Wanted: A New Miracle

Huang Shaobi was just 7 years old, growing up dirt poor in southeast China, when the world she would inherit changed forever. It was 30 years ago--December 1978--when China's leadership decided the time had come for their country to open up its economy and embrace something akin to capitalism. The monumental shift--China under Mao Zedong had been a centrally planned economic disaster--reflected the growing, behind-the-scenes influence of a man few in the West had then heard of: Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping. China, the ruling Communist Party decreed back then, "required great growth in the productive forces." And Deng was smart enough to know that it would come in only one way. China would get on the road to capitalism.

Today, Huang, who has chosen a Western name, Colleen, works in a gleaming office tower in the manufacturing center of Guangzhou in southern China. At 37, she is the very image of a polished chief executive officer, right down to her Milano briefcase. Huang is the founder of an advertising agency that employs nearly 70 people in three Chinese cities and counts as customers major multinational companies, including Procter & Gamble and Sony Ericsson. Like so many of her generation, Huang never looked back after racing through the door that Deng's economic reforms opened, and her accomplishments show how far the country has come. But just a few miles from Huang's office, the evidence is everywhere to see that China's capitalist road is leading toward a wall, that the first phase of its 30-year economic miracle has run its course.

Every day at the Guangzhou train station, hundreds of migrant workers wait to start the long journey back to their home provinces. They have been laid off from jobs at toy and textile factories and construction sites throughout what used to be a booming province. Among them is Zhang Dingli, 36, who worked at a toy factory for a decade. But in early November, the plant closed. He is a victim of an economic transition--a move away from the low-end, low-wage, export-oriented manufacturing on which much of China's rapid growth was built--that has been made more urgent by the global economic crisis. As China's double-digit growth rate plummets, thousands of factories are being shut down, and millions of workers are being thrown into the streets. They will need jobs in the years to come, and the Chinese government is scrambling for an answer to Zhang's plaintive question as he prepares to return to his native Sichuan province: "What am I going to do after I get home?"