Chapter 10 3. Rheology

From the perspective of the division of generations, private enterprises can be said to have experienced three generations in the past 28 years. The first generation ran from 1978 to the early 1990s, a period that can be called the "pre-corporate era".At that time, the main characteristics of doing business in the society were self-employed + government-owned, and self-employed were also called Daoye. They basically did simple trade, or opened a restaurant, nailed shoes, and sold clothes (the most typical one was Gaodi Street in Guangzhou).The big ones are government dumps, dumping steel products, dumping approval documents, and dumping cars.They trade in a monopoly fashion.I have also been to North Korea recently. North Korea has just opened up, and it is the same now. It is full of self-employed people doing small businesses and a few special officials.

At that time, the vast majority of those who participated in individual economic activities were marginalized people, prisoners released from labor camps, people who had nothing to do after the policy was implemented, and a large number of educated youths who returned to the city.These people are marginalized people abandoned by society. In order to survive, they have to find their own way.An important way for self-survival is to do business, and the business that can be done is the small business mentioned above.The business licenses applied for at that time were all self-employed. Because there were no company regulations at that time, private companies were rarely established, and private companies could not establish companies. They could only be called self-employed persons or self-employed.

Another group of people are the so-called sons, or "children of cadres".The children of cadres set up a company, but what they set up is not a private company. On the surface, it is a state company. In fact, individuals have reaped huge benefits from it.Their companies are mainly engaged in buying and selling, called officials to dump the company. Therefore, in the 1980s, two types of people participated in the so-called market economy and engaged in business activities similar to private enterprises: one was the self-employed, and the other was the children of cadres.The former is the marginal population of society, while the latter is the relatives of the leaders at the core of the society. It is precisely because of their profit-seeking tendency that they objectively promote the transfer of the economic form to the market.I remember that when I went to Wuhan in 1985, I worked in the Economic Commission and met many so-called children of cadres. They all controlled some companies in the local area, reselling them, and doing business.

This stage should be said to be a very primitive market economy stage, and non-governmental commercial activities are more like going to the rivers and lakes, so this era can also be called "the era of rivers and lakes" rather than the era of companies.Self-employed people do business, and their behavior mostly follows the rules of the rivers and lakes. What does Jiang Hu mean?Jianghu refers to the fringe areas of society. The term "jianghu" originally referred to some corners in a city, which belong to the kind of places where no one cares about them.That's why the ancients said that people lived far away from the rivers and lakes and lived at the height of the temple. The so-called remoteness of the rivers and lakes is a place far away from the system.Therefore, the rivers and lakes refer to the fringe areas far away from the system, belonging to standardized management and irregular places, and the identities of the people are also relatively messy.Throughout the period from the 1980s to the early 1990s, the general mentality and position of all traders belonged to the same quagmire.

The state of the rivers and lakes has advantages and disadvantages for doing business.The advantage is that it will form a kind of morality in the world, prompting you to play a good role, and it will push people to go in a good direction, becoming a kind of chivalry, a kind of saint, and a kind of hero.If you want to become a chivalrous man or a hero, the moral standards of Jianghu morality are consistent with the requirements of doing business.For example, "respecting promises" means to do what is promised;These qualities in Jianghu are conducive to the formation of a good business culture for doing business.

On the other hand, there are also some negative things in the rivers and lakes. After some people fall, they become bandits.In the rivers and lakes era of private enterprises, we often hear some unfortunate stories.