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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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The woman had short-cropped hair and lively eyes; her identity card said she was 17. She leaned close to the desk and fiddled nervously with the bra rings, as if they were pieces in a game she was determined to win.
"Just change a name," she said. "Why does it matter?"
"I can't do that."
"I would have come yesterday if I'd known."
"I'll make sure you're first on the second list. See, I even wrote 'good girl' next to your name."
But the woman wouldn't give up. At last, after ten minutes of pleading, he added her name—but then the Wenzhou superstition struck. "Now it's ershi," he said. "Twenty. That's a bad-sounding number—too much like esi, starving to death. So I'll have to add another."
The woman thanked him and headed toward the door.
"But if the boss says 21 is too many, then it'll have to be 19," he warned her.
The woman walked back to the desk. "Move my name up the list."
Five minutes later, her name was squarely in the middle of the sheet. When she finally left, the man shook his head admiringly. He said, "That girl knows how to get things done."
Later they realized that she had used her older sister's identity card. The girl who got things done, it turned out, was barely 15 years old.
even the fountains make music
The first time I visited the factory, the road in front was dirt, and the development zone's billboards were mostly blank. By my second visit, six weeks later, the Yintai real estate company had posted an advertisement. The road was being paved during my third trip. On the fourth, I saw a woman drive the front left wheel of her Honda into an open manhole. The manhole covers were installed by my fifth visit. A medical clinic appeared before the sixth trip. Sidewalks and streetlights by the seventh. Trees and bus stops by the eighth.
Factory production didn't wait for finished infrastructure, and neither did daily life. In a Chinese development zone, construction sites are essentially public space, and the factory's street hosted all sorts of makeshift entertainment. One week, a traditional Wu opera troupe erected a stage in the middle of the road; later, a traveling carnival set up shop. Every month, the local government parked a truck at an intersection, unfurled a white screen, and showed a free double feature. Nearby, a real estate company used its construction site to sponsor the Harmonious Sound Workers' Karaoke Contest. Representatives from local factories competed, and over 12,000 workers came to watch. The winner was a security guard from a plant that made down blankets and clothing. He sang a popular love song—"A Woman's Heart."
One week, the Red Star Acrobatic and Artistic Troupe came to town. Their battered truck had side panels that unfolded to reveal a marquee with photographs of half-dressed women, along with bright slogans (Passion! Perfection!). The truck's body converted into a box office; they pitched a tent in back. Admission was 60 cents, and 160 people bought tickets—almost all men. Troupe members sang songs and performed skits; one man acted out the heartbreaking story of a migrant imprisoned for theft. Another man popped his shoulder out of its socket and writhed on stage while his brother took up a collection. At the end, a woman stripped.
It was all illegal. Nude shows are banned in China, and the troupe wasn't registered; no one even had a driver's license. They were an extended family from Henan Province, bouncing their way south—in succession, they'd been kicked out of Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Yongkang. When I asked Liu Changfu, the troupe leader, why they included nudity, he said, "Before people buy tickets, they often ask if we have some 'open entertainment.' We need to be able to say yes." The task of stripping fell to the wife of the most distant cousin. Liu told me they were profitable as long as they kept moving, and there was always another half-built development zone down the road.
Lishui depended as much on construction sites as did the itinerant entertainers. Chinese cities aren't allowed to raise funds through municipal bonds or sharp tax increases, so they turn to real estate. Legally, all land belongs to the nation, but local governments can approve the sale of land-use rights—the closest thing to private ownership. Cities acquire suburban land from peasants at artificially low set rates, approve it for development, and sell for a profit on the open market. Across China, an estimated 40 to 60 percent of local government revenue is acquired in this way.
New apartment complexes were rising all around Lishui, and one of the biggest was the Jiangbin development. Formerly, the 16.5 acres (6.7 hectares) had belonged to the village of Xiahe, but in 2000 the city government bought the land-use rights for one million dollars. Three years later, Lishui flipped the land to Yintai Real Estate for 37 million dollars. Given that corruption is endemic in Chinese real estate, the actual price may have been even higher.
In such an environment, everybody gambles on growth. Most of the city's massive investment in infrastructure had been borrowed from state-owned banks, which also loaned money to the developers—Yintai had borrowed over 28 million dollars for its Jiangbin venture. If the real estate market went cold, the whole system was in trouble, and the central government had recently instituted new laws intended to slow down such expansions. But the money kept pouring in—during the past five years, the average price of a Lishui apartment had risen sixfold.
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