Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  “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.

  It didn’t take long for Third Boss to enter the picture. He was also based in Shantou, where he started a company called Jinde, and he poached Liu Hongwei. Together they used the blueprints once more, custom building another Machine. By now the price of bra rings had already dropped significantly, but the margins were still good, and Third Boss did well, too. Nevertheless, he was furious when he heard that Liu Hongwei had secretly begun negotiations with Fourth Boss.

  I first heard this story from Master Luo, who had worked alongside Liu Hongwei in the city of Shantou. Back then people said that Liu had received approximately twenty thousand American dollars for the sales of his blueprints, but nobody knew for certain. Master Luo did know, however, the exact amount of the bounty that was placed on the man’s head by Third Boss: one hundred thousand yuan, or more than twelve thousand dollars. “He just wanted information,” Master Luo explained. “He said he would pay that money to anybody who could tell him where Liu Hongwei had gone. He was really angry about what he had done.”

  I asked what Third Boss planned to do if he found the man.

  “You know how business is in the south,” Master Luo said, grinning. “It would be like killing a dog.”

  But as far as profits went, it was already too late. Once the Machine became available on the open market, anybody with sixty-five thousand American dollars could buy one. Over the past few years, Fourth Boss had been joined by Fifth Boss, and Sixth Boss, and Seventh Boss, and on and on. By the time the Lishui company got started, there were already twenty major factories in China involved in the business, and the bulk price of a bra ring had plummeted by 60 percent. Nowadays the profit margin often comes down to transport, which is why Boss Gao and Boss Wang chose to make the product in Lishui. No other major bra ring manufacturer was located in this part of Zhejiang, and with the new expressway they would have an advantage in supplying the province’s brassiere factories.

  Master Luo often talked about Liu Hongwei, referring to him as “the worker who tricked three bosses.” The story had the ring of myth, a laborer’s legend, and finally, out of curiosity, I flew to Shantou to try to confirm it. First Boss, Second Boss, and Third Boss all refused to talk—they clearly did not wish to revisit this incident. But I met with others who had worked with Liu Hongwei, and all of them told the same basic story, although certain details changed with every narrator. Some people believed that Liu wasn’t his real name; others thought he lied about his home region. A couple of coworkers described him as a master forger, although one factory manager, who had seen Liu’s government-issued ID card with his own eyes, swore that it was authentic.

  Eventually, I was even shown the plans for the stolen Machine. They were held in the city of Guangzhou, at the Qingsui Machinery Manufacture Company, which had custom-made the equipment according to Liu’s specifications. “His schooling wasn’t really very good, so it was hard to get the assembly line to work,” the manager at Qingsui told me. “It took us two months to make all the adjustments.” The manager was friendly and open, and I sensed that he showed me the blueprints because he hoped to sell me a Machine, even though I told him repeatedly I was a writer. His most recent deal had been with Boss Gao and Boss Wang.

  At the Lishui factory, where the first test of the equipment ended in failure, Master Luo eventually realized that the Machine still had a major design problem. He spent two weeks taking the thing apart and replacing key sections. He adjusted the gas burners closer to the conveyor belt, and he tinkered with the design of the oscillator. He jury-rigged some sections of the Machine with plywood and string, and he never bothered to reattach the handle that had melted off. By the time they started production, the Machine was already bruised and battered—there was a big gash where the handle used to be, and the adjusted burners had left black scorch marks
across the steel. Master Luo told me the support pillars were needlessly thick because Liu Hongwei hadn’t paid so much attention to that part of the design. “The blueprints still aren’t very good,” he said.

  Master Luo believed that Liu Hongwei was a false name, and he described his former coworker in many of the same terms I heard from others. People said Liu Hongwei was tall and thin, with the dark-skinned appearance of a peasant. He was poorly educated. He supposedly had a wife and child, although nobody had ever met them. And despite the impressive bounty offered by Third Boss, the twelve thousand dollars were never claimed, because Liu successfully disappeared without a trace. He was jiaohua, tricky—that’s the word most closely associated with Liu Hongwei. I heard it again and again, in all the places where bra rings are made, in Lishui and Shantou and Guangzhou; everywhere people shook their heads and said Liu was jiaohua. Nobody had the slightest idea where the man had gone.

  BY THE TIME THE Machine was working, in January of 2006, the Jinliwen Expressway had opened. It consisted of two lanes in each direction, and shoulders were broad; the median had been meticulously landscaped with bushes that blocked the headlights of oncoming vehicles. All along the road, at an interval of every thousand meters, stood a free emergency phone—a detail that would have seemed extravagant in the United States, and one that’s hardly necessary in China, where cell phone coverage is excellent. Along the Ou River, mountains are so steep that in many places the highway crews had to blast straight through the cliffs. From Wenzhou to Lishui, there were twenty-nine new tunnels, the longest of which stretched for over two miles. The only detail still lacking involved maps. On government-published atlases, the expressway’s route hadn’t been marked out yet, but Chinese maps always lag behind construction. Sometimes it seems as if people can build things faster than they can draw them.

  For a driver in China there is no greater pleasure than a new highway. The first few times I took the Jinliwen Expressway, traffic was light, because many local ramps had yet to open. It was possible to drive the seventy-five miles from Wenzhou to Lishui, but you couldn’t exit or enter along the way, and often I cruised for dozens of miles without seeing another vehicle. Some sections of the highway were elevated, passing right above factory towns like Qiaotou. The new road stood so close to the warehouses that I could see local life: workers entering buildings, trucks picking up goods, cement mixers starting new construction projects. But nobody was entering the expressway, which was still off-limits to these places. It felt like flying—glimpses from the window as I cruised overhead.

  All along the highway, billboards touted cement brands: Golden Garden Cement, Red Lion Cement, Capital of the Immortals Cement. Those were the first advertisements, and the highway was also marked by information signs, which were the same shade of green as in the United States. Many Zhejiang road signs had even been translated into English. In Wenzhou, the exit read “Shoe Center of China.” The expressway’s lanes had been labeled “Slow Lane” and “Quickly Lane.” “Dirve Carefully”—that mangled notice was everywhere. Another commanded “Do Not Get Tired.” Periodically a strange couplet appeared on a sign beside the road:

  PLEASE NOT TRY TIRED DRIVING

  KEEP OFF THE TRAFFIC ACCIDENT

  At Lishui, the exit led straight to the city’s Economic Development Zone. After the peacefulness of the new expressway, it was a shock to enter the half-built industrial park, where most roads had yet to be paved. Earthmovers and bulldozers worked around the clock, and rugged farmland surrounded the zone on all sides, a reminder of how this place had looked until recently. The scale of the construction project was impressive—nearly six square miles. The director of the economic zone, a man named Wang Lijiong, told me that in order to prepare for the factories they had leveled exactly one hundred and eight mountains and hills.

  Chinese officials have a way with statistics—they rattle off overwhelming numbers in the most casual fashion. One of Director Wang’s government colleagues, a man named Yang Xiaohong, told me that from 2000 to 2005, Lishui’s urban population had grown from 160,000 to 250,000, because of all the migrants who came to work construction and factory jobs. With the new development zone, he expected the population to double to half a million in the next fifteen years. He also said the Lishui government had invested $8.8 billion in infrastructure from 2000 to 2005. During those five years, according to Yang, the city’s infrastructure investment was five times the amount spent during the previous half century.

  Every time I met an official, I scrambled to write down the numbers, and then in the evening I’d look at my notebook and wonder if they could possibly be true. But Director Wang Lijiong’s remark about moving one hundred and eight mountains made me stop scribbling. I asked the man to explain what he meant.

  “Pretend that this is a mountain,” he said, pointing at a spot on the table between us. He moved his finger a few inches over. “This is another mountain. Between them there’s a valley. So we take the tops off the two mountains, and we fill in the valley. We lower the high parts and raise the low parts, and we make it as flat as possible.”

  He ran his hand along the table—perfectly flat. He continued: “There’s a saying here in Lishui. ‘For every nine acres of mountains, there’s half an acre of water and half an acre of farmland.’ With such a small percentage of good land, we had no choice but to move the mountains.”

  Director Wang was in his late forties, and he dressed casually, in jeans and sweaters. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a gold Omega watch. He was a member of the Communist Party. In his pocket, he carried a laser pointer, and during our discussions he occasionally used it to illuminate some detail on the map of Lishui that hung on his office wall. It was a map of the future—the drawing featured all the roads in the development zone that had yet to be built. Director Wang was friendly and easygoing, and he answered my questions with a directness that surprised me. He also returned my phone calls—I had never known a Chinese official who did that. Most of them are wary and secretive; they see no reason to talk to a foreign reporter. But Director Wang was different, and once I asked him about his background.

  “My experiences are very complicated,” he began. He explained that during the Cultural Revolution he had been sent down to the countryside, like many city youths, and afterward he was assigned to a job in a dynamite factory. Then he joined the People’s Liberation Army and trained as a tank driver. For five years he drove tanks, after which he left the military and was appointed to a banking job. Ten years of banking were followed by a cadre position in a development zone. After that, he moved from town to town, rising steadily through the bureaucracy, until at last he had been chosen to lead Lishui’s new industrial park. He had very little formal education, but his son was a graduate student in international finance at the University of Auckland. The fact that in two generations this family had gone from driving tanks to studying foreign economics was not particularly stunning. Many men of Director Wang’s age possess illogical résumés, full of disjointed transitions and unexpected career jumps. But when they tell these stories, it’s the trajectory that matters, not the specific steps themselves. Dynamite to tanks to banks to development zones—who can argue that this isn’t progress?

  Director Wang still drew lessons from his days in the military. “In a tank, you go directly at your goal,” he said. “You can’t worry about whether the road is good or bad, or if something happens along the way. You have to be focused; you need the spirit of persistence. I’m that way here at the development zone. I don’t get discouraged by problems.”

  He explained that his tank-driving years had inspired the slogan for the Lishui Economic Development Zone: “Each person does the work of two people, and two days’ work is done in a single day.” For Director Wang, the biggest threat was time. Development zones had already been functioning for twenty years in other parts of China, and new ones constantly cropped up. Their basic strategy was the same everywhere: prepare infrastructure, sell land-use rights at cut ra
tes to factory owners, and grant tax breaks for initial years of production. If a city came late to this strategy and hoped to distinguish itself, there weren’t many options. Occasionally the local government discovered some major industry that was ripe for exploitation—this happened in Wuhu, the city in Anhui Province that decided to produce Chery cars. But such opportunities were increasingly rare, and nowadays it was far more likely that a latecomer ended up making products that other places hoped to avoid.

  By 2006, Lishui had already become home to more than a dozen major plants producing synthetic leather. If cement and steel are the characteristic elements of Chinese cities, overused in construction projects, synthetic leather plays a similar role for consumers. Foreigners living in China call the stuff “pleather”—shorthand for “plastic leather”—and it’s amazing how many permutations can be found in daily life. Virtually every Chinese entrepreneur carries a pleather money bag, and the cooler ones wear pleather jackets. Women dress in pleather skirts; men have pleather loafers. I’ve visited apartments in which every piece of furniture is covered in pleather. The stuff is so plentiful that it seems like a natural resource—sometimes I imagined they were mining it straight out of the ground in some forgotten part of Shanxi Province.

  In fact a lot of it comes from the Wenzhou region. Pleather factories first developed in the coastal suburbs, near the airport, and the industry’s effects are one of the first things that a visitor notices upon arrival: the air is a dirty brown and a sickly sweet smell lingers over the airport. The pleather industry is notorious for a solvent called DMF, or dimethylformamide, which is used in production. In the United States, studies have shown that people who work with DMF often suffer from watery eyes, dry throat, and coughing. They lose their sense of smell and they become intolerant of alcohol. Long-term exposure to DMF causes liver damage, and studies suggest that female workers have increased risk of stillbirths. In laboratory tests with animals, DMF has been proven to cause birth defects.