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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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A worker noticed me and walked over. In each hand, he carried a cheap plastic shopping bag filled with explosive. He set the bags on the ground and said, "Will you take my little brother to New York?"
Having lived as a foreigner in China for a decade, I was accustomed to non sequitur conversations, but that opener left me speechless. Anyway, I couldn't take my eyes off those plastic bags. The man smiled and said, "I'm joking. But he really wants to go to America."
He introduced me to Mu Shiyou, who was in charge of detonation. Mu and I walked to the base of the doomed hill, where a tangle of wires connected to the packed dynamite. He spliced the wires to a single line and payed it out as we walked away. All vehicles and workers had been evacuated; it was so quiet that I could hear birds overhead.
The detonator box had two switches labeled "Charge" and "Explode." We stood behind the treaded wheels of a parked Caterpillar. A command crackled over Mu's walkie-talkie: "Charge!"
He hit the switch and said, "Get out there where you can see it better!" A countdown, another command ("Explode!"), and he flipped the second switch. For the briefest instant, before there was any sound, a web of electricity flickered across the hillside, like lightning come to earth.
willing to eat bitterness
On February 6, half a month after testing the Machine, Boss Wang officially opened the factory by igniting two boxes of fireworks. According to the lunar calendar, it was the eighth day of the new year, and a feng shui expert had advised the owners to take advantage of eight, a lucky number in China.
Like most Wenzhou businessmen, Boss Wang was deeply superstitious. He had a high-pitched voice and a slight stutter; his eyelids fluttered rapidly when he spoke. He was 40 years old, and in the past he had always manufactured parts of objects: pieces of piping, pieces of bicycle bells, pieces of brassieres. In hindsight, he wished that as a young man he had gone into the shoe business. "I have some regrets," he told me, because a number of his boyhood friends had become shoe-factory millionaires. Even in the new Lishui factory zone, where virtually everything was still under construction, the grass was already greener next door. Boss Wang's neighbor was Geley Electrical Co., whose owner had started as a lowly button manufacturer in Qiaotou before moving on to bigger and better things. Now Geley employed hundreds of workers, and the new factory produced three-dollar plastic electric outlets that were marketed proudly as the Jane Eyre model.
Boss Wang and Boss Gao gave their company the English name Lishui Yashun Underdress Fittings Industry Co., Ltd. Branding was instant: For less than $800, a Wenzhou designer created a logo, sample books, website, and business cards. Everything was hot pink; the website and sample books featured photographs of sultry foreign women wearing bras. The men's business cards bore the logo:
I wondered if the design represented a bird in flight, or maybe a heart, or perhaps a pair of—
"I don't know what it's supposed to be," Boss Wang admitted. "It doesn't matter, as long as it looks good. The designer probably took it from some other company."
Three days after setting off the fireworks, Boss Wang posted a handwritten job notice on the factory gate:
1. Ages 18 to 35, middle-school education
2. Good health, good quality
3. Attentive to hygiene, willing to eat bitterness and work hard.
All across the Lishui development zone, young people wandered in packs, reading the factory signs that had been posted at the end of the New Year holiday. At the local job fair, migrants gazed up at a digital board with listings so terse they read like code:
"Cashiers, women, 1.66 meters [5.4 feet] or taller"
"Willing to eat bitterness and work hard, 25 to 45 yuan a day, male,
middle school"
"Male workers 35 yuan, female workers 25 yuan"
"Average workers, people from Jiangxi and Sichuan need not apply."
There were no euphemisms, no apologies. If a company preferred its women to be tall, they asked for tall women. If they had a prejudice against a certain region, tough luck. At a factory called Jinchao, the guard turned away all applicants from Guizhou, the poorest province in China. When I asked the manager why, he said, "Around here, a lot of the petty criminals are from Guizhou." At Yashun, Boss Gao's father handled the hiring, and I sat in on a job interview in which he asked an applicant how old she was. The woman said, "Do you mean my real age, or the age that's on my identity card?" She explained that seven years ago, when she had first left home, she'd forged the ID because she'd been so young. The man offered her a job; he told me that a woman like that must really enjoy working.
In China, minimum wage varies by region, and Lishui's is about 40 cents an hour. Yashun offered jobs at the lowest rate, but applicants poured in; there was no shortage of unskilled labor. Boss Gao's father kept a pile of bra rings on his desk, to show what the factory produced. On the second day, after the workers' list was full, he told an applicant that her name would be on the backup sheet.
"Just switch my name with somebody else's," she said.
"I can't do that. We already have enough. We have 19."
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