Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (40 page)

“I’m waiting for my partner,” he said. “We’re opening a business here.”

He introduced himself as Gao Xiaomeng, and he was thirty-three years old. His partner was his uncle, a man named Wang Aiguo who was also from the coast. Boss Gao said they were involved in the manufacturing of “clothing accessories” he didn’t go into detail about what they produced. This afternoon they were supposed to design their new factory, but Boss Wang was late. He was stuck on Highway 330—a common occurrence on the narrow road, where accidents sometimes backed up traffic for an hour. Until the new expressway was finished, and the four lanes opened for traffic, nobody would be able to predict how long it took to drive from Wenzhou.

Every five minutes Boss Gao checked his cell phone. Every fifteen minutes he lit another cigarette. We stood in the shade of the half-built factory, chatting idly; we exchanged business cards and discussed the Lishui weather. By the time Boss Wang finally showed up, Boss Gao introduced me as a friend. In the development zone it was easy to meet people; everybody was an outsider and nobody knew what to expect from this place. It felt wide open—most structures were empty shells, and the half-built roads were bordered by blank billboards still waiting for sponsors. The silver surfaces reflected the sky, advertising nothing but late October sunlight.

AT
2:30
IN THE
afternoon, after Boss Wang had finally arrived, the men started designing the factory. The two bosses were joined by a contractor and his assistant, both of whom were natives of Lishui. There was no architect, no draftsman; nobody had brought a ruler or plumb line. The only tools carried by the men were disposable lighters, and Boss Gao’s first act was to distribute a round of State Express 555 cigarettes. After everybody lit up, he rummaged in his bag for a crumpled piece of scrap paper. He smoothed it atop the surface of a cheap folding table, and then he began to draw.

Apart from the table, the room was empty: white walls, bare floors, untouched pillars. Naked lightbulbs dangled on cords from the ceiling like unripe fruit. The plumbing had been installed, but the water was still off; the front door had no lock. On the blank page, Boss Gao sketched
the room’s walls in the shape of a rectangle, and then he added two lines in the southeastern corner. They represented walls to be constructed: someday that space would enclose a machine room. Boss Gao turned to the contractor. They spoke Mandarin—in Zhejiang, local dialects are so difficult that businessmen use the national language whenever they go to another town.

“What’s the standard width for a door?” Boss Gao asked.

“Usually about one and a half meters.”

“I want it wider. Can you do two and a half?”

“That won’t work. If you want to use standard doors, make it one and a half.”

Boss Gao returned to the paper, sketching fast, and four more rooms took shape: a chemist’s laboratory, a storage closet, two additional spaces for machines. Boss Wang leaned over to study the diagram. “We don’t need this room,” he said to his nephew.

“Don’t you want two more for the machines?”

“One is enough. Put them all together.”

Boss Wang took the pen, scratched out a line, and the planned room disappeared. The older man was more conscious of money, and he knew that every new wall only meant higher costs. He had been in business for twenty years, and many of the best opportunities had passed him by, but his nephew still had the nervous eagerness of youth. Boss Gao’s previous endeavor had been a moderate success, and he dressed the part, with a sort of understated coolness. He was proud of his Buick Sail—when we first met, he made sure to tell me that he drove an American car. In fact the Sail is based on the platform of the Opel Corsa, which gives it the distinction of being an Opel-engineered car built by Chinese workers under the brand of a troubled American automaker. But such details didn’t matter to Boss Gao, who had already come a long way from peasant roots. His father had been a rice farmer and local schoolteacher, and Boss Gao was the first member of his family to succeed in business.

At 2:57 the bosses finished designing the ground level. They moved to the second floor, where Boss Gao reached once more into his quiver of State Express 555s. He handed out the cigarettes and then flipped over the sheet of paper.

“This is too small for an office.”

“Put the wall here instead. That’s big enough.”

“Can you put a wall in here?”

“It’ll be too dark if you do it like that.”

“This room isn’t for workers anyway.”

“
Budui!
That doesn’t look right.”

The two bosses conferred and the uncle scribbled out another wall. In twenty-three minutes they designed an office, a hallway, and three living quarters for factory managers. They moved to the top floor. Two bathrooms, a kitchen, nine dormitory rooms for workers: fourteen minutes. All told, they had mapped out a 21,000-square-foot factory, from bottom to top, in one hour and four minutes. Boss Gao handed the scrap of paper to the Lishui contractor. The man asked when they wanted the estimate.

“How about this afternoon?” Boss Gao said.

The contractor looked at his watch. It was 3:48 p.m.

“I can’t do it that fast!”

“Well, then tell me early in the morning.”

They went outside to discuss building materials. The contractor showed them two kinds of cinder blocks: one sold for 18.6 American cents; the other was 19.8 cents. Boss Wang chose the cheaper blocks. When it came to plaster, he said, “We just don’t want that kind that rubs off on your clothes when you brush against it.” The contractor asked if they needed a detailed estimate, with square footage itemized and calculated, but Boss Wang didn’t have time for that. “Just give us the price,” he said. The last thing they discussed was doors. The new factory would require fifteen total, and for some reason this particular item concerned Boss Wang.

“Don’t buy those cheap five-dollar doors that look terrible,” he said sternly. “We want the ten-dollar doors. And don’t try to make money by getting cheaper materials. That’s not the way you make money. I’ll tell you how to do it—do a good job now and then we’ll hire you again. That’s how we make money in Wenzhou. If you do it right, you’ll get more business. Do you understand?”

ALL ACROSS CHINA THE
people of Wenzhou are famous for their entrepreneurial skill. In a nation where millions have made the transition from countryside to city, from farming to business, the natives of southern Zhejiang are the prototypical peasant-entrepreneurs. Back in the 1980s, when China’s private economy took its first tentative steps, the Wenzhou people responded so quickly that the central government began to praise the “Wenzhou model” of rural development. As a business strategy it couldn’t have been simpler: low investment, low-quality products, low profit margins. Low education, too—even today, after two decades of a booming economy, nearly 80 percent of all Wenzhou entrepreneurs have fewer than nine years of formal schooling. But somehow it works, and the city has come to dominate certain industries. Today, roughly a quarter of the shoes sold in China come from Wenzhou. The city produces an estimated 70 percent of the world’s cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of the Wenzhou economy is private—unlike other parts of the nation, state-owned industries have played little role in local development.

Over time, Wenzhou entrepreneurs have spread out across the south. Often they follow new roads, which was part of the plan for the Jinliwen Expressway: it was designed to transport factory goods to the coast, but it would also allow businessmen to travel into the interior. This had already happened along other routes, like Highway 330. Wenzhou businessmen often came to a village, started a few factories, and then locals picked up on the idea. Many of the one-product towns began in this manner, and it had contributed to the overall success of Zhejiang Province. Despite having been relatively poor in the 1970s, Zhejiang now has the highest per capita urban and rural incomes of any province.

The Wenzhou people themselves love to talk about the mystery of their success. In general, the Chinese are highly attuned to regional differences, and they’re quick to bring up the shortcomings of some other part of the country. Beijing natives ridicule the low class of the Henanese; people in Shenzhen disparage migrants from Hunan and Sichuan;
lots of folks have something bad to say about women from Shanghai. But Wenzhou has an unusual taste for self-analysis. At the airport bookstore, an entire section is devoted to volumes about Wenzhou business:
The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money
,
The Feared Wenzhou People
,
The Wenzhou Code
,
Actually You Don’t Understand the Wenzhou People
. These books are popular with visitors, but it’s also common for natives to read up on themselves. Once I saw Boss Gao studying a book called
The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Entrepreneurs
. He asked me if I knew any Jews in America, and I said yes.

“Are they good at business?” Boss Gao said.

I said that some of them did business, and some of them did other things.

“It says here that Jews in Europe are famous for doing business,” he said.

“I guess that’s true historically,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean that all Jews do business nowadays.”

“This book says that the Jews are the Wenzhou people of Europe,” said Boss Gao.

It took me a minute to wrap my head around that one. But eventually I learned what to expect in conversations about Wenzhou development. Entrepreneurs often asked the same question: “Why do you think that we Wenzhou people are so good at business?” It pleased them if I said, “The environment.” This response agreed with the Wenzhou books, which generally propagate theories of environmental determinism. The region possesses little arable soil, and during imperial times there were poor transport links to the interior, because of the rugged landscape. With few options, Wenzhou natives turned to the sea, and they had already developed a strong trading culture by the end of the Ming dynasty, in the seventeenth century. They also built a tradition of migration, and pockets of Wenzhou émigrés gained footholds in port cities around the world. These networks survived the isolation of the Mao years, and so did the Wenzhou business instinct. Once the Communists allowed them to leave farms and start factories, the local economy took off.

The environmental theory makes sense, but there’s also an element
of self-determinism. People in southern Zhejiang believe in their business acumen, and they take pride in their ability to cut margins and develop trade networks. They have faith in themselves, and they have faith in business—there’s no shame in being a cold-blooded entrepreneur. A few years ago, a Wenzhou newspaper called
Fortune Weekly
ran a special Valentine’s Day supplement that included a survey of local male millionaires. The newspaper asked the men where they liked to have romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, and it listed the gifts they purchased for their wives and girlfriends. One question called upon respondents to recall “the time in your life when you felt the deepest emotion.” The two most common responses were “When I started my business” and “When I got divorced.” Another question asked: “If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be?” Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn’t make up their minds.

BY MY THIRD TRIP
to Zhejiang, I learned how to return a rental car with an empty tank. The first couple of times I miscalculated, bringing back the Santana with plenty of gas, which obviously pleased the men who ran the Wenzhou Prosperous Automobile Rental Company. The trick was to never fill the thing up: I added gas in five-and ten-dollar increments, and at the end of a journey I timed it so the low-fuel light flashed just before I made it back to Wenzhou Prosperous. And it was obvious that so long as I paid my thirty dollars per day, I could do whatever I pleased to a Wenzhou car. There weren’t any rules about where I could drive, and the company never checked for damage; they couldn’t have cared less about dents and scratches. In this part of China, it was hopeless—the rental cars were already riddled with marks.

I had never been any place in the country where driving was so dangerous. Part of the problem was infrastructure, which often had a slapdash quality. Wenzhou never benefited from the kind of central planning that shaped other key cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai, and here in Zhejiang the local governments usually had to figure out things on their own. Roads were undersized and in poor repair; traffic control
was a disaster. And the Wenzhou business instinct made things worse, because people were in a rush and they liked to take risks.

There was nothing more terrifying than a drive through the city’s coastal suburbs. Fifteen years ago, this region was all farmland, but it boomed so fast that old village boundaries disappeared. Now you judged transitions by advertisements on the side of the road, which featured local products. Once, I toured this region, heading south past the airport. First I cruised through a neighborhood where virtually every billboard displayed hinges, and then I began to see signs for electric plugs and adaptors. Soon they were replaced by plastic light switches; next came fluorescent bulbs. Everywhere I passed warehouses and factory buildings, but the road itself remained of rural dimensions: two lanes, no shoulder, badly pitted. Periodically a minor accident caused a traffic jam, and drivers leaned on their horns while staring at advertisements for hinges or light switches. In a place called Longwan I reached faucets—this area was home to nearly seven hundred factories that made water spouts. Automobile axles were next, then metal punch presses.

At last I came to the district of Rui’an, which according to the local government was home to exactly 1,208 manufacturers of automobile engine accessories, brakes, and steering systems. I passed pieces of vehicles in all the roadside shops: dozens of wheels in one window, rows of brake pads in the next, and then a block of stores that featured nothing but car ignitions. In the middle of town I came upon a fatal accident that had occurred just moments earlier. A young woman had been driving a scooter, and she must have been moving at a high rate of speed when she struck a car. The larger vehicle was badly dented and the scooter was smashed beyond recognition. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, and I had no choice but to drive directly past the accident site. A crowd had already gathered, pointing and chattering excitedly; nobody had bothered to cover the body. The woman hadn’t worn a helmet and she had struck the ground headfirst: legs bent backward, arms splayed out, face pressed flat down. When I drove past, before I could look away, I caught an image of her brains poured onto the pavement. It was late afternoon and the light was sharp; blood pooled bright around tangled hair.