"Jiang Feng Du" describes the ups and downs of a generation of Jiangxi youth under the wave of reform.
In the early 1990s, Chen Xunan, a boy from a farm family, was admitted to Nanchang University. After graduation in 1995, he was assigned to Jiujiang State-owned Power Machinery Factory, holding the enviable iron rice bowl. At that time, the long-standing shortcomings of the state-owned enterprise system were gradually becoming apparent, and the company was riddled with triangular debts. The Asian financial crisis hit the market, factory efficiency was in decline, and wages were often in arrears. In 1998, Jiujiang suffered the most severe flood, and all employees of the factory rushed to the river embankment to rescue the people day and night. After the flood receded, the state-owned enterprises' three-year poverty relief reform was fully launched, and a wave of downsizing and efficiency improvement hit. A large number of workers in this once prosperous old factory were laid off, and Chen Xunan also lost his job.
With his iron rice bowl shattered, he struggled to survive on the streets of Jiujiang and saw his masters and workers going their separate ways. In despair, he pinned his future on the postgraduate entrance examination, spent countless cold nights immersed in books, and finally got admitted to a Beijing university for a master's degree.
When I came to Beijing, the years of drifting to Beijing while working part-time and studying part-time rushed towards my face. He has seen the crowded talent market and experienced the opportunities and cruelty of the barbaric growth of the private economy. After graduating with a master's degree, I first experienced ups and downs in the workplace, and then seized the opportunities of the times to start a business. Over the past decade or so, the tax-sharing system, the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, housing reform, and WTO accession have always affected the fate of ordinary people. Looking back at the banks of Poyang Lake and the head of the Xunyang River, the old factory has long since changed. The youth, pain and pursuit of a generation have all been submerged in the rolling river wind.
