For most of the past 70 years Qiao Shuzhi's family supported the Communist Party, and the party took good care of the family. Mr Qiao's father, an underground member during the war against Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, helped store and move military supplies. He was rewarded with a building in the Haidian district of north-western Beijing. In 1953 he turned it into the Tianyi Guesthouse, offering budget lodgings to travellers. Permission for the business was granted, in writing, by China's police chief at the time. In the 1960s, Mr Qiao says, Zhou Enlai, who was then prime minister, protected the guesthouse, allowing it to operate as the only private business in Beijing throughout the mayhem of Mao's Cultural Revolution. When pro-market reforms began in the late 1970s the guesthouse was widely praised as a model family-run operation.
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