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China's Boomtowns
JUNE 2007
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China's Boomtowns
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By Peter Hessler
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Photographs by Mark Leong
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After its arrival on the mainland, where production costs are much cheaper, "the Machine" essentially minted money. The boss got rich, and then a worker named Liu Hongwei got an idea. Despite his lack of formal education, Liu was a skilled mechanic, who worked closely with the Machine. Meticulously, he memorized the assembly line, piece by piece, and in secret he sketched out blueprints. When the plans were complete, he contacted a second boss at a company called Shangang Keji, in the city of Shantou.
In 1998, Boss Number Two hired Liu and took the blueprints to Qingsui Machinery Manufacture Company, in Guangzhou, which custom-built the assembly line. Initially, the new Machine didn't work—nobody's memory is perfect, after all—but two months of adjustments solved the problems. Shangang Keji began producing bra rings, but then Liu found Boss Number Three, at a company called Jinde. Every time Liu jumped, he demanded money for his blueprints and expertise; some believe he made as much as $20,000.
Without knowing it, the man was following a path blazed by other societies that had also experienced sudden manufacturing booms. In 1810, a wealthy American named Francis Cabot Lowell traveled to England, where he used his connections to tour the world's premier textile mills. British law forbade the export of machinery or blueprints, but Lowell had an excellent memory. He returned to the United States, where, in the words of his business partner, he re-invented the Cartwright loom. Lowell became an American hero, with a Massachusetts factory town named in his honor.
Nearly two centuries later, Liu Hongwei's luck ran out when he tried to switch to Boss Number Four. According to a former co-worker, Number Three put a $12,000 bounty on Liu's head, and he fled. "I know that Jinde was looking for him, and they were angry," said Gu Hong, a Qingsui business manager who had helped custom-build the Machine. "He disappeared."
The industry, though, had already been changed. In the five years after Liu's reinvention, the bra-ring price dropped by 60 percent. Today, more than 20 Chinese companies manufacture the object, and the Machine is available to anybody with $65,000. Previously, all major manufacturers had been concentrated in the south, but now Boss Gao and Boss Wang hoped to be the first to make rings in Zhejiang.
On the day they tested the Machine, the temperature refused to budge, and the men took turns standing on the stepladder and dumping buckets of boiling water over the gas canisters. Half an hour later, steam filled the room, and they had discovered a new axiom: Pouring boiling water on natural gas canisters has no effect on the production of bra rings.
After four hours of testing, they gave up. In the end, Mechanic Luo disassembled the Machine, replaced a key part, and moved the burners closer to the assembly line. It took nearly two weeks. Some sections of the Machine had to be jury-rigged with plywood and string; they never reattached the melted handle. "The blueprints still aren't very good," Mechanic Luo explained. Years ago, he had worked alongside Liu Hongwei, and he said the same things about the technology thief that I heard from others. Liu was tall, devious, and from Sichuan Province. People speculated that Liu wasn't his real name, and they had never met his wife or child. Nobody had any idea where the man had gone.
moving mountains
The government motto of the Lishui Economic Development Zone is "Each person does the work of two; two days' work is done in one." The slogan may be too modest. From 2000 to 2005, the city's population went from 160,000 to 250,000, and the local government invested 8.8 billion dollars in infrastructure for the region it administers. During those five years, infrastructure investment was five times the amount spent in the previous half century. In money terms, what was once 50 days' work is now done in one.
For the past three decades, China's economy has averaged nearly 10 percent annual growth. The economy is fueled by the largest migration the world has ever seen: An estimated 140 million rural Chinese have already left their homes, and another 45 million are expected to join the urban workforce in the next five years. Most have gone to factory towns along the coast, but in recent years migrants have been drawn increasingly to cities in the interior, where there's less competition for jobs.
Such cities must expand and attract industry on their own, because the central government no longer provides the funding and guidance of the old planned economy. One common strategy is to establish a factory zone: Clear out land, sell it at reduced rates, and give investors tax breaks. In 2002, Lishui began construction of a factory zone, which consists of a 5.6-square-mile (14.5 square kilometers) plot to the south of the city proper. By 2006, nearly 200 plants had started production, attracting 30,000 migrant workers.
This early growth had been guided by Wang Lijiong, the 48-year-old director of the development zone. As a young man, Wang's first job had been in a dynamite factory, and then he spent five years driving a tank for the People's Liberation Army. Upon leaving the military, he worked in a state-owned bank, and then he began to rise through the government bureaucracy. He is friendly and open—qualities unusual for a Chinese official. He told me that he still draws inspiration from his military experience. "In a tank, you go directly at your goal," he said. "You need the spirit of persistence."
Lishui's zone occupies what was previously rugged farmland. Director Wang told me that approximately one thousand peasants had been relocated, as well as exactly 108 separate mountains and hills. He said, simply, "We lowered the higher places and raised the lower places." During one of my earlier trips to Lishui, I had watched a higher place get lowered. There were 30 dump trucks and 11 Caterpillar excavators; workers had just packed the hillside with 9.9 tons (9 metric tons) of dynamite. Eventually, this site would become home to a half dozen chemical factories.
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