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Nearby in the Pudong economic zone, which was swampy farmland only two years ago, modern highways, bridges and office buildings are taking shape. Shanghai will soon emerge as "the national and international financial center," boasts Huang Ju, the city's mayor. It will be "the dragon's head that will pull the body of the Yangtse River valley," home to a third of China's 1.2 billion people, into a new age of prosperity.
Individual lives are similarly transformed. More than a million Chinese have become dakuan, or dollar millionaires, and as much as 5% of the population is affluent by Chinese standards. In 1978 Li Xiaohua was a cook in a Beijing restaurant. Today he is a business tycoon who wears a diamond-studded Rolex watch and owns two Mercedes-Benz and a red Ferrari. Ten years ago, Chen Xiaohan was a steelworker in a mill near Beijing. Now he manages a state-owned import-export company and drives around in a Cadillac with a mobile phone. Wang Guoqing quit his job at the Bank of China in Xian three years ago and is now a multimillionaire retailer, restaurateur and real estate developer who wears Pierre Cardin suits, Italian shoes and a $2,000 Swiss watch.
Deng says, "To get rich is glorious." That is undoubtedly true for people like Li and Wang, but for the vast Chinese nation getting rich is a mixed blessing. The rigid discipline of the party and its apparatus is slipping, and crime is on the increase. Corruption -- payoffs and connections -- is the rule at every level. Wealth is growing unevenly: very fast in the special zones, in big cities and along the seaboard, but slowly in the great agricultural interior. Both rural and urban incomes have increased significantly in the past 15 years, but farmers still average less than half of the city worker's wages. Agriculture Minister Liu Jiang warns, "The profitability of farming is declining, and farmers are losing their motivation."
While perhaps 200 million coastal dwellers are now prosperous, and tens of millions of township and village enterprises are thriving, 90 million hamlet dwellers in the interior are still stuck in subsistence farming and near feudal conditions. "Beijing has no extra money to spend on us," says an official in northern Shanxi province. "We were told we would be helped after the reforms took off in the south." Much of the north is still waiting. A businessman from Gansu province, where a quarter of the population is illiterate, complains, "We will always be 10 years behind Shenzhen." At least 100 million peasants have left the land to search for quick riches and are floating rootlessly from job to job in the cities, increasing the crime rate and the profits of resurgent drug rings.
As party control slacked off and the drive to make money was legitimized, provincial and city officials went into business for themselves, creating their own special-enterprise zones to attract outside investment. The money and loans to finance these schemes usually came from local branches of the state bank; many of the banks used all their money for such investments and ended up having to pay farmers for their harvest in promissory notes of doubtful value. The leaders in Beijing called these unregulated investment programs "warlord economies" and set out to control them.