Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  In the southeast, one of the new routes was the Jinliwen Expressway. The road would begin in Wenzhou, not far from the coast, and it would run west and north for 145 miles, connecting the cities of Lishui and Jinhua. Much of the route paralleled the outdated National Highway 330, and on my first trip I drove the Santana along the old two-lane road, past miles of construction. Some parts of the new expressway were mostly finished; other sections were still in the early stages, with rows of cement pylons running along the banks of the Ou River. There were workers everywhere—total investment was over 1.5 billion dollars, and it was a priority project, which in China means that construction continues day and night. Driving along the old road, looking out the window, I saw workers hauling rebar, and mixing cement, and scurrying nimbly across webbed scaffolding. Sometimes a half dozen men knelt in a line, using hand tools to smooth a stretch of fresh-laid roadway. They worked patiently, moving backward step by step, and their steady progress represented the first traffic of the Jinliwen Expressway. At night the glow of welding torches could be seen from miles away, an intimation of the headlights that would someday sweep across this road.

  I had come to southern Zhejiang Province in search of a city. Years ago, my first long driving trip had followed relics of the past, the stretches of the Great Wall that went through dying villages; and I had found a home in Sancha because I wanted some link to the countryside of today. But here in Zhejiang I was thinking about the future. In southern China, nothing changes the landscape faster than a new expressway: farmland disappears, and factories sprout up, and entrepreneurs and migrants pour into town. I was curious about this early rush—I wanted to know what life is like for the pioneering factory owners and workers. But first I had to find a city, and the Jinliwen Expressway would be my guide. The new highway was scheduled to open by the end of 2005, and after that these places would boom.

  There had already been several generations of road building along this route. It’s rugged countryside, following the banks of the Ou River, where most hillsides are too steep for crop terracing. Much of this region was inaccessible until the original version of Highway 330 was completed in 1934, during China’s first wave of modern road construction. Back then they had also looked to the example of the United States, and American engineers oversaw much of the early work across the country. Those packed-dirt roads were typically suited for speeds of only thirty miles per hour, and many of them were damaged or destroyed during the war. In southern Zhejiang, Highway 330 was finally paved in the late 1970s, and it wasn’t improved significantly until 1987.

  Even then, when the Reform period was still in the early stages, the new road had an immediate effect. It transformed villages along its path, especially in the regions close to Wenzhou, where people traditionally raised rice and fish. With access to the new Highway 330, they left farming behind, and over time they came to make the most unexpected things. Driving northwest from Wenzhou, I sometimes could see the products from the road. In Xiaxie, a village ten miles outside of the city, I passed endless rows of playground equipment. It was stored in bulk everywhere beside the street: piles of swing sets, big stacks of red plastic slides, long lines of blue and yellow monkey bars. There wasn’t a child in sight, and most buildings had the industrial squareness of factories. I pulled over to chat with locals, who told me that making playground equipment had become the local specialty. Xiaxie was part of Qiaoxia Township, which was currently home to 270 individual manufacturers, all of them producing some version of the same thing. Half of China’s domestic market for playground equipment was supplied by this single town.

  Another ten miles down Highway 330, past another bend in the river, the town of Qiaotou had erected a statue of a button. It was a huge disk of silver, ten feet wide and topped by wings that spun whenever the wind came up. Qiaotou’s population was only 64,000, but the town had 380 factories that manufactured more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In honor of this status, the village elders erected the statue in the center of town, right in front of a new building called “Button City.” Button City was four stories tall, and the ground-floor market was dedicated entirely to Qiaotou’s distinctive product. Clothes manufacturers arrived to buy in bulk, and sellers organized their wares by size and style. Former peasants hawked buttons out of grain sacks—big twenty-five-pound bags, still labeled “Rice” and “Flour,” now filled with nothing but buttons.

  On the day I drove through, many dealers were women with small children, and the kids sat on the cement floor. Whenever they began to cry, somebody tossed them another handful of buttons to play with. I could only imagine how much of Button City was being processed by tiny intestines on a daily basis, and it occurred to me that with a little organization, these kids could be shipped out to Xiaxie every morning to play on the jungle gyms. But there was no overlap between the towns, and moving from one to the other, at least in the economic sense, was almost as absolute as crossing an international border. People told me that even the local dialects were essentially unintelligible.

  This part of Zhejiang is famous for difficult dialects, and it’s also full of one-product towns. Locals tend to specialize in some simple object, in part because they have little formal training and it’s easiest to manufacture something that doesn’t require much technology and investment. Whenever Highway 330 led me to a place of decent size, I pulled over and asked a bystander, “What do people make here?” Usually they could answer the question in a sentence; sometimes they didn’t need to say a word. In the town of Wuyi, a man responded by reaching into his pocket and pulling out a handful of playing cards. I subsequently learned that Wuyi manufactures one billion decks a year: half of China’s domestic market. Fifty miles away, Yiwu makes one quarter of the world’s plastic drinking straws. A place called Yongkang produces 95 percent of Chinese scales. In another part of Zhejiang, Songxia turns out 350 million umbrellas every year. Fenshui specializes in pens; Shangguan manufactures table tennis paddles. Datang produces one-third of the socks on earth. Forty percent of the world’s neckties are made in a place called Shengzhou.

  Between factory towns I drove through countryside of remarkable beauty. Sometimes the Ou River narrowed, bordered by big cliffs of stone, and the valley deepened into a gorge. Highway 330 follows the river upstream, into the provincial highlands, and with every mile the mountains become more impressive. Unlike northern China, these areas receive heavy rainfall and there’s a lushness to the landscape. And after a couple of days I began to enjoy the journey’s contrasts: the stunning scenery and the odd products, the way the landscape expanded to vistas of rivers and mountains, and then suddenly narrowed into a town that made something tiny: cards, pens, straws.

  In the evenings I usually stayed at the International Hotel. Many factory towns had a guesthouse with that name, to serve the foreign buyers and managers who occasionally passed through. In the lobby they displayed flyers from local companies; sometimes, if there was a factory that made something more elaborate than a button or a straw, they featured a high-end model in the room. In the city of Yongkang, famous for scales and electrical tools, my room contained something called the Human Body Ingredient Test Device. It looked like a scale covered with electrodes; wires ran in all directions and a sign in English had been posted atop the thing: “WARNING: Prohibited for pregnant woman and the man with heart getting up abundantly.” I decided to take a pass on the Human Body Ingredient Test Device. Beside my bed stood another local product called the Light-Wave Health Room. It was the size of a closet, made of wood, and the door was studded with electric switches—the thing looked like an outhouse from the future. Instructions read in English:

  PLEASE DON’T USE THE APPLIANCE

  IF YOU HAVE THESE SITUATIONS.

  1. The one with the bleeding wound and fester inflammation.

  2. The one with serious eyes inflammation (if not serious, please cover some wet cloth and cotton balls on the eyes).

  3. The one is burned seriously withi
n 4 months.

  4. Prohibited for the advances man, pregnant woman, baby.

  5. Prohibited for the one with serious sick, dangerous patient.

  6. Some people have the temperature taboo, please use it under the direction of doctor.

  7. Don’t put pets into appliance.

  8. Prohibited for the drunk man.

  In the city of Lishui I finally found what I was looking for. It was located seventy-five miles from Wenzhou, where Highway 330 was in bad shape. The drive from the coast usually took at least three hours, and accidents often caused delays; it was too remote for businessmen, at least until the new expressway was completed. The surrounding mountains were the highest I’d seen thus far, with green peaks rising a thousand feet above the city. Lishui lay at the intersection of the Da and the Hao rivers, and people still farmed within a mile of downtown—fruit orchards were everywhere in the suburbs. When I asked what Lishui manufactured, people laughed and said, “Tangerines.” One local entrepreneur told me earnestly, “This is the Tibet of Zhejiang.” Here in bustling southeastern China, within a few hours’ drive of the coast, it was an oxymoron—like calling a place the Alaska of New Jersey. But there was no doubt that Lishui was isolated by Zhejiang standards. When I first visited, it had the lowest per capita urban income of any city in the province, and industry was so young that Lishui had yet to settle on a local product. From an economic standpoint, it was still a blank slate: a place without buttons or playing cards or jungle gyms.

  But already changes had begun. South of town, where the new expressway would soon have an exit, the government was building the Lishui Economic Development Zone. Until recently this region had all been agricultural, as timeless as any farmland in China—a quiet place where peasants followed the regular cycles of seasons and months, planting and harvest. But now the fields were being replaced with a sprawling industrial park, and the government hoped to attract investors from the coast. Once the new road was finished, the three-hour journey from Wenzhou would be reduced to little more than sixty minutes. In the future, that was the kind of time that would matter to Lishui: the hours and minutes of a businessman’s schedule.

  ON MY NEXT JOURNEY to Lishui, three months later, I noticed a man in new clothes standing beside a half-built factory in the development zone. His outfit caught my eye: stiff black jeans, black sweater, thin-soled leather shoes with a square front. The shoes identified him as a Wenzhou native: the city is famous for its shoe factories and often local bosses adopt the export fashions. That year, a European-style loafer with squared toes was everywhere in Wenzhou, and the moment I saw the shoes I knew the man was not from Lishui.

  It was also unusual to see somebody so clean in the development zone. Roads were still dirt, and most buildings were covered with scaffolding; very few factories had started producing. Virtually everybody outside was a construction worker dressed in a grimy military uniform, carrying a sledgehammer or saw. But this man’s clothes were spotless and he held nothing but a black fake-leather money bag. His white Buick Sail was parked nearby. He looked nervous; he chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarettes. But he answered in a friendly way when I asked why he was in the development zone.

  “I’m waiting for my partner,” he said. “We’re opening a business here.”

  He introduced himself as Gao Xiaomeng, and he was thirty-three years old. His partner was his uncle, a man named Wang Aiguo who was also from the coast. Boss Gao said they were involved in the manufacturing of “clothing accessories” he didn’t go into detail about what they produced. This afternoon they were supposed to design their new factory, but Boss Wang was late. He was stuck on Highway 330—a common occurrence on the narrow road, where accidents sometimes backed up traffic for an hour. Until the new expressway was finished, and the four lanes opened for traffic, nobody would be able to predict how long it took to drive from Wenzhou.

  Every five minutes Boss Gao checked his cell phone. Every fifteen minutes he lit another cigarette. We stood in the shade of the half-built factory, chatting idly; we exchanged business cards and discussed the Lishui weather. By the time Boss Wang finally showed up, Boss Gao introduced me as a friend. In the development zone it was easy to meet people; everybody was an outsider and nobody knew what to expect from this place. It felt wide open—most structures were empty shells, and the half-built roads were bordered by blank billboards still waiting for sponsors. The silver surfaces reflected the sky, advertising nothing but late October sunlight.

  AT 2:30 IN THE afternoon, after Boss Wang had finally arrived, the men started designing the factory. The two bosses were joined by a contractor and his assistant, both of whom were natives of Lishui. There was no architect, no draftsman; nobody had brought a ruler or plumb line. The only tools carried by the men were disposable lighters, and Boss Gao’s first act was to distribute a round of State Express 555 cigarettes. After everybody lit up, he rummaged in his bag for a crumpled piece of scrap paper. He smoothed it atop the surface of a cheap folding table, and then he began to draw.

  Apart from the table, the room was empty: white walls, bare floors, untouched pillars. Naked lightbulbs dangled on cords from the ceiling like unripe fruit. The plumbing had been installed, but the water was still off; the front door had no lock. On the blank page, Boss Gao sketched the room’s walls in the shape of a rectangle, and then he added two lines in the southeastern corner. They represented walls to be constructed: someday that space would enclose a machine room. Boss Gao turned to the contractor. They spoke Mandarin—in Zhejiang, local dialects are so difficult that businessmen use the national language whenever they go to another town.

  “What’s the standard width for a door?” Boss Gao asked.

  “Usually about one and a half meters.”

  “I want it wider. Can you do two and a half?”

  “That won’t work. If you want to use standard doors, make it one and a half.”

  Boss Gao returned to the paper, sketching fast, and four more rooms took shape: a chemist’s laboratory, a storage closet, two additional spaces for machines. Boss Wang leaned over to study the diagram. “We don’t need this room,” he said to his nephew.

  “Don’t you want two more for the machines?”

  “One is enough. Put them all together.”

  Boss Wang took the pen, scratched out a line, and the planned room disappeared. The older man was more conscious of money, and he knew that every new wall only meant higher costs. He had been in business for twenty years, and many of the best opportunities had passed him by, but his nephew still had the nervous eagerness of youth. Boss Gao’s previous endeavor had been a moderate success, and he dressed the part, with a sort of understated coolness. He was proud of his Buick Sail—when we first met, he made sure to tell me that he drove an American car. In fact the Sail is based on the platform of the Opel Corsa, which gives it the distinction of being an Opel-engineered car built by Chinese workers under the brand of a troubled American automaker. But such details didn’t matter to Boss Gao, who had already come a long way from peasant roots. His father had been a rice farmer and local schoolteacher, and Boss Gao was the first member of his family to succeed in business.

  At 2:57 the bosses finished designing the ground level. They moved to the second floor, where Boss Gao reached once more into his quiver of State Express 555s. He handed out the cigarettes and then flipped over the sheet of paper.

  “This is too small for an office.”

  “Put the wall here instead. That’s big enough.”

  “Can you put a wall in here?”

  “It’ll be too dark if you do it like that.”

  “This room isn’t for workers anyway.”

  “Budui! That doesn’t look right.”

  The two bosses conferred and the uncle scribbled out another wall. In twenty-three minutes they designed an office, a hallway, and three living quarters for factory managers. They moved to the top floor. Two bathrooms, a kitchen, nine dormitory rooms for workers: fourteen minutes. All to
ld, they had mapped out a 21,000-square-foot factory, from bottom to top, in one hour and four minutes. Boss Gao handed the scrap of paper to the Lishui contractor. The man asked when they wanted the estimate.

  “How about this afternoon?” Boss Gao said.

  The contractor looked at his watch. It was 3:48 p.m.

  “I can’t do it that fast!”

  “Well, then tell me early in the morning.”

  They went outside to discuss building materials. The contractor showed them two kinds of cinder blocks: one sold for 18.6 American cents; the other was 19.8 cents. Boss Wang chose the cheaper blocks. When it came to plaster, he said, “We just don’t want that kind that rubs off on your clothes when you brush against it.” The contractor asked if they needed a detailed estimate, with square footage itemized and calculated, but Boss Wang didn’t have time for that. “Just give us the price,” he said. The last thing they discussed was doors. The new factory would require fifteen total, and for some reason this particular item concerned Boss Wang.

  “Don’t buy those cheap five-dollar doors that look terrible,” he said sternly. “We want the ten-dollar doors. And don’t try to make money by getting cheaper materials. That’s not the way you make money. I’ll tell you how to do it—do a good job now and then we’ll hire you again. That’s how we make money in Wenzhou. If you do it right, you’ll get more business. Do you understand?”