Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  At the end of autumn, Master Luo decided that it was best for his wife and baby to return to her hometown in Guizhou Province. He wasn’t sure if the factory was going to move, and the bosses were still withholding part of his salary; there was a chance he’d make a job search after the Spring Festival holiday. In either case, mobility would be crucial, and such things are harder with a small child. Like so many migrant families, they decided to live apart until Master Luo’s job situation was more stable.

  Cheng Youqin packed up as much as she could carry, and she took their new Canon digital camera. This was the family’s most valuable possession—after the baby’s birth, they spent one hundred and fifty dollars on the camera. With all of her bags and the baby, Cheng left from the Lishui bus station, eventually transferring to a train to Guiyang, the capital of Guizhou Province. It was an overnight journey and they arrived before five in the morning. At the Guiyang train station, a friendly young woman approached Cheng and asked where she was going. The friendly woman said she knew somebody with a van that was also headed in that direction, and she offered a good price, so Cheng accepted. Her hometown was in the countryside outside of Guiyang, more than an hour away, and usually she had to connect with a couple of public buses in order to get there.

  She followed the young woman outside the train station, but once she saw the vehicle she became nervous. It was dingy and cramped, the kind of minivan known as a “breadbox.” Three people waited inside, and two of them were heavyset men who smoked cigarettes and didn’t say much when Cheng approached. She thought about turning around and waiting for a public bus, but it was so early and the long journey from Lishui had left her tired. Her son still slept peacefully in her arms. At last she decided to enter the breadbox van and hope for the best.

  They drove through Guiyang and into the countryside. The other four people all knew each other, but they didn’t say much, and the farther they went, the more this silence unnerved Cheng. Guizhou is a poor, remote province, with stunningly rugged scenery, and soon they had left the last settlements of the Guiyang suburbs. Along an empty stretch of road Cheng noticed a strong chemical smell; suddenly she felt dizzy. The breadbox van pulled over to the side of the road. After that, events occurred as if through a haze: the men demanded her money, valuables, and cell phone; they threatened to kill her and the baby if she didn’t cooperate. Cheng had the equivalent of one hundred and twenty dollars in cash, which she handed over, along with her cell phone. They asked for her earrings and she took them off. But she didn’t tell them about the digital camera, which she had hidden at the bottom of a bag of baby supplies. Even when the men asked again about valuables, threatening to kill them both if she lied, she denied there was anything else.

  The thieves left Cheng and her baby by the side of the road. It was early morning, and the air was wet and cold; Cheng still felt disoriented. She believed she had been drugged—recently there had been reports of thieves using chemicals to knock out victims. Fortunately, a farmhouse stood not far from the road, and Cheng stumbled there with the baby in her arms. The elderly couple who answered the door took Cheng in, gave her something to eat, and let her use their phone. The first thing she did was try to call every friend and relative whose number had been programmed onto her cell phone. After stealing a phone, Chinese thieves sometimes go through the memory bank, calling numbers with a story about a terrible accident. They claim the phone’s owner is so badly injured that she can’t speak, and she needs a medical procedure immediately; doctors won’t treat if they’re not paid in advance. If relatives fall for the story, the thieves convince them to wire money immediately.

  Cheng had heard about such scams, so she tried to remember every number possible, and she called Master Luo to ask for any others. For half an hour she telephoned relatives and friends, explaining what had happened and warning them about the scam. Then she noticed that the baby was still asleep. Usually he woke up by this time in the morning, but today he seemed groggy, and Cheng called Master Luo again in a panic. He told her to bathe the baby immediately, scrubbing hard in case he had been contaminated with some drug.

  In the farmhouse, the elderly couple ran a bath and the baby woke up. Afterward he seemed fine, and Cheng observed him carefully over the coming weeks. But he remained as calm and happy as ever, and she believed that the chemicals hadn’t done any harm. The next time I saw her, she told me that she was certain the thieves would have murdered her if it hadn’t been for the baby. She was proud that she had tricked them about the digital camera—even under duress, she had protected the family’s most valued possession.

  As the child grew older, his face began to resemble Master Luo’s. The boy had the same long nose, heavy brow, and gentle smile. Maybe someday he would also share Master Luo’s quiet manner, the air of experience without cynicism, but that remained to be seen. In the first four months of the child’s life, he had traveled twice across China, lived in a factory dormitory, and served as a pawn in salary negotiations. He had witnessed the hotpot complaint scam and he had dodged the stolen phone trick. He had been drugged and robbed. His given name was Wen, which means “Cultured.” Master Luo had chosen that character because he dreamed that someday his son would become an educated man.

  MASTER LUO NEVER WROTE any slogans on the wall of his dormitory room. He didn’t read self-help books, and he had no interest in religion. He disliked Mao Zedong, believing that the leader had caused China to waste thirty years, but he admired Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatism. After more than two decades in factory towns, Master Luo’s life philosophy could be summed up in a single sentence: “If you have a problem, you have to take care of it yourself.” It’s common to hear people talk like this in development zones. The ones who succeed generally do so through their own talent and effort, and they neither expect nor receive support from the government, labor unions, or anybody else. A worker on the rise is rarely inspired to join the Communist Party, because such status is irrelevant in the factory world. There is one legal labor group, the government-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions, but in Lishui I never met a worker who had turned to this organization for support. In fact, the only evidence I saw of union activity consisted of streetside entertainments. Once a month, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions showed a movie on a portable screen in Suisong Road, free for everybody, and each year they hosted a big karaoke contest for workers. Apart from that, I never encountered the union during my trips to Lishui.

  In factory towns, the most common attitudes toward the government range from scorn to complete disinterest. Many people complain about official corruption, but they tend to do so in abstract terms, because they have little direct contact with cadres. It’s similar to the speeding tickets on the expressway: if drivers were pulled over and hassled by cops, or extorted in some heavy-handed way, they might be infuriated. But the authorities know better, and usually they find strategies to earn money without making it too personal. For the most part, citizens tolerate it; sometimes they’re even patronizing. One factory boss described his bribes in terms of public service. “You need to make them feel like they’re important,” he told me. “You need to give them cigarettes, give them banquets—give them a little face. If they don’t have these things to do, they’ll just sit in an office all day long. Think about what it’s like for them; they don’t get to start businesses or do interesting things. Their lives are so boring!”

  When people do turn to the government for assistance, it’s usually a sign of desperation. During my drives along the expressway, the dam relocation towns were the only places where residents sometimes spoke hopefully of getting something from cadres. And these were by far the most depressing settlements I ever saw in Zhejiang. Most were located on lonely sites near some highway exit, and they had all the dusty feel of a new boomtown without the energy. In these construction sites, nothing ever seemed to get finished: I visited Shifan, the exit town south of Lishui, over a period of more than two years and never saw the main street complet
ed. It began the same way as every other new town, with the same pioneer shops—China Mobile, construction supplies, home furnishings. They sold floor tiles and faucets, and there were plenty of goods for finishing an apartment. But over time the main street never reached the next stage of growth, where restaurants flourish and street-side entertainments appear. Shifan didn’t have a chance to come to life, because there wasn’t any major industry nearby.

  It was a drive-by town, and it received nothing but drive-by work. Occasionally some big-city factory owner came in on the expressway and offered locals a chance to earn some extra money. Once, I stopped by and dozens of older women were sitting in the street, chatting idly while they sewed plastic beads onto strips of cloth. The work had been commissioned by a Wenzhou shoe factory, which paid twelve and a half cents per embroidered strip. Eventually they would be attached to the tops of children’s shoes. A couple of months later, I made another visit to Shifan and saw people sewing beads onto headbands. Then there was a period during which everybody assembled tiny lightbulbs for electric signs. After that, they made cheap cotton gloves for a couple of months.

  The most ambitious Shifan industry involved online video games. A group of young men purchased computers, set up high-speed Internet connections, and began playing World of Warcraft for profit. World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular online game, and players build characters by accumulating virtual treasure. The game is so widespread that markets have developed in which these prizes can be bought and sold for real money. In America and Europe, players might be too busy to spend much time on the game, but they’re happy to pay somebody else to do the grunt work of developing a character. It’s called gold farming: essentially, the outsourcing of entertainment. For a time, the young men in Shifan made good money; they played World of Warcraft in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, selling the points to players in Germany. But then the game’s administrators cracked down on the practice, shutting down accounts in China, and finally the Shifan players gave up on their venture. They sold their computers and headed off on the expressway, looking for work in Wenzhou and other places. For most young people in the exit towns, that was the obvious solution to the lack of opportunity: they left.

  But there was also a small corps of people who had been embittered by the Tankeng Dam project and now sought justice. During the resettlement, authorities had promised compensation according to the type of home and farmland of each resident, and people were given discount prices on new apartments in Shifan and the other exit towns. The degree of detail was remarkable: if a person’s former house had been made of brick, he received 220 yuan per square meter; if it was wood, the price was 180. Each stove was reimbursed at a set rate. A fee of 480 yuan covered transport costs. Any resident employed in a full-time job received another 480, to compensate for missed workdays during the move. If they had orchards, every individual fruit tree was noted, evaluated for maturity, and reimbursed accordingly. On the average, compensation came to over ten thousand dollars per resident, but often the actual amount was reduced by corruption. Virtually everybody in Shifan grumbled about the resettlement, and some had become so angry that they prepared official requests for justice.

  Their goal was to contact a higher level of government. Like many traditional Chinese citizens, they had a deep-rooted faith in authority, believing that corruption was primarily a local issue. They visited Hangzhou, the provincial capital, where they waited in line at special offices, hoping some official would notice. I never heard of anybody in Shifan receiving justice from such a visit, but they kept trying. And almost every time I stopped in town, I was approached by somebody who wanted to tell the story of his case. I explained that I wrote books to be published overseas, and it wasn’t possible for me to print something in Zhejiang, but people wanted to talk anyway. Probably they just needed somebody to listen: often I sat for an hour while a displaced farmer flipped through his resettlement book. Inevitably he knew it all by heart, every detail, every injustice—his house had been brick but he had been paid only for wood, or the floor space had been miscalculated, or tangerine trees had been marked as young when in fact they were mature. These conversations made me feel helpless, because only a functional local press could deal with such issues, but Zhejiang journalists had been told to stay away from the dam. In a drive-by town, I felt like a drive-by journalist, listening to sad stories before I got back on the expressway.

  It was particularly depressing because in a way the system worked well. It didn’t necessarily make people happy, and it certainly wasn’t fair, but it was extremely functional. The government was smart enough not to resettle all the dam refugees in one place, which could have been a political disaster; instead they scattered them in exit towns all along the expressway. And they created lots of little rules that distracted people from the larger issues. They measured square meters and they counted trees; they quantified the difference between brick and wood. It gave an air of legality and due process to the whole affair, when in fact it was fundamentally flawed. There should have been public meetings about the dam; the press should have played a role; people should have been in a position to own the land they had farmed for generations. New towns like Shifan should have been located near industry, where people could find work. But these were rarely the issues that came up in conversations, because locals were so obsessed with the minutiae.

  In the early stages of the project, there were demonstrations in Beishan. Locals told me that officials hired thugs to beat up a few organizers, and there were rumors that one man had been killed. In the end, the authorities were able to quell the unrest without much trouble. Such flare-ups are common in China—during the year that Beishan was demolished, the Ministry of Public Security reported 87,000 “public-order disturbances” nationwide. Every year, a similar statistic comes out of China, and it always seems staggering. But in fact the number of protests is irrelevant; all that matters is the target. If people were calling for the downfall of the Communist Party, or complaining about the fundamental structure of land-use laws, that might be a serious problem. But it’s a very different issue when somebody is upset because his home has been measured at 100 square meters instead of 150. In China, virtually all complaints occur at this level: they’re intensely local and individual. And it also matters who does the protesting. In rural areas, where the worst abuses occur, talented people tend to migrate. If a capable individual happens to stay behind, like Wei Ziqi in Sancha, there’s a good chance he ends up involved in the local power structure, perhaps as a Communist Party member. This is another way in which the system is functional: there are plenty of pressure valves to redirect the energies of potentially dangerous people.

  For the most part, capable Chinese have learned that there’s no point in overt political activity, but this doesn’t mean they’re powerless. The degree of social mobility is higher than in most developing countries, and talent and hard work usually pay off—this is clear from the experience of people like Master Luo. But such folks rely on the government for virtually nothing. They find agency elsewhere: they pay for private training courses; they learn to use guanxi; they switch jobs on their own. They negotiate hard with bosses, using any advantage they can find. If they’re relocated to a dead community, they simply leave. With so many options and so much movement, it doesn’t make sense to get involved in a doomed battle against the cadres.

  In Shifan, most petitioners I met seemed desperate. They tended to be less educated than the average resident, with worse job prospects, and often they had had poor luck as migrants. Many of them had been traumatized—during the course of protesting, they had been threatened in some manner. All of these factors made it even less likely that they would succeed, but they kept trying, because they had been pushed beyond the pale. And only once did I meet a protestor who impressed me as highly competent. He arranged a meeting carefully, through a mutual acquaintance, and the first thing he did was ask to see my government-issued journalist license. Nobody in an exit town
had ever done that before.

  “To be honest, I would prefer to talk with somebody else,” he said. “I really want to speak with the Columbia Broadcasting System or the British Broadcasting Corporation.”

  I respected that—he wanted TV time, not some lousy print journalist. But on that day I was the only option at hand, so we chatted for an hour. He complained that nobody knew exactly how the Tankeng Dam had been approved and funded, and there were rumors of private investors who stood to profit from any electricity that was generated. “If they build something like this, we need to know why,” he said. “We need to know who the investors are. But the main reason I oppose it is that the government didn’t offer anything to the people. It’s not enough to give us money and apartments. How are people going to earn a living in this place? Look outside—there’s nothing here. In Beishan we had a good location for doing business, because it was a center for people from other villages in the region.”

  It was the first time I had met a local who seemed concerned with the fundamental issues behind the dam, and he had refused to accept his cash settlement out of principle. He was well dressed and he carried an expensive cell phone; I asked how he supported himself. “I do business,” he said. “I have shops in this area, including one here.”