Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  Lots of people say your life is hard,

  But you smile and say that as long as you have us, you’re never sad…

  Little Long kept his diary in a spiral notebook. It also contained a copy of a long letter he had written to a former girlfriend, as well as pages on which he had practiced writing the Latin alphabet, in an attempt at self-education. Throughout the notebook he had copied aphorisms and mottos, some of which also appeared on his dormitory wall. In big characters above his bed was the phrase: “Find Success Immediately.” Another wall read: “Face the Future Directly.” And he also inscribed the title of one of his self-help books: “Square and Round.”

  Like many young people in factory towns, Little Long was a great consumer of inspirational literature. One of his favorites was Square and Round, a best-seller in China that explains how to function in modern society. The title comes from a traditional phrase—squareness represents a person’s internal integrity, whereas roundness is the external flexibility necessary to deal with other people. The author adapts this classical notion to the intense competitiveness of today’s boomtown society, with unsettling conclusions: much of the book describes how to lie profitably, manipulate co-workers, and generally behave like a post-Communist Machiavelli. There’s a section on the best way to request something from a boss (first, ask for something unrealistic, so the rejection creates a sense of obligation). Another chapter tells how to cry effectively in front of a superior (don’t overdo it). There’s advice on how to keep friendship in perspective. (“If you and your best friend get along very well, then you are true friends for now. But if there is one million dollars’ worth of business to be done, and if you don’t kick him aside or he doesn’t kick you aside, then you have mental problems.”)

  In addition to Square and Round, Little Long often turned to a Chinese copy of The Harvard MBA Comprehensive Volume of How to Conduct Yourself in Society. “I’m not mature enough,” he told me. “Somebody as young as me needs help, and this book can provide it. If I have some kind of problem, I don’t have anybody that I can talk to—I’m lonely in that way. But books like this give me ideas about how to handle situations.” He also relied on A Treasured Book for Success in Life, and another one of his favorites was A Collection of the Classics. This book features foreign-themed stories, and Little Long was particularly impressed by a chapter about John D. Rockefeller. According to Collection of the Classics, the oil tycoon took his lunch every day at the same local restaurant, where he always left a one-dollar tip. After a period of weeks the waiter finally said, “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so miserly as to give such a small tip.” Rockefeller shot back, “Because of such thinking, you’re only a waiter.” The Collection of the Classics concludes with a moral: “A great many people can’t become rich, and a major reason is that they spend money freely.” Another chapter features Jesus Christ, although this particular parable isn’t one that appears in the Bible. In the Chinese book, a man who tries to help others only makes things worse, and finally Jesus tells him to cut it out. That’s the Messiah’s message—accept the world as it is. “In our real world, we often think about the best way to act, but the reality and our desires are often at odds,” explains the moral. “We must believe that accepting what we have is the best arrangement for us.”

  Little Long had a naturally sweet disposition, and from this odd cocktail of books he drew a lesson of equanimity. That was the most important thing he learned from all the great teachers: Confucius and Jesus, Rockefeller and Mao. “I want to be persistent,” he told me. “I don’t want things to frustrate me or make me angry.” He wrote his slogans on the dormitory wall, and he made a point of never complaining about overwork—in his opinion, people in factories gripe too much. He wanted to be at peace with himself, and he wanted to get along with others. “In a group you need to be flexible,” he said. “It’s about balance, about trying to get along, trying to find the right path.” Little Long’s words could have come straight from a Daoist text, and the same is true for the parable about Jesus: it echoes the classical phrase Wu wei er wu bu wei, “By doing nothing everything will be done.” It reminded me of my experience as a teacher of English literature in Sichuan, where my students often interpreted Western classics in a Chinese way. Even as foreign materials pour into China, and young people seek out new influences, their instincts often remain deeply traditional.

  For his part, John D. Rockefeller inspired Little Long to switch cigarette brands. After reading about the difference between a waiter and an oil baron, Little Long decided to be more thrifty. So he quit smoking Profitable Crowd cigarettes and began buying a brand called Hibiscus. Hibiscus are terrible; they cost a cent and a half each, and the label immediately identifies the bearer as a peasant. But Little Long was determined to rise above such petty thinking, just like Rockefeller. Every time he smoked a pack, he saved 37.5 cents, and money like that was bound to add up over time. Someday he’d have enough to fulfill Mao Zedong’s prophecy on the dormitory wall:

  A PERSON CAN BECOME SUCCESSFUL ANYWHERE;

  I SWEAR I WILL NOT RETURN HOME UNTIL I AM FAMOUS.

  IN LISHUI, I OFTEN found myself talking about the outside world, although I never met a foreign buyer or investor. There wasn’t much reason for them to come to the development zone, which was home to relatively few factories funded by overseas investment. And a remote place like Lishui tends to make things that are a step or two removed from the finished product. Rings are shipped elsewhere to be attached to bras; pleather eventually becomes handbags or car seats in bigger Chinese factories. Other goods are sold in bulk in Yiwu, a Zhejiang city whose wholesale malls attract hordes of foreign buyers. But such people don’t bother traveling to Lishui, and whenever I drove around the city, glimpses of the foreign tended to be odd and slightly disorienting. The first gym to open downtown was called The Scent of a Woman. In the development zone, the Geley factory turned out crates of Jane Eyre light switches. A block away, at the front gate of Lishui Sanxing Power Machinery Co., Ltd., the owners had posted a huge sign that was supposed to be in English. But they had written the letters from right to left, the way the Chinese traditionally do with characters:

  DTL, .OC YRENIHCAM REWOP GNIXNAS IUHSIL

  And yet the people in Lishui—the migrants, the bosses, the entrepreneurs—made many products bound for the outside world, and they liked to talk about foreign things. They searched out self-help books with supposed American themes, and their curiosity was boundless. When I met somebody like Little Long, his energy and determination reminded me of other places, other times. This was China’s version of the Industrial Revolution: rural people were moving to cities, and they had a gift for self-invention that rivaled anything in Dickens. And they practiced a no-holds-barred version of capitalism that would be recognizable to any American historian. At the bra ring factory, when I heard the tale of how Liu Hongwei memorized and copied the Machine, I thought of Francis Cabot Lowell, who performed the same trick in the early 1800s. Back then, the United States was the upstart society, and the British carefully guarded the designs for their water-powered Cartwright looms. But Lowell visited the mills of Manchester under false pretenses, and he used his photographic memory to rebuild the machinery in Massachusetts, where his company became the foundation for the American textile industry.

  The sheer pace of change in China also has similarities to boom times in the United States. During the nineteenth century, when the first wave of American urban development swept westward, European visitors were amazed to see new settlements spring up as if overnight. Their sense of wonder resembled the way outsiders now feel in China, where development zones turn into instant cities. But the longer I stayed in Lishui, watching the factory district come to life, the more I noticed key contrasts. It wasn’t simply a matter of a different age, a different culture—the fundamental motivation for settling a new city was also different. And there was a distinct narrowness to the groups of pioneers who showed up in a Chinese boomtown. Back when ma
ny American towns had been founded, the first wave of residents typically included lawyers, along with traders and bankers. A local newspaper often began printing while people still lived in tents. The first permanent buildings were generally the courthouse and the church. It was certainly a tough world, but at least there was some early sense of community and law.

  In a Chinese boomtown, though, it’s all business: factories and construction supplies and cell phone shops. The free market shapes all early stages of growth, which is why entertainment options appear instantly but social organizations are rare. No private newspapers, no independent labor unions—such things are banned by the Communist Party. Religion might flourish at the individual level, but institutions are weak; in Lishui’s development zone nobody built a church or temple. There weren’t any law firms or nonprofit organizations. Police and government cadres were almost as rare—they showed up only when there was some opportunity for profiteering.

  On the Jinliwen Expressway, my first encounter with authority occurred in July of 2006, when I received a speeding ticket. It was fully automated: I didn’t learn about the fine until I returned the Santana to the Prosperous Automobile Rental Company. Their computer showed that I had been photographed while driving ninety-six kilometers per hour in an eighty-kilometer zone. The fine, a total of about twenty-five dollars, was deducted directly from my deposit.

  After that first violation, the floodgates opened wide, and I collected tickets in factory towns all along the expressway. One camera caught me outside of Qiaotou, the button town, and then I got fined in Jinhua, famous for producing underwear. The most tickets I received in a single day was three. Once in Lishui I got nailed twice in less than an hour. I was not a reckless driver, and my prior record had been spotless—in five years with a Chinese license, I never had a violation until I went to Zhejiang. But the authorities in the south were quick to figure out the entrepreneurial potential of speed traps. They posted cameras at confusing intersections, and on the expressway they set up radar guns in places where the speed limit suddenly dropped without reason or warning. Local drivers memorized the locations, and I did my best to do the same, but there was already so much to think about. For one thing, I had to watch out for bosses in their Audi A6s, driving a hundred miles per hour and then slamming on their brakes right before a radar camera. I never saw a live cop on that highway.

  “It’s a good business for the police,” the manager at Prosperous Automobile told me, whenever I complained about another fine. And he was right: police officers invested as private stockholders in radar cameras, which paid dividends. If a Zhejiang cop contributed six thousand dollars to an expressway speed trap, he collected 7.5 percent of the proceeds from each ticket. Investors were limited to four per camera, and rookie cops weren’t allowed to purchase a share until they had accumulated a certain amount of seniority. High-ranking officers could buy into multiple cameras. There was a lottery system that determined which cops got which locations on the expressway. This industry even had a corps of private moneylenders, because people knew it was safe to loan money to a cop who was buying into a speed trap. Like so many aspects of boomtown life, it wasn’t exactly lawless—in fact there were strict rules that governed police investment. But these were the rules of hierarchy and profit, not law and order.

  Each speeding ticket added points to a driver’s record, and finally I accumulated so many that I was required by law to take a remedial driving course. But the manager at the car rental company told me it wouldn’t be necessary if I made a personal visit to the Lishui police station. At the station, an officer called up my outstanding violations on a computer. He printed out a series of forms and instructed me to pay at the Bank of China, which was conveniently located across the street. The most recent tickets came to a total of about sixty dollars.

  “What about the points?” I asked.

  “I erased them,” the officer said. “As long as your fee goes through, it won’t be a problem.”

  At the bank I joined a special line dedicated to traffic violations. A half dozen yuppies were already waiting, and one by one we made our way to the front, where a clerk efficiently handled our money. It was February; a big English banner in the lobby said “Merry Christmas.” That same week I noticed a new sign on the expressway:

  DRIVE SAFELY!

  26 PEOPLE HAVE DIED ON THIS ROAD!

  BY THE END OF July, the factory still had only four customers, and they had accumulated over a million bra rings in storage. The Machine stood silent for days at a stretch, and now the factory was clearly in serious trouble. They stopped calling the part-time assembly-line workers, and they slashed the salaries of all high-level technicians. Little Long’s wages were cut by 40 percent; Master Luo’s salary was reduced by half. This violated the men’s contracts, and in theory they could have complained to the local labor bureau, but Chinese workers rarely take such a step. They generally have little faith in government—“You have to handle these things yourself,” as Master Luo often said. He told me that for the time being he’d be patient, and if things didn’t turn around he’d search for another job.

  Master Luo had worked with bra rings for so many years that he dreamed of them at night. When he slept, he saw rings coming off the Machine’s conveyor belt, and he had visions of piles of rings waiting to be sorted and bagged. His nightmares usually featured long pointless arguments with bosses. Once, while we were chatting in the Machine room, Master Luo described the dream that had woken him up the night before. “We had just gotten a shipment of nylon powder and it wasn’t any good,” he said. “But Boss Wang said it was fine. I said, no, it won’t work. He said it was fine. I said, no, you’re talking farts!”

  In the factory world, Luo was the kind of person known as a Da Shifu, a “Big Master.” He was only in his late thirties, but twenty-three of those years had been spent working in plants across China. And like virtually all masters of his generation, he had grown up on a farm. His parents raised cotton outside of Songzi, a small city in central China’s Hubei Province. In the late 1970s, rural schools were terrible, and Master Luo didn’t receive much formal education. “We had only two textbooks,” he remembered. “Chinese and mathematics. That was it.” By the start of middle school, he was still functionally illiterate, but his parents decided to stop paying school fees. “They said they needed money, so it would be better if I went out to work.”

  In 1984, at the age of fourteen, he found a job in a toy factory in Hunan Province. He worked there for a year, sending home much of his twenty-five-dollar-a-month salary. Soon he made his way to Shenzhen, the special economic zone in the far south that began to boom in the 1980s. For a while, Master Luo worked in a textile factory, and then he changed jobs again. It became his pattern: over the course of a decade, he jumped from city to city, factory to factory, product to product. He manufactured screws in Hubei, and he worked in a paint plant in Xinjiang. He made plastic bowls in Guangzhou. He did trade in Yunnan Province, near the Burmese border; and he worked in a toy factory in northeastern Heilongjiang, near Siberia.

  But eventually he returned to Shenzhen and the other cities of the far south. Years later, he spoke most fondly of this region, because in Shenzhen he attended private classes during the late 1980s. “The class started at eight o’clock, and we used to hurry over right after finishing our shift at the factory,” he remembered. “The class cost five yuan and it was forty-five minutes long. They covered electrical wiring, machine tooling, welding—anything that’s useful. The teacher was from Beijing; he was retired and he was really good. The class was in a room about this size, but there were more than two hundred people every night. It was packed because that teacher had such a good reputation.”

  Back then, Master Luo worked sixty hours a week, but he still found time to attend night school. The financial investment was significant—he earned only five hundred yuan per month, and yet he was willing to spend five yuan every time he attended a lesson. In development zones, private schools an
d tutorials are common, because motivated workers know they can rise from the assembly line. During his twenties, in his spare time, Master Luo also improved his reading and writing, until finally he became fully literate. In Shenzhen he passed a state-administered exam that granted him a vocational high school diploma.

  Apart from his native intelligence and determination, Master Luo had few natural advantages. He had grown up in poverty, and he wasn’t good-looking by Chinese standards. He was short, and he had freckles, which are considered blemishes in China. He had a heavy brow and a long nose; his teeth were bad. But there was an openness to his expression, and he smiled easily, with soft lines of age fanning out across his temples. He had the air of somebody who’s experienced a great deal without becoming too cynical, and over time he became the factory worker I knew best. His vision was broader than most—he had the instinctive curiosity of the self-educated man. And as a Big Master he often found himself positioned between ownership and labor. In the city of Shantou, he had helped manage workers as well as machinery, and the experience left a deep impression.

  “I took care of all the registration forms at the factory, and I noticed that many workers couldn’t write,” he said. “There are still so many uneducated people in China! But you know, sometimes these people are very smart. In Shantou I knew a man who worked as an elevator operator at the Blue Sky Hotel. He hadn’t gone to school, and he couldn’t read or write, but he was naturally intelligent. Once, the hotel’s generator broke and the electricians couldn’t fix it. After they failed, the elevator operator said to the boss, ‘Let me look at it.’ The boss said, ‘You don’t understand something like this.’ But finally he let him try and the man fixed it within an hour. After that, the boss gave him more responsibility, and then another boss hired him for 2,800 yuan per month. This worker, he was from Sichuan, and he was very honest. He said, ‘I can’t read or write, how can I make that much money?’ The boss said, ‘I don’t care as long as you understand things.’ Eventually another boss hired him for four thousand. He basically couldn’t write his name, but he could fix anything. He couldn’t explain it, but he could do it.”