From The Fortune Magazine:
It was 1978, and thousands of students were rampaging through the streets of Tehran, burning barricades and chanting their vision of a radical Islamic republic that would transform Iran forever. Halfway across the world, a young Iranian student was sitting in an economics class at the University of California at Berkeley, listening to his professor’s predictions about the future. “He told us to watch China,” Mohammed Rafsanjani recalls, sitting in an ornate reception room in one of the Shah’s old palaces atop a snowy mountainside in north Tehran. “He said, ‘If each Chinese person buys one aspirin, we can sell a billion aspirins.'”