Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (48 page)

After the city acquired the Xiahe territory, they built a network of roads and installed a sewage system, and then they sold the development rights to a private company called Yintai. Yintai planned to build an apartment complex, and Zhang Qiaoping had heard that they paid around thirty-six million dollars for the land. After talking with him, I visited Yintai’s main office, where the director of development showed me documents certifying the actual price: thirty-seven million dollars. In other words, Lishui had bought land for one million and then, in the span of three years, flipped it for thirty-seven million. And much of this had been done openly—even the peasants knew the ballpark figures. When I asked Zhang Qiaoping if the deal was fair, he shrugged. “They have the right to buy it,” he said. In truth, his plot of land had been worth at least two hundred thousand dollars, but he hadn’t protested about his fifteen-thousand-dollar settlement. Instead, he took the cash and invested in a small shop directly across from Yintai’s planned apartment complex. The project was being built day and night, and con
struction workers often stopped by Zhang’s new shop to buy food and drinks. Knowing that he couldn’t fight the system, Zhang had done what he could to profit from it.

The new apartment complex was called Jiangbin, or Riverside. It consisted of twenty-eight buildings, the tallest of which would be eleven stories. The planned centerpiece was a musical fountain larger than a football field. For this construction project, Yintai had borrowed more than twenty-eight million dollars, much of it from individuals hoping to earn high interest rates. In Zhejiang this is common—companies often raise money through private investors, because it’s easier than getting bank loans. Technically, such fund-raising is illegal, but it’s widely tolerated in a country where capital tends to be in short supply. At Yintai, company officials didn’t believe there would be any problem paying the money back, because their timing seemed to be perfect: during the past five years, the average price of a Lishui apartment had risen sixfold. The vice chairman of the board at Yintai told me that they expected to profit nineteen million dollars total from Riverside.

The vice chairman’s name was Ji Shengjun, and he was the son of Yintai’s founder. Back in 1978, when the reforms began, the Jis were a poor peasant family in the town of Qiaotou. The patriarch worked for private construction crews, eventually starting his own company. He caught the early wave of the building boom, expanding his business all across Zhejiang, and now he worked with all three of his sons. Ji Shengjun was the youngest, at twenty-seven years of age. In addition to the family development company, he owned a number of businesses on the side, including a local nightclub called Masear. One evening I met him there, in the upstairs VIP room. He wore black Prada loafers, black Prada trousers, and a red and black Versace shirt. He carried a gold-plated Dupont cigarette lighter that had cost over six hundred dollars. He smoked Chunghwa cigarettes, naturally. Like everybody else in the VIP room, I was served Ji’s drink of choice, which was Old Matisse Scotch sweetened with green tea and served in a wineglass. Every once in a while, after taking a drink, Ji leaned over and spat directly onto the carpet, rubbing it in with his Prada loafers. He wore no socks.

There were a half dozen people in the VIP room. The door was monitored by Ji’s personal bodyguard, a well-built man in a tight T-shirt. One of the bodyguard’s daily responsibilities was to carry Ji’s Louis Vitton clutch purse as he cruised around Lishui. In the club, a pretty young woman sat close to Ji, her hand on his lap. When Ji told me that he was about to have a wedding, I made the mistake of referring to this woman as his fiancée, which made everybody laugh. Ji was friendly and easygoing, and whenever he smiled he showed tea-stained teeth. He had the extreme thinness that you often find in the countryside, where people are slightly malnourished—if not for the Prada clothes and the bodyguard, this man would have been indistinguishable from a peasant. And his multimillion-dollar company raised money in the peasant way, relying on
guanxi
and acquiring loans from individuals. Ji Shengjun told me offhandedly that it had cost him $1.25 million to open the nightclub. I never met his fiancée. The pretty young woman in the VIP room was sucking a lollipop. She stroked Ji’s arm and cooed in his ear; from appearances it seemed romantic, but then I caught a fragment of their conversation. It was strictly business: she was pleading with Ji to help her acquire a visa so she could look for work in Portugal.

ONE JULY AFTERNOON, AT
the start of a summer rainstorm, the bra ring factory received an express mail envelope. It was pleather weather—in the development zone, the initial stages of a downpour consisted of big dirty drops. The deliveryman held the envelope over his head, to guard against the filthy rain, and once he was inside the factory he wiped the package on his trousers and handed it to Master Luo. The envelope contained nothing but four nylon bra straps. Each was a different color: pink, white, brown, and light blue. There was no letter, no invoice—no explanation of any sort. The straps were a kind of semaphore, and Master Luo knew who could interpret them. “Xiao Long!” he called upstairs, to the factory dormitories. “Delivery!”

Xiao Long was the factory chemist. His full name was Long Chunming, but everybody called him Xiao Long—“Little Long.” He came downstairs wearing a pair of plastic flip-flops and a blue-and-white
basketball uniform. In bigger factories, workers dress in company jumpsuits, but the bra ring plant was so small and informal that everybody wore whatever they pleased. Little Long’s shorts and tank top were nylon knockoffs of the Puma brand, and they gave him the appearance of an athlete at game time. He studied the envelope’s return address: it came from a brassiere assembly plant in a city called Dongyang.

“They ordered rings a couple of days ago, and these are the colors,” he explained. It was easy to remember because the bra ring factory still had so little business. At the moment, they had only four regular buyers, all of whom were small. Boss Gao and Boss Wang were often away from the plant for days at a time, trying to woo new customers, but the bosses usually returned with long faces and short tempers. Workers had started to gossip—there were rumors that the factory was in financial trouble. The bosses had already laid off some of the young women on the assembly line, and they called the Tao family into work sporadically, when orders arrived. Only a half dozen technicians like Master Luo and Little Long were still working full-time.

After Little Long deciphered the envelope, I followed him to the factory lab, which was located next to the Machine room. Dressed in the Puma uniform, Little Long picked up his playbook—a loose-leaf notebook filled with dozens of rings taped in rows, their colors changing incrementally from page to page. Next to each ring, Little Long had inscribed the dyeing formula and an English name. These descriptions sounded exotic: a red ring, for example, was labeled as “Sellan Bordeaux G-P.” Little Long didn’t speak the foreign language, but he had copied long lines of inscriptions from other sample books:

“I already know how to make the pink and the blue,” he said. “But now I have to do the brown.” He cut off a piece of the strap and com
pared the color to other browns in the book, trying to gauge the formula. Then he took out three powdered dyes: blue, yellow, and red. He poured each powder into a beaker and weighed them on a balance scale. He wrote down the ratios on a new page in his notebook. “This will take more blue and yellow, less red,” he said. He heated water, mixed in the powders, and tried the resulting dye on a few rings. He checked the color against the strap—too light. More blue, more red. He tried again: still too light. It took three times before he got a match. “There are Big Masters in Guangdong who can just look at a color once and immediately know the formula,” he said. “They work for the big Hong Kong companies; a Big Master like that makes tens of thousands of yuan every month. I’m nowhere near that level.”

The sudden downpour had stopped and now the air felt muggy. Outdoors it was over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and here in the lab, with the burners and the machines, it was even hotter. After the initial round of dyeing, Little Long had taken off his uniform top, like a playground athlete who’s finished the first game and wants to get serious. Finally I did the same, and both of us stood sweating in the lab, watching the rings spin in an industrial mixer. Virtually all the factory men went shirtless in summer.

Little Long was in his early twenties, and he was the only person in the plant who was not Han Chinese. He was Miao, an ethnicity that’s native to parts of southwestern China, and culturally related to the Hmong of Laos and Vietnam. Little Long’s skin was a shade darker than the Han Chinese, and his face was subtly different, almost girlish: he had full lips and high cheekbones. He was good-looking and slightly vain, especially when it came to his hair. He grew it past his shoulders, dyeing it a shade of red so bright it’s best described in chemist’s terms: Sellan Bordeaux G-P. When Little Long wasn’t busy, he spent much of his time flirting with the Tao sisters and the other girls in the factory.

He had come from a poor farming village in Guizhou Province. His family’s main crops were tea and tobacco, and after finishing the eighth grade Little Long had migrated to Guangdong. Initially he worked for a textile plant, and then he found a job at a bra factory that specialized in exports. “Each country has its own characteristic,” he told me
once. I expected him to embark on a series of sweeping generalizations, the kind of conversation that’s common in villages. But Little Long’s worldview was far more empirical: he saw foreign lands through a tight network of straps and rings. “The Japanese like to have little flowers on their bras,” he continued. “They like that kind of detail. The Russians don’t like that—they don’t want flowers and little patterns. They just want bras to be plain and brightly colored. And big!”

Little Long was attentive, and in the bra factories of the south he had learned to specialize. After starting on the assembly line, he moved to the chemistry lab, where he picked up techniques of dyeing. He studied the trade from Big Masters; it was skilled work and the pay was good. In Lishui he had been hired for 2,500 yuan per month, more than three hundred dollars. But he wasn’t satisfied with this status. On the unpainted plaster wall of his dorm room, he had inscribed a sentence:

A PERSON CAN BECOME SUCCESSFUL ANYWHERE;
I SWEAR I WILL NOT RETURN HOME UNTIL I AM FAMOUS.

In the bra ring factory, resident workers often wrote inspirational phrases on their walls. This particular sentence—a Mao Zedong quote—was Little Long’s mantra. Years ago he had read it in a self-help book, and he adopted it as a guiding philosophy. His goal was to save enough money from factory jobs to eventually return home and start a business. Sometimes he talked about raising rabbits to sell to restaurants, and he also had an idea for marketing wholesale goods to small shopkeepers. These plans were vague; it was all in the distant future, and right now his top priority was concentrating on his work and saving money. He avoided taking trips home during vacations, and whenever his will began to flag, he thought of his mother back home on the farm. She was the only family member still in the village—Little Long’s father and two siblings had all migrated to coastal regions. “I think about my mother when I’m tired,” he said. “If I’m discouraged, I remember that she has to be alone.” Recently he had written a song in her honor, and he had thought about singing it to her over the phone, but he was afraid of making her cry. Instead he inscribed the verses in his diary:

Little Long kept his diary in a spiral notebook. It also contained a copy of a long letter he had written to a former girlfriend, as well as pages on which he had practiced writing the Latin alphabet, in an attempt at self-education. Throughout the notebook he had copied aphorisms and mottos, some of which also appeared on his dormitory wall. In big characters above his bed was the phrase: “Find Success Immediately.” Another wall read: “Face the Future Directly.” And he also inscribed the title of one of his self-help books: “Square and Round.”

Like many young people in factory towns, Little Long was a great consumer of inspirational literature. One of his favorites was
Square and Round
, a best-seller in China that explains how to function in modern society. The title comes from a traditional phrase—squareness represents a person’s internal integrity, whereas roundness is the external flexibility necessary to deal with other people. The author adapts this classical notion to the intense competitiveness of today’s boomtown society, with unsettling conclusions: much of the book describes how to lie profitably, manipulate co-workers, and generally behave like a post-Communist Machiavelli. There’s a section on the best way to request something from a boss (first, ask for something unrealistic, so the rejection creates a sense of obligation). Another chapter tells how to cry effectively in front of a superior (don’t overdo it). There’s advice on how to keep friendship in perspective. (“If you and your best friend get along very well, then you are true friends for now. But if there is one million dollars’ worth of business to be done, and if you don’t kick him aside or he doesn’t kick you aside, then you have mental problems.”)

In addition to
Square and Round
, Little Long often turned to a Chinese copy of
The Harvard MBA Comprehensive Volume of How to Conduct Yourself in Society
. “I’m not mature enough,” he told me. “Somebody as young as me needs help, and this book can provide it. If I have some kind of problem, I don’t have anybody that I can talk to—I’m lonely in that way. But books like this give me ideas about how to
handle situations.” He also relied on
A Treasured Book for Success in Life
, and another one of his favorites was
A Collection of the Classics
. This book features foreign-themed stories, and Little Long was particularly impressed by a chapter about John D. Rockefeller. According to
Collection of the Classics
, the oil tycoon took his lunch every day at the same local restaurant, where he always left a one-dollar tip. After a period of weeks the waiter finally said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so miserly as to give such a small tip.” Rockefeller shot back, “Because of such thinking, you’re only a waiter.” The
Collection of the Classics
concludes with a moral: “A great many people can’t become rich, and a major reason is that they spend money freely.” Another chapter features Jesus Christ, although this particular parable isn’t one that appears in the Bible. In the Chinese book, a man who tries to help others only makes things worse, and finally Jesus tells him to cut it out. That’s the Messiah’s message—accept the world as it is. “In our real world, we often think about the best way to act, but the reality and our desires are often at odds,” explains the moral. “We must believe that accepting what we have is the best arrangement for us.”