One Billion Customers - James McGregor [7]
Establish a Sense of Urgency: This was easy after the Cultural Revolution. The Communist party had to change course or lose power.
Form a Powerful Guiding Coalition: Deng empowered practical reformers but also left Long March veterans with enough of a grip to apply the brakes.
Create a Vision: Deng challenged the country to quadruple per-capita GNP from 1980 to 2000, a goal achieved four years early.
Communicate the Vision: Day and night, the state-owned press celebrates progress and exhorts new goals.
Institutionalize New Approaches: All major reforms, from farming to housing to finance and privatization, were tested and refined as local experiments before being spread nationwide and surrounded with regulatory structures.
The startup side of the equation is where foreign businesses and governments come in. China needed capital, technology, manufacturing expertise, management know-how, and overseas markets for its products. Like all startups, the Chinese have progressed through frantic trial and error, making it up every day, copying and modifying practices and products of others, always sprinting to capture the market first, always aiming at the next pile of quick profits.
Journey to the East
I first came to China as Deng’s turnaround was starting to get traction. My interest in Asia started at age eighteen when I served as an infantry soldier in Vietnam. I went from the army to journalism school, to a Los Angeles crime beat, to a correspondent’s job in Washington, D.C., covering the U.S. Congress. All along, my ultimate goal was to return to Asia as a reporter. So in 1985 I hooked up with my sister Lisa, who was working in refugee camps in Thailand, and we set out on a six-week backpacking trip across China. We bounced around the country in filthy, jam-packed trains and buses. We spoke not a word of Chinese but found ourselves hounded by eager students desperate to practice the English they were learning in school. Physicians, professors, and even government officials volunteered to serve as our guides just for the opportunity to speak English and learn what they could about the outside world. I returned to the United States convinced that China’s eventual emergence onto the world scene would be the economic event of my lifetime. After convincing my wife, Cathy, that Taiwan was “just like Hawaii” (I had never been there but knew that petrochemical plants were more prevalent than pineapple plantations), we sold everything we owned and in early 1987 flew to the island with two suitcases each and moved into a threadbare YWCA. The idea was, at our ripe old ages of thirty-three, to learn Mandarin and then head off to mainland China.
A few months after we landed in Taiwan, The Asian Wall Street Journal hired me as its Taiwan bureau chief. It was the perfect time to be a journalist in Taiwan. Martial law was lifted. Fistfights in the legislature signaled the start of a democratic revolution. Gangsters built flimflam empires. The stock market soared by 1,800 percent, then tanked. Everybody bought cars, and then sat fuming in traffic jams. The government scrambled to pretend that it was in full control. The next three years were a preview of many things I would see again in China.
When The Wall Street Journal sent me to Beijing as bureau chief in 1990, the tears of the Tiananmen Massacre still streaked the face of China. The government was patching up its internal split and exercising white-knuckled repression. Rage was widespread, but only vented to close friends and family. I rode my bicycle around Beijing almost every night, trying to probe the thoughts of those puffing along in the smoky, polluted blackness beside me. Most people were afraid to talk to foreigners, but I turned our lovely one-year-old daughter, Sally, into an interview lure. Chinese love children and with her Shirley Temple blond curls, Sally could easily gather talkative crowds of several dozen, and sometimes several hundred, when I plopped