Postcards From Tomorrow Square (7 page)

As will be obvious by now, there are things both admirable and creepy about this utopia. In every way possible, Zhang has isolated the culture of Broad Town from influences other than his own. He has no public shareholders to second-guess his choices—whether to stick to environmentally friendly products or to build a pyramid—nor even bankers holding debt. He has distanced the company from governmental control as much as any Chinese company owner can. His workers are physically distant from the distractions of Changsha—and that city itself is distant from the thriving metropolises of the coast. The same blogs that complain about imposed cultlike behavior at Broad acknowledge that the jobs pay well enough that plenty of new applicants are always willing to put on military uniforms and live their lives at Broad Town.

The positive aspect of this invented world is its ambition for something more than sheer efficiency and success. The entire workforce also musters for musical events. Many employees play musical instruments, and apparently all can, or do, sing. On December 31, 1999, Zhang had all of his workers stand in front of the then half-finished Versailles to be photographed singing in the new millennium. (The palace now serves as a “management training center” for meetings and seminars; the pyramid’s interior is being fitted out as an environmental museum.) The inspirational sayings carved on nearly every wall could sound like corporate boilerplate. From the founder of Toyota: “There is no boat that cannot be sunk.” (Moral: Don’t let up.) But the walls also bear sayings from Abraham Lincoln and other noncorporate figures. Among those honored with statues are Winston Churchill, the Chinese poet Li Bai, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Zhang has not forgotten his background as an artist, and he is renowned for fussing over every design detail of every feature of Broad Town.

When I asked him a more polite version of what any visitor would wonder—What is the deal with the pyramid?—Zhang said, “Our products are to make people comfortable and happy. If our employees are comfortable and happy, that will affect their work ethic and their professionalism.” He said that good food matters—and the food at Broad Town is good. So does a visually pleasant environment—and most vistas in this controlled landscape are pleasant. “Many companies in China are looking only for the short-term profit,” he said in conclusion. “Some of our expenditures are not directly for manufacture and sales, but our vision is long-term, and we believe that indirectly they will increase manufacture and sales.” And even if the steps don’t pay off, in the end it’s his company, and like utopians before him, he seems to consider it another work of art.

ZHANG AND INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

If I had asked my European friend what he was seeing but not noticing at Broad Town, the answer should have been: wood. Polished, attractive wood shows up in every structure. Clean, gleaming wood floors and beams in a lovely Japanese house, built (for no apparent reason) as part of a “Global Village” of housing styles from around the world. Wooden parquet floors and walls in a gymnasium for badminton and Ping-Pong. Wooden furniture in many of the offices. Dark wood paneling in the Mediterranean Club. Wood-block flooring throughout. If China was ever rich in timber resources, it certainly is not now. Why should a heavy-industry facility use so much expensive wood? Because it was free. All of the wood was recycled from shipping pallets and packing crates coming into the factory. Where it came from before that is another matter, but once it got to Broad Town, it was carefully reprocessed and reused—all at the insistence of Zhang Yue.

There is a showboat aspect to Broad Town’s recycling effort—every person I met there told me the story of the packing crates. And the Porsches roaring through town over the luxury weekend did not quite fit Zhang’s message that people should be conscious of their environmental impact at all times. But in fairness, when the United Nations Environment Program held a forum at Broad Town in 2003, Zhang argued that worldwide, systematic changes—in energy, packaging, and transportation—were essential so consumers could “enjoy a comfortable yet moderate life.” And when we finally reached my friend from NASA, around 6:30 a.m. EST, Zhang grilled him (through an interpreter) about the most efficient engines on the market—and lit up when he heard about a radically more efficient airplane being made in Austria. His company got its start partly because China was growing too fast for its own electric grid. Over the last decade he has read constantly about environmental problems and has come up with serious-sounding proposals for what his company, his country, and the world can do.

Solar-energy collectors are everywhere in Broad Town. Part of boot-camp indoctrination is training employees about environmental issues. When the company sells a cooling unit, it also offers guidance on reducing demand for air-conditioning. “For years the Chinese government focused only on economic development, but now they say that the environment and the economy should both be stressed,” Zhang told me. “But really the environment needs to be in first place, and economic growth in fourth.” Not seeing the trap, I asked what should come second and third. “The environment, and the environment!” he said. “The real measure of our economic progress is the life people can live, and the [gross domestic product] does not measure that.” He observed that a ton of dirty coal might bring 120 yuan in profit—but recent studies have shown that a ton of coal costs at least 200 yuan in medical care for inhabitants of the bleak, cancer-ridden mining towns. “Any primary-school child can see what’s wrong with that,” Zhang said, “but our economists can’t.”

For another international conference on the environment, Zhang prepared a captivating and unintentionally revealing document called “The World in 2015.” Part of it is quiet Chinese triumphalism: the world’s largest trading zone will be in Asia; the international currency will be not the U.S. dollar but the Asian dollar; the world’s most popular movie will be a drama set in ancient China. The world’s most profitable and admired company will not be one that sells computers or airplanes or oil but one that quietly economizes on energy use around the world, starting with new air-conditioning systems. “This company still has little reputation, for they have done those things others don’t care about. . . . It doesn’t matter that people may not know the name of this company, but they should know it is a Chinese company.”

The conclusion of the imagined history involves a historic UN speech by another of Zhang’s idols: “Albert Gore, sixty-seven years old, walked slowly to the platform. This old man, who became secretary-general of the UN one year ago, has a dull look in his eyes.” Why had no one heeded his warnings when there had been time? Why did the world keep building more coal and nuclear plants, instead of noticing what was happening to its climate and learning to conserve? “Choked with sobs, Secretary [Gore] cannot speak.” At last he finds his voice and challenges mankind, in the final words of Zhang’s essay, “to choose the establishment of the new moral ideal with higher standards.”

Subtle? No. Consistent with every detail of Zhang’s daily life? Probably not. But as an indication that more than pure moneymaking is under way, it is worth noticing. China will bring more than mere commerce to the world.

WIN IN CHINA!

APRIL 2007

Y
ou think TV is bad in America, and then you watch it someplace else. For all of its defects, American TV generally has high production values—attractive people to look at, sets and staging that don’t seem homemade—and it is often the place where new ideas get their start, just before they become worldwide clichés.

Right now the curse of Chinese TV, apart from its being state-controlled and de facto censored, is the proliferation of stupid, low-budget reality shows. The oddest reality show I’ve come across while channel surfing was a World’s Strongest Man–type contest between teams of midgets. The cruelest, put on by the state-owned China Central Television (CCTV), pitted young families against one another in elimination events. Each family team had three members—father, mother, elementary-school-aged child—and did coordinated stunts. Three families survived each show to appear in future rounds, and three were sent home, the children inconsolable and the husbands and wives looking daggers at each other.

Fortunately there is also a best Chinese reality show, or at least one that my wife and I followed avidly through its increasingly suspenseful Tuesday night episodes last year. We first heard of
Ying Zai Zhongguo
, or
Win in China
, from a Chinese American friend, Baifang Schell, who was involved in the production. We became so interested that in December we traveled to Beijing to be in the audience at CCTV’s cavernous main studio for the live final episode, in which one grand champion was chosen from five remaining contestants. Like many other Chinese reality shows, this one featured a segment known by the English letters “PK.” This means nothing to most English speakers (penalty kick?), but it is widely recognized in China as meaning “Player Kill” in online games.

The PK stage of
Win
served the function of the tribal council in
Survivor
or the boardroom in
The Apprentice
: After a contest or judges’ assessment each week, two of that episode’s competitors ended up pitted against each other in a three-minute lightning elimination. This is PK, in which one opponent issues a question, challenge, or taunt, and the other tries to answer, outwit, and provoke the first. Once done speaking, a competitor slams a hand down on a big button, stopping his or her own clock (as with a chess-match timer) and starting the opponent’s. Faster and faster, each contestant tries to manage the time so as to get the very last word. The audience gasps, cheers, and roars with laughter at the gibes—and at the end, one contestant is “killed,” as determined by audience vote or a panel of judges. Even if you can barely follow the language, it’s exciting.

But something else distinguishes
Win in China
—not just from the slew of other reality shows but also from its American model,
The Apprentice
, with Donald Trump. “The purpose of
The Apprentice
was very functional,” Wang Lifen, the producer and on-camera host of the show, told me (in English) shortly after the final episode. “There’s some job that already exists, and Donald Trump is just looking for somebody to fill it, while providing entertainment.” Wang said that she had higher ambitions for her show: “We want to teach values. Our dream for the show is to enlighten Chinese people and help them realize their own dreams.” Having seen the program and talked with contestants and compared it with some superficially similar Chinese reality shows, I don’t scoff at what she said.

The didactic and uplifting ambitions of the show could be considered classically Chinese, the latest expression of a value-imprinting impulse that stretches from the Analects of Confucius to the sayings of Chairman Mao. Or they could be considered, like the Horatio Alger novels of young, muscular America, signs of an economy at an expansive moment when many people want to understand how to seize new opportunities. Either way, the particular message delivered by the show seems appropriate to China at this stage of its growth. Reduced to a moral,
Win in China
instructs Chinese people that they have chances never open to their compatriots before—but also that, as one contestant told me at the end of the show, “The only one I can rely on is myself.”

W
ang Lifen moved from Beijing to Washington, D.C., in the fall of 2004, for a one-year fellowship at the Brookings Institution. She was then in her late thirties and was an influential figure in CCTV’s news division, where she had created and produced documentaries and talk shows. By the time she returned to CCTV a year later, she was ready to act on a question she’d asked while watching American TV: What would an improved, Sinified version of
The Apprentice
look like?

It would be Chinese in being huge. There would be thousands of initial candidates, with entry open to any adult “of Chinese origin” anywhere in the world. More than 100 (versus
The Apprentice
’s 18) would have a serious chance to compete on camera for the prize. The nature of that prize indicated why
Win in China
could seem more American than its American model. Instead of a job and a paycheck within a Trump-style empire, Wang offered seed money for new entrepreneurial ventures—and for more than just one contestant. By Chinese standards, the sums were enormous. The ultimate victor would receive 10 million yuan, or nearly $1.3 million. The runner-up would get 7 million yuan, and the three other finalists would get 5 million yuan apiece. With other prizes and incentives, the money the show was offering came to nearly $4 million.

This would be large even for a U.S. show, but the source of the prizes was even more unusual. Wang raised the money not from sponsors or the network but from individual investors in China—for instance, Andrew Yan, of Softbank Asia Infrastructure Fund, who had recently been named “Venture Capitalist of the Year” by the China Venture Capital Association. Yan and a few other investors, including Kathy Xu, of Capital Today, and Hugo Shong, of the U.S.-based company IDG, put up the pool of prize money—in return for a 50 percent share in the real-world businesses the winning contestants would use it to create or expand. Twenty percent would belong to the contestants, and 15 percent to the show’s production company. The remaining 15 percent would go by “lucky draw” to viewers who had voted for candidates, via mobile-phone text messages, during the show’s run. In effect, the many weeks of the program (33 episodes were shown in all, some live) amounted to a drawn-out, public version of a pitch to venture capitalists (the investors) from entrepreneurs seeking their backing (the contestants). Every week, contestants would be put through some kind of quiz or business-oriented team challenge that would whittle their numbers down. Wang had an additional hope for this process: that it would give viewers practical tips on starting businesses of their own.