Fresh Air Fiend (33 page)

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Ingredients: Germicide No. 1,...[etc.]

 

Many of the products at the fair are lovely and finely made—the carpets, the embroideries, the lace, the silks. The hand tools—hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches—are among the cheapest and best in the world, and have put many American companies out of business. But if there is one business the Chinese monopolize worldwide, it is that of Christmas decorations. There is hardly a Santa or a hanging ball on earth that is not produced in the People's Republic, and even the Christmas lights that were formerly made in Taiwan are now made in China, many of them in joint ventures with Taiwanese partners, as wages have risen back home.

"Are they any good?" I asked an Italian, Mario, from Modena—here in Guangzhou for no other reason than to buy Christmas lights to sell in Italy.

"They are very good," Mario said. "They conform to Italian standards. They are cheap. It's perfect." He smiled. "But this place"—and he made an Italianate gesture, his hands and face simultaneously expressive, to take in not only the fair, but Guangzhou and the whole of China—"is 'orrible, eh?"

Yet it was Mario who summed up the fair and perhaps Chinese business generally. We were talking about how China made everything and shipped it everywhere.

"China," he said, "is the manufacturer for the world."

***

Hearing of a model factory, I went by road through east-central Guangdong to the once sleepy town of Huizhou.

There were now four expatriates in Huizhou, but four years ago there had been only one, Mel Dickinson. He had been sent to the town by the Austrian family firm of Swarowski, purveyors of crystal to every duty-free shop on the planet. Mel's orders were to sort out an almost bankrupt jewelry factory. This too was like an outpost in old China: the
gweilo
stuck in a factory in a riverbank town in rural Guangdong, hating its snakes, consoling himself with his pint of Tsingtao beer at night, dreaming of his dog and his last fishing holiday back in Britain while he labored with his workers to produce costume jewelry by the ton. The heat, the rubble, the stink, the terrible town, the melancholy—it was like a portrait out of Maugham's
On a Chinese Screen,
or the much earlier narratives of American or European expatriates in China, summed up in the genial British expression "wog bashers."

Mel considered my comparison, and then said, "It is the same except for that difference. People like me came in the nineteenth century, and they lived the way I do. But they exploited the natives. We don't."

This proved true in Mel's case. He was a kind, funny, hard-working man, clearly liked by his workers. His factory, Huisi Fashion Jewellery and Crafts Company, had won a top award in the province for being the best run, the most productive. Another prize had been awarded for environmental reasons: Mel had his own waste-water treatment plant in the factory.

Mel was forty-eight, a chemist by training, a salmon fisherman and former rugby player, Welsh by birth, resident in Ireland, childless, dog-owning. His wife, Freda, had come with him and ("to keep myself sane") also worked full time at the factory. They had arrived in Huizhou in January 1989, "and almost walked straight out. The factory was filthy and silent. All I saw were workers having naps amidst orange peels and peanut shells. But I decided to stay. I liked the town. It was quiet and very safe."

Four months later, production was in full swing. "We had a ceremony—a box of swan pins. The Swarowski logo. We had a man hand-carry the box to Hong Kong to present to the office there."

Soon after that, the students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

"Not a peep here in Huizhou," Mel said. "It was business as usual. There were some tanks in Guangzhou."

Within four years many things had changed in Huizhou. Prices had tripled. The small town had become a very large town—a city by American standards. More factories opened. Rice growers whose fields had been filled in and built on by developers flocked to town from the surrounding countryside, and unable to find jobs, they slept on the streets and made the place unsafe. Highway robbers hijacked buses, emptying passengers' pockets. Murders, burglaries, muggings, fights increased. The day before payday, when the Huisi safe was full of cash, one of the factory workers broke in. Mel and some other men caught the man before he opened the safe. The man received a four-year sentence for the crime. If he had managed to get the safe open, he would have been executed.

"This is the Wild West now," Mel said. "The authorities try hard, but it's not enough. Go downtown and you'll see masses of policemen, but after five o'clock there won't be any. They'll all have gone home."

He lived in a small apartment above the factory courtyard, behind the spiked factory gates, liking the seclusion and the safety of the two night watchmen. He worked all day and at night sipped beer on his verandah and tied salmon flies.

He was modest and humorous in his self-effacing Welsh way, but he was clearly proud of his factory, pleased by its awards and its profits. In this slack period he employed 220 people, but soon the Christmas orders would be coming in, and 350 people would be working to turn out bracelets, pins, necklaces, and pendants. His people earned between 350 and 400 yuan a month ($60 to $70); their hours were eight to five, with an hour for lunch. The cafeteria had also won a prize, for cleanliness and the quality of the food.

Huisi Jewellery had been intended as an export effort, the gold-plated products to be sold in American department stores ($40 earrings, $60 pendants), the sort of sparkly things that made some women say, "These are fun." But they had caught on locally and were being snapped up all over China, and the Chinese were now buying more than half his output of affordable jewelry.

His factory seemed a pleasant place, most of it air-conditioned, all of it well lighted. What impressed me about the operation was the amount of technical training the workers received, as designers and model makers creating the baubles. Three of them were being sent to Thailand to study another Swarowski operation. Everything was made on site—the wooden models, the rubber molds—and even the metal was bought in China, which made Chinese sales of the jewelry sensible: the
renminbi
currency could be used to buy the tin alloy used in most of the products.

We passed through a room where men and women were polishing earrings and pins.

"Polishing is the expensive part of the operation. See that gold mushroom?" The knickknack he pointed to was curvaceous and gleaming, about two inches high. "A polisher can only do five an hour. That's why you cannot afford to polish in Europe."

He told me that a worker in Ireland would get 15 Irish punts an hour, perhaps $25. A polisher in China was paid 50 cents and did the job just as well. Anyone wondering why world manufacturing had moved to China might consider this simple example.

We moved on to the electroplating shop. "This is the heart of the factory," Mel said. "This is where we make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

The tin alloy, plated with a layer of copper and then nickel, was gilded in a solution of potassium gold cyanide, which Mel bought in large quantities from Hong Kong.

Being in this well-run and apparently happy factory made me want to see the sweatshops that still existed in this part of China. But they were damnably hard to find. I had tried to visit one, but the owners kept them off limits, not wanting their exploitation to be observed, particularly by a foreigner. I knew from various informants that the classic sweatshop was a textile or umbrella-making operation or a simple electronics factory, owned by a Taiwanese or Hong Kong businessman, and typically it was in an anonymous building in a rural village in which all the employees had been brought from one of the poorer provinces, Sichuan or Gansu.

Back in the courtyard after our tour, I asked Mel whether he had seen very bad working conditions.

"Oh, yes. I've seen many. Even joint ventures. They were so awful they would have made Charles Dickens throw up."

"What about sweatshops?"

"They're all over the place, but you'll never get in. My secretary's brother worked in one, though."

Mel's workers were his window on China. If you mentioned theft, Mel said, "Richard was robbed last week on the bus to Shenzhen." If you mentioned corruption, Mel said, "Betty was asked for a bribe last month." If you mentioned carnage on the roads, he said, "Mary saw a torso yesterday. David saw a leg last week, just lying by the side of the road."

I talked to Mel's secretary about sweatshops. In her late twenties, formerly a schoolteacher, her name was Linda. She had been born in Huizhou, and she lamented the rising crime. She too had been robbed.

"My brother works in one of those places," Linda said, in excellent English. "At first he was making ovens, now he is making telephones. He works until ten or eleven at night. Most weeks he works seven days, but now and then he gets a day off. His boss is from Taiwan."

For this he was paid 200 yuan, or $35, a month. This was not exceptional—in fact, many of the rural people who had come to Huizhou would have settled for that sort of job.

"See that man?" Mel said to me as I was leaving.

A dapper Chinese man in a well-cut suit, his hair fashionably permed, was picking his way across the cobbles of the courtyard in narrow shiny shoes. He was in his thirties, the sort of man I imagined I would be seeing in large numbers when I set off for China, the new executive—little man, big Rolex. After traveling around for a while, I had seen enough of them to realize I had lost interest in such people, because they were the exception. I was more interested in daily life as it was being borne by the majority of people—workers, gardeners, market vendors—and the changing configurations of the landscape.

Still, this man was unavoidable. He was a client from Shanghai, come to sign a contract for an order. When the man was out of earshot, on his tour of the factory, Mel whispered to me, "He has a check in his pocket for me, made out for one million
renminbi.
That's the down payment. His order is two and a half million."

There was another man in the courtyard, a cripple, and his body was so twisted and misshapen he could move only by occasionally touching the ground with his free hand, straining with his serious face. But he was tidy, and his clothes were clean. He made his way crabwise through the gate to the porcelain factory next door.

"When I think the world's against me and I'm feeling sorry for myself, I look at him and I realize I don't have it so bad," Mel said. "I've been looking at him for four years. I have never heard him complain."

I happened to be present when an American manager in his company's plant in Guangdong innocently asked an old China hand, "So how do they choose their leaders in China, anyway?"

"You are used to leaders' being chosen from the outside and below" was the reply. "In China they choose them from the inside, from above."

"Oh, I see," the American manager said, and went back to work.

But he did not see anything. A kind of moral blindness afflicts many people who do business with the Chinese, since—along with everything else—China is still a dictatorship of pitiful wages, fairly miserable living conditions, with a brutal legal system, and still practicing such quaint customs as convict labor, child labor, and mass (and often public) executions. Most people engaged in trade with the Chinese are so besotted by their profits that they could not care less about any of this. When the British pharmaceutical firm Glaxo perceived a need for antiasthma medicine, they set up a $10 million factory in a joint venture, choosing an appropriate city, Chongqing, where the air quality is eight times worse than normal. Glaxo produces the world's leading antiasthma medicine, Ventolin, which it sells in a pressurized inhaler in the Chinese domestic market.

"With thirty million asthmatics in China, Chongqing Glaxo will have ready customers for a long while," a company employee explained when I asked why that particular product was being manufactured. In less than two years, the Chinese Glaxo operation has grown larger than the one in Hong Kong.

China is about as far from a democracy as it is possible to be. Many people contend that China's authoritarianism is the reason for its success and its recent wave of prosperity. In other words, that the Chinese government has a firm grip on things. But Chinese authority is actually a loose and baggy monster. More likely it is the absence of government control that has been crucial to success. Chinese workers and entrepreneurs did not need political guidance, they needed permission and—after such a turbulent recent history—especially a firm assurance that they would not be accused of being traitors, class enemies, capitalist roaders, and spies if they made deals with foreign companies. Prosperity was a sure thing, Chinese sources told me, when it became politically safe to transact business.

Even as recently as the mid-1970s, manufacturing foreign merchandise was the moral equivalent of sleeping with the enemy. After all, Mao had envisaged a self-sufficient China with a vast population, a classless society in which money was irrelevant. Ultimately, the whole world would be revolutionized in this way, and from time to time purges would be necessary. These would be very violent, for, as the old man was fond of saying, "a revolution is not a dinner party." In all this, the hard thing for the Chinese has been in knowing when to stop.

China has evolved quite differently from anything that Mao (or anyone else) envisaged. When Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, was on trial she was apoplectic in denouncing the power structure and the direction China had taken. She was given a death sentence, but with true Chinese ambiguity it was changed to life imprisonment. She never stopped howling about betrayal throughout her incarceration, and eventually she died in prison.