms of intersecting cycles of collapse and resurgence, revolution and advance, subjugation and development. The period from 1989–1992 was definitely a transitional link from one cycle to the next. This was a sensitive yet thrilling period. Under the stimulus of a market economy, the whole nation was like a child making a sudden growth spurt. China’s bones were cracking through the old systems and the old ways of thinking. The country seemed to be lifted by one big invisible force, ceaselessly searching for a better ecological niche to grow upward and outward. As one cycle ended and a new one began, China and its economy derived new life from among the cracks of the broken and discarded systems that it was rapidly leaving behind.
PART 3
Radical Dreams
1993 –1997
Ruling over Chaos with an “Iron Wrist”
C
hinese athletes broke two world records in 1993 and won a number of gold, bronze, and silver medals at the World Championships in Athletics, held in Stuttgart, Germany. It was an auspicious beginning to a new era in modern-day China. Even more significant as a symbolic
change from the old days was the abolition of the food coupon system. Representatives attending conferences in Beijing were no longer required to present coupons in order to get their meals. On May 10, 1993, the Beijing municipal government formally announced that grain coupons were a thing of the past. The system had begun in 1955 and for decades, everyone in China had used these rationed tickets to buy grain and other staples. Now, the symbol infused with the very taste of a “planned economy” disappeared from people’s lives.
Other indicators made it clear in 1993 that China was no longer a planned economy in the traditional sense and would not become one again. Private business was brisk among ordinary people. The old expression “speculation