Entrepreneurs Say a Prayer for Their Patron Saint--and Their Future

Wang Jianping, a peasant farmer from Henan province, moved to the capital to work in a factory. Now she owns a thriving grocery store that features exotic vegetables, Dijon mustard and Bulgarian wine.

Zhong Balong, a former rice farmer, has a booming shop in Shenzhen that sells designer toilets and Jacuzzis.

Zhong Guo, a former factory worker in Shanghai, remembers when eating chicken was a “big event, a celebration.”

But since he opened his own flower shop, he gets all the drumsticks he can stomach.

“Now chicken is nothing,” Zhong said, “During this Spring Festival, I couldn’t eat any more. I was stuffed.”

These small-scale entrepreneurs are the biggest, most grateful beneficiaries of economic reforms initiated by “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping, who died Wednesday.

They are also the people who long most for a continuation of those policies now that Deng is gone.

Collectively--like the famed bazaaris of Tehran and the shopkeepers of London--they form a political constituency that is beginning to carry weight in Chinese society.

“Of all the people we survey,” said Beijing independent polling expert Victor Yuan, “these entrepreneurs seem to have the deepest feelings toward Deng. I talked with a number of these business people who believe that they became rich as a direct result of Deng’s policies.”

Zhang Meizhong, 55, is the son of a doctor. His father hoped his son would follow him into medicine. But China’s era of radical Maoism intervened, and young Zhang was sent to work in the fields during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

He might still be in the fields of Zhejiang province if Deng had not come to power in 1978.

Deng’s economic policies freed Zhang to come to Beijing, where he and his wife sell steamed dumplings from a shed.

Their income from the small business is modest. They charge 30 cents for their Hangzhou-style dumplings filled with pork and onions. But they have a loyal clientele and have managed to save enough money to build a four-story home back in Zhejiang province, where they plan to retire after a few more years on the road.

“Wherever the business is best, that’s where we’ll go,” said Zhang, a barrel-chested man with a ready smile. “If you want to make money, you must go to the city.”

Zhang and his wife were hit hard by the news of the senior leader’s death.

“If it were not for Deng,” Zhang said Friday, “we’d still be in our commune, planting rice.”

The Deng era also had millions of losers, especially workers in obsolete state factories and government employees on fixed incomes.

Some factory workers in the rust-belt industrial regions of northeast China have gone for more than two years without paychecks. University professors now also seek freelance jobs to make ends meet. The “iron rice bowl” social welfare safety net of state-provided housing and hospitalization is breaking down under Deng’s market reforms. Retirees face new hardships.

But there are also abundant success stories like that of Shanghai flower shop owner Zhong Guo, whose name contains the same two characters, meaning “Middle Kingdom,” as China itself.

“I was sent off to Anhui province in 1970 just after I graduated from middle school,” Zhong, 44, recalled. “At that time we were all 16- to 17-year-old boys and girls. You cannot imagine the life we had there. I still remember the scene when my parents saw me off at the railway station. When the train started moving, a lot of people ran to follow. My parents grasped my hand until they could no longer hold it. They were still running when they disappeared from my sight.”

Once Deng came to power, he said, he was able to return to his native Shanghai, where he took a job in a factory earning the equivalent of $40 a month.

In 1986, he quit his job and opened a small grocery store in his home. In 1989, he rented a bigger space and opened a restaurant. In 1992, he opened the flower shop where he now earns more than $800 a month.

“Life is easier and better now,” he said, pointing proudly to his new Honda motor scooter parked outside the shop. “If I have free time, I like to take a ride.”

Occasionally there are stories of real riches in the ranks of small entrepreneurs.

Zhong Balong, 35, presides over a column of maroon, deep blue and teal toilets in her bathroom supply store in Shenzhen, the boomtown special economic zone across the border from Hong Kong.

Only two years ago, she said, she and her husband were rice farmers in Shantou in Guangdong province, earning $700 a year from their crops.

Now they make six times that amount each month selling toilet fixtures and Jacuzzis to the office building construction trade.

“Everybody has to die,” she said, speaking of Deng, “but his policies will live on.”

Times staff writer Maggie Farley in Shenzhen and Bao Lei of The Times’ Shanghai Bureau and Anthony Kuhn of The Times’ Beijing Bureau contributed to this report.