Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories

Tombrello–244
adapting to free enterprise. In ’79, as we were chauffeured about town, we noticed clusters of
people with bicycles and boxes of what looked to be vegetables on street corners, where streetcar
lines crossed. I said to the guide, “What’s that?” He started laughing and said, “You’re seeing
the beginnings of free enterprise.” These people were coming in from the countryside with
vegetables and selling them on the street corners. He says, “It’s not part of the collective. It’s a
totally new thing.” So we saw the beginnings. It was matched to, I think, the nature of the
Chinese people, who are clearly entrepreneurial. I think Deng Xiaoping was an absolute
genius—he picked that avenue to begin opening the economy, and it worked. You could see it
starting to work. I have a diary from that trip, and in it I wrote that the standard of living in
China would stay low for a long time but that something was happening. There’s this old
statement from Napoleon that China is sleeping, but it is a sleeping giant and when it wakes it
will shake the world. Clearly, China was waking up. The question is, How long will it take?
How fast will this accelerate? But even then it was very clear that China was going to be a
model. I remember saying that China is a model for a lot of economic development around the
world, in places where they’re going to have to start as low on the development scale as China
did. I don’t know what the average income per person was in 1979 in China—maybe $300 a
year? It’s probably ten times that now; I think it’s at least $3,000 a year.
ASPATURIAN: They’re aiming for $30,000. I read that somewhere recently.
TOMBRELLO: That’s going to be interesting. I’d say the real concern about whether that’s
possible or not is whether there are enough natural resources anywhere to get another factor of
tenfold for China.
ASPATURIAN: For that many people, true. And then you’ve got India next door, too, on top of
that.
TOMBRELLO: India will take longer, though.
ASPATURIAN: Well, they have chosen a different path.
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