Tide Players: The Movers and Shakers of a Rising China

by Jianying Zha

  Perhaps because of this, Zhang’s support of the present Chinese leadership struck me as quite genuine. Leng Tiesong, one of Zhang’s childhood friends, told me a story about how Zhang was “bullied” by an official from the city’s Bureau of Industry and Commerce (BIC). According to Leng, the official had penalized a businessman, confiscated some of his construction materials, and then forced Zhang to buy them. “It was junk Dazhong had no use for, but he had to swallow things like this,” Leng concluded. “It’s not easy to be a private entrepreneur in China.” But later, when I asked Zhang about the incident, he shrugged it off and said that Leng doesn’t know the full story. “I get along very well with those BIC officials. You may say I’m a bit of a diplomat, but a relationship is always give and take. Nobody forced me. He asked if I’d buy those materials at a low price and I said sure, since I’ve got warehouse space and the stuff comes in handy sometimes.” Zhang admitted that back in the 1980s the government and the whole society used to look down on ge ti hu (个体户, people doing business on their own). “But that changed after 1992. Official policies toward private business have been improving. On the whole the government treats us pretty well.”

  Li Shaohua, founding chairman of a private company that offers real estate management services, shares this view of an improved, benign relationship between the state and private business. Li and Zhang had met in 1993 at a business meeting, and the two have become friends over the years. Both served several terms as vice president of ge xie (个协, Beijing Association of Private Entrepreneurs), an organization that helps manage relations between the government and private businesses. Launched with a dozen members in the early 1990s, ge xie now boasts over one thousand members. “After 1995 the government started paying more attention to us because our ranks swelled so quickly. Dazhong was among the first to be invited to BIC meetings. The government usually favors good men with a solid business, not those commodity-trading and property-flipping types with a showy cell phone.”

  At first Li thought of Zhang as “just a simple, plain-looking guy who worked really hard and didn’t talk much at the meetings.” “Until last year, every time I visited Dazhong I’d see him dressed in a blue work vest, looking just like a da gong zai [打工仔, a guy who works for a living]. He didn’t even drink good tea, not to mention good wine.” He was referring to Zhang’s recently developed interest in wine and tea. “Now he talks a lot more at meetings and gives his opinions,” Li said, chuckling.

  Li has come to admire Zhang greatly. “I know a lot of rich people, and frankly a lot of them suck as human beings,” he rolled his eyes darkly. “I won’t name names here. But Dazhong is a rare specimen. In Chinese we call an educated merchant with culture ru shang [儒商, Confucian merchant]. I’d call Dazhong de shang [德商, a virtuous merchant],” Li said. He went on, citing his friend’s many virtues: decency, honesty, perseverance, calmness, and a self-assured, principled mind that doesn’t shift with the winds but dares to challenge itself. These, in Li’s opinion, are the personal attributes that have made Zhang so successful in business. But what makes him also a beloved man among friends and popular among his employees, Li said, is his true sensitivity and generosity. “He sent a hong bao [红包, cash gift in a red envelope] when he heard from his driver that my driver was getting married—to my driver! Once I had to cancel a meeting with Dazhong because my father-in-law died. Then, at the crematorium, we were surprised to see him and his wife: they rushed over to offer their condolences to us. My wife was so touched.” Li said he finally realized what the difference was between Zhang and his other rich friends: “All of us know how to make money, but Dazhong is the one who really knows how to spend money. No wonder he is rewarded with this bounty of affection—why, he is living in paradise now!”

  Indeed, nearly everyone I interviewed mentioned Zhang’s generosity and deep sense of gratitude. Hu Rong, Zhang’s former schoolmate, described him with an ancient Chinese proverb: Di shui zhi en, yong quan xiang bao (滴水之恩, 涌泉相报—someone who repays a debt of one drop of water with a gushing spring). Zhang would seek out anyone who had showed any kindness to his family when they were down and poor—an old neighbor who said a few encouraging words or invited him for a home meal, a classmate who lent him half a yuan—and shower them with appreciation and gifts. To thank those who helped him in his humble entrepreneurial beginnings, Zhang placed a newspaper ad offering 60,000 yuan to anyone who brought him one of the floor lamps he made and sold for six yuan over twenty years earlier. One customer answered the ad. The lamp he brought back now stands in a corner of Zhang’s office. Zhang told me he had once heard a cab driver complaining that all rich people in China are corrupt scoundrels who got started by kissing officials’ butts. “Well,” he pointed at the lamp, “that’s how I got started.”

  Many of Zhang’s former schoolmates are retired and living on pensions now, and they appreciate the annual school reunion Zhang has hosted for over thirty years. “When he was poor, he used to invite us all to his home, where he and his wife cooked all the food,” Hu Rong told me. “As he grew rich, the restaurants he booked for our reunions got better and better. It’s the event all of us look forward to every year.” In 2008 Zhang also sponsored a group of them on a sightseeing trip to Japan, paying all their expenses, including those for gift shopping. He often helped their children find jobs at his company; if nothing was suitable, he’d help them with money.

  Zhang is also a popular boss. Right after he made the deal with Gome, Zhang celebrated by distributing hong bao to all his employees. Shortly after Gome’s takeover, Zhang set up a fund, available to all former Dazhong employees, from which they could claim a small monthly subsidy for the rest of their lives in recognition of their contribution to Dazhong’s growth. Hong Chun, a former Dazhong store manager in charge of air-conditioner sales, now works for Gome but gets 600 yuan annually from the Dazhong fund. “We all feel nostalgic about the old days,” Hong told me. Gome and Dazhong have different company cultures, he said. Gome management is standardized and procedure-based, with its ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) accounting system and its frequent staff meetings, memos, and regulations. This is better for bookkeeping and overall managerial control, but Dazhong operated in a more personal style, more like a family business. Unlike Huang, whom Hong has never met, Zhang used to show up in the store regularly, wearing the same blue work uniform as his employees, and he liked to stroll around to get a sense of the sales scene. Once, having watched a salesman talking on and on with a hesitant customer, Zhang intervened. “I’ll give you a 200-yuan discount if you buy this system,” Zhang offered, and the customer bought it right away. “When our salespeople heard that story, everyone tried to follow the boss’s example,” Hong said.

  At lunchtime Zhang would sit down and have a quick bowl of noodles with the sales staff, chatting and laughing. “He has no big-boss airs, but a lot of ren qing wei [人情味, a flavor of human warmth],” I have been told by many Dazhong employees. Now, with Gome’s stocks reduced to a fourth of its previous value (trading was closed after Huang’s arrest), and sluggish sales in 2009, Hong said staff morale was low. “I’m doing my job, but I don’t feel the passion and drive I once had working under boss Zhang.”

  On a balmy April evening recently, I met with Zhang again in his gleaming Westside office. He had just returned from a weeklong driving trip in his BMW jeep with a group of friends to the beautiful mountains of south Anhui, during which he had sent me via cell phone a poem depicting the landscape and the camaraderie shared among good friends. The verse was composed in the classical form and read quite nicely. Zhang laughed upon my inquiry as to whether he was the author: “Oh no, it was written by someone in our group. You must be wondering how my literary level shot up all of a sudden?” He laughed again and leaned back in his chair, exuding the air of a happy man who is living a charmed life after years of hard labor.

  These days, Zhang tells me, he spends less than a third of his time on business. After a year
of learning the stock market, he has made major investment decisions. He loaned 1 billion yuan (over $140 million) to a state bank that makes commercial loans to clients he considers quite stable and safe. Then he bought 2 billion yuan (over $280 million) worth of stocks and bonds of various companies and enterprises that are more risky. “But I entered at a low point and I’m in it for the long haul,” he said. Perhaps as the entire Chinese economy experiences the pains of the downturn and the pressure of transitioning from the old manufacturing and export model to a yet uncertain new phase, Zhang’s own long-term plan will also need time to take shape and flourish. For now, while a team of staff keeps monitoring the market and reporting to him, Zhang spends about two-thirds of his time “recharging”: traveling and reading. When he is in Beijing, he plays tennis regularly. It’s been a hobby of his for over ten years. “My partners say my technique has been improving lately,” Zhang smiles. “I used to work 365 days a year, my head full of thoughts about sales all the time. So my mind would wander on the court and the ball would hit me right in the face!”

  Besides trips inside China, travels to northern Europe, Canada, and Latin America have also been on Zhang’s agenda. He told me about a memoir he had read about an American investor who traveled around the world by motorcycle. “He was also about sixty. Once, in Africa, he ran into some bandits who occupied a gold mine. He got down into the gold mining world pretty deeply and learned it cold. Later on, that experience was crucial in his decision about when to invest in gold mines. I’m not traveling to chase gold, but I believe it would broaden the vision and enrich the mind.”

  Reading is another activity Zhang takes up with a characteristic seriousness and a methodical approach. (Zhang once showed me a room he sleeps in when he stays late at his office. It’s next to the gym where he regularly works out and on the same floor as his office. Everything in the room is kept in perfect order: the ironed, pressed shirts and trousers hanging on different racks; the sturdy sneakers and the well-buffed leather shoes in separate rows; the socks and ties; the books and DVDs. “You can tell a lot about a person from how organized he is in his daily habits,” Zhang said.) I browsed through the bookcases, which cover a full wall in Zhang’s large office. There are tomes on business and finance. History. Philosophy. Literature. Biographies of great figures from East to West. And on two low tables, books are arranged in tall, neat piles, each with filing cards sticking out from the pages. Zhang has three “reading staff” whose full-time job is reading books on various topics and briefing their boss with written summaries, notes, and quotations. “I can’t read all the books from cover to cover, so I rely on these notes,” Zhang said, pointing at the book piles. But certain books are deemed so important that he not only reads every page himself but also purchases extra copies to circulate to others.

  One such book is Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The 2005 biography offers a devastatingly negative picture of the man whose portrait still hangs on the rostrum in Tiananmen Square today. Officially banned in mainland China, this book gets around in limited ways through the Internet and private hands. It so impressed Zhang that he tracked down the Londonbased authors to offer his compliments. When Jung Chang visited Beijing in 2007, Zhang took her to dinner and offered his help in any way possible on her future work. After the book’s Chinese edition was published in Hong Kong, Zhang bought a thousand copies, which he has been giving to whomever he deems appropriate. Wherever he goes, he always carries several copies in the trunk of his black Benchi, just in case. “I don’t have the ability to write such a powerful work about Mao,” Zhang told me. “The least I can do is to support her in whatever way I can and let more people know about it.”

  Yin Jinqi, who leads Zhang’s reading team, admitted to me that the Mao biography had not been an easy read for her and the other reading staff. Yin is a petite, vivacious young woman with bright eyes, smart manners, and a master’s degree in economics and finance. She is a fast reader who could easily finish off a big book a day and still find time to do a few other things. But the Mao biography is tough, she told me, because its content is “very unfamiliar” to young people like her who grew up in post-Mao China. “Boss Zhang got quite upset at us,” Yin said. “He demanded that we read it carefully.”

  We were having this conversation one evening in a car as Yin accompanied Hu Jie, an independent filmmaker whom Zhang had recently hired to make a documentary about his mother. Hu’s two earlier documentaries about two woman martyrs—a “rightist” critic jailed and executed, and a high school principal beaten to death by her own Red Guard students—had gained an underground reputation even though they were both banned in China. That afternoon Hu had interviewed and shot some footage of two of Wang’s old colleagues; we were now on the way to another house on the eastern outskirts of Beijing to interview a witness who had participated in the mass rally at the Workers’ Stadium on the day of Wang’s execution. (Pan Shihong, the witness, happens to be a friend of mine, so I decided to go along for the interview.)

  That evening, in his comfortable living room, with a camera rolling under bright lights, Pan described in vivid detail the scene at the Workers’ Stadium nearly forty years earlier. The rally opened with loudspeakers blaring out revolutionary songs and quotations from Chairman Mao about class struggle, then rounds of slogan shouting. The twelve “counterrevolutionaries,” Zhang’s mother among them, were brought in. Tied up in ropes and manhandled by three guards, they were forced to kneel in a row on the floor, with their heads pressed down. Denunciations were made, and as each death sentence was announced, the head of the condemned one would be yanked up momentarily to face the crowd. The atmosphere grew frantic, and a cloud of dust flew up as the condemned men and women were pushed and shoved and the ropes on their necks and arms pulled and tightened. Finally, amid the deafening shouting of slogans, they were dragged off to be executed.

  As a twenty-two-year-old school teacher back then, Pan was in a vulnerable position because he had relatives abroad (and thus easily could be accused of being a Western spy). Sitting in the crowd, he realized why he was ordered to attend the rally: it served as a warning for someone like him. “I’m sorry to say I shouted slogans against the convicts as well. I was terrified.” At that time, nobody had the right to remain silent.

  Pan talked about other cases he witnessed: incidents of beating, humiliation, betrayal. Above all, he talked about the pervasive fear in the society.

  Later that night, after we got back in the car, everyone was silent for a while. But as the car moved smoothly on the new multilane expressway connecting the suburbs to the city, Yin turned to me and confessed that Pan’s account had been absolutely shocking to her. She said none of her friends in her peer group have any real knowledge about this history, and they probably don’t want to know about it, either. She said she has become more aware of it only since she started working for Zhang Dazhong.

  “I’m still feeling dazed,” she said, her voice uncertain and full of a shaky innocence. “It all seems so unfamiliar, so unthinkable. But Mr. Pan seems a kind person, very civil and obliging. So I don’t think a nice man like him would lie to us. He couldn’t have made all this up, could he?”

  Listening to her, I understood why Zhang got frustrated and insisted that his young staff read the Mao biography with care. I understood, too, why Zhang would carry copies in his car trunk. I also thought about a remark Hu Rong had made about Zhang: “He suffered a great deal in the past. But I’ve never met anyone with greater determination and courage to walk out from that suffering.”

  A few days before, Zhang had mentioned an article in Beijing Wanbao, a local newspaper. It was about a recent incident at a local high school where a student reported to the administration that his teacher was a “counterrevolutionary” because in his lectures the teacher had criticized the government and China’s political system. But the newspaper article said that citizens should have the right to free speech and should not be incriminated by what they
say. Some Chinese intellectuals were disturbed by the report: to them, the young student’s behavior toward his teacher confirmed their pessimism that the poison of the Cultural Revolution has not been expunged, that the ghost of history continues to haunt people despite all the shining achievements China has made in the past thirty years.

  But Zhang wants to look at the bright side. “You see,” Zhang said to me with an air of satisfaction, “this article is teaching folks about the rule of law. It means our country has developed not just economically. It has progressed politically.”

  Postscript

  On March 27, 2010, Zhang Dazhong convened a public gathering at Beijing’s Shangri-la Hotel to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of his mother’s execution. About five hundred people, among them many old neighbors and family friends, attended the event. Mao Yushi, a renowned liberal scholar, delivered a moving eulogy about Wang, praising her as a hero and a martyr. Zhang choked up many times during his remarks; he thanked and bowed to all who had shown kindness to the Zhang family in that dark time. Afterward, participants formed long lines to lay flowers before Wang’s portrait, and each received a package of materials about her life that included an elegantly printed booklet and a DVD documentary. Zhang also unveiled an oil portrait of Wang he had commissioned. The event went smoothly without any official interference.