Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  Inevitably, the Lishui standard of living will rise as the initial investment in infrastructure and industry pays off. In the first six months after the expressway opened, the number of Lishui households buying an automobile doubled in comparison to the same period a year earlier. People were moving into bigger apartments, like the Riverside development owned by the Ji family. In the northern part of town, another real estate company was building White Cloud, the city’s first neighborhood of stand-alone villas. Each White Cloud home came with a driveway and a garage—managers told me proudly this was another first for Lishui. But larger homes were bound to put more pressure on the city’s power grid, which already relied heavily on electricity purchased from other parts of China. The Tankeng Dam was an attempt to reduce such dependence, and it had the advantage of being located high in the mountains, where people were poor and less likely to resist a resettlement.

  The largest town in the affected region was called Beishan, with a population of about ten thousand. In the fall of 2005, when it came time to move the residents, the government consulted a fortune-teller, who determined that the twenty-third day of the ninth lunar month was the most auspicious moment to demolish the place. On the morning of the twenty-third, I drove my rented Santana westward toward Beishan. The unnamed road was narrow, and it followed the path of the Xiao River, where the fast-flowing channel was braided around boulders that marked the valley floor. Occasionally a fisherman waded along the banks, but the Xiao is too shallow for boats and these regions are lightly populated. It’s a hard country for farming, too: rice paddies lie in the flatlands beside the river, but the mountains are too steep for terracing. This rugged countryside seems to have nothing in common with the factory districts of Wenzhou, but in fact the city is less than fifty miles away as the crow flies. And these landscapes helped shape the business instinct of southern Zhejiang. Centuries ago, the mountains drove people to a life of trade along the coast, and more recently the natives learned to direct their entrepreneurial energy toward manufacturing. Now at last they have returned to the hinterlands as dam builders, hoping to create more power for their factory towns.

  All along the road stood billboards for Red Lion Cement. There were few other advertisements, and most settlements were tiny and poor, but the road itself was full of traffic. A steady stream of vehicles poured down from Beishan: big Liberation trucks, beaten-up flatbeds with wooden rails, tricycle tractor-carts sputtering behind two-stroke engines. They carried crates and cupboards and stacks of furniture; dirty old mattresses had been lashed to the sides of trucks. They passed blue government signs that had been posted beside the road:

  FINISH BUILDING THE TANKENG DAM

  BENEFIT THE FUTURE GENERATIONS

  OFFER THE TANKENG DAM AS A TRIBUTE TODAY

  BENEFIT THE GENERATIONS OF TOMORROW

  Most vehicles heading in the same direction as me belonged to profiteers of one sort or another. Cement mixers rumbled toward the dam, along with flatbeds carrying work crews. Scavengers drove empty trucks: demolition sites always provide plenty of bricks, wood, and metal that can be recycled. There were cadres in black Audi A6s, and cops, too—more police than I had ever seen in rural Zhejiang. Along the way to Beishan, I passed the location of the dam, where another billboard noted that the project would require a total of 164,000 cubic meters of cement. That was Red Lion Cement’s stake in this region, and most work was yet to come; the retaining wall was nothing but a sliver of scaffolded structures edging into the river. Up above, the scarred hillside marked the location of the future dam—a huge groove in the mountains, running from one side of the valley to the other, like a massive puzzle waiting for its final piece.

  I had visited Beishan once before, when the town was still thriving, but today the place was unrecognizable. A countdown billboard stood on the main street, a counterpart to Shifan’s sign. Here in Beishan the numbers had reached double zero, and demolition crews were finishing off the heart of the former downtown. Government-appointed teams wore white coveralls, and they went from building to building, checking for last residents. For the destruction itself they relied primarily on freelance scavengers. In Lishui’s development zone, market forces built a whole community, with factories and shops rising simultaneously; and here the profit motive was equally efficient at demolishing Beishan. There were tiles on the roofs, bricks in the walls, copper beneath floors—all of it could be sold. And so the crews passed quickly through town, like locusts in a fertile field, leaving only desolation in their wake.

  It took ten minutes to drive to the former center of town, because of backlogged trucks carting off materials. At last, after fighting the traffic inch by inch, I pulled over and simply listened. In the factory towns, mechanical noises rule the day, but here in Beishan the demolition was mostly done by hand. Boards were ripped apart; nails were torn from walls; cement was smashed with sledgehammers. I heard the percussion of one scavenger destroying a wall—rip, tear, smash; rip, tear, smash—and then a final thud followed by nothing. That emptiness was Beishan’s destiny: the valley would never become home to the rhythms of the factory floor or the voices of nighttime workers. Instead it was bound for the stillness of the reservoir, the hush of walled water, and beneath fathoms of silence this place would die.

  IN THE DEVELOPMENT ZONE, foliage appeared in the span of two days during November of 2006. That was the same month government work crews finished installing the sidewalk tiles on Suisong Road, where they even posted trash cans. Previously, as entrepreneurs built the place, garbage was allowed to accumulate in the gutters, but now the city instituted regular pickup. They started a public bus service to downtown, too, and work crews made their way along the development zone streets, installing nursery-grown camphor trees that were already eight feet tall. The trees appeared at intervals of every fifty meters, as regular as assembly-line stations. And all at once there was greenery in the factory district—a reminder that little more than year earlier, before the mountains had been blown up and the machinery had been installed, this region had been entirely rural.

  A few days after the trees appeared, one of the girls who worked on the Machine’s assembly line celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Her name was Ren Jing and she was originally from a village in Anhui Province, not far from the hometown of the Tao family. Like the Taos, the Ren family migrated en masse: both parents, two daughters, and a son. The parents ran a fruit and vegetable stand that catered to workers, and the eldest daughter sold bootleg video disks. At the bra ring factory, Ren Jing worked alongside TaoYuran, the older of the Tao sisters; they sorted rings as they came off the Machine’s assembly line. All three factory girls usually spent time together in the evenings, when the work shifts were finished and their parents were busy with their stands. This was one reason the girls enjoyed their work routines—at night they were usually unsupervised.

  On the evening of the birthday, they didn’t get off the assembly line until eight o’clock, because the factory was working overtime to process an order from another new customer. The Tao sisters bought Ren Jing a cake with frosting that said, in English, “Luck for You!” Ren Jing’s sister took time away from selling video disks and prepared a seven-course dinner. She was nineteen years old, and tonight she cooked grass carp, cubed chicken, cauliflower, and lotus root. They ate in the Ren family home, which consisted of a rented room in a house that once belonged to a local farmer. The place had cement walls and a rough tile floor; crates of oranges and apples covered most of the floor space. The girls sat on their parents’ bed, enjoying the banquet and toasting each other with shots of Sprite and Coca-Cola.

  They had purchased bottles of Double Deer beer for the men. The older Ren sister’s boyfriend was there—he had just finished a twelve-hour shift at a pleather plant—and Old Tian came from the factory. Old Tian was the foreman on the underwire assembly line, where he monitored Tao Yufeng, the fifteen-year-old who had lied about her age during the factory’s first hiring. Tonight the girl targeted Old Tian as
soon as the beer was uncapped.

  “Old Tian, drink a glass,” she said. She topped off the man’s shot glass with beer and filled her own cup with Sprite. They both drank, and Yufeng immediately followed with a refill.

  “Drink again,” she said sternly.

  “Wait a minute,” Old Tian said. “I need to rest.”

  “Drink it!”

  “Wait.”

  “Now! Drink it now!”

  The moment the glass was empty she poured another.

  “Now it’s your turn,” she said, pointing to Ren’s boyfriend. “Make him drink. I want him drunk so he can’t boss me around at work tomorrow morning.”

  “I won’t boss you around!”

  “Make him drink!”

  After the boyfriend obliged, she turned to me. “You go next,” she instructed. “Make Old Tian drink.” I didn’t hesitate—I knew better than to get in the way of Yufeng. From the moment she lied her way into the job, Yufeng had established herself as a force of nature in the factory. She had a young, boyish face, with chubby cheeks and short-cropped hair, but she had more attitude than all of the adult workers combined. Nobody else was nearly as fast with underwire, and she refused to be intimidated by the bosses. Once, when Boss Wang told Yufeng there wouldn’t be any work for a few days, she cursed him and stormed out of the factory. “That g-g-girl has a temper,” he said mildly, after she was gone. Like the other men at the plant, he seemed more bemused than anything: nobody knew how to handle a woman so young and yet so sharp.

  In particular, OldTian was no match for the girl. He barely weighed one hundred pounds, with a gentle, elflike face, and he lived according to a two-sentence motto: “Pass Every Day Happily! A New Day Begins from Right Now!” This had been his catchphrase ever since he first set out from rural Sichuan in the mid–1980s. Back then, he earned a good living as a wristwatch repairman, setting up stands on the streets of development zones. Soon, however, he found himself overtaken by the pace of progress. In the early 2000s, cell phones suddenly became cheap enough for even low-income consumers, who also used the devices to tell time; Old Tian’s trade in wristwatches became obsolete. Like so many people in China, he learned that it was impossible to be complacent with new knowledge; he had already shifted from farming to watches, but now it was time to learn something else. He took it all in stride, the eternal optimist: A New Day Begins from Right Now! In the Wenzhou region he found jobs as a factory technician, eventually specializing in the production of underwire.

  He earned a good wage, roughly a third of which was spent on lottery tickets. In China, the state-run Welfare Lottery funds social programs, and Old Tian contributed more than his share. The man was obsessed—he kept track of winning numbers, writing them across the walls of his dormitory room. He slept in a windowless chamber on the first floor, where the bare plaster walls had been covered with his motto about passing days happily, along with dozens of mysterious lottery calculations:

  95 1.3.17.20.21.24 + 16

  97 1.5.9.13.15.33 + 14

  97 11.14.15.20.26.27 + 12

  98 6.7.10.11.15.23 + 16

  99 7.12.18.23.24.27 + 5

  Every worker in the plant nursed some secret dream for the future. Yufeng told me that eventually she wanted to start a shoe factory, and Little Long talked about raising rabbits or doing wholesale trade. Master Luo had a business idea that involved drying lotus root and selling it shrink-wrapped in northern China, where it doesn’t grow naturally. Once, when Old Tian was fiddling with the factory’s machinery, I asked him what he would do if he got lucky and won the lottery. He smiled and pointed at the underwire. “I’d make this,” he said. “I’d start my own business making it.” He was the only person in the factory who aspired to do exactly what he already did. In China, that’s a pipe dream, as unlikely as winning the lottery: to live in complete confidence that your trade will never become obsolete.

  At the birthday party Old Tian’s face quickly turned red from the beer. Yufeng bullied him into a few final shots before relenting, and he sank onto the bunk bed in the corner of the room. The girls started talking about factory jobs. They mentioned the rumors that working with pige, or pleather, causes birth defects, and Yufeng said shoe plants are better.

  “They have toxic fumes, too,” Ren Jing said. “It’s the same problem.”

  “The fumes aren’t the same,” Yuran, the older sister, corrected her. “The problem with shoes is that they use a type of glue that’s bad for you. But it’s not as bad as the pige fumes.”

  Yuran was only seventeen, but she was worldly when it came to factories; this was her third assembly-line job. Previously she had made shoes and dress shirts. Ren Jing, the birthday girl, had technically come of legal working age only today, but she was already onto her second job. At the age of fourteen she had started as a seamstress in a low-end garment factory. “They paid by the piece,” she told me. “This job is better, because I get paid by the hour. It’s more relaxed.”

  “I liked the clothes factory where I used to work,” Yuran said. “The boss was really nice. One night we had to work late, because of an order, and he came and brought drinks for all of us. Nobody asked him to do that.”

  “Boss Gao wouldn’t do that.”

  “Boss Gao is too cheap.”

  “The boss at the clothes factory cared about the workers.”

  “Boss Wang is nice. He’s just too worried all the time.”

  “Look at Old Tian!”

  The girls laughed—the tipsy foreman had fallen asleep on the bunk bed. The cake had all been eaten, and a small pile of gifts sat on the table: a toy pig, a little cow, a floppy cloth dog. Ren Jing loved stuffed animals, and like all the girls she sometimes seemed younger than her years. They never mentioned boys, at least not in mixed company, and they obeyed their parents with a readiness that would have been unimaginable to an American teenager. But in other ways they were remarkably mature. In the United States, few girls could prepare a seven-course banquet for a sweet sixteen birthday party, and almost certainly such an event would not feature a fifteen-year-old bullying her assembly-line foreman into drinking too much. But some teenager qualities are the same everywhere, and once the Anhui girls started talking, their faces lit up and they couldn’t have been happier. For an hour Ren Jing sat with her friends, chatting about old jobs and new bosses and which factories are the best.

  ONE EVENING THAT FALL, while driving from Wenzhou to Lishui on the new expressway, Boss Gao lost control of his car. It was pitch-black and raining hard; he was going faster than eighty miles per hour. On a curve, he hit a patch of water and locked the brakes, and then he hydroplaned. He was driving his aptly named Buick Sail. The car spun a full three-sixty, skidded across the highway, and slammed into a guardrail. Many sections of the Jinliwen Expressway are elevated, and often the road is bordered by cliffs, but Boss Gao was fortunate in the location of his accident—the guardrail held. It was nearly midnight and the road was empty. Afterward, when the car came to a stop on the shoulder, Boss Gao smoked a State Express 555 until his nerves calmed. But the damage to the car was relatively minor, and he was able to continue driving to Lishui.

  Both bosses still had homes near Wenzhou, and they made the round-trip journey two or three times a week. To some degree it was an issue of machine quality: in the factory, something always seemed to be breaking down, forcing them to return to Wenzhou to get the right part or repair. In the past, neither boss had driven much and the open road unsettled them. It was expensive, too—each round trip cost roughly twenty-five dollars in highway tolls. And that autumn, almost immediately after the factory became profitable, the bosses began to talk about moving the whole operation closer to their hometowns.

  Some of it was simply the eternal restlessness of the development zone. People in such places become accustomed to moving and adjusting; their instinct is always to tinker. And often a little success proves to be more unsettling than satisfying. After the bosses began to earn money, they became obsessed
with cutting costs. Their staff of twenty employees was overstretched, and often the crew worked late into the evening, but the bosses refused to hire new people. They complained about rent, because their factory space was so big. Their initial plans for the business had been overly ambitious; they had hoped to make a major expansion within six months. But after a year the growth had proven to be smaller than expected, and much of the empty space on the top floors was wasted.

  Whenever the bosses discussed important business between themselves, they spoke in their local dialect, so the workers wouldn’t understand. And they rarely gave anybody a sense of their plans. But during the fall they asked Master Luo how much time he would need, in the event of a factory transfer, to disassemble the Machine and put it back together again. He told them it would take ten days total. After that, they didn’t ask him any more questions, and he couldn’t tell whether they were serious about the possibility of moving. He believed they wouldn’t try something like that before the end of the year, because business was just starting to boom and a transfer involved risks. But Master Luo admitted that after all the years he’d spent in Chinese factory towns, he still couldn’t predict the snap decisions of a boss. People rarely planned carefully, especially in a place like Zhejiang. From Master Luo’s perspective, the region was even more chaotic than Guangdong, where he spent so many years. “They build things differently there,” he told me. “It’s more logical. In Guangdong the first thing they do is build the road, and then they build the factories. But here it’s the opposite. They build factories first and then they worry about finishing the roads and everything else.”