Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (39 page)

The cadre never mentioned Wei Ziqi’s name or the surreptitious campaign. After he was finished, he called upon each individual member to comment openly on the Party Secretary’s performance. One by one, people stood up and followed the cadre’s cue, praising the Party Secretary. They mentioned the new road, the cell phone tower, the streetlights, the garbage collection. Only a handful of members said anything negative. The Shitkicker was the most outspoken—he complained about the land deals and the mystery of village finances.

Finally the township cadre called on Wei Ziqi. Wei Ziqi stood up and spoke one sentence. “
Gande bucuo
,” he said. “She’s done a fine job.” And then he sat back down again.

AFTER THAT THERE WERE
no surprises. Three days later, they held the vote, with every member listing his top candidates, and the Party Secretary’s name appeared on fifteen ballots. Wei Ziqi received ten nominations. Standard protocol called for voting to go to a second round, with choices limited to the top five names, and Wei Ziqi came in fourth. The Party Secretary won, and the Vice Party Secretary took second, which meant that both positions were retained. Third place became the village’s Party Committee Member. Wei Ziqi was left with nothing—he failed to pick up even a low-ranking office.

He learned that one of his supposed adherents, a farmer who lived in the lower village and claimed to admire Wei Ziqi, had in fact served as a spy in the campaign. The farmer had pretended to back Wei Ziqi, attending all the dinners and late-night meetings; and meanwhile at every step he secretly briefed the Party Secretary. With this knowledge the woman was able to track the campaign, finding ways to convince key voters. As for how she managed to convince them, nobody could say for certain. Wei Ziqi refused to speculate—he was tired of the politics.

He had realized it was hopeless the moment the township cadre gave his speech. “
Mei banfa
,” Wei Ziqi said. “There was nothing I could do.” In his opinion the man’s words represented the turning point, even more so than the actions of the spy. And the speech was the reason that Wei Ziqi said so little when asked to comment about the Party Secretary’s performance. That was his final calculation of the campaign—at the last moment, after all the secrecy and planning, he hedged his bets.

FOR A SPELL WEI
Ziqi drank heavily. He claimed the loss didn’t matter, and he often said that he had campaigned only because he had been recruited to do so; but in truth the defeat left him depressed. He often remembered the fortune-teller’s warning: Avoid politics at all costs. But Wei Ziqi hadn’t listened, and now he paid for his pride; he swore that never again would he challenge local authority. The only way he would run for office was if the Party Secretary retired and approved Wei
Ziqi as her successor. “If she supports me, then I’ll do it,” he said. “If she doesn’t, then I don’t have a chance.”

Their relations were strained on a personal level, but Wei Ziqi believed she wouldn’t seek revenge. He said she still feared his abilities, and she remembered what had happened when Wei Ziqi dropped off the Idiot at the township government. In Wei Ziqi’s opinion, the memory of that action was critical to his security in the village. “If somebody goes to a higher authority like that, it causes a problem for her,” he said. “Others don’t do this because they don’t really understand the policies and the law. I understand because I studied the law.”

In 2007, the Communist Party started a national campaign called “Develop Modern Agriculture.” They hoped to introduce new technology and management strategies to the countryside, and they also wanted to give rural cadres a glimpse of city life. In Sancha, that year’s annual Party junket took the members to Dalian, a major city on the northeastern coast near the Korean peninsula. For Wei Ziqi, and nearly everybody else in the delegation, it was the first time they had ever flown in an airplane. The Air China flight was delayed by five hours and it was after midnight when they finally departed.

For half a week the Sancha Party members toured Dalian. Every night they ate seafood, the local specialty, and during the days they were taken to see various tourist sites and examples of modern infrastructure. Dalian is one of the most prosperous places in northern China, and it’s also one of the best planned, with elevated highways that ease congestion. The Sancha cadres rode on the highways, and they visited Dalian’s new development zone. Pfizer, Toshiba, and Mitsubishi had already set up operations in the industrial park, and Intel had recently announced that it planned to build a Dalian factory dedicated to making semiconductors.

But the cadres seemed most deeply impressed by a variety show that featured Thai transvestites. In recent years, the Chinese government had loosened restrictions on international travel, and Thailand had become a popular destination for middle-and upper-class people. Whenever Chinese tour groups went to Bangkok, they made sure to schedule an evening at a transvestite show. As more and more people went abroad,
the shows became increasingly famous, until finally the folks in Dalian decided to import some Thai transvestites of their own.

After Wei Ziqi returned from the northeast, he couldn’t stop talking about the variety show. “You’ve been to Thailand,” he said. “About the
renyao
—is that true?”

I said I was pretty certain they’re actually men.

“That’s not what I mean,” he said. “We were told they take children when they’re really small, maybe four or five years old, and then they train them to be transvestites. They said they spend years and years on this training. Is that true?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I think they probably do this as adults. It shouldn’t take that long to become a transvestite.”

“That’s what I thought,” Wei Ziqi said. He seemed happy that I had confirmed his analysis. “All the other Party members believed it,” he said, “but I didn’t.”

IN
2007,
CAO CHUNMEI
decided that she wanted a driver’s license. Now that they had a car, she thought it made sense; she could pick up groceries down in the valley. But Wei Ziqi wouldn’t spend money on another driving course. “It’s not necessary,” he told her. “We already have one license.” For a while, Cao Chunmei tried to change his mind, but he was too stubborn, and eventually she gave up on the idea of driving.

In the spring she began to experience panic attacks. Periodically her heart raced and her mind filled with dread; sometimes she was struck almost helpless. Finally she saw a doctor of traditional Chinese medicine, and she also went to Huairou to visit the clairvoyant. The man took her right wrist, felt her pulse, and informed her that new spirits had entered the home. Now she needed to appease a snake spirit, a rabbit spirit, and a fox spirit. Rabbit spirits are particularly jumpy; they often cause marital problems. Cao Chunmei prayed diligently at her shrines, and she did everything she could to avoid the slaughter of fish and chickens, and by summer she felt calmer again.

Wei Ziqi seemed to recover when the customers reappeared. He
cut down on his drinking, and he focused once again on expanding his business; he renovated the patio and built a new pond for the Swiss trout. To determine the most auspicious location for the pond, he called in a clairvoyant from down in the valley. Wei Ziqi had never been religious, and he ignored his wife’s shrines in the living room, but he obeyed the clairvoyant’s instructions. That was one thing Wei Ziqi had learned—never again would he ignore a fortune-teller’s warning.

As for Wei Jia, he picked up his own lessons about politics. In school, fifth grade is the first year that Chinese children campaign for classroom cadre positions, as opposed to being appointed by the teacher. Wei Jia had been successful as Politeness Monitor; he was well liked by other kids and the instructors trusted him. They encouraged him to run for office, but he flatly refused. “It’s too much hassle,” he told me. “Let somebody else do that stuff.” His favorite subjects were English and computers. He never talked much about what he wanted to be when he grew up, but he said that someday, after he left the village, he’d live in downtown Beijing, near the lake of Houhai.

In autumn the Party Secretary’s mother died. It happened at the end of harvest, and the villagers gathered in the dead woman’s home to pay their respects. She had been an important person: the first Sancha woman to join the Party, and the inspiration for her daughter’s rise. The funeral lasted three days. On the first day, I happened to walk past while the Party Secretary was mourning. She wore funeral white, and she had fallen onto her knees before the coffin. She was keening—her high-pitched wails echoed off the stony walls of the valley. In the past I had only seen her brusqueness, the sense of control that she carried around the village, and I had never entirely trusted her. But the sight of the funeral made me feel something different, and I realized that part of me was relieved that Wei Ziqi had lost the election. Cao Chunmei was right: he already had enough to worry about. In the countryside there are many ways to be humbled, and a man is lucky if a brush with politics turns out to be his worst moment.

The Shitkicker’s new house remained empty. The unfinished brick walls still dominated the upper village, and piles of cement lay abandoned along the walk. He never found a buyer, and he never made
another attempt at a local coup. But in other respects his status grew. Half a century after pouring tea for the local clairvoyant, he seemed to draw more of the old man’s power. The Shitkicker was gaining clarity—he could see the unseen; he could speak the unspoken. He felt the wrists and he described the visions, the spirits of snakes and rabbits and foxes, and soon more villagers sought wisdom in the shadow of the empty house.

IN THE CITY OF WENZHOU THEY RENTED OUT CARS WITH
an empty tank. The first time I went there and picked up a Volkswagen Santana, in July of 2005, that was my welcome: I paid my deposit, put the key in the ignition, and the low-fuel warning light flashed on. There was barely enough in the tank to make it to a gas station. In the past, when I’d rented from Beijing’s Capital Motors, I complained about inconsistent fuel levels, but the folks at the Wenzhou Prosperous Automobile Rental Company had solved that problem in their own entrepreneurial way. If I returned the Santana with so much as a gallon left in the tank, it would be siphoned out and sold.

Before that year, I had never rented a car in the south, and I hadn’t spent much time driving in Chinese cities. Almost all of my journeys had been in the countryside of the north, where I became accustomed to rural rhythms: the busy mornings of spring planting, the road-threshing of autumn. In winter I spent quiet days in villages where most young people were already gone. But there had never been any mystery about where they were going, or how they were getting there. They followed the new roads south, and each year there were more migrants, more ways to leave. In 2003, the central government embarked on a major two-year road-building campaign in the countryside, and after that was finished they turned their attention to the cities. These places were being transformed by the auto boom: in the four years since I acquired my driver’s license, the number of passenger vehicles in China had more than doubled. In January of 2005, officials announced plans to construct
another thirty thousand miles of high-speed expressways. Eventually this network would connect every city with a population of over two hundred thousand people, stretching all the way from the factory towns of the eastern coast to the far western border with Kyrgyzstan. China may have come late to the world of high-speed transport—the nation’s first expressway wasn’t completed until 1988—but by 2020 they intended to have more highway miles than the United States.

When the government announced the expansion, they specifically mentioned the States as a source of inspiration. Zhang Chunxian, the Minister of Communications, hosted a press conference in Beijing, and he responded to one question with a story about Condoleezza Rice. Recently she had visited China, where apparently she told an official that they should follow the example of America in the 1950s and build more roads. “She said when she was young, she took a lot of trips with her family across America,” Zhang explained. “This was how she became interested in the country’s highways, and she said those trips helped her love the United States. By building expressways, we can boost the auto industry, but that’s only a small part of it. What’s important is the implication for national development and the improvement in people’s lives.”

In the southeast, one of the new routes was the Jinliwen Expressway. The road would begin in Wenzhou, not far from the coast, and it would run west and north for 145 miles, connecting the cities of Lishui and Jinhua. Much of the route paralleled the outdated National Highway 330, and on my first trip I drove the Santana along the old two-lane road, past miles of construction. Some parts of the new expressway were mostly finished; other sections were still in the early stages, with rows of cement pylons running along the banks of the Ou River. There were workers everywhere—total investment was over 1.5 billion dollars, and it was a priority project, which in China means that construction continues day and night. Driving along the old road, looking out the window, I saw workers hauling rebar, and mixing cement, and scurrying nimbly across webbed scaffolding. Sometimes a half dozen men knelt in a line, using hand tools to smooth a stretch of fresh-laid roadway. They worked patiently, moving backward step by step, and their steady prog
ress represented the first traffic of the Jinliwen Expressway. At night the glow of welding torches could be seen from miles away, an intimation of the headlights that would someday sweep across this road.

I had come to southern Zhejiang Province in search of a city. Years ago, my first long driving trip had followed relics of the past, the stretches of the Great Wall that went through dying villages; and I had found a home in Sancha because I wanted some link to the countryside of today. But here in Zhejiang I was thinking about the future. In southern China, nothing changes the landscape faster than a new expressway: farmland disappears, and factories sprout up, and entrepreneurs and migrants pour into town. I was curious about this early rush—I wanted to know what life is like for the pioneering factory owners and workers. But first I had to find a city, and the Jinliwen Expressway would be my guide. The new highway was scheduled to open by the end of 2005, and after that these places would boom.

There had already been several generations of road building along this route. It’s rugged countryside, following the banks of the Ou River, where most hillsides are too steep for crop terracing. Much of this region was inaccessible until the original version of Highway 330 was completed in 1934, during China’s first wave of modern road construction. Back then they had also looked to the example of the United States, and American engineers oversaw much of the early work across the country. Those packed-dirt roads were typically suited for speeds of only thirty miles per hour, and many of them were damaged or destroyed during the war. In southern Zhejiang, Highway 330 was finally paved in the late 1970s, and it wasn’t improved significantly until 1987.

Even then, when the Reform period was still in the early stages, the new road had an immediate effect. It transformed villages along its path, especially in the regions close to Wenzhou, where people traditionally raised rice and fish. With access to the new Highway 330, they left farming behind, and over time they came to make the most unexpected things. Driving northwest from Wenzhou, I sometimes could see the products from the road. In Xiaxie, a village ten miles outside of the city, I passed endless rows of playground equipment. It was stored in bulk everywhere beside the street: piles of swing sets, big stacks of red plastic
slides, long lines of blue and yellow monkey bars. There wasn’t a child in sight, and most buildings had the industrial squareness of factories. I pulled over to chat with locals, who told me that making playground equipment had become the local specialty. Xiaxie was part of Qiaoxia Township, which was currently home to 270 individual manufacturers, all of them producing some version of the same thing. Half of China’s domestic market for playground equipment was supplied by this single town.

Another ten miles down Highway 330, past another bend in the river, the town of Qiaotou had erected a statue of a button. It was a huge disk of silver, ten feet wide and topped by wings that spun whenever the wind came up. Qiaotou’s population was only 64,000, but the town had 380 factories that manufactured more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In honor of this status, the village elders erected the statue in the center of town, right in front of a new building called “Button City.” Button City was four stories tall, and the ground-floor market was dedicated entirely to Qiaotou’s distinctive product. Clothes manufacturers arrived to buy in bulk, and sellers organized their wares by size and style. Former peasants hawked buttons out of grain sacks—big twenty-five-pound bags, still labeled “Rice” and “Flour,” now filled with nothing but buttons.

On the day I drove through, many dealers were women with small children, and the kids sat on the cement floor. Whenever they began to cry, somebody tossed them another handful of buttons to play with. I could only imagine how much of Button City was being processed by tiny intestines on a daily basis, and it occurred to me that with a little organization, these kids could be shipped out to Xiaxie every morning to play on the jungle gyms. But there was no overlap between the towns, and moving from one to the other, at least in the economic sense, was almost as absolute as crossing an international border. People told me that even the local dialects were essentially unintelligible.

This part of Zhejiang is famous for difficult dialects, and it’s also full of one-product towns. Locals tend to specialize in some simple object, in part because they have little formal training and it’s easiest to manufacture something that doesn’t require much technology and invest
ment. Whenever Highway 330 led me to a place of decent size, I pulled over and asked a bystander, “What do people make here?” Usually they could answer the question in a sentence; sometimes they didn’t need to say a word. In the town of Wuyi, a man responded by reaching into his pocket and pulling out a handful of playing cards. I subsequently learned that Wuyi manufactures one billion decks a year: half of China’s domestic market. Fifty miles away, Yiwu makes one quarter of the world’s plastic drinking straws. A place called Yongkang produces 95 percent of Chinese scales. In another part of Zhejiang, Songxia turns out 350 million umbrellas every year. Fenshui specializes in pens; Shangguan manufactures table tennis paddles. Datang produces one-third of the socks on earth. Forty percent of the world’s neckties are made in a place called Shengzhou.

Between factory towns I drove through countryside of remarkable beauty. Sometimes the Ou River narrowed, bordered by big cliffs of stone, and the valley deepened into a gorge. Highway 330 follows the river upstream, into the provincial highlands, and with every mile the mountains become more impressive. Unlike northern China, these areas receive heavy rainfall and there’s a lushness to the landscape. And after a couple of days I began to enjoy the journey’s contrasts: the stunning scenery and the odd products, the way the landscape expanded to vistas of rivers and mountains, and then suddenly narrowed into a town that made something tiny: cards, pens, straws.

In the evenings I usually stayed at the International Hotel. Many factory towns had a guesthouse with that name, to serve the foreign buyers and managers who occasionally passed through. In the lobby they displayed flyers from local companies; sometimes, if there was a factory that made something more elaborate than a button or a straw, they featured a high-end model in the room. In the city of Yongkang, famous for scales and electrical tools, my room contained something called the Human Body Ingredient Test Device. It looked like a scale covered with electrodes; wires ran in all directions and a sign in English had been posted atop the thing: “WARNING: Prohibited for pregnant woman and the man with heart getting up abundantly.” I decided to take a pass on the Human Body Ingredient Test Device. Beside my bed stood
another local product called the Light-Wave Health Room. It was the size of a closet, made of wood, and the door was studded with electric switches—the thing looked like an outhouse from the future. Instructions read in English:

PLEASE DON’T USE THE APPLIANCE
IF YOU HAVE THESE SITUATIONS.

• 1. The one with the bleeding wound and fester inflammation.
  
• 2. The one with serious eyes inflammation (if not serious, please cover some wet cloth and cotton balls on the eyes).
  
• 3. The one is burned seriously within 4 months.
  
• 4. Prohibited for the advances man, pregnant woman, baby.
  
• 5. Prohibited for the one with serious sick, dangerous patient.
  
• 6. Some people have the temperature taboo, please use it under the direction of doctor.
  
• 7. Don’t put pets into appliance.
  
• 8. Prohibited for the drunk man.
  

In the city of Lishui I finally found what I was looking for. It was located seventy-five miles from Wenzhou, where Highway 330 was in bad shape. The drive from the coast usually took at least three hours, and accidents often caused delays; it was too remote for businessmen, at least until the new expressway was completed. The surrounding mountains were the highest I’d seen thus far, with green peaks rising a thousand feet above the city. Lishui lay at the intersection of the Da and the Hao rivers, and people still farmed within a mile of downtown—fruit orchards were everywhere in the suburbs. When I asked what Lishui manufactured, people laughed and said, “Tangerines.” One local entrepreneur told me earnestly, “This is the Tibet of Zhejiang.” Here in bustling southeastern China, within a few hours’ drive of the coast, it was an oxymoron—like calling a place the Alaska of New Jersey. But there was no doubt that Lishui was isolated by Zhejiang standards. When I first visited, it had the lowest per capita urban income of any city in the province, and industry was so young that Lishui had yet to settle on a
local product. From an economic standpoint, it was still a blank slate: a place without buttons or playing cards or jungle gyms.

But already changes had begun. South of town, where the new expressway would soon have an exit, the government was building the Lishui Economic Development Zone. Until recently this region had all been agricultural, as timeless as any farmland in China—a quiet place where peasants followed the regular cycles of seasons and months, planting and harvest. But now the fields were being replaced with a sprawling industrial park, and the government hoped to attract investors from the coast. Once the new road was finished, the three-hour journey from Wenzhou would be reduced to little more than sixty minutes. In the future, that was the kind of time that would matter to Lishui: the hours and minutes of a businessman’s schedule.

ON MY NEXT JOURNEY
to Lishui, three months later, I noticed a man in new clothes standing beside a half-built factory in the development zone. His outfit caught my eye: stiff black jeans, black sweater, thin-soled leather shoes with a square front. The shoes identified him as a Wenzhou native: the city is famous for its shoe factories and often local bosses adopt the export fashions. That year, a European-style loafer with squared toes was everywhere in Wenzhou, and the moment I saw the shoes I knew the man was not from Lishui.

It was also unusual to see somebody so clean in the development zone. Roads were still dirt, and most buildings were covered with scaffolding; very few factories had started producing. Virtually everybody outside was a construction worker dressed in a grimy military uniform, carrying a sledgehammer or saw. But this man’s clothes were spotless and he held nothing but a black fake-leather money bag. His white Buick Sail was parked nearby. He looked nervous; he chain-smoked State Express 555 cigarettes. But he answered in a friendly way when I asked why he was in the development zone.