Boarding China's Last Bus

Basically true. I lived in a northern city in the 90s. My parents worked at state-owned company. That period was genuinely brutal. The companies weren't just laying people off, they were also constantly delaying wage payments. I remember at one point wages went unpaid for over half a year. For newer employees with little savings, the life will be difficult.

But to be fair, by that time those companies had reached a point where reform was simply unavoidable. They offered lifetime employment and ran their own schools, hospitals, even shopping malls. Jobs were inherited, when parents retired, their children took over the position, and it was completely normal for multiple generations of a family to work at the same company. This meant the company had virtually no competitiveness. From top to bottom, people just coasted along for stability, while the companies bled losses year after year, relying on state subsidies and bank loans just to make payroll. So they went through a "socialized reform", the consequence was mass layoffs.

At the same time, society was unstable, and some people used the chaos to get rich. For example the mother of [0]. When a company was restructured or sold off back then, the assets were supposed to be used first to pay severance to employees. She took a farm and land worth 2.3 billion, cooked the books to make them look like negative assets, and sold them to her friends' shell company for just 60 million. Then she pocketed the money that should have gone to laid-off workers, driving more than 500 families into bankruptcy. This ties into another point the article makes: having experienced the pain of change, but also understanding that change was necessary to survive, people became much more open to new things.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanting_Qu