Yesterday Danwei linked to a post on Standoff at Tiananmen, a translation of an oral history of Beijing's first private restaurant opened after the Cultural Revolution.

Below is a news article from The Daily Telegraph by Graham Earnshaw, originally published on November 6, 1980, republished here with his permission.

In a back alley near the Chinese National Art Gallery, a privately-owned restaurant has opened, Peking’s first for at least 22 years.

A jolly, plump woman of about 50 runs the miniscule “happy guest restaurant” which boasts a total of four tables.

Getting to meet Madame Liu Guixian was easy. I went to lunch one day. But getting to talk to her about how she set herself up was a different story.

“Oh, you’re a journalist,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry. I can’t talk to you unless there is a representative of the local district government here.”

We arranged to meet again the next morning, when I called on the district government office to find an official who could spare 15 minutes to go to the restaurant with me.

“But you shouldn’t have come to us directly,” said the district official with a look of horror. Disheartened, I retreated to my office and rang the Foreign Affairs Office. “You should make a formal request in writing,” the official cautiously replied. “But just this once …”

When I arrived at the restaurant four official representatives were waiting. Madame Liu wore a nervous smile and talked about how she became an entrepreneur in Communist China.

“I was a cook at the Environment Protection Institute but applied in March to set up my own restaurant so that I could have an opportunity to teach my two unemployed sons the trade,” she said.

She received official approval last September, and the restaurant opened in the middle of last month amid a blaze of publicity from the official Press eager to show what strides China’s economic reforms were making.

For nearly 20 years, the Chinese authorities denounced the sort of business Madame Liu is doing as a “remnant of capitalism” which should be vigorously suppressed. The opening of the Happy Guest restaurant is a stark symbol of the complete economic about-face China’s leaders have performed over the past few years.

On the walls of the alley leading to the “Happy Guest” is the faint remains of one of the thousands of raucous slogans daubed all over Peking during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s. It reads: “The Great Cultural revolution must be carried through to the very end.”