A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China: Free to Fly Inside the Cage

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"You think it's not the same everywhere? Of course it is. Corruption is endemic. It's bad in China, sure, but I still say the mainland people are like Chinese everywhere else in the world: turn 'em loose and they'll earn % trillions." A capitalist's faith expressed by a true capitalist. The speaker is Tommy Quan, 55, a millionaire Chinese American from Seattle known as the "orange king" of Guangdong's Taishan County.

Taishan bills itself accurately as the "home of the overseas Chinese." The county's 960,000 residents have about 1.2 million relatives living abroad, and much as American Jews send money to Israel in lieu of actually moving there, Taishan's "overseas compatriots" have sent millions home. Since 1982 foreign funds have built 500 new schools, 50 hospitals and an indoor soccer stadium.

Rather than send money, Tommy Quan decided to send himself. Until the Communists took over in 1949, Quan lived in a small village of 160 people not far from the Taishan County seat. Then at age 15, Quan and his family immigrated to Seattle. Eventually, Quan owned two thriving restaurants, a ski resort and "more real estate than I can keep track of."

Leaving behind a wife and four children, two of whom are Seattle cops, Quan returned in 1982 to "do something for China -- and myself." But certainly not because of any romantic longing for his roots. "You know what they say about the good old days," he says. "They are the product of bad memory."

Short and powerfully built, Quan can outswear a gale of wind -- and outtalk even the most talkative Chinese. He reminds me of Robert Strauss, the former Democratic national chairman; Quan too, I am convinced, could talk a hungry dog out of a pork chop.

On his way back to China, Quan stopped in California to pick up some orange- tree saplings. "You know the Chinese were the first to grow orange trees," he says. "But like a good deal else that the Chinese invented first, they had forgotten how to do it." Today almost all the villages around Quan's 300-acre farm, which may be the largest private landholding in China, are growing oranges.

Quan spends most evenings in his new two-story home "drinking beer and watching my Rambo tapes, because it's so damn boring here." Many of those who remember Quan and his family from before the revolution think he was crazy to return, despite his roots in Taishan. "Most of my friends here thought I was on the lam when I showed up." Others thought Quan could not possibly have anything to offer. "The Chinese have an incredible superiority complex," he says. "They're backward as hell, but they still believe the world revolves around China. They take great pride in their civilization simply because it is old. It is almost impossible to teach them anything. You have to do what I have done. You show by example, and they pick it up as if they were the ones who had the idea all along. You can't even get them thinking about why, if China was so far ahead of the rest of the world 2,000 years ago, it is so far behind today."