Word: sichuan
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...Jiatai's disposable cups ought to runneth over. In 2002, says the entrepreneur from western China's Sichuan province, his private company raked in $2.5 million in sales by manufacturing paper containers for food and beverages. He has four production lines making paper cups in hangar-like buildings, and 20 young women from the countryside toil in the yard beside them, pasting labels featuring words such as "White Family Potato Noodles" onto single-serving bowls. Business has never been better. Yet Mao, like so many other owners of private companies in China, can't seem to catch a break...
...remain cut off from many of the resources that grease the wheels of commerce. Like their counterparts everywhere, China's grassroots entrepreneurs gripe about taxes and bureaucratic obstacles. Their biggest complaint, however, is their inability to get bank loans. In a recent survey of 600 private companies in Sichuan by the IFC, access to financing was cited as the No. 1 problem, far ahead of unfair competition and corruption...
...Turned away by banks, Sichuan's budding entrepreneurial class must rely on unconventional lenders, including pawnbrokers and loan sharks, to meet its capital requirements. Liu Qingrong, for example, borrowed money from friends and family to set up a Chinese medicine factory in 1992. Within two years, her traditional remedies were outselling those produced by her biggest state-owned competitor by a margin of 5 to 1. But her rival, which was backed by local officials, still received every advantage, including governmental assistance to raise capital via a stock-market listing. "It was bitter medicine," Qingrong recalls...
...Then again, a quid pro quo with a business associate is probably a less costly option than borrowing money from pawnbrokers that have become China's de facto commercial lenders. The booming city of Chengdu, Sichuan's capital, is home to some 200 pawnbrokers. Don't think of them as sleazy purveyors of rusting bikes and busted TVs. The tiled floors and tawny sofas of Liu Jianjun's Building China Pawnshop suggest a bank lobby, and rightly so. His loans, which can run up to $1 million each, mostly go to private businesses...
...EXECUTED. LOBSANG DHONDUP, 28, pro-independence activist and former Tibetan monk convicted in a secret trial for inciting separatism and carrying out a string of bombings; in Sichuan province. Dhondup was held incommunicado for several months and denied adequate legal representation, according to Amnesty International...