Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  Welcome to the home of one of China’s ten most vital economies:

  Wenzhou. Here in the pioneering hometown of “Daring

  Trailblazers, Harmonious Citizens,” the Wenzhou City Municipal

  Communist Party Committee sincerely hopes that you find

  friendship, business opportunities, and success.

  On one flight I met Mao Zedong. It was the first Beijing-Wenzhou departure of the morning, the 7:30 Air China special, and the moment I got to my seat I fell asleep. As usual, the flight was full of businessmen and cadres. While they were boarding I dozed fitfully, and at one point I half awoke and saw, as if through a fog, a passanger who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Chairman. But I dismissed it as a dream, at least until the plane took off and I heard two flight attendants talking.

  “The actor who plays Chairman Mao is back there!” one of them said.

  “Which row?”

  “Twenty-five!”

  He had the middle seat, wedged between two Wenzhou businessmen, who had conked out like nearly everybody else on the flight. But the actor who played Chairman Mao was completely alert. He wore a neat gray suit, a red tie, and stage makeup—his face glowed with unnatural brightness. His teeth gleamed, too, and his hair had been dyed black and brushed away from his forehead, the way Mao used to do it. He even had a prosthetic mole on the left side of his chin. Every time somebody walked past on their way to the bathroom, they did a double take: Mao Zedong, sitting in economy class, seat 25E.

  After we landed in Wenzhou, a bus transferred all passengers from the plane to the terminal. The bus was even more crowded than the plane, and I found myself pressed against Chairman Mao. I introduced myself and gave him a business card; he fished one of his own out of a pocket. It listed no fewer than seven official titles:

  Jin Yang, The Actor Who Plays the Role of the Great Leader Mao Zedong

  Director, Phoenix Cultural and Artistic Center

  Director-General, China International Film Company, Ltd.

  Vice-Manager, Beijing Strong and Prosperous International Martial Arts Cultural Development Company

  Business Director, Beijing Film Research Institute

  Honorary Director, Zhonghua Societal University Film Institute

  High-Level Advisor, China Red Dragonfly Group

  Chief Inspector, China Red Dragonfly Business and Cultural Center

  He was traveling to Wenzhou in order to film a miniseries for China Central Television. They planned to tell the story of an incident from the 1940s, when the Red Army clashed with Japanese invaders in Zhejiang. Jin Yang said that for the past decade he had played the Chairman in movies and television shows. He smiled when he read my business card.

  “Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said. “There was a famous American journalist named Edgar Snow who was friends with Chairman Mao.”

  I was well aware of Edgar Snow, whose history is a cautionary tale to any Missouri native who writes about China. Back in the 1930s, Snow had been a favorite of Mao and Zhou Enlai’s, and eventually the American came to swallow much of their propaganda whole. During the Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions of Chinese starved to death, Edgar Snow toured the nation and reported that rumors of a famine were untrue. But here in Wenzhou I was much more curious about the story behind Jin Yang. How had this man been discovered? What had he been doing before he became the Actor Who Plays the Role of the Great Leader Mao Zedong?

  But every time I asked a question, he responded with some anecdote from the Chairman’s life. He told me he was from Changsha—Mao’s actual home region. When I inquired about his former career, the actor said, “You know, the most famous photograph of Chairman Mao was taken by Edgar Snow.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I said. “But what were you doing before you became an actor?”

  “That’s the photograph they always use for the young Mao,” he continued. “It was reproduced in so many places in the fifties and sixties!”

  Our bus lurched unsteadily toward the Wenzhou terminal; the vehicle was packed with people shouting into cell phones. But Jin Yang’s smile was as steady as the plastic mole that clung to his chin. It was the same benevolent gaze that he had maintained throughout the flight, as if in fact he was still the leader of the nation, and not a passenger stuck in the middle seat on the early-morning special to Wenzhou. I kept trying to figure out his background; I studied the business card and asked about his position with the “Beijing Strong and Prosperous International Martial Arts Cultural Development Company.” “Do you participate in martial arts?” I asked, and he smiled serenely and said, “Yes, I do. And Chairman Mao always emphasized the importance of physical activity! Did you know that he made a famous swim across the Yangtze River?” He told me again that he came from Changsha. He remarked that Edgar Snow’s book had first introduced the Chairman to the West. With every secondhand anecdote, the smile seemed creepier, until at last I abandoned the conversation. Was this man completely insane? Did he really believe he was Mao Zedong?

  At the terminal I picked up my bag. Before leaving the airport, I stopped to use the men’s bathroom. It was empty except for Mao Zedong. He stood at the first urinal, and I heard him speak softly, as if to himself. “Meiguo jizhe, Meiguo jizhe,” he said. “American journalist, American journalist.” I decided to occupy the urinal that was farthest from Chairman Mao. As quickly as possible, I went about my business, zipped up, and left without a word. He still wore the same benevolent smile, standing alone in the bathroom, muttering happily to himself.

  AT THE BRA RING factory, the summer malaise ran through August, and then it finally ended with the appearance of deep coffee. In September, a new customer ordered over one hundred thousand rings, all of them dyed the same color. After months of inactivity, Little Long was suddenly busy; his laboratory was full of test tubes containing a shade of dark brown. In his color book it was identified as “deep coffee.” The new customer was a bra assembly plant in southern Zhejiang, although Little Long and Master Luo didn’t know much about the company. The bosses usually gave employees few details about customers, for fear that they would jump to another job with information about potential buyers. In this case, the bosses told Master Luo only that the new customer was involved in export, which meant that the rings needed to be of the highest quality. As for the final destination, Master Luo didn’t know—it must have been some country with an appetite for brown underwear.

  That same month, another new customer made a major order, and now the whole factory began to move. For the first time since spring, two metal punch presses were in operation, and the Machine rumbled eight hours a day. The Taos returned en masse: both sisters, the father, and a cousin were called in to work on a daily basis. The factory rehired a few of the assembly-line women who had been laid off, and Boss Wang told me that September was the first month in which income exceeded expenses. Eleven months had passed since they first designed the plant, and they were still a long way from recouping their investment, but finally the business was profitable.

  Over the summer, the factory dormitory had acquired its youngest resident. Boss Wang’s wife and two-year-old son often lived in the building for weeks at a time, and now the place also became home to Master Luo’s newborn baby. Before the child was even two months old, his mother, whose name was Cheng Youqin, had taken him across China, traveling more than twenty hours by bus. In the dormitory the family lived together in an unfinished room on the third floor. They had a simple wooden bed, a hot plate, a few cooking utensils, and a cardboard box where they stored their clothes. Apart from that they had almost no possessions. Cheng told me proudly that the baby could already sleep through the sound of the machinery.

  On the fiftieth day after the birth, I invited the family out to dinner. In China, people often mark such days, with a baby’s hundredth being particularly important. We met in the dormitory; Master Luo was smoking a Profitable Crowd cigarette while he changed his son’s clothes. The baby’s head had been shaved recentl
y, because of the heat in the factory, and he had his mother’s pretty eyes. Fat cheeks, full lips, a nose that could have come from Buttontown: this was a good-looking child. Master Luo put him in my arms.

  “How’s his big brother doing?” I asked. I assumed the older child was still in the village, being cared for by grandparents or other relatives. But the moment I asked the question, Master Luo’s face fell, and his wife gave him an uncomfortable look.

  “There’s something I should tell you,” Master Luo said slowly. “This is actually our first child. When Boss Wang and Boss Gao hired me, I told them I already had a son so I could ask for a higher salary. I didn’t want to lie to you, but they were around when we were talking. I was afraid they’d overhear, so I never told you the truth. I should have told you before I left, but I didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  I told him not to worry. In any case, the phantom child had already returned to haunt Master Luo once, when Boss Wang refused to let him go home for the birth of his real child. At that time, the boss had insisted that the event wasn’t important, because it was a second birth. I asked if now he knew the truth.

  “No,” Master Luo said. “It’s too late to tell him now. I just act like there’s another boy at home.”

  I hardly considered it a lie, because such stories are so common in boomtowns. When people negotiate with bosses, they find any advantage they can, and I understood the value of a nonexistent child. Even now he might still play a role. If Master Luo decided to quit the Lishui job and find something else, he could create a phantom sickness for the phantom child, and that would give him reason to ask for leave.

  ON SUISONG ROAD, WE met a friend of Master Luo’s, an entrepreneur who sold cheap clothes from a nearby stand. He said a new hotpot restaurant down the block was celebrating its grand opening. At hotpot places, diners sit around cauldrons filled with oil and spices, and a gas flame heats the stuff to a boil. Customers cook the food themselves, dropping raw vegetables and meat into the oil, and often the main ingredients are pig intestines and other innards. Much of the appeal is social: it’s a good meal for drinking beer, and restaurants are always steam-filled and noisy, the way Chinese people like it on a night out. Hotpot is also the last meal to which I would take a baby celebrating his fifty-day anniversary, but nobody was asking me for child-care advice.

  The appearance of the restaurant marked another stage in the neighborhood’s progress. Hotpot isn’t cheap, and it appeals to the middle-class of the development zone, the managers and the technicians. This was the second hotpot joint to open on Suisong Road within a month, and the entrance had been decorated with flowers to mark the occasion. They were setting off fireworks, too—the moment we sat down, the restaurant owner ignited a strand outside the door. The baby’s eyes flickered with the sound of the explosion, but he didn’t cry. At our table, we fired up the pot, and Master Luo and his friend lit Profitable Crowd cigarettes. Soon the child’s porcelain skin glistened with sweat; his cheeks turned beet-red; his eyes looked slightly dazed. I was the only man in this restaurant who wasn’t smoking. But the baby’s expression remained calm, and at last I decided to stop worrying. He had already had fifty days to toughen up, and in a development zone that’s an eternity.

  Near the entrance of the restaurant, at a big round table, eight men were finishing their meal. They must have arrived early in the evening, and it was clear that they had been drinking hard. One of them hectored the waitress, complaining loudly about the food, and the restaurant owner hurried over. He was a young man in his thirties; his wife helped him run the place. He tried to appease the customer, offering apologies, but the other men chimed in loudly. At last the boss gave them a discount, along with a free round of beers, but the men’s voices continued to rise.

  In China it’s common for people in restaurants to complain about food. The Chinese can be passive about many things, but food is not one of them; I suppose this is one reason they’ve ended up with a first-rate cuisine and a long history of political disasters. Nevertheless there was something unusual about the scene at the hotpot restaurant. Offering a discount and free drinks is an extreme measure, and generally it reduces a party to quiet grumbling. But this group continued to shout and carry on. They called the owner back for another tongue-lashing, and they yelled at his wife, and then they insisted on speaking with the chef. The poor man stood there, wide-eyed in a dirty white smock, while one of the drunks shook a finger in his face. He complained about the oil and the cuts of meat; he said the vegetables weren’t fresh. The restaurant was quite small and the other diners watched this scene intently. After the party finally left, the place was quiet for a minute and then the drunkest man burst back through the door, like a villain in a horror film. He shouted one last string of complaints before his buddies pulled him out for good.

  After it was finished, the owner came to our table. “I’m sorry about the disturbance,” he said. “But you have to understand they weren’t really angry about the food!” He explained: it had all been planned by the boss of the other hotpot restaurant down the street. The competing boss had paid the men to have an early meal, get drunk, and make a scene. The goal was to ruin the grand opening, and the owner hadn’t recognized the stunt until it was too late.

  He was earnest and soft-spoken, and he went from table to table, explaining the situation. But it was hopeless: Chinese complaints are highly contagious, sweeping through crowds like a bad germ. It has something to do with the group impulse, and people can’t seem to help themselves—if they see others behaving a certain way, they immediately catch the vibe. And here in the hotpot restaurant it happened at our own table. Master Luo commented that the place wasn’t very clean, and his friend remarked that the vegetables didn’t look so great. The broth was too salty; there wasn’t enough meat. It was low quality, too—they made this complaint while steadily dunking food into the oil and eating it with relish. That’s one thing about Chinese food criticism: it never interferes with the appetite. By the end of the meal, Cheng Youqin was even denigrating the tea. The baby was the only one with nothing bad to say—he remained calm as ever, inhaling secondhand smoke and sweating like a little pig in the hotpot fumes.

  After the unsatisfactory food had been completely devoured, Master Luo’s friend dipped his chopsticks in beer and shoved them into the baby’s mouth. The little guy wrinkled his face—the most expressive he’d been all evening. This encouraged the friend to embark on a series of reflex tests. He swung his hand as if to strike the baby, stopping just short of the button nose; the child remained unfazed. “He doesn’t really see it,” the man explained. “At this age they can’t see very well.”

  “He can, too!” Cheng said.

  “No he can’t!” The man swung his fist again: no reaction. “See, I told you!”

  No mother likes to see her child maligned, and Cheng quickly came to the defense. She jabbed her chopsticks within an inch of the baby’s face—at last he blinked. “See!” she said triumphantly. “His eyes are good!”

  “But he doesn’t see this!”

  “Yes, he does!”

  “Watch this—he won’t react.”

  “He does, too! You just have to do it like this!”

  “Actually, I’m getting a little hot,” I said. “Do you think we could leave now?”

  On our way out, the owner gave us fifty yuan in coupons, by way of apology. “I won’t go back there,” Master Luo said, once we were out on Suisong Road. “The food’s terrible.” But he carefully folded the coupons and put them in his pocket. Outside, the air was cooler, and the baby stopped sweating. His eyes remained unblinking, calm as ever, ready for anything the next fifty days might throw at him.

  WHENEVER I FOLLOWED THE expressway from Wenzhou to Lishui, I stopped in small towns along the way. A number of them had been planned in conjunction with the highway: at every exit, new neighborhoods were being built, and sometimes a whole settlement appeared in what had formerly been farmland. One of the exit towns was called Shifan, a
nd it was located about ten miles south of Lishui. I first visited Shifan before the expressway had even opened, when the town was still a construction site full of unfinished streets and scaffolded apartment blocks. A billboard stood at the head of the main street:

  CHERISH THE TANKENG DAM,

  SERVE THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BE RELOCATED HERE

  THE FIRST STAGE OF MOVING WILL BEGIN IN:

  32 DAYS

  The sign had tear-away numbers, and sheets of paper from previous days still lay on the ground beneath the billboard. There was a 5 here, a 4 there, a crumbled 3 nearby: countdown to a new community. When I wandered down the main street, a man carrying a hammer approached me. “Are you here to buy an apartment?” he said. I told him no, I was a journalist on my way to Lishui. “Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said. “Are you looking for people who are unhappy about the dam?”

  Those were the first two things I was offered in Shifan: empty apartments and unhappy people. I learned that it was one of a number of exit towns that were being built because of a hydroelectric project called the Tankeng Dam. The dam is located on the Xiao River, high in the mountains west of Lishui; construction will require five years of work and a total investment of over six hundred million dollars. Upon completion, the new reservoir will submerge ten towns and eighty villages, and over fifty thousand people must be relocated. All of these facts were printed on information billboards near the construction site, but apart from that it was hard to learn much about the Tankeng Dam. Few articles about the project had appeared in Zhejiang newspapers, and not one word had been published in the foreign press. The most remarkable thing about the Tankeng Dam was that fifty thousand people could be displaced in virtual silence, at least as far as the media was concerned.

  Chinese dams are so common that they often don’t receive much attention, and domestic media is typically prevented from criticizing such projects. With air pollution an increasing concern, the government needs alternatives to coal-burning power plants, and hydroelectric is often the first option. This is especially true in a place like Lishui, which has high mountains, plenty of rainfall, and dreams of becoming a major industrial center. The region is already famous for its dam-building, and local electrical needs are only going to increase. In the development zone, a government official told me that industry currently accounted for 70 percent of Lishui’s total consumption of electricity. This statistic was for the whole administrative region, which includes smaller towns and countryside. The percentage was so high because of all the heavy industry and mechanized manufacturing, but it also reflected low living standards. In the United States, in contrast, the industrial sector uses only one-third of the nation’s total power.