by Paul Theroux
"How do you like it here?" I asked.
"It's an incredible place," he said.
"I think Guangdong is horrendous."
"I've seen fewer beggars here than in Santa Cruz."
"Have you been to the railway station? Every third person is bumming money."
"Maybe you're right. I wasn't counting that. But there's no hippies. In Santa Cruz you find hippies everywhere. Guys with long hair, just living off the government. I've got a personal pet peeve against graffiti. Santa Cruz is full of it. You don't see that here. And even if a person lives in a humble house, they're still neat and clean. I like that."
Very soon, he signaled that the interview was at an end and that it was time for me to leave the building. He did not offer to show me the plant. What I realized afterward was that in the course of the conversation he had, without realizing it, more or less parroted The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. He believed in obedience, respect for property, cleanliness, thrift, learning by doing, and hard work; he wanted each worker to be the "rustless screw" of Chinese ideology. He was opposed to the sort of organized mass dissent that a trade union represented. He would not go on the record with me, and obviously did not care enough about freedom of the press to realize that such freedom depends on truthful sources. I was sure he had voted for George Bush and was a staunch Republican, but that was only further proof that, in his heart, he was a Maoist.
I had the distinct notion that most American businessmen in China were Maoists in the same sense—not dreamers like the old man, but resembling the monopolistic-minded bureaucrats who followed him, the hard-liners (qiang ying pai) and extreme leftists (ji zhou pai). A "leftist" in China is actually very repressive and right wing, and to their delight many foreign businessmen find they have a great deal in common with the enthusiasms, prejudices, and obsessions of hard-liners.
The more commercial-minded Chinese, like the Japanese before them, have created ways of circumventing the rules. They seem to be able to make anything, and to sell it anywhere, in whatever quantity they wish. They sell rockets to the Iraqis. They sell automatic rifles to anyone with money to buy them. It might be true to say that the indestructible AK-47, sold by North Industries (NORINCO) in Beijing, has made war all over the world cheap, deadly, and endless. NORINCO has been described, by a U.S. Treasury official, as "the Kmart of arms manufacturers." "No other rifle design has shown the rugged dependability of the series AK," the NORINCO catalogue states. "Through harsh climatic conditions ranging from rain to dust to snow the series AK has proven itself valuable."
The Chinese sell tin pots in African countries, baseball caps in America, and, ever since the pit closures in Britain, might well be shipping coal to Newcastle. There is hardly a gift shop in America that is not stocked from top to bottom with candles, carvings, baskets, and nameless knickknacks from the many kitsch-producing Chinese provinces. Those pretty masks and doormats and mailboxes and Santa Clauses and almost-Hummels and toy classic cars that are so sensibly priced in any number of Olde Worlde Gyfte Shoppes? They're from China. Those English pub signs? The Red Lion. The Cricketers. The Horse and Groom. They are carved in a factory in Liaoning and bought by the quarter-containerload for about a dollar each.
Except for the rockets, rifles, and tanks, which are sold at the annual Chinese Arms and Armaments Fair, much of this stuff is bought at the Chinese Export Commodities Fair, often called the Canton Trade Fair. The first fair was held in 1920. I went to the seventy-third, describing myself on my application as "in publishing."
A frenetic ten-day bazaar, the fair fills one of the largest buildings in Guangzhou. Before Deng's reforms, the trade fair was the only way foreigners could do business in China, since they were forbidden to pass beyond the Canton (Guangzhou) threshold. These days, foreigners travel to factories around China to place their orders, yet the trade fair is the main focus of Chinese commerce and a wonderful way to window-shop. In past years the fair's areas have been demarcated by varieties of merchandise—carpets here, electrical appliances there, hairpieces and bikes over here, and so forth. But this year, for the first time (and perhaps the last; it proved very chaotic), the fair was divided into provinces: Jiangsi here, Shandong there, Inner Mongolia right down the stairs. It costs about $10 to register as a delegate and have your picture inserted into an ID badge, and the rest is easy, like a long, vulgar browsing trek through the biggest gift shop on earth.
In the lobby is a musical fountain with responsive lights flashing to the piano of Richard Clayderman, playing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina." The buyers, bused in from their hotels, are mainly huge, sweating men and feverish-looking women from all over the world, squinting and poker-faced like most bargain hunters.
"Zis bench grinder—tell him I want two sousand pieces," a Frenchman is saying to his interpreter.
"When these shirts arrive Lebanon?" a Levantine woman is saying.
A man is buying an orange lifeboat, another haggling over cotton baseball caps made in Shanghai, which cost $7 a dozen, at one thousand dozen per color, minimum order.
A German is ordering sleeping bags, made in Tianjin in a factory that employs twenty-four hundred workers. Two million are exported, a great number to Germany. The wholesale price for these well-designed ones—warm, light, easily compressible—is $11.80 a bag.
I drifted over to a stall where a sign read "Foshon Hardware & Plastic Factory," and in this one small space I saw fishing rods (eight sizes), mortise door locks, hammocks, pipe joints, cups, plastic flowers, brake shoes, welding electrodes, hinges, washers, faucets, windshield wipers, spoons, small toy dogs that jumped and yapped, and an assortment of cigarette lighters—fifty or more—one of which was a panther whose eyes lit up as its mouth expelled a jet of fire.
In other stalls you could get a floor-length raccoon coat for $418 (including delivery to the West Coast). A Chinalight New Magnetic Massage Cushion ($14). Black Dragon in-line skates made in the remote northern province of Heilongjiang ($13.60 a pair, delivered)—the skateboards were cheaper. A wig made of Chinese human hair, dyed blond, Shirley Temple style, $10.25. A mountain bike was $50, cashmere scarves were $8, herbal remedies and surgical tools were all reasonably priced, and a Xingfu 250cc motorcycle was $663. The Wuyang bike I had seen on the road where the man riding pillion had been yakking on a cellular phone was $2,000, wholesale. There was every machine tool known to man. There was drilling equipment. There were inflatable toys. There were more Virgin Marys and plaster saints and crucifixes than you would see in a whole year's pilgrimage in Italy.
"We're raiding a stall tomorrow," a man in Guangzhou had told me. He worked for a law firm that represented a company that made the sort of peculiarly repellent-looking porcelain animal in which the Chinese seem to specialize. Another company was copying this ugly creature, and I was being given a chance to witness the bust. A team of lawyers and heavies were going to approach the stall holder, tap him on the shoulder, and tell him to stop pirating this thing or else face the music. (In the end, the copyright infringement raid was canceled, because no one really knew what to do if the infringer made a fuss.)
I spent two days at the fair, taking a disgusted pleasure at the profusion of stuff and making a solemn vow never again to buy a basket or a candle or anything else at a gift shop in the States. They were all bought by the pound here and they cost next to nothing.
My most productive time was spent at the tea stalls, where all the varieties of tea in China were displayed. It was an industry thousands of years old, even if tea drinking itself had started (according to the French historian Fernand Braudel) only in the eighteenth century. My favorite kind of tea is Lung Ching (Dragon Well), from Hangzhou. It is green tea, and its flat, smooth leaves resemble the needles of a fir tree.
"Why is this tea so expensive?" I asked the man from Zhejiang, Mr. Jin.
"This tea is picked in a small area," Mr. Jin said. "The best is found on just one hill. There are not many trees, the season is short, only two tons a month of the best quality are picked in t
he harvest season."
I discovered Lung Ching on my first visit to China in 1980 and have drunk it ever since, buying it in Friendship Stores or in New York, where the best quality might sell for $60 a pound. But "expensive" is an impression you get only if you buy it outside China. This same tea at the Canton Trade Fair costs $2 a pound from the China Tuhsu Zhejiang Tea Import-Export Corp.
Walking through the exhibition hall, I came across a provincial stall selling herbal remedies, which included ginseng, royal jelly, anti-cancer pills (made of "myrrh, muschus, mastix and calculus bovis"). I also noticed something called Love Solution. As if mountain bikes and in-line skates were not proof enough, this was also one-in-the-eye for anybody who has criticized the Chinese for doing poor market research, probably the most up-to-date potion at the fair. It was concerned with health and sex, and claimed on its box that with it "100% of AIDS virus and chlamydia can be killed within two minutes." There was a spray version for men, a plunger for women. I read the label:
This product has the function to kill off the Diplococcus gonorrhea, staphycoccus aureaus, chlamydia and AIDS virus rapidly with no toxicity and no irritation to the human body. It is specially used for the prevention of bacterial and viral infection of womans pudenda. It also has the function of prevention and cure [of] vaginitis.
Usage: Plunge the tube into the vagina and spray once a night or before sexual intercourse.
Ingredients: Germicide No. 1,...[etc.]
Many of the products at the fair are lovely and finely made—the carpets, the embroideries, the lace, the silks. The hand tools—hammers, screwdrivers, socket wrenches—are among the cheapest and best in the world, and have put many American companies out of business. But if there is one business the Chinese monopolize worldwide, it is that of Christmas decorations. There is hardly a Santa or a hanging ball on earth that is not produced in the People's Republic, and even the Christmas lights that were formerly made in Taiwan are now made in China, many of them in joint ventures with Taiwanese partners, as wages have risen back home.
"Are they any good?" I asked an Italian, Mario, from Modena—here in Guangzhou for no other reason than to buy Christmas lights to sell in Italy.
"They are very good," Mario said. "They conform to Italian standards. They are cheap. It's perfect." He smiled. "But this place"—and he made an Italianate gesture, his hands and face simultaneously expressive, to take in not only the fair, but Guangzhou and the whole of China—"is 'orrible, eh?"
Yet it was Mario who summed up the fair and perhaps Chinese business generally. We were talking about how China made everything and shipped it everywhere.
"China," he said, "is the manufacturer for the world."
***
Hearing of a model factory, I went by road through east-central Guangdong to the once sleepy town of Huizhou.
There were now four expatriates in Huizhou, but four years ago there had been only one, Mel Dickinson. He had been sent to the town by the Austrian family firm of Swarowski, purveyors of crystal to every duty-free shop on the planet. Mel's orders were to sort out an almost bankrupt jewelry factory. This too was like an outpost in old China: the gweilo stuck in a factory in a riverbank town in rural Guangdong, hating its snakes, consoling himself with his pint of Tsingtao beer at night, dreaming of his dog and his last fishing holiday back in Britain while he labored with his workers to produce costume jewelry by the ton. The heat, the rubble, the stink, the terrible town, the melancholy—it was like a portrait out of Maugham's On a Chinese Screen, or the much earlier narratives of American or European expatriates in China, summed up in the genial British expression "wog bashers."
Mel considered my comparison, and then said, "It is the same except for that difference. People like me came in the nineteenth century, and they lived the way I do. But they exploited the natives. We don't."
This proved true in Mel's case. He was a kind, funny, hard-working man, clearly liked by his workers. His factory, Huisi Fashion Jewellery and Crafts Company, had won a top award in the province for being the best run, the most productive. Another prize had been awarded for environmental reasons: Mel had his own waste-water treatment plant in the factory.
Mel was forty-eight, a chemist by training, a salmon fisherman and former rugby player, Welsh by birth, resident in Ireland, childless, dog-owning. His wife, Freda, had come with him and ("to keep myself sane") also worked full time at the factory. They had arrived in Huizhou in January 1989, "and almost walked straight out. The factory was filthy and silent. All I saw were workers having naps amidst orange peels and peanut shells. But I decided to stay. I liked the town. It was quiet and very safe."
Four months later, production was in full swing. "We had a ceremony—a box of swan pins. The Swarowski logo. We had a man hand-carry the box to Hong Kong to present to the office there."
Soon after that, the students occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
"Not a peep here in Huizhou," Mel said. "It was business as usual. There were some tanks in Guangzhou."
Within four years many things had changed in Huizhou. Prices had tripled. The small town had become a very large town—a city by American standards. More factories opened. Rice growers whose fields had been filled in and built on by developers flocked to town from the surrounding countryside, and unable to find jobs, they slept on the streets and made the place unsafe. Highway robbers hijacked buses, emptying passengers' pockets. Murders, burglaries, muggings, fights increased. The day before payday, when the Huisi safe was full of cash, one of the factory workers broke in. Mel and some other men caught the man before he opened the safe. The man received a four-year sentence for the crime. If he had managed to get the safe open, he would have been executed.
"This is the Wild West now," Mel said. "The authorities try hard, but it's not enough. Go downtown and you'll see masses of policemen, but after five o'clock there won't be any. They'll all have gone home."
He lived in a small apartment above the factory courtyard, behind the spiked factory gates, liking the seclusion and the safety of the two night watchmen. He worked all day and at night sipped beer on his verandah and tied salmon flies.
He was modest and humorous in his self-effacing Welsh way, but he was clearly proud of his factory, pleased by its awards and its profits. In this slack period he employed 220 people, but soon the Christmas orders would be coming in, and 350 people would be working to turn out bracelets, pins, necklaces, and pendants. His people earned between 350 and 400 yuan a month ($60 to $70); their hours were eight to five, with an hour for lunch. The cafeteria had also won a prize, for cleanliness and the quality of the food.
Huisi Jewellery had been intended as an export effort, the gold-plated products to be sold in American department stores ($40 earrings, $60 pendants), the sort of sparkly things that made some women say, "These are fun." But they had caught on locally and were being snapped up all over China, and the Chinese were now buying more than half his output of affordable jewelry.
His factory seemed a pleasant place, most of it air-conditioned, all of it well lighted. What impressed me about the operation was the amount of technical training the workers received, as designers and model makers creating the baubles. Three of them were being sent to Thailand to study another Swarowski operation. Everything was made on site—the wooden models, the rubber molds—and even the metal was bought in China, which made Chinese sales of the jewelry sensible: the renminbi currency could be used to buy the tin alloy used in most of the products.
We passed through a room where men and women were polishing earrings and pins.
"Polishing is the expensive part of the operation. See that gold mushroom?" The knickknack he pointed to was curvaceous and gleaming, about two inches high. "A polisher can only do five an hour. That's why you cannot afford to polish in Europe."
He told me that a worker in Ireland would get 15 Irish punts an hour, perhaps $25. A polisher in China was paid 50 cents and did the job just as well. Anyone wondering why world manufactu
ring had moved to China might consider this simple example.
We moved on to the electroplating shop. "This is the heart of the factory," Mel said. "This is where we make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
The tin alloy, plated with a layer of copper and then nickel, was gilded in a solution of potassium gold cyanide, which Mel bought in large quantities from Hong Kong.
Being in this well-run and apparently happy factory made me want to see the sweatshops that still existed in this part of China. But they were damnably hard to find. I had tried to visit one, but the owners kept them off limits, not wanting their exploitation to be observed, particularly by a foreigner. I knew from various informants that the classic sweatshop was a textile or umbrella-making operation or a simple electronics factory, owned by a Taiwanese or Hong Kong businessman, and typically it was in an anonymous building in a rural village in which all the employees had been brought from one of the poorer provinces, Sichuan or Gansu.
Back in the courtyard after our tour, I asked Mel whether he had seen very bad working conditions.
"Oh, yes. I've seen many. Even joint ventures. They were so awful they would have made Charles Dickens throw up."
"What about sweatshops?"
"They're all over the place, but you'll never get in. My secretary's brother worked in one, though."
Mel's workers were his window on China. If you mentioned theft, Mel said, "Richard was robbed last week on the bus to Shenzhen." If you mentioned corruption, Mel said, "Betty was asked for a bribe last month." If you mentioned carnage on the roads, he said, "Mary saw a torso yesterday. David saw a leg last week, just lying by the side of the road."
I talked to Mel's secretary about sweatshops. In her late twenties, formerly a schoolteacher, her name was Linda. She had been born in Huizhou, and she lamented the rising crime. She too had been robbed.
"My brother works in one of those places," Linda said, in excellent English. "At first he was making ovens, now he is making telephones. He works until ten or eleven at night. Most weeks he works seven days, but now and then he gets a day off. His boss is from Taiwan."
