“My generation is very lucky,” said Feng Jun.
Feng, the chief executive of Aigo, a large Chinese consumer electronics company, is a classic Chinese entrepreneur: starting with US$31 in his pocket, he has built a business whose products are a staple of urban China, including digital cameras, MP3 players and a new iPhone-like all-in-one device. Before telling me his Horatio Alger story, though, he had something he wanted me to understand.
“My mother and father went through the Cultural Revolution,” Feng said. “They had no chance.”
“When I was in grammar school, the Cultural Revolution ended. When I graduated from university in 1992, that was the year of real reform. Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) encouraged students to go into business and become entrepreneurs. Before then, if you wanted to be an entrepreneur, you would sink like a stone. But after that, anyone could be an entrepreneur,” he said.
I spent two weeks in China, hardly enough time to begin understanding the place — as if a country as vast and varied and complex as China can ever be truly understood by a foreigner. But as I headed back to New York, Feng’s quote stuck with me. It resonates with so much else I saw and heard.
First, it helps explain why most of the Chinese chief executives I met — every one a company founder — were in their 30s. Though Feng began his company 16 years ago, he is still just 39, and absolutely brimming with entrepreneurial enthusiasm.
You hear constantly that China is a country of young people — the average age is 33 — but you really see it in business, where just about everybody seems to be under the age of 40. For people over the age of 50, sadly, as Feng said, they had no chance. The risk-taking impulse, and so much else, was crushed by the Cultural Revolution.
Second, it’s a reminder just how quickly China’s economic rebirth has taken place. Mao Zedong (毛澤東) died in 1976. Four years later, the country’s first special economic zone, explicitly created to encourage entrepreneurial capitalism, was established in the southern city of Shenzhen. What China has done in less than three decades is nothing short of astonishing.
As Byron Wien, the chief investment strategist for Pequot Capital Management, wrote last summer, “Nothing I have read, heard or seen will dissuade me from my view that China has made more economic progress in the last 30 years than any country in history.”
It is impossible to visit today’s China and disagree.
Third, modern China surely shows that trickle-down economics is not just supply-side propaganda. Deng, the driving force behind the move to capitalism after Mao’s death, famously said, “To get rich is glorious.” And goodness knows, lots of people have gotten rich.
But look at what else happened: motivated by the prospect of wealth, people started companies. And as those companies succeeded, millions of new jobs were created. In Shanghai — a place with more entrepreneurial energy than any place I’ve ever visited, including Silicon Valley in the 1990s and Houston during the 1980s oil boom — you can practically see wealth being created before your very eyes. If Shanghai doesn’t make you a believer in the power of capitalism to improve lives, nothing will.
RAW DEAL
Yes, in much of China, the deal is still a pretty raw one for most laborers, who live far from their families, working under arduous conditions for low wages. And like most first-time visitors, I was appalled by the pollution, especially in Beijing. (Are they really going to run a marathon there?) But even these problems are beginning to get attention, as the country moves to higher-value products, and as the environment becomes a public policy priority, thanks in part to the Olympics.
RSS