Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (41 page)

A block further, the pedestrian crowd thinned out and traffic
returned to normal. Motor scooters zipped along; cars jockeyed for position; horns sang out in the streets. Billboards advertised more pieces of automobiles: hubcaps, pedals, spark plugs. Wipers and windshields, seats and steering wheels. Tires, tires, tires. My hands were still shaking when I pulled over for the evening at Rui’an’s International Hotel. The parking lot was packed with rows of black cars: Audis and Buicks and Volkswagens. Buyers and sellers, businessmen and cadres—and out on the bustling evening streets, where the neon shop signs came to life, nobody would have guessed that there was one less driver in the city.

WHEN I RETURNED TO
the Lishui factory in January of 2006, the bosses were testing the machinery. It had been only three months since my last visit, but during that time the place had been transformed. The contractor’s work was finished; the dividing walls had been erected and the ten-dollar doors were all in place. Three big punch press machines stood in the main room. Crates and boxes had been piled everywhere, full of equipment waiting to be assembled. There were workers, too—Boss Gao, the younger of the two entrepreneurs, was accompanied by three technicians who had been hired to get the factory running. On my last trip, the bosses had spoken vaguely of their products as “clothing accessories,” and now I asked one of the technicians for more detail.

The man’s name was Tian Hongguo, and originally he had come from Sichuan Province. He was in his late thirties, an advanced age in the factory world; everybody called him “Old Tian.” He was tiny, weighing just over one hundred pounds, and he had an elflike face: pointed chin, big ears, wide mouth. He grinned at my question.

“We’re going to make two things,” he said, and he took samples out of a box. One was a ring so small that it wouldn’t fit around my little finger. The other was a larger band of steel, razor-thin and covered with plastic at both ends. It was bent in the shape of a wide-open U, and Old Tian handed me a couple, in different sizes. One was just large enough for a billiard ball to pass through. The other was about the size of a softball. I asked Old Tian what they were for.

“It’s for women’s clothing,” he said.

He held the band to his breast so that the tips faced up, like a smile. Suddenly it dawned on me—these were support structures for brassieres.

“It helps women dress more beautifully,” Old Tian said. “We have different sizes, too. Some are small and some are big. Some are
really
big.” He gestured with his hands, forming the shape of an object roughly the size of a basketball. I couldn’t imagine he was still talking about bras, so I figured those wires must have a different function.

“The ones that are that big,” I asked, “what are they used for?”

“For Russians,” Old Tian said.

FOR THE PAST DECADE
Boss Gao had manufactured obscure pieces of clothing. He had grown up in the marshlands south of Wenzhou, in the region known as Ouhai, where his father grew rice and taught in the local middle school. Boss Gao attended two years of trade school, studying machinery, and in the mid-1990s he opened a small workshop with his family. They manufactured lining for trousers—the cheap white fabric that’s attached to the beltline. Like so many Wenzhou products, it required very little in the way of labor or technology. Initially the Gaos invested less than four thousand American dollars, and the family represented the entire work force: Boss Gao, his parents, and his two sisters. They sold to local clothing factories, and their profit margin in the early years was roughly 50 percent. They made enough money to expand, buying new machinery and hiring a half dozen workers.

In the beginning there were only five or six other workshops in the region that made the same product. But soon others in town noticed the Gao family’s success, and new factories began to spring up. By 2003, their neighborhood had become home to twenty different producers of nonwoven fabric, and profit margins had plummeted to 15 percent. That year, Boss Gao gave up on trouser lining. He was still making money, but he didn’t want to ride the industry all the way to the bottom.

“It was a lot easier to do business in the 1990s,” he told me once. “There weren’t so many people starting factories back then.” He often spoke fondly about that time; for Boss Gao, who was all of thirty-three
years old, the 1990s were the good old days, when competition wasn’t so intense. “Back then it was the product that mattered,” he said wistfully. “It used to be that you’d try to find a product that nobody else was making. But now everything is already being made by somebody in China. No matter what you make, you’re going to have competition. So now it’s not the product that counts. It’s the volume.”

After abandoning trouser lining, Boss Gao partnered with his uncle, who produced underwire for brassieres. It’s another product with a low cost of entry: all it requires is an electric metal-punch machine, which bends the steel, cuts the pieces, and cranks out nearly a hundred wires per minute. Demand is steady, which is the only good thing about underwire. “As long as there are women, you’ll have customers,” Boss Gao once said philosophically. “It’s like sanitary napkins.” But nobody gets rich from the wires, and Boss Gao and Boss Wang began to look for a new product. Their goal was to find something that required significant investment in technical machinery, which was one way to weed out the copycats.

Together the bosses searched far and wide—well, at any rate they thoroughly explored the brassiere. From the Wenzhou perspective, the product represents a vast world unto itself, since the final assembly of each bra consists of twelve separate components. The bosses started their search at the bottom, with the underwire, and then they worked their way up the bra, weighing the possibilities of each separate component. They thought about thread; they looked at lace; they considered the clasp. When they reached the top, where tiny 0-and 8-shaped rings adjust the straps, they found what they were looking for.

To a consumer, a bra ring seems simple to the point of invisibility. It consists of thin steel coated with nylon, and it weighs only half a gram; the average bra contains four such rings. They connect to nylon straps, and hardly any woman in America or Europe gives the objects a second thought. But in fact the rings are the most technically complicated component of the garment. In order to coat a steel ring evenly with high-gloss nylon, a manufacturer must have an assembly line with three distinct stages, each of which heats the ring to over five hundred degrees Celsius. All of it must be computer-controlled: the temperature,
the oscillating mechanism of the powder mixer, the speed of each conveyor belt. Such machinery can’t be cobbled together from spare parts, and it’s not cheap: Boss Gao and Boss Wang purchased their assembly line for sixty-five thousand dollars. In the past, neither entrepreneur had spent even a tenth as much on a piece of equipment, and all of their plans depended on this assembly line working smoothly.

The Machine sat on the ground floor, in the first room that Boss Gao had designed. It was a squat, sullen-looking thing: the exterior had been painted seasick-green and the two main assembly lines stretched fifty feet long. They were arranged one on top of the other, double-decker fashion. The conveyor belts were made of polished steel and they gleamed mirror-bright beneath bare lightbulbs. The whole thing weighed six tons, because the belts were propped up by unbelievably thick pillars of steel. These supports easily could have hoisted a house—there’s no logical reason why the manufacture of tiny bra rings requires such thick pillars. But steel, like cement, is one of the basic construction materials that tend to be overused in urban China. It’s an economy of scale: in such a massive country, at a time of incredible growth, companies turn out raw materials so fast that the prices are relatively cheap. Foreign architects often comment on the staggering amounts of cement and steel that go into a typical Chinese building project.

I visited the factory on the day they first tested the Machine. A technician named Luo Shouyun hit a switch, and gas burners ignited blue flames; the conveyor belts lurched forward. A digital console tracked the temperature. The room itself was cold—outside it wasn’t much above freezing, and the bosses, like most people in Zhejiang, didn’t heat their factory. But soon the digital numbers began to rise as the gas flames warmed the Machine. It hit ninety degrees Celsius, then 150. Within fifteen minutes the temperature had broken 400. The number topped out at 474, and then it suddenly plummeted. The Machine needed to sustain a level of at least 500 degrees before production could begin.

“Maybe it’s because it’s colder here than in Guangdong,” Luo Shouyun said. In the far south of China, he had spent most of a decade working on bra rings, and everybody called him Luo Shifu: Master Luo. He had been poached from a competing factory, and he was the only
one in the room who truly understood how the Machine worked. Now he put on a pair of fireproof gloves and tried to open the door to one of the heating elements. But the metal had been welded so poorly that the joints melted away in the heat, and the handle came off in Master Luo’s hand. He cursed and dropped the red-hot metal, which lay on the cold cement floor, hissing like an angry snake.

“
Mei shir
,” Boss Gao said. “No problem. Don’t worry about that.”

He lit another State Express 555 and gave one to Master Luo. Cigarette clenched between his teeth, Master Luo tinkered with the control panel, which was covered with two dozen switches. He decided to run an initial batch of rings through the assembly line, to see how they came out. At the end of the line he measured them with a digital caliper. They were 1.7 millimeters in width—far too fat for a bra ring, whose ideal thickness ranges from 1.2 to 1.3 millimeters. The nylon wasn’t melting evenly; the Machine was running too cold. Now the temperature of the assembly line wouldn’t even break 400. “Is it the weather?” Boss Gao said.

“In Guangdong during winter it was usually seventeen or eighteen degrees in the factory,” Master Luo said. He tinkered with the Machine’s gas valves, using a wrench. “Today it’s about six degrees,” he said. “Maybe that’s the difference.”

“Or it could be a problem with the gas,” Boss Gao said.

A half dozen natural gas canisters stood in the next room. They were four feet tall and made of metal, with rubber hoses that ran to the Machine. The men checked the connections: everything looked fine. Somebody theorized that a little movement might help. First they shook the gas canisters gently, rocking the huge tubes back and forth, but the Machine’s temperature console didn’t budge. They began to push harder. The men were still smoking and cigarettes dangled from their mouths while they clanged the metal tubes against the cement floor. Quietly, I edged toward the doorway, hoping to duck out if something blew.

“Maybe we need to heat them up,” Boss Gao said. “I’ll boil some water.” He turned on a stove in the main room and began to heat some kettles. Old Tian retrieved a stepladder and pushed it next to the gas canisters. After the water came to a boil, Boss Gao poured it into a
bucket, hoisted the thing onto his shoulder, and climbed the ladder. He still had a State Express 555 cigarette clamped in his mouth. That was my final vision of Boss Gao—at that point I decided it was no longer necessary to rely on eyesight to document these proceedings. From the next room I listened to what came next.

First a great sizzling sound, like meat hitting a hot grill; then a series of splashes; finally silence. I poked my head back inside the doorway. Steam had filled the room, and the newly baptized canisters glistened under bare lightbulbs. Master Luo checked the Machine’s temperature: no change. By the end of the evening, they had been fiddling with the assembly line for nearly four hours without any progress. They theorized that the natural gas might be low quality; Boss Gao said he’d try a different supplier. But that sounded like wishful thinking, and everybody seemed reluctant to confront the most likely reason—that there was some flaw in their brand-new Machine.

THE MACHINE’S ANCESTORS HAD
originally come from Europe. In Chinese factories, there’s always a genealogy to the equipment, and usually it can be traced to the outside world. Back in the 1980s, the bra ring industry was dominated by French and German manufacturers, but then production shifted to Taiwan, where labor was cheap. A number of Taiwanese factories imported the European machinery, and by the early 1990s the island supplied most of the world’s market for rings. In the middle of that decade, a Taiwanese-invested company called Daming decided to move production to China. This shift would become increasingly common for all industries over the next decade, until finally most of Taiwan’s labor-intensive plants relocated to the mainland.

Daming set up shop in Xiamen, one of China’s “special economic zones,” designed to attract foreign investment. The boss—for the sake of the story, it’s simplest to call him the First Boss—imported a European-made Machine. In the early years that Machine essentially minted money. Labor costs were even cheaper than in Taiwan, and there wasn’t any local competition, because the sophisticated production process made it difficult for knockoff artists. Over time, First Boss came to rely heavily on a worker
named Liu Hongwei, a migrant from rural Sichuan province. Liu had little formal education, but he was extremely intelligent, and over time he became an expert in the maintenance of the Machine.

Liu Hongwei also had the gift of remarkable memory. At Daming, in secret, he somehow created a detailed blueprint of the Machine. None of Liu’s coworkers ever saw him measuring or sketching the assembly line, and later they theorized that he must have memorized it section by section, studying the thing by day and then drawing it at night. After Liu finished his blueprints, he took them to the city of Shantou, another special economic zone in southern China. He met with Second Boss, who ran a company called Shangang Keji. In 1998, Second Boss hired Liu Hongwei and took the blueprints to a custom-tooling plant, which built another Machine. Initially the thing didn’t work—nobody’s memory is perfect, after all—but a couple months of adjustments solved the problems. Shangang Keji began producing bra rings, and soon Second Boss was rich, too.