Some describe Mr Zhao as a 'quack' - a term that seems genuinely to hurt him.

WE ARE driving across the city's vast, central Tiananmen square in Mr Zhao Zhangguang's Mercedes 280 SEL with its dark, tinted windows and car telephone. Known widely throughout China as the ''hair lotion king'', he is in an expansive mood.

''Call your friends anywhere in the world . . . call your mother, call your wife,'' he says, offering me the phone. I call my wife at home in Beijing to tell her I will be late for an appointment.

The ebullient Mr Zhao is reminiscing as we pass on the right the Gate of Heavenly Peace, with its outsize portrait of Mao Zedong, and on the left the Great Hall of the People, seat of China's parliament. Mr Zhao was elevated to parliament recently for his money-making abilities. ''Getting selected for parliament only ever appeared in my dreams from time to time,'' he says, reflectively. ''You know what they call me now? The Red Fat Cat.'' Mr Zhao is perhaps the best-known member of China's newest class - the entrepreneur or ge ti hu. He has certainly become one of the richest since he began producing and marketing a hair-growth tonic that, he insists, has achieved spectacular results.

Not so long ago, Mr Zhao's entrepreneurial activities would have been scorned and his material success held as a black mark against him. Indeed, the word ge ti hu was not even in common use before paramount leader Deng Xiaoping began, late in the 1970s, to prise open China to the outside world and declared that ''to get rich is glorious''.

Since those first, faltering steps towards a market economy with Chinese characteristics, millions like Mr Zhao have taken the entrepreneurial, if not capitalist, road. According to China's taxation bureau, 15.3 million private businesses sprouted by theend of 1992 and the total is expected to reach 30 million by the year 2000.

Mr Zhao comes from a remote part of China that has itself become a symbol of rampant commercialism. It is in places like the small, damp, coastal city of Wenzhou, 300 kilometres south of Shanghai, that the awesome, almost manic, energies being applied tomaking money and getting ahead are seen best.