When he was a student, Ding Yu's teacher used to tell him that in the old days people were so poor they could not afford to buy tyres. Eventually though, Chinese people would have anything - it was just a matter of time.
Today, Mr Ding owns two vehicles, rents two houses and is manager of a news distribution company in Beijing - and he is only 27.
Decreasing government interference and Communist Party economic stimulus over the past two decades have enabled Mr Ding to pursue two careers and spurred the growth of a company dependent on his entrepreneurial mind.
'Thirty years ago, this couldn't have been done,' said Mr Ding, one of the estimated 75 million Chinese entrepreneurs.
As a high school student in Bozhou, Anhui province, Mr Ding was told his poor English proficiency would never get him a high-paying job in a nation obsessed with learning the international language.
So Mr Ding got a degree in Japanese from the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, then taught at Beijing colleges in 1997 for a measly 1,300 yuan a month.