Author: Junxi Fan
1. Origins
My grandfather was born in 1956 in Zhuoshui, a town in the mountains of Qianjiang in southeastern Chongqing. He was the eldest of eight children. These were the years of the people's communes, when a family's survival was measured in work points in the production brigade. A day's labor earned anywhere from one to eight points, and at the end of the year, grain was handed out according to what each household had accumulated. A family with many mouths and few working hands always came up short. His grandparents were too old for the fields and could only keep house. His brothers and sisters were too young to work. So the burden fell on him early.
He went to school three days a week. The Cultural Revolution had hollowed out the classrooms, and he received little formal primary education. Even so, he learned quickly enough to skip ahead, from fourth grade straight into junior high.
For the next three years, he split his weeks. Three days went to the production brigade and the rest to school. The family was desperately poor. A geological survey team was stationed in Zhuoshui at the time, but there were no paved roads, so every machine and every length of steel pipe had to be carried up the mountain on someone's back. After class, my then twelve-year-old grandfather hauled coal and pipe, 25 to 30 kilograms a trip, for 60 cents. The money paid his own expenses, and whatever was left went to his younger brothers and sisters.
He finished junior high with an average of 85 across nine subjects. Only three students in his class passed every subject without a make-up exam, and he was one of them. His literature compositions were pinned to the public bulletin boards. But none of it mattered. In those years, places in senior high went by recommendation, not examination, and recommendations went to the children of Party branch secretaries and commune leaders. His family had been classified as middle peasants. That door was closed.
At fifteen, he went back to the production brigade. For two years he worked in the fields, and when work teams held meetings there, he asked questions, sometimes ones that left the cadres unsure how to respond. One official was impressed rather than offended and asked him to take the meeting minutes. He did the job well enough to be recommended for a position at the people's commune.
He spent several years at the commune. First he did publicity work for the Fifth National People's Congress. Then he spent a year and a half on family-planning campaigns. Later he was transferred to the Industrial Design Station to run its operations. During this time, through a relative's introduction, he married my grandmother and moved to Fengjiaba to live with her family. Now he had elderly relatives to support on both sides and seven younger siblings who still depended on him. By 1982 his salary was 39.5 yuan a month. It was nowhere near enough.
Qianjiang in the Early 1980s
In those days, Qianjiang was a remote mountain county. It had few decent roads, no high-rises, and no shopping malls. Tractors rumbled down the streets, and a bicycle was still a luxury. Getting from Fengjiaba to the county town meant hiking mountain paths, wading across rivers, and climbing steep slopes. "You set off before dawn," he remembers, "and you got home after dark."
But reform and opening up of the 1980s had arrived, and private business licensees were now allowed. A friend put it to him bluntly: "Don't settle for those 30 yuan a month. I make more in a day than you make in a month. Tens of thousands a year."
He decided to leave. In 1982 he submitted his resignation, and it was rejected. In March 1983 he left anyway. For all his years of service, he walked away with 300 yuan in resettlement subsidies, medical allowances, and back wages.
2. Getting Started
His first venture was tailoring. He was supposed to train for a month and a half, but two weeks in, he decided his master had little left to teach him and that he could do the teaching himself. Soon he was taking on apprentices of his own. In three months, he trained sixty of them and earned more than 6,000 yuan. That was the end of 1983, when an ordinary factory worker earned at most 60 yuan a month. In one season, he had made more than eight years of a worker's wages.
Then the household was divided. The eight children in his generation shared only two and a half rooms. Since his marriage the pressure had only grown, and once he had borrowed 80 yuan from the bank, about two months' salary, just to get by. Now my great-grandfather set his terms. My grandfather would pay the family 2,000 yuan, and he would raise his own capital. There would be no help from home.
He still remembers the date: September 22, 1984. When the division was finished, he owned almost nothing except 175 kilograms of unhusked rice. He was starting from zero. Everything had to be borrowed.
The next day he set out for Qianjiang on little money he borrowed from an aunt. There he went to an old friend who managed a local native-products company. He borrowed the company's business license and secured 1,000 yuan in startup capital. He traded whatever the mountains produced and the market would buy: medicinal herbs, fruit peels, and junks. On that borrowed 1,000 yuan, he cleared 3,900 yuan in profit. That was his start-up money. With it, he bought new utensils for the whole household and brought home a 100-kilogram fattened pig, much to my great-grandfather's displeasure.
3. Changing Trades
Three months later, competition was squeezing his margins, so he changed industries again, this time to construction. He spent only three months learning bricklaying. On his first tiling job, he noticed flaws in the usual methods, worked out a better one, and laid tile twice as fast as men who had been doing it for years. The contractors could hardly believe he was new to the trade. That was how he entered construction.
His first jobs were small repairs. In 1985 he earned 80 yuan fixing a boundary wall. Through a referral from his younger brother, he took on a canal project for the Fengjiaba water station and cleared 890 yuan after weeks of hard labor. Then in 1988, he landed a project that brought in 30,000 yuan in profit, an astronomical sum at the time. With that money he rebuilt the old family house and moved his own family out.
As the projects multiplied, he brought in my younger brother-in-law to help manage them, paying him 20,000 yuan a year. They worked together until 1992.
The Fengjiaba Hydropower Station made him wealthy. He knew none of the project directors, but he kept going back to their office for a month until they gave him part of the contract. The deadline was brutal: a 10,000-yuan fine for every day of delay. He and two other men worked their section without stopping for three days and nights. They finished on time and earned a 30,000-yuan bonus, and the segment's total profit of 48,000 yuan was split three ways. Each man took home 16,000 yuan for work in less than a week.
For his first three years in construction, he worked beside his laborers, hauling cement and sandstone on two shoulder poles lashed together. He understood early, though, that the trade rewarded more than strength. It took technical knowledge and management skill too. He learned every step of the building process by doing it himself. After partners cheated him early on, he bought engineering textbooks and taught himself to read blueprints, draw up budgets, and settle final accounts. Eventually he was drawing his own construction and as-built drawings.
Through the 1990s, most of his projects were small and medium-sized. After 2000 they grew larger, and some brought in profits in the millions. In 2013 he moved into real estate development, a venture that cost him heavily in the recent decade. The company still takes on engineering projects today. Over the years he spent building it, Qianjiang grew from a remote mountain county into the central city of southeastern Chongqing.
4. The City Has Changed. Can the Old Keep Up?
Qianjiang was once a single street. Now it is a city. But while the city raced ahead, the men who built it stayed the same.
Men of his generation came down from the mountains on strength, nerve, and connections. They got things done face to face, through favors and relationships. Today the city is run by rules. Bidding for a project takes formal qualifications, set procedures, and digital systems. His old-school methods don't work the way they used to.
He dislikes how anonymous the city is. In the village, when someone was in trouble, the neighbors came running. In the city, you can live next door to someone for years and never learn their name. His generation valued kinship above almost everything, and he made sure his brothers and sisters were all established. He found work for his fourth younger brother, who now earns four to five hundred thousand yuan a year. He helped his third younger brother secure a lifelong position at a state-owned enterprise. He helped his youngest brother start his own company. But in the city, that closeness has thinned. My father and my youngest uncle are not nearly as close as my grandfather and his siblings were.
He misses the old family house. He began with an empty lot and built a two-bay, single-story house. Over the years he expanded it five times, until it stood five stories tall, every brick paid for with his own work. He owns several properties in town now, but that is the house he remembers, cherishes.
He also misses the era itself, when opportunities were everywhere and most of what he hoped for came true. Back then, the city was growing, and people grew with it. Now the city is built, the opportunities are fewer, and he has grown old.
5. A Life
His life follows a clear path. He was born deep in the mountains and walked out of them. He took a government job, then gave it up to go into business when reform and opening up began. He made his first fortune and built a company that still operates today.
"I feel my life has been fulfilling," he says.
Then he gives his advice: "In life, you have to know where you stand. Set short-term goals and long-term goals, and make the short-term ones serve the long-term ones. Life will never always go smoothly. Learn to adjust. If one road is blocked, take another. But never give up."