Crossing the River on the Jiang Wind

River Winds Crossing

River Winds Crossing tells of the turbulent fate of a generation of young people from Jiangxi amid the waves of reform.

In the early 1990s, Chen Xunan, the son of a farming family, entered Nanchang University. After graduating in 1995, he was assigned to the state-owned Jiujiang Power Machinery Factory, with the kind of secure job everyone envied. By then, the accumulated problems in the state-owned enterprise system were becoming clear. Triangular debt weighed on the factory, the Asian financial crisis rocked the market, business steadily declined, and wages were often delayed. In 1998, Jiujiang was struck by a catastrophic flood, and the entire workforce rushed to the riverbanks to fight the rising waters day and night. After the flood receded, a three-year campaign to turn around state-owned enterprises got underway, and the drive to cut staff and improve efficiency swept through the country. Large numbers of workers at the once-thriving old factory were laid off, and Chen Xunan lost his job too.

With his secure job gone, he struggled to survive on the streets of Jiujiang and watched as veteran technicians and former coworkers scattered in every direction. In despair, he pinned his hopes on graduate school. After countless cold nights bent over his books, he finally earned a place in a master's program at a Beijing university.

His years as a work-study drifter in Beijing began. He saw the crowds at job markets and experienced both the opportunities and the brutality of the private sector's headlong growth. After earning his master's degree, he first weathered the ups and downs of the workplace, then seized the opportunities of the age to start a business. Over more than a decade, tax-sharing reform, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, housing reform, and China's entry into the WTO: the great tides of the era kept sweeping ordinary people's lives along with them. Looking back at the shores of Poyang Lake and the banks of the Xunyang River, the old factory had long since become unrecognizable. The youth, pain, and searching of an entire generation had all been swallowed by the rolling river winds.