Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  In the Shantou suburb called Chaonan, Master Luo made his own rise in the factory world. During the late 1990s, he found a job at Shangang Keji, one of the early plants to manufacture bra rings. Master Luo learned to repair the Machine, and by 2002 he earned nearly two hundred dollars every month, an excellent wage. Meanwhile, other Chaonan bosses heard about the profits from bra rings, and one of them came calling. Initially the boss didn’t say anything about a job, but he invited Master Luo to dinner at an expensive place called the Peace Restaurant. “We had crabs, squid, and lobster,” Master Luo remembered. “And he ordered the kind of beer that’s eighteen yuan per bottle. They gave me Chunghwa cigarettes. Afterward we went to a coffee shop and then to karaoke. We did this three times, and then the boss said, ‘Can you help me?’ He said his current master was bad and he needed somebody who understood the business.”

  Years later, Master Luo could still rattle off intricate details from the times he had been wooed by competing bosses. He was like a former debutante: he told these stories wistfully, recalling every hotel, every restaurant, even the dishes and the prices. After the second boss offered to double Master Luo’s salary, he accepted, and soon that company was successful, too. When the next one came calling, Master Luo’s status had risen, and thus the courtship became more elaborate. “We went to eat at the Golden Garden Hotel twice,” he said. “We also went to the Auspicious Garden twice, and then once at the Golden Dragon, and once at the Golden Beautiful City.” By the time Boss Gao and Boss Wang entered the picture, they represented the fourth bra ring factory to hire Master Luo, and along the way his monthly salary had risen from less than two hundred dollars to more than seven hundred.

  Whenever Master Luo left a company, he followed a set protocol. He didn’t tell his current boss about the new offer, and he tried to collect any salary that was still owed to him. Then he asked for a few days’ vacation, explaining that he had to attend to urgent family business in his hometown. Sometimes he left a few worthless belongings in the factory dormitory, to make it look like he’d be coming back. And then he simply changed his cell phone number, started work at the new job, and avoided everybody from the old company. In Chaonan, he had done this three times, at three different bra ring factories, all of which were located in the same neighborhood.

  “Don’t people get angry about this?” I asked.

  “Of course!” he said. “But by the time they figure it out, they can’t do anything about it. That’s why you can’t tell them ahead of time. If you do, they’ll try to find some way to make you stay, probably by withholding salary or threatening you or something.”

  “What if the new job turns out to be bad and you want to go back?”

  “Well, that’s a problem,” he said with a grin. He told me his last jump had been easier, because Lishui is located hundreds of miles from Chaonan. This allowed him to maintain the fiction that he might eventually return to the old job. Every now and then, Master Luo popped his previous SIM card into a cell phone, used the old number, and telephoned the former boss, explaining that unfortunately he was still in Hubei because of a serious illness in his family. This was the kind of solution that’s propagated in Chinese self-help books like Square and Round—if a lie works, fine; otherwise just burn the bridges. Nobody thinks long-term in a development zone, and nobody looks backward. “Going to a new job is like gambling,” Master Luo explained. “You leave and you hope that the new factory does well. If it doesn’t, then you probably can’t go back to the old job and the old life. What’s in the past stays in the past.”

  LISHUI WAS THE FIRST place where Master Luo gambled and lost. Boss Gao and Boss Wang gave the technician a raise from his previous job, and they promised more money if the factory succeeded. But after they ran into financial problems, they reduced Master Luo’s salary, and then they stopped paying him at all. Perversely, this was the most effective way of preventing him from jumping to another job. If they continued to give a lower salary, he’d probably abandon the factory, but he was less likely to leave if he was owed significant cash. All summer long, at the end of every month, Boss Gao and Boss Wang made excuses and promises, hoping their debt would keep Master Luo in Lishui. They were desperate not to lose him—he was the only employee who understood the Machine.

  In development zones in southern China, summer is often a sluggish time. For many factories, the production schedule picks up in the fall, to prepare for the Christmas buying season in America and Europe. But weather also has something to do with the annual slowdown. Most Chinese factories lack air-conditioning, and summers in the south are brutal; it’s hard to imagine anything worse than laboring on a pleather assembly line in mid-July. Workers become languid and bosses lose their motivation; construction crews seek out shade. When I visited Lishui that summer, work on Suisong Road had slowed to a near halt. The sidewalk remained unfinished; piles of paving stones baked in the sun. A malaise seemed to have settled over the district, reducing everybody to half speed.

  At the bra ring factory, the product wasn’t tied to Christmas schedules, and their problems went far beyond uncomfortable weather. The bosses looked tense and tight-lipped, and Master Luo said they were bickering about investment. Originally both Boss Wang and Boss Gao had agreed to fund the factory fifty-fifty, and each was supposed to contribute 750,000 yuan, about $90,000. But neither paid the full promised amount, and during summer each of them waited, unwilling to be the first to spend more. According to Master Luo, family-run factories are often trouble. “It’s better to have a partnership between friends,” he said. “With a friend you can speak more directly. With a relative, people are more sensitive, and they get angry easily.”

  The fundamental problem, though, seemed to be a complete lack of system. The factory had no management board, no investment schedule; nobody cared about legal contracts or predefined protocol. The bosses had funded almost entirely with cash, which raised the stakes and created tensions within families. They had sketched the blueprints for their factory in one hour and four minutes. Their most critical machinery had been designed according to the memory of a former peasant with a middle-school education. There wasn’t the slightest hint of a formal business plan. The future customer base depended upon the hopeful distribution of Wuliangye baijiu and Chunghwa cigarettes. It was hardly surprising that by July the factory’s most liquid assets consisted of a million bra rings packed in plastic bags.

  If anything, it was amazing that they had gotten this far. The most educated person in the factory was Boss Gao, who had attended a couple years of trade school. The majority of employees lacked any formal training, and all of them, from top to bottom, had grown up on farms. Boss Gao and Boss Wang came from rice-growing families; Master Luo had been born on a cotton plot. Old Tian, the man in charge of underwire, had once farmed rice. Little Long’s parents grew tea and tobacco. The Taos knew wheat and soybeans. The secretary—she was essentially an accountant, because she handled the books—had grown up in pear country. A former resident of an orange plot worked the metal punch press. Somehow all these agricultural products had been left behind, and the former peasant labor now manufactured two inedible objects: razor-thin underwire and bra rings that weighed half a gram each.

  Almost every Chinese factory tells a similar story. People might lack formal education, but they find themselves in situations where they’re forced to learn on the job. Most important, there are plenty of them out there. Of the nation’s 1.3 billion citizens, 72 percent are between the ages of sixteen and sixty-four. In modern history, the nation has never enjoyed such a high percentage of able workers, and it’s never been easier for them to leave the countryside. Roads are better; migrant networks are well established; the old Communist hukou registration system has become so lax that people can go wherever they wish. And all of them have been toughened by the past—workers are resourceful and motivated, and entrepreneurs are fearless. The government’s basic strategy has been to unleash this human energy, trusting the market to build
new towns like Lishui.

  But there are limits to how far individuals can go on sheer will-power. Even with a product as simple as a bra ring, there’s a point at which a lack of systematic structure and formal education causes problems. And the bigger question is whether Chinese companies can move beyond low-margin products, developing industries that require creativity and innovation. In the end, this is the greatest contrast between China’s boom and the history of the western Industrial Revolution. In Europe and the United States, the rise of industry involved radical changes in thinking, and it happened partly because of a shortage of labor. In nineteenth-century America, for example, there was plenty of land and relatively few people; anyone who saved a few months’ wages could move west and try farming. Agriculture and western expansion sapped the pool of able-bodied workers, so bosses made the most of limited labor. This need for efficiency inspired innovations that changed the world: the cotton gin, the sewing machine, the assembly line, the “American System” of standardization and interchangeable parts.

  In today’s China, though, there’s little incentive to save labor. Each year the migrant population grows by another estimated ten million, and young people leave the countryside increasingly early. Formal schooling often seems irrelevant to students bound for the boomtowns, especially since traditional Chinese education offers little besides rote repetition and memorization. All of it—the high population, the lack of social institutions, the slowness of educational reform—combines to dull the edge of innovation. Inevitably, any nation is tempted to waste its greatest wealth, and in China this resource happens to be human. Master Luo’s personal story was a triumph, but he was still making nothing more sophisticated than bra rings, and for every man like that, there were dozens of others who never made it so far.

  WHEN THE LISHUI BOSSES first recruited Master Luo, he told them that he already had one child and planned to have another soon. They never met his wife or his first son; like many migrant workers Master Luo lived apart from his family. But he made sure the bosses knew about his personal obligations—this was an effective way to bargain for a higher salary. Boss Wang also had two children, so he was familiar with the bribes and fines necessary to deal with the planned birth officials.

  Near the end of July, Master Luo requested permission to return to Hubei in order to attend the birth of his second child. But now the bosses were smart enough to turn his financial responsibility against him.

  “You need to stay here,” Boss Wang said. “It just wastes a lot of money to go home right now.”

  Master Luo explained that the factory wasn’t busy, and he wouldn’t be away for long; it was important for him to be there when his wife gave birth.

  “You were there for the first one, right?” Boss Wang said. “That’s all that matters. The first child is the exciting one. The second one isn’t such a big deal. When my wife had the second child I wasn’t nearly as excited.”

  For over a week they continued this conversation, in the slow-burn fashion of most development zone negotiations. There weren’t any ultimatums, and nobody became angry or impatient; each man’s voice remained as calm as if he were discussing last night’s meal. But the conversation smoldered, day after day, and there were subtle signs of tension. Master Luo’s face flushed and he no longer smiled as easily. Boss Wang became less free with cigarettes. These days he stuttered more often—the bad business weighed on him and now he had the added pressure of Master Luo’s request. In normal times, Boss Wang would have granted leave without a second thought, but he feared that Master Luo would take this opportunity to flee the factory. And his worries were well founded: in the past this was precisely the kind of family event that Master Luo had used as a pretext to switch jobs.

  For the most part they negotiated in passing. The worker would say something; the boss would answer; neither made eye contact. Often it was so understated that I barely caught what they said. One morning, when I was in the Machine room with Master Luo, he turned to Boss Wang and I heard the word “salary.” Boss Wang quickly looked away.

  “L-l-l-later,” he said. “Business isn’t good enough right now.”

  “All I’m asking for is two months,” Master Luo said. “You owe me three.”

  “C-c-c-can’t do it.”

  “And all I want is to go for four days. Four days is enough.”

  “It’s not p-p-possible. We might get new business any time.”

  With that, Boss Wang left the room, and Master Luo grinned at me. I had learned to be careful during this period—I watched myself around Master Luo. Not long ago, I had invited him to dinner at a restaurant on Suisong Road, where we drank a couple of beers and talked for two hours. The next day Boss Wang was full of questions for me: Where did you go with Master Luo last night? Why were you gone so long? And why are you always so curious about the factory? In other parts of China, during other writing projects, I occasionally had to reassure people that my stories wouldn’t cause them political problems. But entrepreneurs in southern Zhejiang didn’t worry about things like that. Their only fear involved business: they worried that I might be an undercover competitor hoping to start a bra ring factory of my own. After noticing Boss Wang’s nervousness, I showed him a copy of one of my books, and I printed out published stories from the Internet. I told him the truth—I had no interest in poaching Master Luo, and I liked writing so much that I wouldn’t give it up for all the bra rings in Zhejiang.

  In the factory, the negotiations continued all the way until eleven o’clock in the morning of July 27, 2006, which was when Master Luo learned that his son had been born. He received the news on his cell phone, via text message from a relative. The baby had been delivered by C-section; the mother was expected to remain in the hospital for two or three days. And all at once the factory conversation made progress. Boss Wang agreed to grant leave, and he paid one month’s back salary. They still owed two months’ wages, an amount that they calculated would be adequate to ensure Master Luo’s return. He immediately went out and bought a train ticket to Hubei. He was scheduled to leave in the middle of the night, and if there weren’t any delays he’d meet his son before the baby was three days old.

  That evening, before Master Luo’s departure, I took him to a celebration dinner in downtown Lishui. We rode in my rented Santana, and Master Luo commented that it was the first time he’d left the development zone in three months. For dinner he chose a Sichuanese restaurant, where we ate spicy eel and Chongqing chicken and mapo bean curd. It wasn’t nearly as elegant as the places he recalled from Chaonan days—the Golden Dragon, the Golden Beautiful Garden—but Master Luo was pleased.

  “I wish I were still in Guangdong,” he said. “If I were, I’d buy a lottery ticket, because this is a lucky day. In Guangdong they sell the Hong Kong lottery tickets, but you can’t buy them here.”

  I asked him how he would handle the planned-birth officials. When migrants violate the policy, they often have children away from their place of registration, but Master Luo’s child had been born in his hometown. He had told me his older son was there, too, and now he paused for a moment, thinking about my question. Finally he said, “It won’t be a problem.”

  “Will you have to pay a fine?”

  “It won’t be a problem,” he said again. “It’s already been handled.”

  He changed the subject and raised his glass; we drank to the health of his newborn son. Master Luo beamed and commented once more that he wished he could buy a Hong Kong lottery ticket. He was owed serious money; he worked at a factory on the verge of bankruptcy; he had just missed the birth of his son. But from his perspective, on that summer evening, he was the luckiest man in all of Lishui.

  III

  FOR MORE THAN A YEAR I HAD TRAVELED REGULARLY to southern Zhejiang, until the place started to feel like another home. I enjoyed driving the new expressway, gazing out at the familiar scenery along the Ou River, and I always stopped to see the same places, the same people. In Lishui they built a new hotel
called the Modern Square, and I negotiated a special rate with the managers, who let me stay for twenty dollars a night. A few blocks away I joined the gym called The Scent of a Woman. It was the only real gym in downtown Lishui, and it was open to both men and women; the managers told me they had chosen that name because it sounded nice. None of them had seen the American movie with the same title. In fact the gym smelled strongly of pleather, because all the machines were brand-new.

  When the weather was good, I went for long runs in the hills south of town, through terraces of tangerine groves. The fruit in this region is wonderful—that’s another reason I enjoyed spending time there. I found a decent Sichuanese restaurant and a first-rate noodle shop, and I explored the towns along the expressway. I liked having regular routines, and I liked the boomtown rush, the energy that comes from so many people on the move. And there was invariably something surreal about these trips to the south. Whenever I flew from Beijing and the plane touched down, a text message immediately appeared on my cell phone: