When had it begun to change? In fact, not long after I first saw it. In 1976, Mao died and his widow was swiftly arrested. By 1979 her old enemy, Deng Xiaoping, was moving China in a new direction. Deng was, as Mao had always maintained, a man bent on taking the capitalist road. Unlike Mao, he had travelled—as a young man he had worked in the Renault factory in France—and he wanted to liberalize China’s economy and open it up to the world. He rationalized the labyrinthine and bureaucratic foreign trade system and gave the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian the freedom to pursue their own foreign trade and investment without having to go through Beijing. In 1980 he set up four Special Economic Zones for foreign investors, three of them in Guangdong. Hong Kong and Taiwanese businesses began to set up factories, encouraged by the tax breaks and the fact that labour costs in Hong Kong were eight times as high. Across the world, an old dream began to stir in the heads of businessmen—that their companies might sell into what was potentially the biggest market in the world. What they had still to discover was that China would put many of them out of business.