• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The rise of chuanxiao companies worried the central government. Some of the companies traded in fake, smuggled, or shoddy goods; their training meetings, where charismatic leaders drove members into an evangelical selling frenzy, came to look disturbingly similar to cults. The more extravagant operations even threatened the social order; in 1994, the police were called out to disperse hundreds of angry distributors after the collapse of a Taiwanese diamond-selling scheme. Beijing passed many regulations to bring the network-sales industry under control, but local governments rarely enforced its orders. This was partly because the companies brought welcome tax revenue and employment to local areas, and partly because moonlighting as a chuanxiao distributor was a popular sideline for government officials.

* * *

For Chunming, the sales meetings were a training ground for learning how to speak. In traditional China, the art of oratory was not an important skill—to write an elegant essay in beautiful calligraphy was what mattered—and speeches in China have always been dismal affairs. Speakers often read directly from a script, and the script is usually tedious. A person like Chunming—young, rural, and female—would have many reasons to stay silent in the presence of her betters. But in a modern China driven by commerce and competition, knowing how to speak had become a necessary skill.

The network-sales companies imported the ethos of America direct to the Chinese lower classes. Their style of speaking combined the call-and-response of old-time preachers with the tireless haranguing of motivational speakers. They spread the news that the individual was important and that everyone was a winner. And they brought with them the very American faith that wealth and virtue could go hand in hand.

In her diary, Chunming collected drafts of her speeches:

My name is Wu Chunming, a very plain and ordinary name. But I believe that someday in the future I will make my name no longer ordinary . . .

Friends, what kind of person do you want to become in the future? This is a question worth thinking about. What kind of person are we today: Is that important?

Not important!

What’s important is: What kind of person do you want to become in the future? For what purpose have we traveled thousands of miles and left our homes behind to come out to work?

To earn money!Correct, to earn money. But until today, have we earned the money we wanted?

No!

Is the life we live today the one we want to live or the one we can live?

Correct, the one we can live . . .

Friends, what kind of person do you want to become? That is all up to you. If you never dare to want to succeed, then you will never succeed . . . What is important is that you must dare to think, dare to want . . .

Really, each of us is unique in the world. When we are born, we are not doomed to failure. Because we are all born winners.

Friends, please believe me! But more important, believe in yourself! Because you can!

At Wanmei, Chunming rose quickly from trainee to manager. In 1997, she quit to join a Taiwanese company called Tangjing Soul Pagoda Garden Development Company. Its business was constructing high-rise buildings to store the ashes of the dead. The buildings were known as “soul pagodas,” and the company’s sales pitch married the spiritual, the practical, and the Chinese passion for real estate. For the dead, the Tangjing Soul Pagoda Garden promised an eternal resting place with excellent feng shui. For the living, the pitch focused on the garden’s prime location, its limited number of spaces, and the burgeoning population of the Pearl River Delta. An investor could purchase an entire soul pagoda and then flip individual spaces to buyers at a profit.

Chunming’s job was to run training sessions for the company’s salespeople. She had learned to talk, and now she taught others how to do it—as with the factories, what was actually being sold was the least important facet of the enterprise. Chunming’s pitch blended