Authors: Tim Clissold
‘True. But now, of course, they want to try to move us back,’ said Che.
‘Move back? Why?’
‘Well, now, you see, all that worry of war, it’s all in the past. The Central Government spends on construction these days, not on the military. So they came up with a new policy
called “change military to civilian”. They want us to start making other stuff – you know, motorcycles, tractors, car parts, that kind of thing. They don’t have the
resources to support so many military factories any more. But it’s all the same; in every campaign the slogans are many, but the money is short.’
Mr Che explained that the money from Beijing just dried up and many factories were stranded without orders. ‘Some of them – the smart ones, that is – managed to start making
civilian products using the machinery they had in the mountains. If you can make parts for a tank, it doesn’t take much to change to manufacturing parts for trucks or buses.’ So that
was what happened.
‘Some of them were terrible failures, of course. Funny, really; the ones that were best at getting money from the ministry, they’re really in trouble now. They got all that really
specialist equipment. We all wanted it then, but now it’s useless. All that money gone to waste. The good ones,’ he went on, ‘the ones that changed, well now, the government wants
to move them all back down the valleys. You can’t run a factory up here; can’t ever get anything done. But the locals, they don’t want us to move out. Once we’ve gone,
who’s going to buy their vegetables? With the factory gone, they’ll not get through the days so easily.’
It seemed as if this second move was causing as much heartbreak as the first. The factory workers had been in the hills for so long that many had married locals. Now there was to be a second
break-up that would tear apart families and loved ones once more. I heard later that, despite severe punishments, in some places the peasants were so desperate that they tried to sabotage the move
by cutting the electricity lines and telephone cables. I remember once using the phone up in the hills and the line suddenly went dead: not even a click, just total silence.
It wasn’t surprising that after a month we were exhausted, bad-tempered and in need of a good workout. More to the point, despite travelling for thousands of miles,
bouncing around in the back of a bus, we hadn’t found a single factory that made the remotest sense for investment. We had been presented with scenes of complete anarchy at most of them: huge
workshops with vats of boiling metal and men wearing cloth shoes pouring it into moulds on the floor; groups of women squatting down on their hunkers, with rusty old files gnawing away on vast
heaps of aluminium castings; accountants’ offices piled high with shoe-boxes stuffed full of wafer-thin paper covered in indecipherable characters. Even if we spent months getting to the
bottom of what was going on, I could see that it would take millions of dollars to restore these rotting warehouses and heaps of broken machinery.
But Pat remained optimistic. The big picture still made sense to him and he was determined to find a way to invest. He was convinced that we were at the start of the next new investment wave and
he wasn’t going to be put off. This was a unique opportunity and Pat, the perpetual optimist, even managed to turn the remote locations into a positive. ‘Just think,’ he said,
‘if we can get the money, we’ll transform these factories. Wages will go up and create demand for a whole range of new products. And we’ll be sitting there with a captive market.
There’s thousands of people stuck up there with nothing to do. We can bring in restaurants, shopping malls, gaming halls, the lot. There’ll be a huge demand for entertainment and once
the market reaches the right size, we can try for a McDonald’s franchise. If we’ve got twenty factories, that’s a huge market already, maybe fifty thousand people right on the
doorstep with nowhere to go. So we can set up transportation companies to take them on trips down the valley, and they’ll need gas stations, repair shops, maybe even banks. The key’s to
get exclusive rights before someone else muscles in. We can do that now because they need capital and we can get it. And people are going to want cable TV. We’ll be plugged in to the right
officials when the licences come up so that we’ll be the ones to supply it. Kleaver made a fortune on cable TV in the States. And all this will affect the value of property. If we buy up some
of the key sites in the factories now, who knows what they’ll be worth when we get the place really humming?’
But the real difficulty with all of those factories was that we never actually felt we knew what was going on. Were they really making motorcycle parts or were they still involved in the old
weapons programme? I thought that getting money to help these factories change from military to civilian products was something that was thoroughly worthwhile, and not just in financial terms. But
could we be absolutely certain how the money would be used? My nagging doubts were removed on the third or fourth visit to the gearbox factory. The subject of the old weapons programme had come up
again at lunch and the managers had been cheerfully evasive.
An hour later, we were standing in the small square outside the office block, just about to get on to the bus. Suddenly there was a colossal explosion from behind a row of sheds at the back of
the factory. There was no possiblity of having missed it, but the conversation continued uninterrupted as if nothing had happened. But I had seen the briefest lapse in Mr Che’s genial
expression. As we drove off on the bus, Ai Jian looked at me and said, ‘You know, even Sunzi’s
Art of War
says that sometimes the best strategy is just to run away!’
Failure in the hills, however, did nothing to dampen our enthusiasm. Although none of the individual factories we’d seen up in the mountains were viable for investment,
the picture of the industry as a whole was encouraging. A consistent story of growth came out of the many discussions we had with the different factory directors. So we persisted and changed our
emphasis towards the larger towns; we found that the factories there were more promising. The first real signs that we were on the right track came when Ai arranged a trip to Changchun in the
north-east where China’s largest truck factory had just started a project to make passenger cars.
First Auto Works had been set up jointly with the Russians in the mid-1950s up in Changchun in the north-east of China. The city grew with the factory and much of the
architecture still retains a strong Stalinist influence, particularly the government buildings and the huge solid hotels, with their endless corridors, high ceilings, dusty chandeliers and heavy
double doors that open in to enormous, draughty banqueting halls. I had taken a trip up to Changchun when I was at the university in Beijing, but that trip had been in the summer and there had been
a gentle breeze in the park at the centre of town. The children splashing about on the boats in the middle of the lake had reminded me of Hyde Park years before. There had been a relaxed feel to
the tree-lined streets, almost a holiday mood, with customers at the lively restaurants spilling out on to the pavements. But, when Pat, Ai and I went on that first trip northwards, it was still
cold with temperatures twenty below and the familiar icy blast howling in from Mongolia.
A couple of officials met us at the airport. They had been sent by the Changchun Government to escort us around the factories and they went through the itinerary as we drove into town.
The first visit was to First Auto Works, which sits in a suburb some way out from the centre. Just like the factories in the hills, it was vast and spread over several square miles with
dormitories, hospitals, kindergartens, even cinemas hiding behind the high walls that encircled the compound. The massive gates, with the guards standing to attention on little white platforms and
the familiar vertical signs strung up on either side led onto a broad avenue. Inside the gates, we found a perfect image of the decaying rust-belt factory. On either side of the broad street there
were rows of shattered warehouses, along with the familiar sight of smashed windows, heaps of coal, workers in oily blue overalls wandering about on bicycles, and pipework with torn lagging strung
up over the roads. The skyline ahead was dominated by a huge square boiler house, with blackened brickwork. On top, four vast chimneys, covered with fins and wrought-iron ornamentation,
periodically disgorged vast clouds of black smoke out of iron chimney pots that looked like fantastic spiky crowns at the top.
At that time, the factory only had two products. They had both been designed in Russia in the 1930s and had been transferred into China before Mao had had his fight with Khrushchev. The first
was an ancient truck with a bulbous nose, a split windscreen and great round wheel arches. It had been introduced into China shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic, so it was
called the ‘Liberation Truck’. The other was a vast upright limo called the ‘Red Flag’, which was used to ferry around government officials who sat on lumpy back seats,
hidden from public view by thick brown curtains draped in the windows at the back. The trucks were always dark green; the limos were always black.
When we visited the assembly lines in the brick factory buildings we started to have a sense that we might be homing in on something big. In contrast to the factories up in the hills, with their
scores of idle workers and offices crammed with people slurping tea out of big jam-jars behind well-thumbed copies of the
People’s Daily,
here all was activity. Workers in blue
overalls climbed all over the half-finished trucks as they moved along the production line. Engines and gearboxes came down on chains through the ceilings and were bolted onto the chassis. Arc
welders flashed as the cabs were attached to the front. At the end of the line, several hundred yards ahead, young girls with blue caps and pigtails drove the fully assembled trucks out of the
factory for testing.
But even this was nothing in comparison to the new car plant being built down the road together with the Germans. It was colossal; about a mile long. Although it was only half-built at the time,
it was already impressive. The assembly lines were being set up; there were automatic welding machines and electronic sensors everywhere and, at the side, workers tore open huge wooden crates with
more equipment shipped in from Germany. They were obviously gearing up to make thousands and thousands of passenger cars; the investment must have been enormous.
That afternoon, we saw several components factories in the town. They made simple parts – electrical connectors, switches and the like – but the one that caught my interest was a
factory that made ignition coils. It was run by a Madame Tan who was only in her late-thirties. She seemed knowledgeable about her business and she had just won the contract to supply ignition
coils to the huge factory that we had seen in the morning. With demand about to go through the roof, she was looking for some money for expansion. As we left through the factory gates, I told her
that I’d come back for another look.
On the way back, the officials told us that we had been invited to dinner at six by the Mayor of Changchun. That was a good sign: Mayor Huang was the top official in the Municipal Government.
With support from him, I felt sure that we’d soon be in business.
We met the Mayor in the hotel that evening. Pat gave a brief description of the day’s visits, sitting rather stiffly on the familiar old sofas in a drafty meeting room,
and told Mayor Huang that he’d been impressed with the factories that we’d seen. The Mayor was pleased; he was one of the younger generation of leaders promoted after Deng’s
Southern Tour. He seemed smart and came back with quick comments, speaking with animation about how he hoped to bring foreign investment into Changchun. He had only been in Changchun for six months
or so, and the transfer from Yangzhou, at the mouth of the Yangtse in the gentler climate near Shanghai, must have been a shock. Nevertheless, the Mayor seemed to have found his feet quickly. He
appeared to be firmly in charge and determined to improve the city.
Mayor Huang was totally different from the plodding cadres we had been more used to in Beijing, and he had long abandoned the traditional Mao jacket for a snappy Western suit and tie. I liked
him. He was alert, interested and supportive of what we were trying to do. He was in his early forties: a shortish man with neat features, thick hair, sparkling eyes and teeth whose whiteness was
accentuated by the clean, slightly tanned look of the southern Chinese. As he listened intently to Pat’s explanation of the recent excitement about China in the financial markets, I sensed
that he was wondering how he could get his hands on his share of the spoils.
Soon it was time for dinner, so we trooped out of the meeting room, through cavernous hallways with thick dusty carpets and followed the Mayor into a private room. There was a huge circular
dinner table with a glass turntable in the middle placed at the centre of the room under an enormous chandelier.
‘Qing zuo;
said the Mayor, ‘Please sit,’ as he gestured towards his right.
I looked at the expanse of white tablecloth in front of me, the perfectly aligned plates and the flowers and elaborately carved vegetables on the circular glass stand in the centre. I leaned
back in my chair and breathed in slowly. ‘This’, I thought resignedly, ‘promises to be an epic’
The food eaten in ordinary homes, factory canteens and local restaurants in China is tasty, diverse and healthy. Within reason, you can stuff as much down as you like without getting fat. It
bears no resemblance at all to some of the glutinous, oily Chinese food served up in restaurants in Britain. But banquet food is quite another matter. The whole purpose is to impress. Chefs compete
to create the most elaborate and obscure dishes. Excess, both in the amount and the nature of the food, is meant to flatter the guests. I thought back to the factories in the hills and hankered
after some simple, spicy Sichuan dishes, but unfortunately my first guess had been right: the dinner we had that evening with the Mayor of Changchun was an absolute classic.