The Boy Who Dreamed of Beijing: Origins of a Service Revolution

The evening of December 26, 1994, in Jianyang, a small county town in Sichuan Province, changed everything. Zhang Yong had just returned home from another unsuccessful day of selling grass carp in the local market. His pockets were empty, his spirit battered by months of failed ventures. His wife, Shu Li, had prepared a simple dinner of stir-fried vegetables and rice—luxuries they could barely afford. As they sat in their cramped rented room, the kind with thin walls that let in the winter wind, she turned to him and said words that would echo through decades of business education: "Every person has their own path. You haven't found yours yet. But I believe you will."

This moment, captured in the oral histories of early Haidilao employees and confirmed in interviews with Zhang Yong himself, represents the crucible moment for what would become one of the most studied service organizations in the world. Yet to understand why this particular night mattered, why this particular man would go on to revolutionize the global hospitality industry, we must travel back further—through the harsh landscapes of rural Sichuan, through the chaos of China's economic transformation, and through the invisible forces that shaped an entire generation of Chinese entrepreneurs.

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The Landscape of Aspiration: 1990s Sichuan and the Making of a New China

To comprehend Zhang Yong's journey, we must first understand the world he inhabited. The Sichuan of the 1990s was a province in transition—economically vibrant yet socially turbulent, full of opportunity yet scarred by displacement. With a population exceeding 100 million, Sichuan had long been known as China's most populous province, a land of fertile plains, spicy cuisine, and a distinctive cultural identity rooted in the basin geography that separated it from China's eastern coastal power centers.

The reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 had begun reshaping this landscape in profound ways. By the early 1990s, Sichuan's state-owned enterprises were contracting, efficiency drives eliminating millions of jobs that had once provided lifetime employment. The agricultural reforms that had freed farmers from collective farming were simultaneously creating a surplus rural population with few prospects in their hometowns. Between 1990 and 1995, Sichuan experienced an exodus of migrant workers—often called the "floating population" in Chinese discourse—flowing eastward and southward toward the booming coastal cities of Guangdong, Shanghai, and Beijing. An estimated 10 million Sichuanese workers would eventually participate in this great migration, forming the backbone of labor in factories, construction sites, and service industries across China.

This migration carried profound social consequences. Families were separated, children left with grandparents in rural villages, and entire communities hollowed out as young people sought fortunes elsewhere. The migrant workers themselves faced a paradoxical existence: they built the gleaming cities of modern China yet were often treated as second-class citizens, denied urban registration (hukou) benefits and subject to discrimination. They sent money home—remittances that transformed rural economies—yet remained outsiders in the places where they labored.

For those who stayed in Sichuan, the picture was equally complex. The province's economy was growing, driven by government investment in infrastructure and the gradual expansion of private enterprise. But growth was uneven, concentrated in Chengdu and a handful of secondary cities. County towns like Jianyang, tucked between Chengdu and Ziyang, remained caught in a transitional limbo—too developed for traditional agriculture, too underdeveloped for industrial prosperity. The unemployment rate in such areas was officially low but practically high, as underemployment masked the true extent of economic distress.

It was in this environment that Zhang Yong learned his first lessons about human dignity, economic hardship, and the deep reserves of resilience that would later characterize his management philosophy. The Sichuan of his youth was not merely a geographical location; it was a crucible of experience that would shape his understanding of what workers needed, what customers valued, and how organizations could bridge the gap between aspiration and reality.

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A Mechanics' Apprentice: The Formative Years

Zhang Yong was born in 1970 in a village near Jianyang, into a family that embodied the precariousness of rural Chinese life. His father worked as a simple laborer, the kind of man who took whatever work was available—construction, farming, occasional odd jobs that paid poorly and offered no security. His mother supplemented the family income through small-scale agricultural work, tending vegetables that would be sold in local markets or consumed at home. They were, in the terminology of Chinese social classification, "poor peasants," a designation that carried both economic and political meaning in the hierarchy of Mao-era China.

The family's circumstances meant that Zhang Yong's education was limited. He attended school through the middle school level—approximately nine years of formal education—before economic necessity pulled him into the workforce. This was not unusual in rural Sichuan; many families could not afford to keep children in school when their labor could contribute to household income. The consequence was a generation of young people with basic literacy but few specialized skills, competing for jobs that required neither.

At around fifteen years old, Zhang Yong began an apprenticeship with a local mechanic. This period—typically lasting three to four years in the Chinese context of the 1980s—involved extensive practical training with minimal compensation. Zhang Yong learned to repair internal combustion engines, to diagnose mechanical failures by sound and touch, and to work with his hands in conditions that were often uncomfortable, if not dangerous. The apprenticeship was demanding, requiring early mornings, late evenings, and work under vehicles in all seasons.

Yet this experience, seemingly humble, provided Zhang Yong with something invaluable: an understanding of craftsmanship and the value of technical skill. In the informal economy of rural Sichuan, a good mechanic commanded respect and could earn a steady income. More importantly, the apprenticeship taught discipline, problem-solving, and the importance of getting things right the first time. These lessons would resurface in unexpected ways in Haidilao's later operations.

When Zhang Yong completed his apprenticeship, he entered a labor market that offered few attractive options. The state-owned factories that had once employed his parents' generation were shrinking, their workers quietly laid off or "reorganized" into skeletal crews. The private sector was still small, concentrated in trading and small-scale commerce. Opportunities for young people without capital, connections, or higher education were limited to informal employment: farm work, construction day labor, or self-employment in small businesses that required minimal startup capital.

Zhang Yong chose the latter, entering the fish trade. This was a practical decision born of circumstance: the fish markets required little initial investment beyond the cost of inventory, and demand was steady, as fish was a protein source accessible to most economic levels in Sichuanese cuisine. He would purchase fish from wholesale markets early each morning, transport them to retail locations, and sell them throughout the day. The work was physically demanding—early mornings, heavy loads, and the constant pressure of selling before the product spoiled. It was also emotionally taxing, as success or failure was measured daily in terms of inventory sold and prices obtained.

The fish business provided Zhang Yong with a crash course in basic entrepreneurship. He learned to read market demand, t