Li Feng's Column 13: China Is at Its Most Precious Historical Moment | Frees Fund
Over four decades of turbulence, the darkest days have always given rise to market opportunities.
(Source: A recent share by Feng Shu at a FreeS Fund internal monthly meeting)
This is the 13th installment of the column, and I'd like to discuss a topic that's been generating considerable debate lately — the confidence of private enterprises and entrepreneurs.
These past six months have arguably marked the lowest point in confidence for private companies and entrepreneurs as a whole. Over the last two months, virtually every CEO I've met has asked me: What's your read on China's current macroeconomy? Is the current environment unfriendly to private enterprises? Are we looking at tax cuts or tax hikes? Will China and the US go to war... I've spent a great deal of time trying to restore people's confidence, repeatedly emphasizing that those who've made it to CEO are overwhelmingly smart people. Don't form your views on China's political and economic landscape from WeChat Moments. Look at the problems and underlying opportunities China faces today through a longer time horizon, and the anxiety subsides.
Before I got into investing, I wasn't as attuned to macroeconomics as I am now. Early-stage investing is fundamentally about finding systematic opportunities within the macro picture — things that look unreasonable today but are destined to unfold over the next three to five years. Regarding the various new policies and uncertainties playing out right now, my conclusion is this: viewed from five to ten years in the future, the present moment represents a new inflection point for private enterprises to access long-cycle development opportunities.
Feel free to share your thoughts at the end of the article.
A New Inflection Point for Long-Cycle Development Opportunities in Private Enterprise
By Li Feng
First published on Caixin
Why We Really Don't Need to Be So Gloomy
2018 was indeed a year saturated with "domestic woes and external pressures" — whether it was the China-US trade war that dragged on for more than half a year with signs of escalating, or domestic financial deleveraging, new asset management regulations, stricter governance following serial defaults, social security policy reforms, and so on. Much of the news was hardly uplifting.
But if we glance back even briefly, we'd find that, speaking of pessimism, China's 40 years of reform and opening up have weathered far worse moments. And yet those days of profound gloom ultimately gave rise to new marketization opportunities.
In other words, whenever our country has confronted severe domestic and external crises — such as the need to stimulate the economy, solve employment crises, or face enormous international pressure — each instance has brought an opportunity to open up monopolized markets to market forces.
And in the process of marketization, it has consistently been private enterprises — those with sharp reflexes and intense survival instincts — that seized these rare historical opportunities. By driving efficiency, they became the dominant players in the market. This pattern played out across the vast majority of industries over the past 40 years: circulation and catering, manufacturing, real estate, finance, urban services, and so on.
Let's start with the 1980s.
That was the embryonic period for individual businesses in new China, where the private economy first emerged in circulation and catering. Before this, the operators in these two sectors were supply and marketing cooperatives and state-run restaurants. Why did they open up?
In 1979, the decade-long "sent-down youth" movement reached its historical endpoint, and the curtain rapidly rose on the return of educated youth to cities. In February of that year, 7.6 million sent-down youth flooded back to urban areas, with estimates suggesting another 3 million would be added each year thereafter. Such massive population migration was something many cities simply couldn't absorb. One can imagine the societal danger if tens of millions of young people returned to cities full of hope, only to find no employment and even no means of survival.
Faced with this "returning youth deluge," how to open the floodgates became an urgent priority. Although the State Council's Office for Sent-Down Youth approved over 300 million yuan annually for youth work, the lifetime employment system meant factories couldn't free up enough positions. The traditional path was blocked; the only option was to encourage people to find their own way.
It is fair to say that the opening of circulation and catering to the private economy was, to some extent, driven by the urgent need to solve the unemployment problem of returning sent-down youth.
Right around the time when sent-down youth were集中返城 in February and March, the national conference of directors of industrial and commercial administration bureaus submitted a report to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the State Council. The report stated that "localities may, according to local market needs and with the consent of relevant business authorities, approve some idle laborers with formal household registration to engage in individual labor in repair, service, and handicraft industries." However, the policy wasn't fully liberalized — the report included a stipulation: "but no hiring of workers is permitted."
Although the restrictive expression "no hiring of workers" remained constrained by ideology, the impetus to "open the floodgates" ran strong from the grassroots to the central government. Encouraged by this policy, many people started small commodity circulation and food service businesses, even though these sectors had previously been entirely state-owned. Wu Xiaobo argues that it was against this special backdrop that the legality of China's private economy began to be established in legal and policy terms.
Throughout the process of opening small commodity circulation and catering to private players, anxiety, pessimism, and controversy persisted.
The representative figure of this period was Nian Guangjiu, an Anhui merchant repeatedly "named" by Deng Xiaoping and known as "China's first peddler." Nian was a master at roasting sunflower seeds, his craft renowned far and wide. As business grew too busy to handle alone, he hired some unemployed young people as helpers. By year's end, people discovered he had employed 12 workers. This immediately touched a raw nerve.
Why was this such a big deal? Bear in mind that in those days, any policy loosening still needed theoretical grounding in the classics. According to regulations issued by the State Council in 1981 and 1983 concerning "urban non-agricultural individual economy," individual industrial and commercial households could hire one or two assistants, and at most four or five apprentices — seven people total when combined. The "seven people" figure reportedly came from Marx's Capital: "When hired workers reach eight, it's no longer ordinary individual economy... it's exploitation."
Nian Guangjiu, having seriously "crossed the line," quickly triggered nationwide theoretical debate. Yet by the end of 1979, his situation was hardly unique among the approximately 100,000 individually approved businesses that had opened nationwide.
In fact, when confronting urgent practical problems, once the window for developing private economies opened, the red line on hiring numbers began to give way to practical needs: the development of private enterprises necessarily meant scaling up, and scaling up necessarily meant growth in the number of hired workers.
More and more people, even at the leadership level, came to recognize the enormous contribution private enterprises made in solving the most pressing employment problem of the time. Although theoretical disputes continued, by then much individual economic activity had already broken through the seven-person red line.
In 1982, at a Politburo discussion, Deng Xiaoping first addressed this issue, using Nian Guangjiu as an example and recommending a "wait and see" approach to private enterprises. That year, the number of workers at Nian's sunflower seed factory had already reached 105.
You see, even amid the cracks and controversies, private enterprises represented by individual businesses still burst with vigorous vitality. By 1987, the Central Committee's Document No. 5 that year completely lifted restrictions on the number of workers private enterprises could hire.
But none of this was destined to proceed smoothly. Nian Guangjiu, considered "untouchable" because of Deng's "naming," was first charged in 1986 with disrupting the market through prize-based sales, resulting in inventory backlogs and total losses; then in 1989, he was prosecuted for embezzlement, misappropriation of public funds, and hooliganism, ultimately being detained for three years.
During Nian's detention in 1992, Deng Xiaoping mentioned him for the third time during his Southern Tour, saying: "In the early stages of rural reform, Anhui produced the 'Shazi Guazi' issue. At the time many people were uncomfortable, saying he earned a million yuan and advocated moving against him. I said we can't move — once we move, people will say the policy has changed, and the losses would outweigh the gains. There are quite a few issues of this sort; if handled improperly, they could easily shake our formation and affect the overall situation of reform."
After Deng's remarks, the court retried Nian Guangjiu's case. In 1992, Nian was acquitted and released. It is said that Deng's words were later printed on the back of Nian's business cards.
Imagine for a moment: if you were living in 1985, running an individual business much smaller than Nian Guangjiu's, you would certainly be anxious. Nian was a national model, yet he was interrogated and arrested in the course of doing business — this was the ultimate embodiment of "one step forward, half a step back." As a far more ordinary small operator, you would naturally be terrified into silence.
But if we look through a longer time dimension, even with this back-and-forth process, once circulation and catering — these once-monopolized markets — moved toward openness, they never fully retreated. Today we barely see state-run restaurants anymore. The facts prove that most of China's first generation of outstanding private entrepreneurs emerged from that period, though of course the precondition is that you didn't cross too many lines.
The 1980s had another example — the birth and development of township and village enterprises (TVEs).
At that stage, TVEs could also be described as an "accidental product" born of domestic woes and external pressures. In a previous column, I analyzed the historical role of township and village enterprises. I believe it was precisely through the vigorous development of TVEs that China was able to accumulate a sufficiently massive industrial labor force and a sufficiently long manufacturing industry chain — developmental achievements from this stage that we continue to benefit from today.
TVEs can be understood as enterprise organizations that used small-scale industrial and manufacturing methods to solve the problem of surplus rural labor locally.
The reason TVEs were able to develop traces back to a transformation in Xiaogang Village, Anhui. The drawbacks of the "big pot" system forced farmers struggling to survive to forge a path of "dividing fields to households" to liberate productivity. From 1978, when 18 farmers risked their lives to sign a "household responsibility contract" in a dilapidated thatched hut, to early 1983, when 93% of production teams nationwide had implemented this responsibility system.
The new land policy solved the long-standing food problem, but it also created a new one — how to absorb the massive number of liberated idle rural laborers? In line with the principle of proximity, township and village enterprises in a gray zone became the first to absorb this productive force. The small workshop format of the time could be considered the precursor to manufacturing, and the enormous volume of rural labor gave TVEs powerful vitality and development momentum, gradually moving them into legal territory.
You could say that the decade from the early 1980s to the early 1990s was precisely when the massive growth of township and village enterprises transformed the flood of surplus rural labor into manufacturing workers, completing their vocational training. Farmers became industrial workers, creating the vast supply of cheap, already-skilled labor that manufacturing needed to take off.
But this process also featured what we've called "one step forward, half a step back." For instance, because TVEs operated outside the state plan, they couldn't purchase steel, cement, lumber, and other raw materials at official prices. They had no choice but to cultivate relationships with government procurement officials to buy desperately needed materials at or above plan prices — and then risked prosecution for doing so. In the mid-1980s, some legal scholars even argued that TVEs didn't merely undermine the planned economy but were the very source of a bribery-based economy, and thus had to be cracked down on hard. Only after years of theoretical debate and practical experimentation did the Supreme People's Procuratorate establish its "eight-character policy" in 1987: "Strike, protect, serve, promote."
If you were a TVE factory director in the 1980s, your days were predictably anxious and fearful. Consider Huaxi Village: "In the eighties, we were operating under the planned economy with unclear policies. We had to run our factories in secret. When leaders from Jiangyin County came down, I'd lock the factory gates and disperse the workers, afraid they'd shut us down if they found out..."
According to the China Township and Village Enterprise Yearbook, TVEs' value-added output accounted for less than 2% of national GDP in 1978. By 1995, that figure had climbed to 25.3%, with industrial value-added reaching 30.8% of the national total.
Tortuous as the path was, the long-term harvest was undeniably rich. To a great extent, China's ascension to the throne of global manufacturing center was a product of this era — built partly on the accumulated growth of TVEs, and partly on the fact that under worldwide sanctions in the 1990s, industry was forced to form closed loops as much as possible, giving China a manufacturing chain of sufficient length, rich with upstream and downstream linkages.
See? Despite enormous hardships, and despite looking more like the accidental product of a crisis, TVEs thrived in the cracks and fulfilled an important historical mission.
Another typical example occurred in the 1990s, when China faced equally serious problems.
When an economy goes wrong, ordinary people directly perceive only two things: employment and prices. Employment relates to unemployment; prices relate to inflation. If the economic challenge of the 1980s manifested directly as an employment problem, then by the late 1980s and early 1990s, the focus shifts to inflation.
First, the data. China experienced a bout of high inflation in 1988 and 1989 — 18.8% and 18% respectively. (For context, China's annual inflation in 2017 was 7.5%.)
What does 18% annual inflation mean? It's as if, without doing anything wrong, your salary shrank by 18% each year. To put it more concretely, according to the China Price Yearbook published by the State Bureau of Commodity Prices, of the 383 commodities used to calculate the national retail price index in 1988, over 95% saw price movements. The total retail price index rose 18.5% for the year.
Young people probably have little memory of the 1988 buying panic. At the time, the defects of the dual-track pricing system were becoming increasingly obvious. The central government piloted reforms in Shanghai, hoping to quickly shift prices to a single market track. But the situation quickly spiraled out of control. Shanghai's prices began galloping upward, transmitting to the rest of the country. People went on mad buying sprees — socks, cloth, salt, then televisions, refrigerators, washing machines — triggering severe inflation. The central government had no choice but to adjust course, once again putting forward the policy of "macroeconomic control, rectification and consolidation."
Not until June 1990 did the price index fall to 3.2%, bringing the panic buying to a close. But what followed was the persistent consumption slump of a "hard landing" after透支 — ordinary people preferred to keep their money in banks.
That was domestically. What about the international environment?
Qian Qichen wrote in his memoirs that the period from the late 1980s to the early 1990s was the most difficult time for Chinese diplomacy during his decade as foreign minister. International winds shifted suddenly. Western governments in North America and Europe announced sanctions against China one after another, and an anti-China wave swept across the world. Although some countries gradually resumed contact and normal trade relations with China in 1990, one can sense how difficult things were for China both at home and abroad.
At the darkest moment came Deng Xiaoping's second Southern Tour in 1992, emphasizing commitment to reform and opening up, affirming the development of special zones, and encouraging a spirit of daring to "charge" and "risk," insisting on bringing in foreign investment. These pronouncements and measures were extremely necessary given the internal and external difficulties at the time, and marked an important moment for China's private-sector economic reform and economic reform more broadly.
At that juncture, an important industry began a vigorous process of marketization and privatization — an industry intimately connected to each of us, and one people discuss most: real estate.
Even those who didn't live through it may know that housing used to be allocated by the state. In early 1990, to stimulate economic growth, the real estate industry was opened to private enterprise. By then, urban housing system reform had already been groping forward for ten years. But progress had been severely set back by the serious inflation of 1988, and the absence of certain key policies had also slowed reform's pace.
Starting in 1990, to pull the national economy, a series of policies were rapidly introduced. These established the system of paid transfer of land-use rights, proposed improving the housing financing system, and particularly the decision to bring finance into the sector — which gave real estate an entirely new landscape.
After Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour speech in early 1992, the central government transmitted a Notice on Studying Comrade Deng Xiaoping's Important Speech nationwide, calling for accelerating housing system reform. Under the overall loose policy environment, hundreds of billions of yuan from across the country flowed to southern coastal cities like Haikou and Beihai, Guangxi, directly producing the first recorded real estate boom since reform and opening up.
Foreign and private capital began playing an increasingly important role in the marketization of housing. In 1992, real estate investment across Hainan Province reached 8.7 billion yuan, accounting for half of total fixed-asset investment. That same year, Haikou's economic growth rate hit 83%, and 40% of Hainan Province's fiscal revenue came from real estate.
A few years later, the property bubble would burst painfully. But it was this very opportunity that put real estate marketization on the fast track, and private capital, through trial and error, began playing an increasingly significant role.
Three Examples, One Principle
The three examples I've given all express a simple pattern: when facing internal difficulties and external pressures, the state finds more ways to solve major problems affecting ordinary people — whether increasing employment, stimulating the economy, easing inflation, or responding to international crises. Even if these aren't part of the original plan, or deviate from the original intent, there are almost no exceptions: the state opens monopolized markets, encourages foreign investment, and brings in private enterprise.
In fact, looking across the 40 years of reform and opening up, every specific historical moment when economic challenges emerged has been followed by a point of marketization and opening of monopolized markets. If you analyze it with a sufficiently long time horizon, you'll find:
- Once a monopolized market is opened, even if it mostly goes through a "one step forward, half a step back" process, stretching the timeline out, it always moves toward openness;
- The process of opening typically encourages both foreign and private enterprise to enter simultaneously. Over the long cycle, in these opened industries, private enterprises usually end up occupying important positions — not only for policy reasons, but more importantly because they tend to be tightly integrated with local conditions and have a strong will to survive;
- If private enterprises align with the economic structural adjustments the state makes to respond to internal and external crises, they will encounter enormous long-term opportunities. But every turning point will be accompanied by tremendous anxiety, pessimism, and controversy, because structural adjustment first means being caught between internal and external troubles, and second means switching tracks. This is normal, and it has happened repeatedly throughout history.
So, What About Now?
Returning to the present, the internal and external problems China faces are also quite evident. Does this logic still apply?
In fact, we can already detect some signals.
Many people likely noticed a piece of news from July 2018 — China relaxed foreign ownership restrictions in the auto industry, and Tesla became the first foreign company to establish a wholly-owned factory in China.
The announcement sent huge shockwaves. This was something that broke through the historical limits of Chinese policy. For decades, when foreign automakers built factories in China, they had to form joint ventures with Chinese enterprises. Even when the purpose was technology transfer, foreign ownership could not exceed 50%. Also worth noting: Elon Musk stated on Tesla's Q2 earnings call that funding for the Shanghai Gigafactory was planned to "utilize loans from local Chinese banks."
Think about it: with Tesla's wholly-owned auto factory approved, who would be most immediately affected? Most likely the state-owned enterprises that had enjoyed the protection of this relatively monopolized market. Media sources cited informed individuals saying that Tesla's Shanghai factory directly offered triple salaries to poach a large number of technical personnel from SAIC.
To a great extent, against a backdrop of internal difficulties and external pressures — domestically needing to deleverage and deflate bubbles, solving structural economic problems; externally needing to respond to the trade war — the country needs to open markets and welcome foreign investment, exchanging market access for time and partnership. This small signal reflects a long-cycle policy direction. In fact, it's similar to the moment in 1992 when Deng Xiaoping's Southern Tour speech delivered the important message of "persisting in reform and opening up" and "building more 'three types of foreign-funded' enterprises."
Similar to the opening of wholly foreign-owned auto factories was the much-discussed Gulf Oil Sanyuanli gas station in September 2018. Although it was later confirmed that the shareholders behind it were still domestic, merely having obtained Gulf Oil brand authorization, it can still be seen as a footnote to the opening of foreign-invested gas stations.
Behind these two pieces of news lies a common policy background. At the end of June 2018, the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Commerce issued the Special Administrative Measures for Foreign Investment Access (Negative List) (2018 Edition), reducing the negative list from 63 items to 48, with opening measures introduced in 22 sectors. The new policy took effect on July 28, 2018.
If you examine the list's contents carefully, there are certainly pleasant surprises. In the energy and minerals sector alone, the state eliminated multiple foreign investment access restrictions, including power grids, gas stations, new energy vehicles, special and scarce coal types, rare earths, and graphite. Beyond this, the scope of market opening also includes railways, ships, general aircraft, grain purchasing and wholesale, banking, securities, futures, and life insurance — more and more sectors are beginning to relax foreign ownership restrictions.
On September 20, a signal on opening the financial sector also emerged. Premier Li Keqiang stated that in three years, foreign enterprises would obtain qualifications for full-license, wholly-owned operations in China's financial industry.
It's fair to say that as China enters its 18th year in the WTO, more and more once-monopolized industries are embarking on market-oriented reforms. Whether this is to fulfill long-standing commitments or an inevitable choice under current circumstances, once these mega-scale monopolies begin opening up, the government — whether from the perspective of market principles or national image — can no longer publicly maintain SOEs' dominant positions through substantial policy favoritism and subsidies. Looking ahead ten years, who stands to benefit most in this increasingly open market environment? There are only three options: state-owned enterprises, foreign enterprises, or private enterprises?
Stripped of long-relied-upon subsidies and preferential treatment, SOEs need to undergo internal adjustments first. That leaves only two options: either let foreign companies profit, or let private enterprises — with their fierce survival instincts — profit. The experience of the past 40 years shows that once more and more massive monopolized industries move toward marketization, there may be advances and retreats, back-and-forth and reversals in the short term, but in the long run, the opportunities ultimately flow more toward private enterprises.
Compared to the two inflection points we discussed earlier — the 1980s and 1990s, which brought the privatization of distribution, catering, and real estate, and gave rise to the birth and growth of township enterprises — China's situation today is clearly no worse. Much of our current anxiety stems from looking at tomorrow from today's vantage point. If we extend our horizon and try to look back at today's China from five years in the future, and if historical patterns hold, we can reasonably predict — based on the domestic and international signals we observed in the second half of 2018 — that we are currently at the starting point of a cyclical inflection point lasting five to ten years.
For those of us in the equity investment industry, I am quite optimistic. More and more industries like rockets, once monopolized by the state, are opening to private players. There may be advances and retreats, but the opening is irreversible. This is a good opportunity for private enterprises, and certainly a good opportunity for long-term investors like us who are committed to the new economy — because everything related to long-term investment in the new economic structure will benefit.
Finally, I'd say: if you're trying to understand China's political and economic issues only by reading WeChat Moments articles (or even just scanning headlines), you'll inevitably be trapped in anxiety. Understanding why things are happening at this particular moment matters more than echoing the emotions others attach to the facts. What truly cures our anxiety is adopting a longer-term perspective on China's current problems and opportunities.
References
[1] "The Lead-Up to the 1978 Yunnan Educated Youth Return Incident," Century Elegance, Issue 8, 2010, author: Wang Xinwen
[2] Turbulent Thirty Years, author: Wu Xiaobo, p. 52
[3] "How Did Hu Yaobang in 1979 Propose Solving the Employment Problem for 'Returned Educated Youth'?", source: People's Daily Online, authors: Hu Deping, Zhou Haibin
[4] "Veteran Educated Youth Recalls After Returning to the City: Always Felt Inferior When Unable to Find Work," source: Log China (Looking Back at 30 Years of Reform and Opening-Up 1978-2008, Vol. 3), compiled by Beijing News
[5] Turbulent Thirty Years, author: Wu Xiaobo, p. 53
[6] Turbulent Thirty Years, author: Wu Xiaobo, p. 55
[7] "Nian Guangjiu: Grateful to Deng Xiaoping All My Life," source: Peninsula Metropolis Daily, October 15, 2008, B54 edition
[8] "'Weekend Engineers' in People's Daily Headlines," source: Jiangsu Legal Daily, author: Song Shiming
[9] "China's Historical Inflation Rate Data (1980-2016)," source: Haojingui
[10] "China's 2017 Inflation Rate," source: Haojingui
[11] "How Did China Withstand Western Sanctions Pressure in the Early 1990s?", source: Guancha.cn, author: Hu Xinmin
[12] "Several Key Events in the Formation of Hainan's 1990s Real Estate Market Bubble," source: Fang.com
[13] "[Historical Reference] Documenting the 1990s Hainan Real Estate Bubble," source: Qionghai Real Estate Information Network
[14] "Time to Seriously Think About What Happens After the Real Estate Bubble Bursts — Let's Start by Reviewing Hainan," source: Investment Essentials public account, author: Shangshan Ruoshui Asset Management
[15] "Tesla to Build Wholly-Owned Factory in China! Will China-Made 'Teslas' Have Nowhere to Go?", source: Che Jiaoshou public account
[16] "Identity of 'First Foreign-Owned Gas Station' Questioned: Merely Brand Licensing, Shareholder Is a State-Owned Enterprise," source: Shanghai Securities News, author: Chen Qijue
[17] "NDRC & Ministry of Commerce: Foreign-Owned New Energy Vehicle Enterprise Access Formally Approved," source: EV Xin Shiye public account
[18] "Li Keqiang: In Three Years, Foreign Enterprises Will Obtain Qualifications for Full-License, Wholly-Owned Operations in China's Financial Industry," source: China Government Network
Key Takeaways
1 We stand at a new inflection point, where crisis and opportunity coexist. Over the past 40 years, every time China faced internal and external difficulties, the solution was invariably the same: implement market-oriented opening, welcome foreign investment, and allow private enterprises to participate.
2 Once a monopolized market is pried open, even if it mostly goes through a process of "one step forward, half a step back," extending the time horizon shows it always moves toward greater openness. From a long-cycle perspective, in these opened industries, private enterprises ultimately occupy important positions — not just because of policy reasons, but more importantly because they tend to be tightly integrated with the local market and possess intense survival instincts.
3 Looking at today from a five-to-ten-year future perspective, we are currently at a new inflection point where private enterprises will gain long-cycle development opportunities.
Feel free to leave a comment at the end and share your views.
(This article was first published on Caixin Online; click "Read Original" to view. For reprint requests, please reply "reprint" to learn about our reprint policy and contact FreeS Little Rui [ID: freesfund] for authorization. Copyright belongs to FreeS Fund.)
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