Yang Huaiding died on June 13th

IF YOU HAD been riding on one of China’s crammed, rickety green trains in 1989, bouncing in a hard-seat carriage, you might have noticed Yang Huaiding sitting nearby. Or you might not. He had taken pains not to stand out, wearing drab clothes and carrying a faded mock-leather travel bag. The black-rimmed glasses, messy hair and stained teeth were his customary look. If he was smoking more than usual, and wiping more sweat, it was because in the bag, layered in newspaper, he had thousands of yuan in ten-yuan notes. He needed a police escort and, at times, he hired one.

He was travelling to Hefei, in Anhui province, from Shanghai, his home town, to buy Chinese government bonds. In 1988 the Communist regime, needing to rebuild the economy and shore up its state-owned enterprises, had decided in a limited way to let the public become investors. Bonds could be freely traded, at first, in only seven cities. But Shanghai and Hefei, two of the seven, were only a night’s train ride apart. And Mr Yang had learned, from intense scouring of local papers in the public library, that bonds priced at 94 yuan in relatively poor Anhui, where collective farmers were getting them as part of their wages, were selling at quite a bit more in Shanghai. Hence the travel-bag, containing (since he had no chequebook) a large wodge of his savings.

...