Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West (P.S.)

by Peter Hessler

  Other Chinese cities have history, but Shenzhen’s origins have the flavor of myth—the miraculous birth, the benevolent god. In 1978, two years after the death of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping marked his rise to power by initiating what became known as Reform and Opening—capitalist-style innovations that ended almost three decades of Communist economics. Deng avoided trying out the more radical changes in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where mistakes would be politically disastrous. Instead, he and his advisers experimented in less developed areas, in what came to be called Special Economic Zones. Through a system of tax breaks and investment privileges, the government hoped to encourage foreign firms to set up shop in these zones. In 1980, they conferred this honor on Shenzhen, a sleepy southern border town whose economy had depended mostly on fishing and farming. Shenzhen became a “reform laboratory,” and one of its nicknames was Window to the Outside World. Before long, major international corporations established plants in the city, including the American firms of IBM, Compaq, PepsiCo, and DuPont.

  In 1990, the government established the Shenzhen Stock Exchange—the first big-board market in China. (The second one opened later that year, in Shanghai.) For more than twenty years, Shenzhen had an average annual growth rate of more than 30 percent, and its residents came to enjoy one of the highest standards of living in any Chinese city. The place was unusually green—parks were sprinkled throughout the downtown area, and streets were lined with banyan trees, palms, and well-groomed strips of grass. There were few bicycles downtown; most people could afford to take buses or cabs. Traffic moved smoothly. The city center was intersected by Shennan Road, nine lanes of cars bordered by Shenzhen’s best-known buildings: the Stock Exchange, a block of glistening blue-green glass; the Land King Tower, a narrow, twin-spired building of sixty-nine stories; and its adjoining apartment complex, which, with a seven-story-high opening in its facade, was the city’s most architecturally innovative structure.

  During its rise, Shenzhen became home to a social experiment that was even more impressive than its economic adventure. The city’s population exploded from three hundred thousand in 1980 to more than four million in 2001. By then, the average Shenzhen resident was less than twenty-nine years old—a remarkable statistic in a country whose planned-birth policy was already resulting in aging urban populations. Because many factories relied on unskilled, low-wage labor, most of the newcomers were women. Although there were no reliable official statistics, locals liked to say that there were seven women to every man in Shenzhen. This was an exaggeration, but one that reflected the general trend. Sometimes people called the city a “woman’s paradise,” because it offered so many job opportunities to young women. But this phrase hardly described the underside of the boomtown. Shenzhen was also notorious as a place where workers in poorly regulated factories suffered injuries, sometimes losing limbs in labor-related accidents. The first phase of China’s free-market development spurred an explosive growth in the sex industry, and nowhere was this phenomenon more obvious than in downtown Shenzhen, where it was impossible to walk at night without being propositioned by young prostitutes, who were known as “street angels.”

  Whenever China faced a moment of political uncertainty, Shenzhen felt like a city under siege. Locals knew that they had benefited from unusual government patronage, and they constantly worried that Shenzhen’s special status might be revoked. The 1997 offerings to Deng Xiaoping at the billboard reflected this fear of political change. In the mid-1980s, when a series of smuggling scandals broke out in the Special Economic Zones, conservative Communist officials targeted Shenzhen. They complained that the loosened restrictions on foreign investment were invitations to corruption and neocolonialism.

  Eventually, such worries inspired the government to erect the fence around the city. It was a distinctly Chinese solution: just as the Great Wall had been built to keep foreigners at bay, so the Shenzhen fence was intended to keep capitalist reforms under control. Chinese citizens entering the city proper had to go through customs, where they showed a border pass and an ID that required approval from their home province. But the completion of the fence in 1984 had unintended consequences. Labor-intensive factories inside the Special Economic Zone began moving to the other side of the fence to take advantage of cheaper rents and less rigorous law enforcement. Eventually, Shenzhen became divided into two worlds, which were described by residents as guannei and guanwai—”within the customs” and “outside the customs.” Satellite towns sprang up beyond the fence, most of them squalid and unplanned. In this sprawl of cheaply constructed factories and worker dormitories, wages were lower, and workers tended to rely heavily on overtime bonuses. Six-day workweeks were standard, as opposed to five-day weeks in Shenzhen proper. There were a lot more labor accidents and dormitory fires on the other side of the fence.

  It was here that Emily found her first factory job. In the satellite city of Longhua, she worked as a secretary who handled inventory, kept track of orders, and did some English translation. Her factory exported costume jewelry—pieces of pewter and brass, and cheap plastic beads that were painted, lacquered, and packaged in ziplock bags to be sent to Hong Kong, to Southeast Asia, to San Francisco, to Chicago.

  Her stories drifted up from the south. Every two or three weeks, Emily telephoned or wrote, creating the city in my mind. Some of her tales ended abruptly, like the one about the businessman from Hong Kong who had pursued her. Other stories lasted longer, like the one about her older sister, who had first worked as a traveling saleswoman and then been recruited by a company that was running a pyramid scheme. She brought Emily to the recruitment meeting. “A lot of the salespeople had low cultural levels, but they had learned how to talk,” Emily recalled. “I didn’t think it was a good way to make money, but it was a good way to improve yourself and improve your confidence.” Her sister had known that it was a scam—the government was cracking down on pyramid schemes, which had run rampant across southern China—and she said that she had gone to the meeting simply out of curiosity. Afterward, she had taken a job with a lonely-hearts hotline, talking on the telephone with other people who felt lost in Shenzhen. “Some people say there is no real love in Shenzhen,” Emily said, when I asked why the hotline existed. “People are too busy with earning money to really live.”

  That was probably why a young man named Zhu Yunfeng took her by surprise. He had been trained as a mold maker, but he came to the jewelry factory as a purchasing agent, because he wanted a break from manual labor. At his previous job in Shenzhen, Zhu Yunfeng had miscalculated the weight of a metal part, which slipped when he and two other workers were trying to lift it. Zhu Yunfeng let go. The other two workers didn’t, and they lost some of their fingers. The workers were promised compensation, and Zhu Yunfeng wasn’t blamed for the accident, which was a relatively common occurrence in plants beyond Shenzhen’s fence. Still, he decided to leave the job. Seeing the injured men around the factory made him feel uncomfortable.

  At first, Emily didn’t take much notice when Zhu Yunfeng arrived at her factory, in March of 1998. He was of average height, with stiff black hair, and his shoulders were broad from working with the molds. He wasn’t handsome. He kept to himself, and none of the other women who worked at the plant thought that he was attractive. But after a while, Emily found that she was noticing him a lot more. She liked the way he walked—there was confidence in his gait.

  Two months later, small gifts started appearing in the drawer of her desk. She received two dolls and a small figurine of a sheep. She didn’t ask who had put them there.

  One day in September, Zhu Yunfeng and Emily went out with some of their coworkers and found themselves walking alone in the local park. Emily didn’t know how they had become separated from the group. Suddenly she felt afraid—things were happening too fast. She was twenty-two years old. He was twenty-six.

  “I don’t want to walk with you,” she said.

  “Who do you want to walk with?” Zhu Yunfeng asked.

/>   “I don’t want to walk with anybody!”

  They turned around and went back to the factory. Months later he would tell her that that was the moment when he knew there was a chance of success. He could see that she still hadn’t made up her mind to reject him.

  The jewelry factory had fifty employees. The owner was Taiwanese, like many of the bosses who ran plants outside the customs, and he told the workers openly that he hated mainland China and was there only because of the cheap labor. The workers didn’t like the Taiwanese owner very much. Some of them made as little as twelve cents an hour, which meant that they had to work overtime to earn a decent income. Whenever they talked about the boss, they used the same words that were commonly applied to Taiwanese owners in Shenzhen: “stingy” and “lecherous.” But the jewelry-factory boss wasn’t as bad as many of the others, and conditions at the plant were better than those at most factories beyond the fence. The workers had Sundays off, and during the week they were allowed to leave the factory after work hours, although everybody had to be back in the dormitory by eleven or midnight, depending on the boss’s whim.

  The dormitory where Emily lived was on the top two floors of a six-story building. There were six workers to a dorm room. It was a “three-in-one” factory—production, warehousing, and living quarters were combined into one structure. This arrangement was illegal in China, and the workers knew it, just as they knew that some of the production material stored on the first floor was extremely flammable. They also knew that the building had bad wiring, because an electrician had come to make a repair and commented to Emily, in an offhand way, that the place could go up in flames. Afterward, she mapped out an escape route for herself. If a fire broke out at night, she would run to the dormitory’s sixth-floor balcony and jump across to the roof of the building next door. That was the extent of her plan—she had no interest in complaining to the government about the violations, and neither did the other workers. All of them were far from home, and they knew that such conditions were common in the plants outside the fence.

  One Saturday night in October, Zhu Yunfeng took Emily’s hand as they prepared to cross the road. She felt her heart leap up in her chest. Zhu Yunfeng held on tightly. They stepped into the street.

  “I’m too nervous,” Emily said, once they had reached the other side. “I don’t want it to be like this.”

  “What’s wrong?” Zhu Yunfeng said. “Haven’t you ever done this before?”

  “I have,” she said. “But I’m still scared.”

  “It’s going to be like this in the future,” Zhu Yunfeng said. “You should get used to it.”

  Emily laughed when she told me that story, during my first visit to Shenzhen. She had a certain gesture that she often made while laughing—she put her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes. Many Chinese women laughed like that, but for some reason it seemed more natural when Emily did it.

  She looked much the same as I remembered from her student days. On the morning that I arrived, she wore a simple blue dress, and the two of us wandered around downtown Shenzhen. We visited the Stock Exchange and the Diwang, the tallest building in town, and I took Emily’s photo in front of the Deng Xiaoping billboard. At the end of the day, we caught a local bus north: past the downtown skyscrapers and the apartment blocks, watching the neighborhoods grow seedier with every mile we traveled from the center. We cut through the green hills just before the border, and then we arrived at the long, low line of the chain-link fence. There was a billboard at the checkpoint: MISSION HILLS GOLF CLUB: THE FIRST 72-HOLE GOLF CLUB IN CHINA.

  Beyond the fence was a rough cluster of unfinished concrete buildings. Piles of dirt stood beside enormous foundation holes; bulldozers and dump trucks were parked near makeshift shacks where construction workers lived. We kept going north, the factory towns appearing one after the other: dormitories surrounded by fences, smokestacks sprouting in dirty clumps. Signs above factory gateways identified the goods produced within: shoes, furniture, toys, computer parts. After twenty miles, we arrived in Longhua, where a group of Taiwanese bosses had set up half a dozen jewelry plants. The buildings were arranged in a tight little group, as if something about this sprawling city had made them huddle close. A space of only a few feet separated Emily’s factory and the neighboring one—this was why she had figured she could jump across to the roof if there was ever a fire.

  That night we had dinner at an outdoor restaurant on the town’s main street. It was a pleasant evening; I had always preferred nighttime in China, when the flaws of the brand-new cities tended to fade into darkness. This was particularly true in the Shenzhen satellite towns, where most people spent their days on assembly line shifts. Daytime streets tended to be empty—often the place seemed almost abandoned. But the mood changed when workers poured out of factory gates in late afternoon. Some of them wore their uniforms, but most made an effort to dress up in new clothes. They gathered in outdoor restaurants and pool halls, and they moved in same-sex groups: packs of boys talking loudly, groups of girls laughing together. It was rare to see a family or even a child. Elderly people were essentially nonexistent. This was the freedom of Shenzhen—there were no traditions here, and no sense of the past; everybody was far from home.

  Emily sent part of her salary back to her parents, to help pay for her brother’s school tuition, and the responsibility had given her a new air of maturity. At twenty-three, she was the oldest worker in her factory office, which was staffed entirely by women. During dinner, she regaled me with stories about the Taiwanese factory owners. They fascinated her—she couldn’t believe the looseness of their lives, financially and morally, and she saw them as symbolic of the world beyond the mainland. She told me about one of her boss’s colleagues, a Chinese-American who had recently arrived from San Francisco on business, had faxed his wife a love letter from Emily’s office, and then had gone out and hired a prostitute. Emily’s boss was always leering at the young women in the factory; another Taiwanese businessman in a nearby plant had become so distracted by two Sichuanese mistresses that his company went bankrupt. In Emily’s opinion, they were all the same. “All of them have failed somewhere else,” she scoffed, explaining that her boss’s old company in Taiwan had gone bankrupt years ago. When I asked if Shenzhen had fewer political restrictions than Fuling, she said it did, but pointed out that the labor practices were just as restrictive. “Here it’s not the government but the bosses who control everything,” she said. “Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”

  She told me about a notorious Taiwanese-owned purse factory in a nearby city. The plant kept the gates locked throughout the six-day workweek—except on Sundays, the workers couldn’t leave the factory complex.

  “That can’t be legal,” I said.

  “Many of the factories do that,” she said, shrugging. “All of them have good connections with the government.”

  She explained that one of her friends had worked at the purse factory, where the Taiwanese boss often ordered everyone to work until midnight, yelling when they got tired. One worker had complained and been fired; when he tried to claim his last paycheck, the boss had him beaten up. Emily decided that she had to do something about it, so she wrote the boss a letter that said, “This day next year will be your memorial day.”

  “And I drew a picture of a—” She was speaking English, and she couldn’t think of the word. She pushed aside her plate and sketched an outline on the table—a simple head, a narrow body.

  “A skeleton?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “A skeleton. But I didn’t write my name. I wrote, ‘An unhappy worker.’ ”

  I didn’t know how to respond—back in Fuling, my writing class hadn’t covered death threats. Finally I said, “Did the letter work?”

  “I think it helped,” she said. “Workers at the factory said that the boss was very worried about it. Afterward, he was a little better.”

  “Why didn’t you complain to the police?”

  “It doesn’t do any
good,” she said. “All of them have connections. In Shenzhen, you have to take care of everything yourself.”

  When we finished the meal, Emily looked at me and said, “Do you want to see something interesting?”

  She led me to a small street near the middle of town. Below the road, a creek flowed sluggishly in the shadows. Dozens of people stood along the curb, smoking cigarettes. The street was unlit, and all of the people were men. I asked what was going on.

  “They’re looking for prostitutes,” Emily said. We watched as a woman appeared—walking slowly, glancing around, until a man came up and spoke to her. They talked for a few seconds, and then the man slipped back into the shadows. The woman kept walking. Emily said, “Do you want to see what happens if I leave you here alone?”

  “No,” I said. “We can leave now.”

  I spent the night in Zhu Yunfeng’s one-room apartment. He had recently left Emily’s factory to start a new job, which allowed him to live in private housing. His neighborhood was covered with boldfaced flyers advertising venereal disease clinics; we followed a string of them up the stairwell to Zhu Yunfeng’s apartment on the fourth floor. The building was only half constructed—the walls unpainted, the plaster chipping away, the plumbing unfinished. They didn’t have hot water yet and probably never would. Much of the development beyond the Shenzhen fence seemed to be like this—abandoned before it was completed. There was so much work to do, so many new factories and apartments to build, and contractors moved on once the bare essentials were in place. It occurred to me that if anything in this region was actually finished, it was immediately sent away for export.

  Zhu Yunfeng’s apartment was furnished with two simple wooden beds covered with rattan mats. There was nothing on the walls, and apart from a thermos and a few books, he didn’t have many possessions. His current job involved making molds for the production of household appliances.

  I knew that something about Zhu Yunfeng made Emily feel secure. Once, she had bluntly told me that he wasn’t handsome, and this was true—acne had badly scarred his face. But his plainness was attractive to her. She had a theory that handsome men weren’t reliable.