First Chinese Millionaire Made Fortune Selling Watermelon Seeds

First Chinese Millionaire Made Fortune Selling Watermelon Seeds! What bureaucrat or government planner would have allowed that either here or in China? Ronald Coase’s and Ning Wang’s How China Became Capitalist. A slice: How was the miracle [of rapid economic growth in China since the 1980s] accomplished? The short story is that it was done simply by letting individual incentives work, by allowing people to try and get rich on the market. Deng Xiapeng, on of the main Chinese political leaders from 1978 to the early 1990s, had a mantra: “getting rich is glorious.” ”[L]et some people get rich first,” he also famously said. Nian Guangjiu, an illiterate man who had been twice convicted of street peddling, took the idea seriously and, four years after Mao’s death, had become one of the first Chinese millionaires, amassing his fortune by selling watermelon seeds. It is fascinating that this simple idea apparently escaped the development economists who spent much of the 20th century devising economic models, foreign assistance proposals, and government schemes to kick-start economic growth in underdeveloped countries