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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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"I know," Mechanic Luo said. "And I don't want to train new workers."
The mother said, "Maybe we should just send them to work in a shoe factory."
"Don't talk about that yet," the father said. "We need to figure this out first."
He demanded the same wage for everybody: a guaranteed 127 dollars a month, plus overtime, and six dollars in living expenses. Mechanic Luo returned to the bosses, who cut the expenses in half—a difference of three dollars. The father didn't reply, and that offer was still on the table when the night ended.
good days ahead
That fall, Lishui applied to add another 13.5 square miles (35 square kilometers) to the development zone. The expansion would require an investment of almost 900 million dollars, most of which would come from bank loans. They planned to double the city's population by 2020. With energy demands rising, the Tankeng Dam was being constructed in the mountains south of Lishui. In preparation, 50,000 people were being relocated from 10 towns and 80 villages. I had watched the final evacuation of Beishan, the largest town, on October 25 of 2005—an auspicious date according to the feng shui experts. There were good days for everything, even abandoning your hometown. Families packed flatbed trucks full of furniture; they unloaded in eight new resettlement communities that had yet to be finished. In Youzhou, Chen Qiaomei told me she'd had trouble finding her apartment, which had no windows yet. "They all look the same!" she said.
When I talked about Lishui's factory zone expansion plans with Director Wang, he acknowledged that approval for such projects was becoming more difficult. The central government feared a real estate bubble, but he remained confident. "We're applying to develop an area where the land isn't good for farming," he explained.
On his office wall hung a map of the proposed expansion—future roads, industrial blocks, waterworks. "We'll have to move more than 400 mountains and hills," he said. He invited me to return in January, when his boy would be home for vacation. The son of the former tank driver was at the University of Auckland, studying international finance.
factory ghosts
They moved the bra-ring factory in one day. The bosses hired a forklift, four flatbed trucks, and seven laborers. Mechanic Luo disassembled the Machine into three parts; the finished bra rings were packed into 94 boxes. They removed everything of value, even the carpet and the lightbulbs. A year earlier, they had ordered ten-dollar doors, and now they took them off the hinges.
At three o'clock, the Tao sisters showed up with their bags packed. Their father, it turned out, had found a better-paying job for himself at a nearby factory that produced synthetic leather. He had arranged it days ago, in secret; the insistence on staying with his daughters turned out to be a negotiating ploy. There weren't any tears at the factory gate. The last thing the father said was, "You need to dress warmly. It's going to get cold, and you'll get sick if you're not careful. If you're sick, you'll have to spend money on medicine. So dress warmly, OK? Goodbye."
Two days later, I drove to the development zone, past rows of finished billboards: Amway, Haishun Steel Structure, Fengchang Steel Hooks. The former Yashun factory was unlocked. Inside, bra rings were strewed everywhere—bent rings, dirty rings, broken rings. There were crumpled cigarette packages and used rolls of tape. An empty diaper bag. A wall calendar frozen at November 22. A good luck charm with Mao Zedong's face on one side and a bodhisattva on the other. And throughout the dormitories, on the white plaster walls, graffiti had accumulated over the months. Next to his bed, one worker had listed numbers: winning lottery combinations. Another had inscribed, "Find success immediately." Others wrote:
"Reflect on the past, consider the future."
"Pass every day happily! A new day begins from right now!"
"Face the future directly."
"Leave the world."
"A person can become successful anywhere; I swear I won't return home until I am famous."
A cold wind blew against the windows. Outside, I heard neighboring plants—the rattle of glassmaking, the rumble of plastic molds, the pneumatic hiss of water heaters being produced. But there wasn't a single human sound, only the silent voices on the walls of the abandoned factory.
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