Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  After they started erecting the tent, a couple of villagers wandered over. Liu’s father asked one of the farmers if there had been other performances recently, and the man nodded. “Lots of them!” he said. “And there’s a singing concert tonight.”

  Everybody froze. The father asked what kind of concert.

  “A free concert,” he said. “China Mobile.”

  Their faces fell—nothing dismayed a variety show performer more than potential competition from China Mobile. After a hurried conference, the troupe decided to send the father on a recon mission. The rest of the players continued setting up the tent, but now they also looked up at the sky, whose color had changed from pleather to something more ominous. China Mobile and rain—the only way things could get worse was if the cops showed up.

  Last night they had cleared less than one hundred American dollars. Their income had been falling over the past two years, because of all the new competition, and they weren’t getting as much from the lost-migrant monologue that Liu gave every night. He had first learned that routine back in the late 1990s, from another troupe. The key to the story, he explained, is sentimentality: it has to be about somebody far from home, preferably with lost parents, or abandoned children, or wives who have strayed. Since the audience is mostly male, it’s important to include an unattainable female figure, which is why Liu ended his story with the dream sequence. He had two different versions of that tale: sometimes the orphan dreams of his mother, and other times he dreams of a lost wife. If it’s the mother, she appears with food; if it’s the wife, she carries a baby. Liu never figured out which story was more effective, so he kept both versions in his repertoire. They usually got an extra five or six dollars in the collection bowl, but a couple times in the past somebody had dropped in a hundred-yuan bill, about twelve dollars. “Maybe the story made them feel sad,” Liu said. “Or maybe they thought it was funny. I don’t know.”

  After a few minutes the father returned from his recon mission. He carried a flyer with marks of doom: the China Mobile logo and the words “Free Performance!” The company was promoting a new phone card that charged only 0.18 yuan per minute.

  “We should leave,” Liu Changfu said.

  “It’s different,” his father said. “They’re a singing show. We’re a variety show.”

  The tent had already been raised; the clouds had grown darker. While they discussed the matter, a half dozen men walked over from the China Mobile show. They were in their twenties, and they had the well-groomed look of city folk. They wore white button-down shirts, and around their necks hung big China Mobile ID tags. They didn’t seem angry—just curious and self-important and more than a little scornful. They faced off with the Liu men in the center of the trash-filled field.

  “What’s your performance?” asked one of the China Mobile men.

  “Acrobatics,” the father said. “All types.”

  The China Mobile man motioned at the marquee with its bikinis. “Where are your women?” he asked.

  “They’re working inside the tent. We have to finish preparing everything.” In truth, the women usually remained out of sight before a show, so potential customers wouldn’t realize that they weren’t nearly as pretty as the pictures on the marquee.

  “You know that our show is free,” said China Mobile. “Nobody’s going to pay to come here if they can come to ours for nothing.”

  “We’ll be fine. Ours is different.”

  “You have to understand, our performance is really big,” said China Mobile, tossing back his head. “The total cost of our show is five thousand yuan!”

  “We have good equipment,” the father said. “Our show is computerized.”

  As evidence he pointed at a box that contained a battered Yamaha electric organ.

  “How much is your admission?” asked China Mobile.

  “Five yuan.”

  “So cheap!”

  China Mobile pointed at me. “What’s the foreigner doing here? Is he performing?”

  “Yes,” the father said. “He’s with us.”

  I decided to let this slide—thus far I had not spoken, and the China Mobile crew assumed that I didn’t understand Chinese. And I had to admire the father’s gall; he puffed out his chest and stood up to the cell phone boys. For a moment they fell silent, perhaps imagining a foreigner performing onstage with women in bikinis. But quickly they regained their swagger. “I think you’ll be better off going somewhere else,” China Mobile said.

  “We’ll stay,” the father said loudly. “You draw your crowd, and we’ll draw ours.”

  The young men shook their heads and walked away. The father’s expression was proud, unyielding; he stood with his arms crossed and watched the China Mobile crew leave. The instant they were out of sight he turned to his sons.

  “We have to leave right now,” he said. “There’s no way we’re going to have any customers with those guys around.”

  It took them half an hour to pack up the tent and get back on the road. A few heavy drops of rain began to fall, and they headed north until they found an empty lot. But a local worker told them that a medicine company had sponsored a free concert just the night before. Next they tried a zipper factory, but the site was too cramped. Finally they settled on a promising place beside another pleather plant called Sunenew. Almost immediately after they had raised the tent, and the music began to play, a police car showed up.

  It was the first time I had ever seen a patrol car in the development zone. Two cops got out, and they climbed the ramp to the box office. One of them asked Liu if the troupe had registered.

  “No,” Liu replied. “But we’re just a small troupe. We’ll only be here one night.”

  The cops conferred for a few minutes, and then one of them turned to Liu. “OK,” he said. “But make sure you don’t do anything disorderly.”

  After the cops were gone, Liu began his spiel: “W-o-r-k-e-rs and b-o-s-s-es!” Men in blue Sunenew factory jumpsuits gathered in front, staring at the marquee and its bikinis, and soon they began to buy tickets. The real women remained out of sight, as usual. Earlier in the day, I had asked Liu Changfu about the nudity. “It’s expected for variety shows to have something like this,” the skinny man explained. “Before people buy tickets, they’ll ask, ‘Is your performance of the more open kind?’ We have to be able to say yes. It’s really only a small thing, what she does at the end, but it’s enough for us to say, ‘Yes, our performance is open.’”

  I asked if Liu’s wife ever performed the final strip. She was the short fat woman who, on the night I watched the show, had performed in a bra and panties, dancing out of rhythm and staring at the floor.

  “No way!” Liu said, eyes wide. “I wouldn’t like that. My brother’s wives don’t do that either. It would be bad, you know, if a close relative had to do that. So the other woman does it every time.”

  In the hierarchy of the Red Star Acrobatic and Artistic Troupe, that was the lowest position: the wife of the most distant cousin. Her name was Wang, and she was twenty-three years old. She was the only member of the troupe who was pretty, with dark eyes and a gentle expression; I never heard her say much. But during one of the tent-raisings she approached me shyly. “Do you have an American dollar?” she asked.

  I had one in my wallet and I showed it to her.

  “I’ve never seen one before,” she said. “How much is it worth?”

  “About eight yuan.”

  “If I give you ten, can I have it?”

  It felt like a stripper’s tip—I handed over the bill and told her not to worry about it. She beamed and showed it off to the others, proud of the foreign souvenir. On the second evening, before they started the performance, I said good-bye and drove away. Liu Changfu was right: it’s the kind of show you don’t need to see twice. I had grown too fond of the troupe to sit through it again.

  IN MARCH OF 2006, in the span of a week, the bra ring factory acquired an official logo, a Web site, business cards, and sample boo
ks. A Wenzhou designer prepared all of it for a fee of less than eight hundred dollars, and for the most part he copied the templates directly from competitors and other companies. He gave them an English name, too: the Lishui Yashun Underdress Fittings Industry Co., Ltd. On the company Web site, the designer posted a photograph of a sparkling multistory complex that had absolutely nothing to do with their facilities in Lishui. The Web site also noted that they had “many years” experience in the manufacture of bra rings, and it described the Machine with particular pride: “German import completely automatic production equipment.”

  The company’s theme color was hot pink. On the Web site, the description of the Machine featured a hot pink border, and hot pink bubbles bounced around the home page. The sample books were the same color, and they featured photographs of sultry foreign women wearing bras and halter tops. Even the bosses’ business cards had been printed in pink. They were decorated with the new company logo:

  When I first saw the design, I thought that it might represent a bird in flight, or maybe a heart. Then I looked more closely and wondered if it was a pair of breasts. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to be,” Boss Wang admitted. “It doesn’t matter as long as it looks good. The designer probably took it from some other company.”

  The bosses had more important issues to worry about. For one thing, nobody was buying bra rings. The new company had machinery, raw materials, technicians, assembly-line workers—but not a single customer, at least for the rings. They had old buyers for the underwire, which they had produced for years, but the new product required a fresh start. Boss Gao told me this is how business works in Zhejiang. “If you don’t have a product, you can’t sell it,” he said. “You have to produce it and then you start finding customers. That’s why we had to set up all of this first.”

  Once the sample books were ready, the bosses began to travel around Zhejiang, meeting representatives of companies that manufacture brassieres. For guanxi, it’s standard practice for a new factory to woo buyers with gifts; it’s not enough to simply show them samples. The bra ring bosses gave out bottles of Wuliangye baijiu and cartons of Chunghwa cigarettes, which are the preferred brand of most Zhejiang bosses. Sometimes they handed out gift boxes with yellow croaker fish, a Wenzhou favorite. In addition to factory buyers, government officials also had their hands out. The tax bureau was particularly important—if these cadres are unhappy, they can ruin a business. “You know how China is: toushui loushui,” Boss Gao said. “Stolen taxes and leaked taxes.” He meant that if the factory was going to follow the standard practice of under-reporting its income, they would need good relations with the cadres. “We haven’t started doing this yet, but eventually we’ll have to take a lot of the tax officials out to dinner,” he said. I asked him if these banquets would also be used for giving gifts, but he shook his head. “You don’t give a gift at dinner,” he said. “Those things are separate. For the gift you stop by their home.”

  They had few bank loans for that reason. In China, acquiring such a loan isn’t easy for a small entrepreneur, and it always requires more guanxi. Boss Gao told me they would need to make friends with bank officials and loan officers; everybody would expect dinners and bribes. In order to avoid this expense, Boss Wang had invested strictly cash, and Boss Gao had only small bank loans. He saved his bribes for the more important officials. He told me that in Lishui such cadres required a gift with a value of roughly two thousand yuan—nearly three hundred dollars. In Wenzhou it would have been even more expensive, which was one reason they had located in this part of the province. “The rent is cheaper here, and it’s cheaper to pull guanxi,” Boss Gao explained.

  At first, the details of guanxi seemed mysteriously complex, because as a foreigner I was distracted by the rituals—the banquets and the secret meetings. But over time I realized that it’s actually a system, and in a place like southern Zhejiang it’s highly functional. Gifts are standardized and portable, which makes them a kind of currency. A carton of Chunghwa can be received by one businessman, given to another, and then passed on to a cadre, who might in turn bestow it upon a higher-up. If only Chunghwa cigarettes could talk! There are probably boxes that have traveled from the marshes of Ouhai to the gardens of Hangzhou, spanning the whole length of Zhejiang Province, pausing for brief sojourns in Buttontown or Pleatherville. And most important, guanxi is convenient. Boss Gao told me that sometimes he gave officials a cash card that could be used at the local supermarket. I asked how he knew the correct amount.

  “You just know,” he said.

  “How do you know?”

  “I can’t explain, but it’s obvious,” he said. “Around here even a schoolchild can figure it out!”

  One afternoon that March, I was sitting with the bosses in their upstairs office when a trio of officials arrived from the tax bureau. The visit was completely unexpected. Boss Wang had been doing some paperwork at his desk, and Boss Gao was working on the sample books, which had just arrived. He was pasting bra rings onto the pages when the tax cadres walked in. For an instant Boss Gao froze, like a man caught playing a child’s game, and then he quickly closed the book. Striking a more dignified pose, he stood up and offered the cadres a hot pink business card.

  None of the officials was particularly well dressed, but they held their heads high, and one of them flashed an identification card from the Lishui State Tax Bureau. His name was Liu. He wore blue jeans and an orange T-shirt, and he had the kind of crew cut that often means trouble in China. That’s the official haircut of the Chinese bully; my heart always sinks a little at the sight of a flattop. Nevertheless I handed Cadre Liu a business card of my own. He studied it for a moment and shrugged: if I wasn’t connected to the factory, he had no interest in me. He turned to Boss Wang.

  “We brought some of your registration papers,” he said. “You need to sign them. You’re supposed to have done this before you started production.”

  “I kn-kn-know,” Boss Wang said, “we’ve been p-p-planning to do that. But we haven’t started selling anything yet.”

  Boss Wang’s stutter always appeared when he was nervous, and now his eyelids fluttered and his voice rose a couple of octaves. He poured cups of tea for the men, gesturing for them to sit on the pleather couch. But they remained standing. Cadre Liu wandered over to examine the door.

  “This place doesn’t seem very safe,” he said. “Why don’t you have a better lock?”

  “We just moved in. We’re still setting everything up.”

  “Somebody could come in through the window. Where do you keep the receipts?”

  Boss Wang showed him a metal file box.

  “You should make it more secure. There’s theft around here.”

  The other two men made a slow circuit of the room, examining the barren furnishings. One of them studied the screen of Boss Gao’s computer; another flipped through a sample book. “Is this what you make?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “What materials does it require?”

  “Just metal and nylon coating. It’s very simple.”

  “What are the byproducts? Anything dangerous?”

  “No. Just water. And high temperature. It’s not a problem.”

  “You know,” Cadre Liu said, “it would have been better if you had contacted us earlier.”

  Boss Wang flushed. “I c-c-called the tax bureau but I couldn’t get an answer about the registration, so I figured I’d wait. You have to understand, I don’t know anybody here. We’re just getting s-s-started. It’s better if we meet personally, so I thought the phone wasn’t convenient.”

  Two of the men finally settled onto the couch, but Cadre Liu still drifted. Now he stood by the window, peering out at Suisong Road. “The environment here isn’t very good,” he remarked.

  “Everything is still new,” Boss Wang said. “They haven’t finished the street.”

  “How many workers do you have?”

  “T-t-twelve or thirteen. After we have customers we’ll
add more.”

  “How many?”

  “Maybe fifty to sixty.”

  “What about that part of the building down there?”

  “That’s not ours. That’s being rented by another company. They’re moving here from Shanghai.”

  “What’s their product?”

  “Thermoses.”

  Cadre Liu nodded—he probably did this everywhere, gathering intelligence on any new companies that could be shaken down. He turned again to Boss Wang. “Do you have an accountant?”

  “We have a secretary who handles accounts. We don’t need a real accountant yet.”

  “Well, you’re going to need one soon.”

  “Once business picks up we’ll hire one.”

  Cadre Liu took another card out of his pleather money bag. “You should call this company,” he said. “My friend is the boss, and he can provide an accounting service.”

  There was only the slightest pause before Boss Wang responded. Then he said the right thing: “H-h-how much?”

  “I think it’s around six or seven hundred a month. But I’m not sure. You can call them. They’re a very good company.”

  Boss Wang left the card sitting on his desk. For Cadre Liu, it served two purposes: a favor for a friend and an additional source of intelligence, because the accounting service would give him a line of information on the business. The best part, of course, was that the bra ring factory would pay to be monitored.

  Cadre Liu produced the registration papers and Boss Wang stamped them with the company chop. At the end, the official mentioned the accountant again.

  “OK,” Boss Wang said. “I’ll call them. I just want things to be c-c-convenient.”

  “We want things to be convenient, too,” said Cadre Liu, smiling. He left the room; the others followed; nobody shook hands. The moment the men were gone, I realized how tense I’d felt just watching the conversation, and I sank back in my chair. But Boss Wang had already picked up the office phone. He dialed the number on the card and said, “Wei, I’d like to ask you to introduce an accountant to me…”