Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  In Wenzhou, the pleather factories developed early in the city’s boom, before officials were concerned about pollution or health problems. But in recent years the city government has become determined to rid itself of the industry, preventing expansions and making it harder for current factories to renew permits. When I first started visiting southern Zhejiang, quite a few of the Wenzhou pleather plants were in the process of relocating to Lishui’s new development zone. In the global marketplace, it represents a natural path for an ugly industry. Americans certainly don’t want to make pleather, and even Wenzhou people have grown wary of the stuff, so now it finds its way to Lishui.

  When I asked Director Wang about the industry, he responded carefully, claiming that Lishui would regulate it better. “They’ve never controlled the DMF tightly around Wenzhou,” he said. “Those factories were started early, and back then there weren’t good standards. We have rules about this now. The government’s Environmental Protection Agency came here this year and did a long inspection, more than a month total. They said we’re on the forefront of this industry.” Director Wang told me that Lishui was limiting the number of pleather factories to twenty-six, because they didn’t want this to become their dominant product. As a strategy, it seemed risky—invite a group of known polluters to your city in an attempt to jump-start the economy. But there weren’t many options for such a remote place, and Lishui was willing to take whatever it could get. If there were mountains in the way, they had no choice but to move them.

  When I first began visiting Lishui, they were still demolishing a hill not far from the bra ring factory, and one day I drove to the site. Dozens of men clambered over the hillside, and the air was full of dust from all the vehicles: thirty dump trucks, eleven Caterpillar excavators, four big hydraulic drills on wheels. A foreman told me that they had been working here for more than a year, and already on this site they had lopped off 1.2 million cubic meters of dirt and stone. They accomplished this by packing the ground with dynamite, blowing everything to hell, and then carting off the rubble. For a year they had done this repeatedly, day after day, and thus far they had reduced the mountain’s elevation by about one hundred feet.

  While we were talking, another worker wandered over. He wore a straw sunhat and he carried a cheap plastic shopping bag in each hand. A slogan was printed on the bags: “Quality Number One, the Customer Comes First.” The bags contained thirteen pounds of dynamite, and the man set them on the ground near my feet. He said, “Will you take my little brother to New York?”

  Having lived in China for a decade, I was fairly accustomed to non sequitur conversations, but that introduction left me speechless. Anyway, I couldn’t take my eyes off those bags. The man smiled and said, “I’m joking. But he really wants to go to America.”

  We chatted for a while, and then the man trudged up the hill; he said they were about to blow up a big boulder. That was a prelude to this morning’s main event. In less than an hour they planned to ignite another 9.9 tons of dynamite that had just been packed beneath one part of the hillside. I asked who was in charge of demolition, and the foreman said it was a person named Mu Shiyou. “He’s up on top of that hill,” he said. What he actually meant was: He’s up on top of what’s left of that hill.

  “Can I talk to him?” I asked.

  “Sure,” said the foreman.

  I stood there for a while. The foreman watched the Cats crawling across the road. At last I said, “Should I just walk over there?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Is it OK if I go by myself?”

  “Of course!”

  I set off alone toward the doomed mountain. Big trucks barreled down with loads of dirt and rock, and I skirted the road, picking my way over the rubble. After a while I saw plastic wiring coming up from holes in the ground, and I realized that this was the area that had been packed with 9.9 tons of dynamite. I began to walk faster. Was it a bad sign that nobody else was on this stretch of hillside? The foreman hadn’t seemed at all concerned about my presence, but that’s precisely the problem with Chinese construction sites: they’re so welcoming that it makes me nervous. With half the nation being built, people have completely adapted to jackhammers and bulldozers, and construction crews rarely make a fuss about outsiders.

  In Lishui, during this early stage of building, it was especially easy to wander around. Government officials and police were almost never seen in the development zone, and people assumed that if you were there, you must have a good reason. They were friendly and they were open; everybody had arrived from somewhere else. When I wandered around, I never asked permission in advance, and I visited anything that interested me. I talked my way onto the catwalk of the city’s half-built bridge, two hundred feet above the Ou River, and I visited countless construction sites. Once I stopped to chat with some workers who were drilling the foundation for a new factory; they had just taken a break to drink some beer. After we talked for about fifteen minutes, they handed me a jackhammer and begged me to try it out. That was my personal contribution to the Lishui Economic Development Zone: half a foot of drilled earth, the workers laughing while I tried to make sure the damn thing didn’t hit my shoes. But who was in charge of all this?

  On the doomed mountain, I finally reached the top and saw the man with his plastic bags of dynamite. He introduced me to Mu Shiyou, who was organizing today’s demolition. Mr. Mu was sixty years old, round-faced and balding; he had the lilting accent of the Sichuanese. He was originally from Luzhou, a town on the Yangtze River, but in recent years he had settled in Zhejiang, where there’s a high demand for demolition crews. He carried government-issued identity cards that testified to his skills. They were pleather-bound, and one was embossed with gold characters that said “Zhejiang Province Demolitioner.” I liked the sound of that—Mr. Mu was fully licensed to blow up Zhejiang Province. Another card was labeled “Zhejiang Province Demolition Equipment Safe Worker.” “This means I’ve never had an accident,” Mr. Mu explained.

  He assured me that today’s blasting wasn’t at all dangerous. Before the big event, they were blowing up the smaller boulders, and periodically I heard an explosion and then a whistling sound as chunks of rock flew through the air. Every time this happened, I ducked instinctively, and Mr. Mu laughed and told me not to worry.

  “I’ve been doing this for thirty years,” he said. “I used to work on some of the nuclear sites in the west!”

  That helped put things in perspective—getting hit in the head with a rock was nothing compared to a twenty-megaton blast. And it was somewhat reassuring that Mr. Mu wore a hard hat, although it would have been even better if he had offered me one, too. I followed the man as he clambered down the hillside, collecting wires from the buried dynamite. He spliced them together, taping the leads and connecting everything to a spool of white wire. He carried an electric detonator in a sack over his shoulder. The smaller blasts were finished; most dump trucks had already left the site. After a while, the foreman blew a whistle, which was the signal for the final vehicles to depart. The yellow Cat excavators crawled away, until all of them were parked in a row at the edge of the site, facing outward. They looked like big animals hunched over, their rumps turned toward the doomed hill.

  The whistle blew again—this time the warning meant that everybody had to leave. The workers headed to the edge, until finally it was only Mr. Mu and me. He finished splicing the leads and began to walk away, playing out the white wire as he went. Fifty feet, one hundred feet, two hundred. The site had grown so quiet that our footsteps crunched in the dirt; I heard birds calling up above. This was the closest thing to silence that I’d experienced in Lishui’s development zone—usually the place roared with trucks and machines and jackhammers.

  We walked together to the line of Cats. Mr. Mu stood in the shadow of one of the vehicles, and he set the detonator atop the parked treads. The detonator had two switches labeled “Charge” and “Explode.” A command crackled over Mr. Mu’s radio—“Charge!”�
��and he flipped the first switch.

  “Get out there where you can see it better!” he said. Nervously I stepped away from the Cat’s shadow, looking out at the silent hillside. On the radio, a countdown began at five and ended with another command: “Explode!” Mr. Mu hit the second switch. For the briefest instant, before the mountain roared, a web of electric sparks flickered across the rocks, like lightning come to earth.

  ON FEBRUARY 9 OF 2006, a week after the Chinese New Year, Boss Wang blew up two big boxes of fireworks outside the factory. In Zhejiang that’s a traditional ritual for opening a business. Bigger companies hire dragon dancers to perform at the front gate, but a small entrepreneur like Boss Wang couldn’t afford the troupe fees, so he limited himself to fireworks. He also paid a fortune-teller to determine the optimum date for his opening. On the lunar calendar, it was the eighth day of the first month, and eight is the luckiest number in China.

  Like many Zhejiang entrepreneurs, Boss Wang was deeply superstitious. In China, religion is stronger in the south, and Christianity has become particularly popular in the regions around Wenzhou, where many people associate the foreign faith with development. But Boss Wang wasn’t religious; he never spoke of Jesus or Buddha. He believed in feng shui, and he believed in fortune-tellers: he never scheduled an important business event without first having the date analyzed. Boss Wang was forty years old, and he made a much less polished figure than his partner and nephew, Boss Gao. The older man had short hair, a gentle smile, and wide-set eyes that often bore a slightly pained expression. He spoke with a stutter—his eyelids fluttered whenever he struggled with a phrase. His clothes tended to be stained with grease. “The big bosses don’t mess with machines,” he told me once, while repairing a metal punch press in the factory. “But I’m only a small boss, so I have to do everything I can. If a general doesn’t have enough soldiers, he has to fight, too.”

  Boss Wang had made a career out of manufacturing odds and ends. His parents had been farmers, and in the early 1990s he first went into business by producing sections of plastic piping. After that, he made steel parts for bicycle bells, and it was the metalwork business that introduced him to bra underwire. He had never grown truly rich from any of these endeavors and he often spoke regretfully of the past. He told me that in high school he had just missed the cutoff for university admission. “It was a lot harder back then,” he said. “From my generation, out of one hundred people, maybe one or two went to college.” He had grown up in Longwan, one of the Wenzhou coastal regions that developed into an early factory district. “For a while they were famous for making pens, but I never made pens,” Boss Wang told me. “Then they became famous for shoes, but I didn’t make that either. Shoes were the best way to make money. So many of my friends went into that business, and now they’re all rich. They sometimes ask me if I wished I had made shoes, too. And I have to admit that I have some regrets. A lot of those guys now have tens of millions.”

  Boss Wang planned to invest most of his life savings in the bra ring factory, a total of over ninety thousand dollars. In China that’s a great deal of cash, and the average person would be thrilled to have such resources. But the frame of reference is all that matters, and in Longwan Boss Wang had always been surrounded by greater success. Even after coming to Lishui he found himself dwarfed by his new neighbors. Boss Wang and Boss Gao rented their factory space from Geley Electrical Company, which had been founded by a man named Ji Jinli. Ji had started out as a lowly peasant in Qiaotou, where he began to manufacture buttons like everybody else. Eventually he expanded to new products—plastic light switches and outlet covers, as well as copper wiring. He had moved to Lishui in order to take advantage of the cheap land-use prices, and his new factory consisted of three large buildings. He had so much extra space that he acted as a landlord, renting out the two-story wing to Boss Wang and Boss Gao.

  In the courtyard of the Geley compound stood a cement pool and a cement stand with three flagpoles. Every day they flew the Chinese flag, a red Geley company flag, and the American Stars and Stripes. Geley’s products were sold in boxes that advertised “American Geley Professional Electrical Engineering.” Workers told me the business had investors from the United States, but when I asked around, I found no evidence of foreign money. Probably it was just a way of gaining prestige: people in factory towns believe that foreign-invested companies are better run. And Ji Jinli was clearly conscious of face. In Lishui he commissioned an impressive factory gate with two big cement lions, and the main entrance hall (cement steps, cement guard stand) featured a quote by the owner in his flowing calligraphy. The words had been reproduced in gold metal and blown up to such size that they covered half a wall:

  THE TREMORS OF THE FUTURE

  ARE HAPPENING RIGHT BEFORE YOUR EYES

  This slogan was also printed atop the cardboard boxes used to ship Geley’s main product line, which was marketed as “The Jane Eyre Series.” The Jane Eyre Series consisted of plastic switches and electric outlet covers that began at a price of two dollars and ninety-seven cents. To some people, it might seem absurd or pretentious to name a light switch after a character in a classic Victorian novel. But such folks have probably never manufactured buttons for a living, and they most certainly did not grow up as peasants in Qiaotou.

  Everything depends on perspective, and somehow Boss Wang always found himself looking up at his neighbors. Here in Lishui, he and Boss Gao had nothing to rival Geley: no cement lions, no gold calligraphy, no foreign flags, no Brontë protagonists. They hadn’t even put up a sign for their factory. But at least the Machine was in working order, and three days after setting off fireworks the bosses posted a handwritten notice next to the factory door:

  WORKERS WANTED

  Looking for 30 female workers

  and 15 male workers

  Qualifications:

  1. Ages 18 to 35, middle-school education

  2. Good health, good quality

  3. Attentive to hygiene, willing to eat bitterness and work hard

  Boss Wang needed men to handle the big metal punch presses, which manufacture the rough rings used on the Machine’s assembly line. Mostly, though, he planned to hire women. The majority of the factory’s jobs were unskilled and required little strength: workers had to sort underwire, monitor assembly lines, and package finished bra rings. Like other factory managers, Boss Wang expressed a strong preference for young female workers.

  “Girls have more patience and they’re easier to handle,” he explained. “Men are more trouble—they start fights or cause some other problem.” When I asked about the ideal worker, Boss Wang said that she should be young and inexperienced. “If she’s already had other jobs, then I’ll just have to pay her more,” he said. For the same reason he preferred a candidate to have little formal education. It was a bad sign if she dressed well or had a distinctive hairstyle. Pretty girls were a risk. “I want a person to look average,” Boss Wang said. “I don’t want somebody who’s too complicated. I don’t want somebody who thinks, ‘If I feel like doing something, then I’m going to do it.’ That’s no good for me.” One of Boss Wang’s questions in job interviews was to ask about hobbies. If a candidate said “Playing cards” or “Spending time with friends,” that was a negative—too frivolous. “Reading books” indicated that an applicant was lazy. Worst of all was a job candidate who said she spent free time on the Internet. “I like it if she enjoys being with her family, or caring for her mother, or something like that,” Boss Wang said. “That’s what a simple person from the countryside should be like. I want somebody who can eat bitterness.”

  IN CHINESE FACTORY TOWNS, late winter is the season of the job search. Many migrants return home for the Spring Festival holiday, when the Chinese New Year is celebrated, and afterward they board buses and trains bound for cities with development zones. It’s a restless time—a month when people finally act on long-held plans to leave the village, or switch jobs, or try a new city. Even the cautious are spurred to action
, and a decision made during this period often shapes the rest of the year. Occasionally, a decade later, a migrant will look back and realize that her entire career was sparked by one chance interview during a February morning long ago.

  All of this was new to Lishui. Locals told me that 2006 was the first year the development zone would have a significant number of working factories, and yet somehow the news had already gone out to migrants. They poured out of the local train station, and they clogged the bus terminus; on the new expressway most traffic consisted of long-distance buses catering to job seekers. In China, where the migrant population grows by an estimated ten million every year, countless bus routes run from the provincial interior. Usually their destination is the coast, but sometimes they find their way to less established places like Lishui. That first year in the development zone, migrants dragged their bags along unfinished roads—people without jobs, newly arrived in a place without proper streets. But they knew some factories were already buzzing, and others would soon follow, and there was an advantage to arriving early.

  Some migrants visited the Lishui “talent market,” the local job-search center. The building was located downtown, and it featured a huge digital screen that scrolled an endless list of jobs. Young people stood in packs, necks craned upward, watching careers flash past in the terse jargon of the Chinese job listing:

  BREAKING ROCKS.

  MALE, GOOD HEALTH, WILLING TO EAT BITTERNESS.

  40 YUAN PER DAY AND MEALS INCLUDED.

  ORDINARY WORKERS NEEDED, FEMALE.