Next stop: a factory whose manager, left, has turned an old military plant into a chemical factory. (By Steven Mufson – The Washington Post)

The entrepreneur said he had recruited a French marketing expert and lined up second-hand German equipment. Because gelatin is made from cow bones, the entrepreneur said he has plenty of raw material. His beef jerky plants could supply 100 tons a day of cow bones.

"I would like to help them, because they've worked hard to get where they are and they're really producing something," Lou said later in his car. "Whether it's a private entrepreneur or a state-owned enterprise doesn't matter as long as it's adding value to what we have in Guizhou and making people's living standards better."

Life did not start in the back seat of a chauffeured Audi for Lou Jiwei. He was the child of middle level government officials, and when he was 16, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution broke out and all normal schooling ceased. Mao used groups of student Red Guards to overthrow his foes in the Communist Party, then in 1968 sent the city youths to the countryside to learn from the peasants.

"We didn't know anything. We didn't understand," Lou says now. "We were very happy not to go to school and stay at home and play."

Lou and his friends also took to the road, taking advantage of free rail travel for youths. He visited Shanghai, Guangzhou, Changsha and Mao's home town, Shaoshan, which he reached by walking the last 50 miles.

In 1968, he joined the army. "It was the best way out," he said. The army sent him to Hainan Island off the southern tip of China for a five-year stint. There was little to do there aside from light drills. So Lou obtained math books from home and taught himself high school math. When he returned to Beijing in 1973, he was put to work at Capital Iron and Steel Corp.'s giant computers, in that era still fed with yellow tape with holes punched in it.

"Now I think about what happened and I'm amazed by how few choices people had over their lives," he says. "It makes me feel I should work harder to prevent it from happening again."

For Lou and others of his generation, life changed after Mao's death when the rehabilitated leader Deng Xiaoping, previously denounced as a capitalist roader, reinstituted competitive university entrance examinations and education resumed in earnest. The competition was fierce.

With his math ability and computer experience, Lou was accepted in 1978 by Qinghua University – China's closest equivalent to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – where he majored in computers. After graduating in 1982, he did postgraduate work in econometrics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, an influential policymaking think tank under Deng.

In 1985, Lou went to work for the State Council, China's cabinet. There he joined a high-powered team working on public finance and monetary policy. In 1988, he became vice director of the State Commission for the Reform of the Economic System in Shanghai. Jiang Zemin, now president, was then Shanghai party secretary. Zhu, now premier, was then mayor.

Lou was in Shanghai in 1989 when student-led demonstrations broke out in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Similar rallies were held in Shanghai's People's Park. Many officials joined the protests. After the June 4 crackdown, many careers were ruined. Some were jailed. The demonstrations were not visible from Lou's office a few blocks away, and he never went to look. "I didn't let my subordinates go, either," he said. "I didn't want them to get involved."

"Lou Jiwei is a good guy, but he's a technocrat," said a foreign foundation official working in China. "He thought 1989 got in the way and was getting things off the track. Unlike those people in [then-Communist Party chief] Zhao Ziyang's democratic think tanks, Lou Jiwei kept away from the movement and so kept on rising."

From Shanghai, Lou returned to Beijing in 1992, where he joined the State Commission for the Reform of the Economic System. He helped design China's value added tax, and. negotiated deals with provincial leaders that increased the central government's share of tax revenue to about 60 percent from 40 percent. "Doing that definitely hurt the vested interests of certain people," Lou said.

Lou's Guizhou experience shows that the Communist Party can no longer, if it ever could, be described as the party of peasants and proletarians. In a country of wide income gaps, high-tech districts and destitute villages, the party's mission looks more and more like that of a U.S. politician juggling different interest groups, dispensing patronage and regulating the less savory aspects of the free market.

But even a powerful politician like Lou can find himself frustrated by people with different agendas. On the way back to the provincial capital Guiyang, Lou stopped to look at a torn-up section of highway littered with carts, peddlers, and road workers. The highway was a key link in his plan to break Guizhou's transportation bottleneck and bring high-speed throughways to a province with just 61 miles of first class roads. Lou scolded the local officials, who half-heartedly promised to speed up their work to clear the way.

"I'm annoyed with that town," Lou said in his car later. "The people there whined and complained and kicked up a fuss that the highway wasn't going through their town. We wanted to bypass it. Now they've turned it into their main street."

One irony of Lou's duty in Guizhou was that he was given responsibility for furthering market-based economic reforms in the Zunyi area. Zunyi was the first place the Red Army stopped on the Long March. It was where Mao seized control of the party, and it was the first place where the Communist Party experimented with communes. All that is history now.

Soon that history will be not only overturned but forgotten.

"The country has had many disasters," Lou said. "That's why people like me appreciate the opportunities. The generation of my son doesn't know. All they want is brand names and new fashions and endless amounts of money."

During his two years in Guizhou, Lou's teenage son visited just once.

"I wanted him to visit the concentration camp on the way to Zunyi where Nationalist troops tortured people during the civil war," Lou said. "He should know what the past was about. But he went [white-water] rafting at the waterfalls instead."