Mr Gui Jingmin counted himself lucky. He was a technician in a Beijing plastics factory, doing a 12-hour night shift with 36-hour rest periods in between. He had a good salary, medical insurance, paid holidays, sports facilities and many friends among the employees. He loved his work, and his wife had just given birth to a daughter.
Then one day he got fired. Or rather he and many of his co-workers were laid off. The factory was losing money because the quality of its products could not match foreign imports, and under the economic reforms the state refused to bail it out.
Thus Mr Gui joined the growing army of laid-off workers in China, 12 million of whom were shown the factory gate last year, according to official figures.
The sudden snatching away of the iron rice bowl, the communist system providing for state-employed workers from cradle to grave, was for him a psychological as well as an economic shock. He suffered a loss of self-esteem familiar to anyone suddenly faced with insecurity, and also felt a sense of betrayal. "I loved the factory like my mother," Mr Gui said, "but I found that my mother didn't love me. Those of us who had access to the iron rice bowl always looked down on people outside the system," he said. "We regarded self-employed people as `chancers'.
"Yet I couldn't find another job so I suddenly was faced with the only alternative, starting a small business myself." (The word "chancers", in the Irish colloquial sense, is the nearest approximation of the Chinese word he used.) In a country where banks refuse loans to small-time entrepreneurs, Mr Gui had to turn to his parents for help. With money from his father's savings, he set up the Quick Printing Service in a tiny rented shop in Xinzhong Street. He bought an old Sletter printing machine and a Plextor Corporation word processor and installed them in the back room with a table, a sink and a few red plastic chairs.
Taking a break from filling an order for hotel menus, as his father, a dignified old man with a grey beard, tended the shop, Mr Gui told me he is now making a good living and his outlook on self-employed people has changed. "I realise business people have to work very hard," he said. "I myself have dived into the sea of business and if I don't apply myself I will sink."
The change in his attitude reflects a fundamental shift in the mentality of Chinese people towards entrepreneurs, especially those over 30, like Mr Gui, brought up to trust the state to provide everything. "I see it among my friends and neighbours," he said. "They, like me, have subconsciously developed a high regard for people who run their own businesses well, people we used to think of as `chancers'."
Some of his co-workers fared less well. One close friend was desperately unlucky. "His parents are in their 80s and his wife has developed mental illness, and he cannot get work anywhere," he said. "I will have to help him myself." There are 33 million privately owned enterprises in China today, so the scope for starting new ventures is limited. While 36,000 workers a day lose their jobs across China, only 4,000 a day get to start up new businesses.
Indeed, laid-off workers have become such a fixed part of society they feature in anecdotes. A popular one in Beijing runs as follows: "What are the `four busies' and the `four idles'?" "The `four busies' are mobile phones, beepers, escort girls and Premier Zhu Rongji. The `four idles' are laid-off workers, civil servants, the managers of state firms and Li Ruihuan [chairman of a government advisory body]."
Laid-off workers are not always idle, even if unable to start a business. They are often sent to re-employment centres or academic courses, where they should receive living allowances while undergoing retraining. Sometimes they don't.
The Chinese Labour Minister, Mr Zhang Zuoji, admitted this month that there had been widespread unrest in China arising partly from the non-payment of living allowances to 650,000 laid-off workers (economists believe the figure is much higher).
Another big grievance is the loss of medical insurance. Strapped for cash, big enterprises do everything to get laid-off workers to cut relations with the factory to avoid continuing payment of allowances and medical insurance. Mr Gui gets nothing from the plastics factory and now pays a state society for medical insurance.
But he has left his employment records with his old work unit. Part of him still longs for the security he once knew. "It's a psychological thing," he said. "It keeps open the possibility that one day I might get my job back, though I don't expect it will ever happen."