Barbarian Lost

by Alexandre Trudeau

  Above the middle class is the group whose notion of choice is again blurred as possibilities multiply. Plus the management of wealth for its own sake brings on a whole gamut of expectations and responsibilities—a sparse group to be sure but one whose numbers are also growing.

  Of course, manufacture for the middle class is where the big money is. Selling to hundreds of millions is far better business than selling luxury items to the chosen few. So Chery squarely targets the so-called middle class. Its brand speaks to the modest yet honest success of the gainfully employed. It’s a car built for the quiet pride of new beginnings, not for the exuberant pretention of established standing.

  Outside brands have been courting the Chinese for several decades. A walk through any shopping mall in new China makes clear the exposure to foreign fashion brands. Although I often suspect that, outside the biggest cities, the luxury clothing stores are only marginally profitable, these shops are prestige stores aimed at raising a shopping centre’s profile. The Chinese love to shop in the vicinity of these stores, without actually buying the expensive products.

  Still, the majority of Chinese industry exists for the export market, not the domestic one. With automobiles it’s different, though. They are for the Chinese. The export market was initially not even an option. But increasingly, Chinese-made cars are being sold into countries throughout the developing world.

  If a free global market truly existed, a large proportion of automobiles on earth might soon be manufactured in China. But automobile manufacture is a long way from a free-market affair, remaining a sacred cow for developed economies. Essential in government labour schemes, automobile plants are mostly spared the merciless mechanics of free trade. Although parallel products like generic tractors or mechanized farm implements are exported from China for sale by Western retailers under various brands, Chinese cars still have little to no access to Western markets. Instead, Western car makers that have been lured into China aim to produce their brands for the massive Chinese market.

  Viv has secured for us a private tour of the General Motors factory in Shanghai. A massive and advanced production facility, it’s a piece of an empire. China now accounts for a third of GM’s global sales.

  To get to the plant, Viv and I take a long taxi ride through the sprawling new industrial districts, far from the city’s historical core. The GM lot, near the coast on the way to the city’s new airport, is huge and efficiently organized. We meet our contact in a showy front pavilion. With its glass facade and atrium, it feels like a dealership, except it houses only a single glittery demo car, a Buick. Our contact is a tall thirty-something woman with a business-like attitude. She has the cold politeness you’d expect. GM is all about public relations in China; as much as it is selling a car here, it’s also selling a brand, and an efficient style of industrial production.

  The GM production facility in Shanghai is state-of-the-art. Everything about it is high-tech. We follow the assembly lines from gangways, looking down on a process that is meticulously organized. The diverse streams of assembly are calculated from the start. The smallest gadget is produced in synchronicity with all the other constituents of an individual automobile, the elements carried along production lines to merge at precisely the right moment. There’s no surplus production and no wasted time. Exactly the right elements are produced at the right moment.

  We’re told that the large majority of vehicle components are produced on site: body, frame, motors, instruments, and so on. We briefly check out earlier phases of production, but there isn’t much to see. The components are produced in closed and automated circuits that originate all over the immense compound and flow toward the assembly proper in a huge chamber; the multiple circuits converge upon a single line along which cars slowly materialize. Depending on which components are fed to the assembly, slightly different models are produced by the same line.

  The workers, with whom we have no contact, are older than the workers at the other factories we visited. They’re not the happy youngsters we observed in Hefei but grave forty-year-olds. They go about their work with unflinching seriousness. They earn a fair bit more as well—based in Shanghai, this GM factory has access to a skilled and mature workforce but must pay much higher wages than its counterparts.

  Along the assembly line, the workers are organized into teams, each responsible for a specific phase of production. A team’s work is gauged by a traffic-light system. A green light means the team is on or ahead of schedule. A yellow light means the team is falling behind in the assembly process. A red light means the team has caused a delay in the production, forcing the downstream production to wait. A female voice chimes over a public address system to encourage a team that has been accumulating green lights or to chide the one that is causing a delay.

  The automobiles produced at this plant are brands from the GM family, Chevrolet and Buick, but the models are unique to China. The Volkswagen or GM factories in China bring with them a wide range of proprietary technology. They have established new corporate entities specific to China, which purchase expensive licences with GM in America or VW in Germany and agree to stringent production requirements.

  With GM and other such partners, Chinese domestic capacity has taken huge leaps. In the plants, workers become habituated to the most advanced forms of labour organization, engineers witness how high efficiency is achieved, and complex industrial models and intellectual property are leached into Chinese soil.

  Deeper still, China grows powerful in this alliance. Foreign multinationals operating and profiting greatly in China do so at the pleasure of the Chinese state. As such, these global companies make for potent allies in foreign capitals. Once combined in a concerted manner by the Chinese state, this network of globalized industry can be leveraged into a mighty tool to extract strategic concessions, possibly subservience even, from Washington, London and Paris.

  After our visit to GM, Viv returns downtown while I am picked up by Allen, who has offered to give me a tour of Shanghai and help me purchase a bolt of raw silk to replace some curtains back home. He takes me to the silk broker’s market.

  “Nobody cares too much about silk anymore,” he admits. “It’s only worn by women for special occasions, and even then less and less. The industry’s still alive, but it must be shrinking fast.”

  The silk market is on the outskirts of town, somewhat close to the GM plant, in a nondescript multi-storey building like so many other commercial bazaars I have seen in China. Most of the shops display prototypes of manufactured silk products for wholesale orders. But I want the raw stuff from which everything is made and have a swatch of the decaying silk curtains I hope to replace. After inquiries about where I might buy a bolt of silk, Allen and I are directed to the interior-decoration section of the market. We choose a shop with an exuberant presentation and are met by an attendant who clearly knows his wares. After examining my fabric, he brings out several big folders of textile samples. It’s quickly clear that my fabric is of a higher quality than anything I’m shown, its silvery sheen made more ethereal by a more natural grain of filament.

  Our helper readily admits defeat: he doesn’t have this quality of silk on hand. But unwilling to give up, he pledges to find me a supplier that might be able to satisfy my needs. I explain that I’m passing through town and won’t be able to come back soon, but I take his business card anyway. Allen offers to help, but unwilling to burden him with such a personal task, I decline it.

  While on the topic of home decor, Allen offers to show me a house that he’s contemplating buying in a neighbourhood nearby. Along the way, he explains the nature of his business to me. His company brokers industrial tools for Western distributors. His particular niche is cable-pulling tools that he sources from various suppliers.

  “My company has been successful at supplying a particular American company in this niche but can organize production in any number of niches. Recently, we have moved into supplying pool-maintenance equipment to foreign wholesalers,
” he tells me.

  “Can’t the foreign companies go straight to the Chinese producers themselves?” I ask.

  “They can, but we mostly deal in new production. My clients come to me with prototypes, and I get them made for them. Even if they could find the appropriate production facilities, I’m sure they couldn’t negotiate unit costs as well as we can for them.”

  Allen explains something important: “There is a side to production in China that is not well known, especially around here. Many of the producers see actual production as a chore. Production and sales are thus not their main revenue stream; it’s real estate development. Some even sell their production at a loss. Over the past years, there has been more and more indifference toward selling product; what matters is selling value-added land.”

  “I don’t understand. They produce goods without caring about revenues from their sale?” I ask incredulously.

  “Some do, yes. Here’s how it works: An industrial entity will turn to the government to ask for a good price on a plot of land to build a new factory. The government is usually ready to rezone some piece of farmland for industrial use and hands it over. Then the company builds and operates the factory for a short time, documents some sales, then finds a reason to go back to the government for a new, larger facility, so that more land can be rezoned. The original factory land is then developed for commercial or residential use and sold off at a huge profit. And on and on it goes.”

  “How long can this be sustained?”

  “You’d be surprised. But yes, real estate always has limits. You can’t make more land.”

  “Could the bubble burst?” I wonder aloud.

  “I’m an optimist. It could burst. And probably will. Speculators and investors will lose out. We’ll maybe see a slowdown and increased unemployment. But still there’s simply no going back to the old ways. Whatever happens, China moves forward. But not quite as fast as before.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Down South

  A good traveller means never to arrive.

  —Lao-tzu, fifth century BC

  The door stands before us in the shadows. Sue, the young Cantonese beat reporter, has done what I asked her to do. She led us through the maze of the undercity to the entrance of a brothel.

  A gloomy staircase leads upward. The building is a four-storey cement block structure. Its facade is narrower than the others. Its sign is but a couple of characters in black mounted on a red light panel. Red lights are common in China and not necessarily a reference to flesh. This sign is alone in the alleyway; it reads, Massage.

  Massage parlours and brothels are plentiful in China—ubiquitous but discreet. The country has seen massive population movements and newly disposable income among the people. Crowded together and bent to purpose, their appetites don’t go unanswered. Like there are places to eat, drink and laugh, there are also places for love, or if you prefer, lust. With so many people far from home, intimacy and human touch—and satisfaction and release—become precious and tradable.

  We’re in Guangzhou, deep in a living quarter as densely inhabited as anything I’ve seen. A massive, rambling labyrinth of concrete-block apartment buildings. Not quite skyscrapers, only six or seven storeys, but they hug each other so closely as to leave between them only the narrowest of passages.

  The great casbahs of old Morocco are dense and full of strange passages and wondrous sights. The old city of Jerusalem is a knotty mess. The shantytowns of India, Africa and South America take one’s breath away. There are even walled quarters across Europe that give some sense of human compression, absent the filth of old. But urban density is different in pockets like this, grown vertically on precious little real estate. Steel and concrete compartmentalize human lives like nothing else. Planned utilities—piped water, sewage and electricity—however rudimentary, bring some harmony to life in the colony. Overseers are also necessarily involved. They’ll profit in the enterprise, or be blamed if disaster strikes and people find themselves mired in excrement and disease.

  It feels like a shantytown, though, abruptly populated by hordes of people packed into close proximity by scarcity of land. There’s an unmistakable energy, as if anything could happen and everything could be found. Chinatown, baby.

  Guangzhou, once known as Canton, is on the shores of the Pearl River. For centuries, the south coast of China has been a staging ground for human migrations. With its islands, bays and protected river outlets facing the welcoming currents of warm seas, the coast has long been an orifice through which people and things go in and out of China. By the late eighteenth century, Canton was at the epicentre of a vast commercial network that linked up with Southeast Asia and beyond. Through these networks, Cantonese language, culture and food came to shape the world’s notion of China. Canton also became a worldwide hub for Chinese labour. Cramped masses huddled here, expecting long sea passages toward foreign lands, destined to build railroads or monuments in the West. Chinatowns grew out of this trade in human bodies. Now more archetype than reality, they conjure up alien energies, strange odours and feelings of wonder and unease.

  Tonight I am back in Chinatown. The archetype comes alive as we venture into the maze and seek out this brothel. The human body trade is all too real.

  Sue explains that the neighbourhood is relatively new. But constantly trod by recent arrivals from the countryside, the streets are so thoroughly used that it doesn’t feel new at all. The grime’s heavy on the concrete walls of the buildings, yet the quarter is clearly maintained. Garbage has been removed, and storefronts tidied, the streets mopped. But God forbid an earthquake. Here, human activity is compressed and relentless. It’s already night and the arteries of the quarter are full of noise and light. The air’s warm and thick with smells.

  The occasional glance at the white man and the two young women walking through the quarter is justified. Foreigners might occasionally enter during the day, and it’s perhaps not unheard of for a white man to be seen walking the streets at night. But wouldn’t he be led by someone from the neighbourhood? Wouldn’t he have come for some shady reason?

  But I am here with Viv, from the north, and Sue. She’s short and dark skinned; she has cropped, spiky hair like a teenaged boy. Her clothes are contemporary and loose fitting. Her face is round and holds an even and happy countenance. She has a fast, decisive manner, and a confidence and purpose in her gait that say “I belong.” Viv pointed out to me earlier that Sue is from a place up the coast famous for its gangsters. Though not from this neighbourhood, she’s still plenty local.

  Sue smooths our passage through the quarter and somehow allows it to make sense, but only just. With her dainty ways, Viv is clearly an outsider. Beside me, is it not obvious that we are observers, not participants? How suspicious the strangers who witness without involvement or those who pass without sacrifice, leaving nothing. I urge us to move swiftly, as if we are heading to an engagement, as if there will be participation and purchase.

  We plan to climb the stairs and enter the establishment, and Sue will engage the management—with any luck, it’ll be a woman. We have money and we want to meet a masseuse. Once in private, we’ll ask questions.

  The story of Chinatown is one of the flesh, the consequence of the body factory China has been through the ages. Spikes in population growth led to sporadic demographic crises and mass migration. Locally, these movements have been a part of Chinese history for over two millennia. But it took the age of discovery and maritime trade and powerful ports along the south shore to make Chinese migration a worldwide phenomenon.

  Chinese labour was a fascinating part of the growing maritime trade. For newly industrialized economies, slave or conscript labour grew less and less feasible through the nineteenth century. Empire builders needed an alternative. A Chinese workforce could be quickly and cheaply applied to massive construction projects like building railroads or digging canals. Unlike slaves, Chinese coolies could be acquired without any great violence, and the liability involved in fee
ding and lodging them would be short term. Builders could purchase labour in bulk for limited contract use. Plus the workforce generally came with its own support structure of Chinese foremen, paymasters and cooks, a veritable turnkey solution for Western entrepreneurs.

  Just as they had to be fed and washed, all the moving bodies occasionally had to be nurtured as well. So around the cadre of cooks and washer folk there grew a community of specialists: agents of ports and providers of medicine and sexual gratification. These elements combined to shape all Chinatowns, from the sprawling quarters of San Francisco and Vancouver to the single alleyways of the frontier posts.

  Of all the things that made Chinatown seem strange and different to outsiders, I imagine the gap between growing Western puritanism and Chinese practicality was one of the more potent. Among the rich and powerful, polygamy was widely practised in nineteenth-century China and, indeed, admired. Women’s bodies in general were a commodity. It was expected that sex be traded for money and protection. If the trade led to long-term advantage for an individual and her family, the business might even be deemed honourable. Fathers traded their daughters away in such a way—although not prostitution in the narrow sense, it did nonetheless involve the implicit notion that the daughter’s body would be served up for enjoyment and procreation, and that this use of her body would be rewarded.

  As I stand before the staircase my own puritanism comes crashing down upon me. I’m suddenly uncomfortable to be thinking all this sexuality through, or at least saddened by the thought of intimately engaging a young woman about her sexual existence. I shudder to think of an embattled soul subjected to scrutiny in her place of work and conclude that our approach is all wrong.