"Basi Xiang Xiang" is set in Qingchuan, a small southern town in 1984. It tells the story of Chen Wanming, an educated youth who returned to the city and was stigmatized as a "speculator". He relied on his father's last wish to build a grassroots team to start a business in the cracks of the policy with the help of his ancestral hot sauce secret recipe and "Industrial Fermentation Technology" notes. From the cold reception of the sub-district office's refusal to issue a license, to the contempt of the supply and marketing cooperative and the expulsion of the urban management; from the viciousness of Director Guo's forgery of debts and arson to frame the case, to Xia Yu's betrayal and struggle to return, the team used grassroots wisdom such as "lard lubricated gears", "military kettle tasting" and "grabbing the ledger on a rainy night" to carve out a path through the cracks of the state-owned economic monopoly.
The novel uses the "Secret Recipe of the Sauce Vat" as a clue to connect the survival dilemmas of self-employed individuals in the early days of reform and opening up with the opportunities of the times: Shen Fei's craftsmanship of using waste materials to cast display racks, Wang Peng's loyalty to resolve crises with military code words, and Zhou Qiang's gray survival rules of wandering on the edge of power. Together, they outline the transformation period from a planned economy to a market economy. In the end, the team won international recognition at the Canton Fair with its unique soy sauce and "self-reliance" booth design. Taking the promulgation of the "Interim Regulations on Private Enterprises" as an opportunity, the team turned the reputation of "speculators" into a medal of "tide-setters" in the wave of reform.
The work is not only an entrepreneurial epic, but also a hymn about perseverance, friendship and the resonance of the times - the phrase "Dad, this is no longer speculation," tells the story of a generation of people using their passion and ingenuity to integrate their individual destiny into the great development of the country.
