Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  I thought, So much for the fortune-tellers. The day had the angry look of pleather weather, with gray-streaked clouds sagging low above the development zone. At the bra ring factory, the bosses had hired a forklift, four Liberation trucks, and seven day laborers. The trucks were five-ton flatbeds with open backs, and one of them had already been loaded by the time I arrived. It was packed with cardboard boxes and pieces of machinery, and I asked Boss Gao what they planned to do if it rained.

  “It can’t rain,” he said.

  “It looks like it might.”

  “Mei banfa,” he said. “There’s nothing we can do about it.”

  Since early morning, Master Luo had been taking apart the Machine. He broke down the main assembly line into three sections, and they used the forklift to hoist the heavy steel frame onto a truck. They hauled out the metal punch presses and the underwire machinery. Old Tian and Little Long boxed up the finished bra rings: more than a million total, packaged into ninety-four cardboard crates. By that point, all the major equipment had been moved, and Boss Gao and Boss Wang picked through each floor like gleaners in the wake of a harvest. They salvaged the dirty carpet in the upstairs office; they gathered any scrap of metal that could be sold to recyclers. They unscrewed every single lightbulb in the factory. With a hammer, Boss Gao pounded out and pocketed nails from a pile of scrap wood. A little more than a year earlier, they had ordered the ten-dollar doors from the contractor, and now they took each one off its hinges. They stacked them flat like playing cards in the back of a truck. At midday a few heavy drops fell, and the bosses looked up in fear, but the weather held.

  Mr. Tao showed up in the afternoon. For half an hour he stood there casually, watching the trucks get loaded. He didn’t offer to help: as of now he was officially off the clock. During recent days, in addition to keeping the salary negotiations on slow burn, he had secretly embarked on a job search, finding an assembly-line position at the nearby Huadu pleather plant. Because of the reputation for toxic fumes, it paid better than most entry-level jobs: Mr. Tao stood to make fifty-nine cents an hour. In the evenings he’d be able to run the family dry goods stand. As for his daughters—all the talk about their youthfulness and the need for a chaperone had been nothing but a negotiating ploy. Mr. Tao had always known they were capable of surviving on their own, and now they were free to go.

  Ren Jing made the same decision for herself. At the end, her mother panicked and pursued the girl all the way to the factory gate, begging her to stay. She was too young; this was only her second factory job; she needed to wait until next year! But Ren Jing was determined: she had packed a small bag with all her possessions, and she waited to catch a ride with one of the moving trucks. She said nothing and she refused to make eye contact with her mother. The woman pleaded until she burst into tears; the girl remained stoic. And finally the mother gave in, shouting, “Leave then, if you want to leave!”

  She turned and walked stiff-legged across Suisong Road, crying hard. The moment she left Ren Jing’s side, the girl broke down—she dropped her head between her knees and sobbed. For the next hour, mother and daughter stood on opposite sides of the street, crying. They were too angry to speak to each other, and they made no eye contact, but the mother refused to go. It’s a Chinese tradition to see a loved one off to the final departure, and even in her rage the mother wouldn’t turn her back on her child.

  Finally Ren Jing’s older sister arrived to ferry messages back and forth across Suisong Road. “She says you better be careful,” she told Ren Jing, and the sixteen-year-old responded: “Tell her I’ll be fine.” Five minutes later, the sister returned: “She’s crying; she really wants you to stay!” But Ren Jing held firm: “I’ll call her when we get there tonight.” It took a long time for the workers to load the third truck, and then Ren Jing climbed into the cab. At the end, after the mother’s entreaties had been exhausted, she sent two hundred yuan across the street. She was still standing there, tears streaming down her cheeks, when the truck disappeared with her daughter.

  Nobody cried at the Tao sisters’ departure. Each girl packed a small suitcase, and they chattered excitedly as they made their way to the old factory, like American kids going off to college. Mr. Tao accompanied them to the gate but didn’t linger. No hugs, no kisses—he was soldier-like until the end. Traditional farewells didn’t matter to him; he had more important business to attend to. The last thing he said was, “You need to dress warmly. It’s going to get cold, and you’ll get sick if you’re not careful. If you’re sick, you’ll have to spend money on medicine. So dress warmly, OK? Good-bye.”

  With that, he spun on his heel and marched off. At ten o’clock the last truck finally left the old factory. They drove to the new location, where everybody worked well past midnight, making sure that the equipment was unloaded and stacked safely indoors. They had moved it all—the Machine and the metal punch presses, the lightbulbs and the ten-dollar doors, the underwire and the million bra rings—in the span of a single day. Almost immediately after they finished the sky opened up and it rained like there was no tomorrow.

  IV

  MY CHINESE DRIVER’S LICENSE EXPIRED IN THE SUMMER of 2007. By then, I had moved back to the United States, where I became accustomed to new road routines. In traffic I learned to drive slower, and the right shoulder no longer presented an option for passing. I kept my hand away from the horn. At intersections, when a light turned green, I had to suppress an instinct to immediately cut left across oncoming traffic, the way you do in China. I no longer worried about three-wheeled tractors, or long-distance buses, or black Audi A6s. I took my car to a garage where the mechanics don’t smoke. Once, in Denver, a woman dented my back bumper, and we exchanged phone numbers instead of cash. Twice I was pulled over by the Colorado cops. Both times they let me off with warnings, telling me to drive a little slower and enjoy my day.

  Near the end of the year I visited China. A friend told me there’s a grace period for license expirations, so I went to Beijing’s Public Safety Traffic Bureau and filled out all the forms. It couldn’t have been easier; they gave me a new document that’s valid until the year 2013. I caught a flight to Wenzhou, picked up a Volkswagen Santana, and turned the key in the ignition: red light. By then, I knew every gas station within a five-mile radius of the Prosperous Automobile Rental Company, so I drove to the nearest Sinopec. While I was filling up, two policemen pushed a patrol car into the station. The engine was off; they had it in neutral gear. I asked if the vehicle had broken down.

  “No, it’s fine,” one of the cops said cheerfully. “We just ran out of gas!”

  It felt good to be back. I headed north on the Jinliwen Expressway, cruising past the one-product towns: the jungle gyms of Xiaxie, the buttons of Qiaotou. In Lishui I spent a couple days driving around the development zone. The government had recently initiated a local project called the Eastern Expansion, which would quadruple the size of the existing factory district. They hoped to move into higher-tech industries, and the project would require an additional $900 million in investment, most of which would come from loans. This statistic was given to me by Wang Lijiong, the former tank driver and current director of the development zone. He told me that the Eastern Expansion would require the removal of another four hundred mountains and hills.

  I remembered the explosion I’d witnessed in 2005, when the demolition crew was working near the bra ring plant. I drove back to the site, and the men were long gone; so was the mountain. In its place stood four new factories. One manufactured construction materials, another sold chemicals to DuPont, and the third produced polyurethane to be used by the pleather plants. The fourth factory had a big English sign: “Zhejiang Renli Environmental Protection Co., Ltd.” It consisted of a long low building with a huge smokestack emitting billowing white clouds. Nearby, hundreds of rusty metal barrels had been lined up beneath a makeshift rain cover. A slogan decorated a wall:

  IN ORDER TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT,

  EVERYBODY HAS RESP
ONSIBILITY

  I wandered into the compound, where nobody minded that I was uninvited. A worker escorted me to an office, and a man in a dark suit handed me his card: Ye Chunsheng, vice president of Renli. He explained that Renli is a private enterprise that processes DMF, the poisonous solvent used in the manufacture of pleather. When Lishui’s pleather factories complete a production cycle, they end up with DMF as a waste product, which they cart over to Renli. All the rusty barrels outside were full of the stuff, waiting to be processed.

  “This facility runs twenty-four hours a day,” Mr. Ye said. “We’re the only company in China that does this. We have one facility in Wenzhou and one facility here.”

  I asked about the clouds of white smoke, and Mr. Ye assured me they were clean. “The government approved it all,” he said. He offered me a cigarette and shook my hand; he invited me to come back any time. On the way out, I counted a total of six hundred and forty barrels of DMF. It occurred to me that only in China could you visit a mountain and then, two years later, find it replaced by something called the Renli Environmental Protection Co., Ltd.

  THE BRA RING FACTORY initially did well after moving. Their new location was in Ouhai, the marshlands south of Wenzhou, where it had been announced that part of the region would eventually be cleared of all industry in order to create a green belt. In Chinese cities, such projects are early signs that an environmental consciousness is developing, but there’s still a long way to go. In Ouhai, after the green belt plans were announced, people responded by moving in a lot of low-end factories that are heavy polluters. They figured that a doomed region temporarily enjoys less regulation, and rents are cheap, too. This was the main appeal for Boss Wang and Boss Gao—they saved a lot of money on their lease. Eventually they’d have to move again, but there wasn’t much reason to worry about that now.

  Within a few months of the transfer, a neighboring entrepreneur secretly approached Master Luo. The neighbor had noticed the bra rings were selling well, and he wanted to get into the business, so he offered Master Luo a stake in a new company. But Master Luo turned it down—he decided that Wenzhou people are too untrustworthy. “I learned that from working with these guys,” he said. “If a Wenzhou boss makes a promise, you know he’ll break it.”

  Nevertheless, the neighbor entrepreneur made an order with the Qingsui Machinery Manufacture Company, and soon there was another Machine in the Wenzhou region, cranking out bra rings. During one of my conversations with Master Luo, he told me that it would require only forty thousand American dollars for an outside investor to start such a business, so long as Master Luo was involved. He knew how to buy a Machine and assemble it, and he could find factory space. Workers were cheap. Master Luo mentioned that he had savings of his own to contribute to the forty thousand in start-up fees, and finally I realized what he was getting at. I thanked him, explaining that I wasn’t cut out for business, especially not in China. But if I ever quit writing and decided to make brassiere accessories, there was nobody else with whom I could imagine partnering.

  A few months later Master Luo left the bra ring factory. They had never paid him the promised salary, and they owed him nearly fifteen hundred dollars, an enormous sum in China—but at last he decided to cut his losses. He returned to the south, where he found another boss who wanted to get into the ring business. Master Luo helped the boss assemble two Machines, and sales were moving briskly when the global economic crisis struck. During the second half of 2008, the effects were felt in factory towns all across China. “Every day you heard about two or three companies going bankrupt,” Master Luo told me. His own factory laid off workers, which was common during that period. Back in Wenzhou, Boss Gao and Boss Wang reduced their workforce by half. In the end, their factory survived, but it was a tough year.

  Others in the region weren’t so fortunate. In Lishui, real estate prices plummeted, and the Yintai real estate company, which had built the Riverside apartment complex that I visited, was suddenly in trouble. Much of their funding was private, but by the summer of 2008 they couldn’t pay interest on these loans, and a panic swept through the investors. They all wanted their money back, but the company couldn’t pay; one farmer became so distraught that he killed himself by drinking pesticide. The government investigated, and they uncovered what everybody had known for years—that Yintai had raised money illegally. All told, more than fifteen thousand people had made loans to the company, whose total debt exceeded 123 million dollars. Now that they couldn’t pay, the government clamped down, seizing assets and arresting Yintai officials. The founder was thrown in jail, along with his sons; in 2009 they were still awaiting trail. Ji Shengjun, the young vice chairman of the board who had met me in his nightclub—dressed in Prada, accompanied by his bodyguard, drinking Old Matisse Scotch and green tea—could expect to spend years in prison. During the investigation of the Ji family, the government seized forty luxury vehicles, including a Ferrari.

  But such major collapses were rare in China, which seemed to have weathered the crisis better than other parts of the world. They didn’t have the same widespread problem with mortgages as the United States, because credit is much harder to come by for a Chinese individual. Even a worst-case scenario like Yintai didn’t paralyze the system, because the loans were private rather than state-backed. Banks didn’t fail: instead it was average people who lost their investments. And in China, where the nation’s rise had depended largely on the initiative of migrants and small entrepreneurs, these same individuals now provided a buffer against economic crisis. They were emotionally prepared for the stress of a downturn: everybody had seen instability and hard times; they knew that opportunities come and go. In 2008, when factory workers were laid off, they usually returned to their villages and waited until things improved. The Chinese had picked up many new skills during the Reform period; they had become quick and resourceful and tough-minded. But they could also be patient—that was an old quality, as old as the countryside itself.

  The central government responded to the economic crisis with another major road-building campaign. In 2008, they announced a two-year stimulus plan that would spend 586 billion dollars, of which nearly half would go toward roads, railways, and airports. Some critics wondered why more of these resources weren’t directed toward Chinese schools; it could have been an opportunity to finally build an education system that better prepared people for innovative work. But the government preferred a time-tested solution: spend money on infrastructure, and teach the citizens to spend money of their own. In particular, they targeted rural regions, hoping to turn the hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers into bigger consumers. The State Council passed a resolution that, if implemented, would allow farmers to lease and trade—but not sell—their land-use rights. Some rural regions began to experiment with small mortgages and loans. The national government initiated a new campaign called “Electronic Appliances Go to the Countryside.” They gave subsidies to rural residents who bought refrigerators, televisions, cell phones, and other goods. It was a boon for farmers, as well as for the factory towns—it helped them reduce the backlog in warehouses.

  In Lishui, these strategies seemed to work, at least initially. During the middle of 2009, Director Wang Lijiong told me that he expected the city’s GDP to grow by at least 10 percent for the year. It was the same story across the country—Chinese exports were down by 20 percent, but the national economy was still growing at a rate of about 8 percent. China had traded overseas consumers for the ones at home; the sheer size of the nation made it possible. Even the car market did well, especially after the government reduced taxes on new vehicles. In the first quarter of 2009, for the first time ever, Chinese consumers bought more motor vehicles than people in the United States.

  During the heart of the economic crisis Luo Shouyun finally made the transition from Big Master to Boss. For a quarter century, nearly the entire span of the Reform period, he had worked for other people. Having started out as an illiterate assembly-line boy, he had b
ounced across the country, from city to city, factory to factory, rising at last to become a skilled technician. He had dealt with unreliable bosses and broken contracts, and he had manufactured so many bra rings that he dreamed of them at night. But in 2009 he left all of that behind. He started his own company, partnering with his nephew, and they set up operations in the southern city of Foshan. They recycled—they purchased trash from overseas and converted it into raw materials for Chinese factories. The company specialized in high-grade plastic, and they relied on Luo’s technical skills to set up the machinery. By the middle of the year they had a dozen employees, and Luo was making more money than he ever had with bra rings. His wife worked with him, and their son remained in Guizhou, living with relatives and attending nursery school.

  He laughed when I referred to him by the new name: Boss Luo. “We get trash from your country,” he said. They received regular shipments from the United States, Europe, and Australia, and most of it arrived in good condition; he could recognize refrigerators and televisions and even parts of cars. They separated the materials, processed the plastic, and sold it to Chinese manufacturers. “Some of them use it to make toys,” Boss Luo said. “But we also have a lot of customers who make refrigerators, televisions—the same things we get from the foreigners. It’s all the same stuff, basically.”

  IN ZHEJIANG, THE TAO sisters and Ren Jing left the bra ring factory not long after the move to the Wenzhou region. That turned out to be another aspect of Mr. Tao’s plan: he negotiated hard for a higher salary before the holiday, and then, once the bonus and the red envelopes were in hand, he pulled out the girls. All of them came back to Lishui, where together they found jobs in a factory that produced ashtrays. After Yufeng turned sixteen, and it was easier to find work at a big plant, they jumped to Huadu pleather, where they worked in quality control. They inspected the finished product, checking for defects, and with their approval the rolls of pleather were sent out to the great wide world.