ALL ACROSS CHINA THE people of Wenzhou are famous for their entrepreneurial skill. In a nation where millions have made the transition from countryside to city, from farming to business, the natives of southern Zhejiang are the prototypical peasant-entrepreneurs. Back in the 1980s, when China’s private economy took its first tentative steps, the Wenzhou people responded so quickly that the central government began to praise the “Wenzhou model” of rural development. As a business strategy it couldn’t have been simpler: low investment, low-quality products, low profit margins. Low education, too—even today, after two decades of a booming economy, nearly 80 percent of all Wenzhou entrepreneurs have fewer than nine years of formal schooling. But somehow it works, and the city has come to dominate certain industries. Today, roughly a quarter of the shoes sold in China come from Wenzhou. The city produces an estimated 70 percent of the world’s cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of the Wenzhou economy is private—unlike other parts of the nation, state-owned industries have played little role in local development.
Over time, Wenzhou entrepreneurs have spread out across the south. Often they follow new roads, which was part of the plan for the Jinliwen Expressway: it was designed to transport factory goods to the coast, but it would also allow businessmen to travel into the interior. This had already happened along other routes, like Highway 330. Wenzhou businessmen often came to a village, started a few factories, and then locals picked up on the idea. Many of the one-product towns began in this manner, and it had contributed to the overall success of Zhejiang Province. Despite having been relatively poor in the 1970s, Zhejiang now has the highest per capita urban and rural incomes of any province.
The Wenzhou people themselves love to talk about the mystery of their success. In general, the Chinese are highly attuned to regional differences, and they’re quick to bring up the shortcomings of some other part of the country. Beijing natives ridicule the low class of the Henanese; people in Shenzhen disparage migrants from Hunan and Sichuan; lots of folks have something bad to say about women from Shanghai. But Wenzhou has an unusual taste for self-analysis. At the airport bookstore, an entire section is devoted to volumes about Wenzhou business: The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, The Feared Wenzhou People, The Wenzhou Code, Actually You Don’t Understand the Wenzhou People. These books are popular with visitors, but it’s also common for natives to read up on themselves. Once I saw Boss Gao studying a book called The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Entrepreneurs. He asked me if I knew any Jews in America, and I said yes.
“Are they good at business?” Boss Gao said.
I said that some of them did business, and some of them did other things.
“It says here that Jews in Europe are famous for doing business,” he said.
“I guess that’s true historically,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean that all Jews do business nowadays.”
“This book says that the Jews are the Wenzhou people of Europe,” said Boss Gao.
It took me a minute to wrap my head around that one. But eventually I learned what to expect in conversations about Wenzhou development. Entrepreneurs often asked the same question: “Why do you think that we Wenzhou people are so good at business?” It pleased them if I said, “The environment.” This response agreed with the Wenzhou books, which generally propagate theories of environmental determinism. The region possesses little arable soil, and during imperial times there were poor transport links to the interior, because of the rugged landscape. With few options, Wenzhou natives turned to the sea, and they had already developed a strong trading culture by the end of the Ming dynasty, in the seventeenth century. They also built a tradition of migration, and pockets of Wenzhou émigrés gained footholds in port cities around the world. These networks survived the isolation of the Mao years, and so did the Wenzhou business instinct. Once the Communists allowed them to leave farms and start factories, the local economy took off.
The environmental theory makes sense, but there’s also an element of self-determinism. People in southern Zhejiang believe in their business acumen, and they take pride in their ability to cut margins and develop trade networks. They have faith in themselves, and they have faith in business—there’s no shame in being a cold-blooded entrepreneur. A few years ago, a Wenzhou newspaper called Fortune Weekly ran a special Valentine’s Day supplement that included a survey of local male millionaires. The newspaper asked the men where they liked to have romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, and it listed the gifts they purchased for their wives and girlfriends. One question called upon respondents to recall “the time in your life when you felt the deepest emotion.” The two most common responses were “When I started my business” and “When I got divorced.” Another question asked: “If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be?” Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn’t make up their minds.
BY MY THIRD TRIP to Zhejiang, I learned how to return a rental car with an empty tank. The first couple of times I miscalculated, bringing back the Santana with plenty of gas, which obviously pleased the men who ran the Wenzhou Prosperous Automobile Rental Company. The trick was to never fill the thing up: I added gas in five-and ten-dollar increments, and at the end of a journey I timed it so the low-fuel light flashed just before I made it back to Wenzhou Prosperous. And it was obvious that so long as I paid my thirty dollars per day, I could do whatever I pleased to a Wenzhou car. There weren’t any rules about where I could drive, and the company never checked for damage; they couldn’t have cared less about dents and scratches. In this part of China, it was hopeless—the rental cars were already riddled with marks.
I had never been any place in the country where driving was so dangerous. Part of the problem was infrastructure, which often had a slapdash quality. Wenzhou never benefited from the kind of central planning that shaped other key cities like Shenzhen and Shanghai, and here in Zhejiang the local governments usually had to figure out things on their own. Roads were undersized and in poor repair; traffic control was a disaster. And the Wenzhou business instinct made things worse, because people were in a rush and they liked to take risks.
There was nothing more terrifying than a drive through the city’s coastal suburbs. Fifteen years ago, this region was all farmland, but it boomed so fast that old village boundaries disappeared. Now you judged transitions by advertisements on the side of the road, which featured local products. Once, I toured this region, heading south past the airport. First I cruised through a neighborhood where virtually every billboard displayed hinges, and then I began to see signs for electric plugs and adaptors. Soon they were replaced by plastic light switches; next came fluorescent bulbs. Everywhere I passed warehouses and factory buildings, but the road itself remained of rural dimensions: two lanes, no shoulder, badly pitted. Periodically a minor accident caused a traffic jam, and drivers leaned on their horns while staring at advertisements for hinges or light switches. In a place called Longwan I reached faucets—this area was home to nearly seven hundred factories that made water spouts. Automobile axles were next, then metal punch presses.
At last I came to the district of Rui’an, which according to the local government was home to exactly 1,208 manufacturers of automobile engine accessories, brakes, and steering systems. I passed pieces of vehicles in all the roadside shops: dozens of wheels in one window, rows of brake pads in the next, and then a block of stores that featured nothing but car ignitions. In the middle of town I came upon a fatal accident that had occurred just moments earlier. A young woman had been driving a scooter, and she must have been moving at a high rate of speed when she struck a car. The larger vehicle was badly dented and the scooter was smashed beyond recognition. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, and I had no choice but to drive directly past the accident site. A crowd had already gathered, pointing and chattering excitedly; nobody had bothered to cover the body. The woman hadn’t worn a helmet and sh
e had struck the ground headfirst: legs bent backward, arms splayed out, face pressed flat down. When I drove past, before I could look away, I caught an image of her brains poured onto the pavement. It was late afternoon and the light was sharp; blood pooled bright around tangled hair.
A block further, the pedestrian crowd thinned out and traffic returned to normal. Motor scooters zipped along; cars jockeyed for position; horns sang out in the streets. Billboards advertised more pieces of automobiles: hubcaps, pedals, spark plugs. Wipers and windshields, seats and steering wheels. Tires, tires, tires. My hands were still shaking when I pulled over for the evening at Rui’an’s International Hotel. The parking lot was packed with rows of black cars: Audis and Buicks and Volkswagens. Buyers and sellers, businessmen and cadres—and out on the bustling evening streets, where the neon shop signs came to life, nobody would have guessed that there was one less driver in the city.
WHEN I RETURNED TO the Lishui factory in January of 2006, the bosses were testing the machinery. It had been only three months since my last visit, but during that time the place had been transformed. The contractor’s work was finished; the dividing walls had been erected and the ten-dollar doors were all in place. Three big punch press machines stood in the main room. Crates and boxes had been piled everywhere, full of equipment waiting to be assembled. There were workers, too—Boss Gao, the younger of the two entrepreneurs, was accompanied by three technicians who had been hired to get the factory running. On my last trip, the bosses had spoken vaguely of their products as “clothing accessories,” and now I asked one of the technicians for more detail.
The man’s name was Tian Hongguo, and originally he had come from Sichuan Province. He was in his late thirties, an advanced age in the factory world; everybody called him “Old Tian.” He was tiny, weighing just over one hundred pounds, and he had an elflike face: pointed chin, big ears, wide mouth. He grinned at my question.
“We’re going to make two things,” he said, and he took samples out of a box. One was a ring so small that it wouldn’t fit around my little finger. The other was a larger band of steel, razor-thin and covered with plastic at both ends. It was bent in the shape of a wide-open U, and Old Tian handed me a couple, in different sizes. One was just large enough for a billiard ball to pass through. The other was about the size of a softball. I asked Old Tian what they were for.
“It’s for women’s clothing,” he said.
He held the band to his breast so that the tips faced up, like a smile. Suddenly it dawned on me—these were support structures for brassieres.
“It helps women dress more beautifully,” Old Tian said. “We have different sizes, too. Some are small and some are big. Some are really big.” He gestured with his hands, forming the shape of an object roughly the size of a basketball. I couldn’t imagine he was still talking about bras, so I figured those wires must have a different function.
“The ones that are that big,” I asked, “what are they used for?”
“For Russians,” Old Tian said.
FOR THE PAST DECADE Boss Gao had manufactured obscure pieces of clothing. He had grown up in the marshlands south of Wenzhou, in the region known as Ouhai, where his father grew rice and taught in the local middle school. Boss Gao attended two years of trade school, studying machinery, and in the mid-1990s he opened a small workshop with his family. They manufactured lining for trousers—the cheap white fabric that’s attached to the beltline. Like so many Wenzhou products, it required very little in the way of labor or technology. Initially the Gaos invested less than four thousand American dollars, and the family represented the entire work force: Boss Gao, his parents, and his two sisters. They sold to local clothing factories, and their profit margin in the early years was roughly 50 percent. They made enough money to expand, buying new machinery and hiring a half dozen workers.
In the beginning there were only five or six other workshops in the region that made the same product. But soon others in town noticed the Gao family’s success, and new factories began to spring up. By 2003, their neighborhood had become home to twenty different producers of nonwoven fabric, and profit margins had plummeted to 15 percent. That year, Boss Gao gave up on trouser lining. He was still making money, but he didn’t want to ride the industry all the way to the bottom.
“It was a lot easier to do business in the 1990s,” he told me once. “There weren’t so many people starting factories back then.” He often spoke fondly about that time; for Boss Gao, who was all of thirty-three years old, the 1990s were the good old days, when competition wasn’t so intense. “Back then it was the product that mattered,” he said wistfully. “It used to be that you’d try to find a product that nobody else was making. But now everything is already being made by somebody in China. No matter what you make, you’re going to have competition. So now it’s not the product that counts. It’s the volume.”
After abandoning trouser lining, Boss Gao partnered with his uncle, who produced underwire for brassieres. It’s another product with a low cost of entry: all it requires is an electric metal-punch machine, which bends the steel, cuts the pieces, and cranks out nearly a hundred wires per minute. Demand is steady, which is the only good thing about underwire. “As long as there are women, you’ll have customers,” Boss Gao once said philosophically. “It’s like sanitary napkins.” But nobody gets rich from the wires, and Boss Gao and Boss Wang began to look for a new product. Their goal was to find something that required significant investment in technical machinery, which was one way to weed out the copycats.
Together the bosses searched far and wide—well, at any rate they thoroughly explored the brassiere. From the Wenzhou perspective, the product represents a vast world unto itself, since the final assembly of each bra consists of twelve separate components. The bosses started their search at the bottom, with the underwire, and then they worked their way up the bra, weighing the possibilities of each separate component. They thought about thread; they looked at lace; they considered the clasp. When they reached the top, where tiny 0-and 8-shaped rings adjust the straps, they found what they were looking for.
To a consumer, a bra ring seems simple to the point of invisibility. It consists of thin steel coated with nylon, and it weighs only half a gram; the average bra contains four such rings. They connect to nylon straps, and hardly any woman in America or Europe gives the objects a second thought. But in fact the rings are the most technically complicated component of the garment. In order to coat a steel ring evenly with high-gloss nylon, a manufacturer must have an assembly line with three distinct stages, each of which heats the ring to over five hundred degrees Celsius. All of it must be computer-controlled: the temperature, the oscillating mechanism of the powder mixer, the speed of each conveyor belt. Such machinery can’t be cobbled together from spare parts, and it’s not cheap: Boss Gao and Boss Wang purchased their assembly line for sixty-five thousand dollars. In the past, neither entrepreneur had spent even a tenth as much on a piece of equipment, and all of their plans depended on this assembly line working smoothly.
The Machine sat on the ground floor, in the first room that Boss Gao had designed. It was a squat, sullen-looking thing: the exterior had been painted seasick-green and the two main assembly lines stretched fifty feet long. They were arranged one on top of the other, double-decker fashion. The conveyor belts were made of polished steel and they gleamed mirror-bright beneath bare lightbulbs. The whole thing weighed six tons, because the belts were propped up by unbelievably thick pillars of steel. These supports easily could have hoisted a house—there’s no logical reason why the manufacture of tiny bra rings requires such thick pillars. But steel, like cement, is one of the basic construction materials that tend to be overused in urban China. It’s an economy of scale: in such a massive country, at a time of incredible growth, companies turn out raw materials so fast that the prices are relatively cheap. Foreign architects often comment on the staggering amounts of cement and steel that go into a typical Chinese building project.
I visited the factory on the day they first tested the Machine. A technician named Luo Shouyun hit a switch, and gas burners ignited blue flames; the conveyor belts lurched forward. A digital console tracked the temperature. The room itself was cold—outside it wasn’t much above freezing, and the bosses, like most people in Zhejiang, didn’t heat their factory. But soon the digital numbers began to rise as the gas flames warmed the Machine. It hit ninety degrees Celsius, then 150. Within fifteen minutes the temperature had broken 400. The number topped out at 474, and then it suddenly plummeted. The Machine needed to sustain a level of at least 500 degrees before production could begin.
“Maybe it’s because it’s colder here than in Guangdong,” Luo Shouyun said. In the far south of China, he had spent most of a decade working on bra rings, and everybody called him Luo Shifu: Master Luo. He had been poached from a competing factory, and he was the only one in the room who truly understood how the Machine worked. Now he put on a pair of fireproof gloves and tried to open the door to one of the heating elements. But the metal had been welded so poorly that the joints melted away in the heat, and the handle came off in Master Luo’s hand. He cursed and dropped the red-hot metal, which lay on the cold cement floor, hissing like an angry snake.
“Mei shir,” Boss Gao said. “No problem. Don’t worry about that.”
He lit another State Express 555 and gave one to Master Luo. Cigarette clenched between his teeth, Master Luo tinkered with the control panel, which was covered with two dozen switches. He decided to run an initial batch of rings through the assembly line, to see how they came out. At the end of the line he measured them with a digital caliper. They were 1.7 millimeters in width—far too fat for a bra ring, whose ideal thickness ranges from 1.2 to 1.3 millimeters. The nylon wasn’t melting evenly; the Machine was running too cold. Now the temperature of the assembly line wouldn’t even break 400. “Is it the weather?” Boss Gao said.
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Page 33
