Faced with continuous difficulties in urban and industrial reform after 1989, the country’s official media spent virtually a whole decade denouncing the ‘iron rice bowl’—secure employment and a steady wage—of workers in state-owned enterprises as an insurmountable obstacle to improvements in productivity. Under Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji, lifetime employment was wiped out by mass dismissals and limited-term contracts, with no compensating pensions, in one sector after another—manufacturing, energy, construction—leaving only party cadres and government personnel (whose ranks multiplied) untouched. Huge numbers in the urban population lost their jobs and wages, without the state so much as starting to think about—let alone deliver—a minimal safety net of social security for them. Layoffs amounted to more than 20 million in the 1990s. Over thirty years, an entire generation—or two—of China’s industrial working class was made victim to the reform process. For them, the net effect was no better than that of ‘shock therapy’ in Russia.