This is John Bachelor, conversation with my colleague Anne Stevenson Yang for her new book,

Wild Ride, a short history of the opening and closing of the Chinese economy.

Anne arrived in the 1980s, and this is a glimpse. economy and theft of dumping, manufacturing overcapacity, of generally evading all WTO rules.

Before, this is 1985 at a magazine in China. Note especially the Indonesian segment of the magazine.

Indonesian. No Indonesian copy of the magazine for 15 years and yet here's Anne Stevenson

Yang, a wild ride, a glimpse of China before the miracle and perhaps again given the sad state of the reporting from the mainland.

More of this later.

That's right, John.

It was quite a shock that office. Everybody who is unmarried, so basically anyone under 30 lived in the office and slept on top of their desk and you'd come in in the morning I think I

began at 8 o'clock and people would be walking up and down the halls with these

tin enamel cups holding their toothbrushes and because that's where they had they had slept and there were all these

these employees who hadn't really had jobs sometimes for decades like there was a whole Indonesian section that had actually been

They had halted the Indonesian version of the magazine 15 years earlier, but the people were still there.

One of them was psychotic, actually.

We called him Crazy Wu, and he would walk up and down the aisles,

the hall kicking the baseboards.

He drove his office mate crazy because in the cold winter he would open all the windows and turn on a fan

because he didn't feel cold and in the summer he'd insist on closing the windows

crazy who but you know employed for 15 years he in the end he died of gangrene on the street