Where to now? 40 years after the big economic experiment that changed China
- Deng Xiaoping’s push for ‘reform and opening up’ launched China’s rise from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution to the world’s second-biggest economy
- To mark the 40th anniversary of the start of the process, the South China Morning Post takes an in-depth look at the forces that shaped that transformation
When China embarked on sweeping economic change 40 years ago, buttons and elastic bands were at the forefront of the new era.
Vendor Zhang Huamei, who sold the small items from a desk in an alley behind her home in the southeastern city of Wenzhou, became the first entrepreneur in the country to be granted a business licence as a sole proprietor.
Until then, Zhang and other businesspeople like her had to be on the alert for authorities trying to stifle the budding but “bourgeois” private sector emerging in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution.
“[Before I got a licence], we had to flee and hide our stock when inspectors came [to clamp down on street vendors],” she said.
“But in 1979, [local officials] came to tell me that I could apply for a business licence, so I did.”
In the four decades since, her button and textile business has risen and fallen and risen again, following many of the twists and turns in the path to “reform and opening up” taken by the country as a whole.