Holidays in Heck by P. J. O'Rourke
The mill’s 150-pound ex-PLA guard dog, Shasha (“Killer”), was extremely glad to see Tom. So were the employees. Although there were some steel mill employees who presumably wouldn’t have been so glad, such as the 200 or 300 “ghost workers” who didn’t exist at all and were on the mill’s payroll when Tom took over, plus the 2,000 or so workers he’d fired because they didn’t do anything. Tom also needed to get rid of the family who had the local “theft rights” to the factory. They once stole a whole railroad train from the mill and would have gotten away with it if trains didn’t have tracks that lead directly to them.
“Here’s where a guy threw a wrench at me,” Tom said as we climbed the tower to the blast furnace.
“What’d you do?”
“I knocked him down the stairs,” Tom said. “Rule of law is the cornerstone of capitalism.”
Tom’s worst problem with the proletariat, however, involved one of his mill hands, who was having an affair with a woman who worked at the chemical factory next door. They conducted their trysts in an electrical equipment closet. Midst throes of passion the mill hand backed into some high-voltage circuitry and fried. (His paramour, with hair a bit more frizzy than is usual in China, survived.) The man’s widow then brought her entire ancestral village to block the steel mill’s gates. As compensation for her husband’s death she demanded his salary in perpetuity, a job for their retarded daughter, a new house, the payment of her husband’s gambling debts, and that her grandmother be flown to the United States to have her glaucoma treated.
“I had to call in the Communist Party officials,” Tom said.
“Did they ship everybody off to prison camp or something?” I asked.
“They didn’t do anything. They said it was my problem. I settled with the widow for a couple hundred bucks.”
Tom had an assistant in Nanjing, Lilly. She and her parents and siblings had bought a small tea farm, which they planned to subdivide. Tea bush plantings are in tidy rows, like vineyards but leafier and less stalky—more in the realm of Demeter than Dionysus. It was a pretty spot, set between woods and ponds, and in the least pretty part of it was the little brick house of the peasant who’d owned the land. If owned is the word. In China all land belongs to the state, though this doesn’t seem to keep anyone from buying and selling it. The house door was ajar, and I walked into the one shabby room. In the middle of the floor were the peasant’s muddy rubber boots—right where he’d left them when he bolted for the fleshpots and business opportunities of Nanjing.
I interviewed a senior Party official responsible for planning and development in the region. He insisted on using his own translator instead of Mai, and I had to submit a list of questions beforehand. I made them as anodyne as possible. “What are the future plans for Nanjing’s deepwater port facilities?” I wanted people to babble away undefensively and without constraint. But I hadn’t counted on this fellow.
“With gross metropolitan product of 241.3 billion yuan and 14.2 percent per annum growth, versus provincial 13 percent and 9 percent national, we are seventh-ranked city in economic status, fourteenth in revenue, having 5,000 U.S. dollars per capita income, versus provincial 3,380 and 1,600 national, resulting from Nanjing’s 9,000 different industrial products in utilization of 45 billion U.S. dollars capital investment from ninety countries and additional 26 billion U.S. dollars contracted,” he said, for a start.
I filled eight pages of my reporter’s notebook and he never consulted a note of his own.
“We have forty-eight universities in Nanjing,” he said. I don’t doubt he attended them all. He concluded, at long last, by saying—though I don’t think his interpreter did him justice here—“We want to take this opportunity to make China the world’s manufacturing basement.”
He and I were escorted to a futuristic conference room with built-in microphone modules in front of each high-backed leather and chrome executive swivel chair. There was an air of Intergalactic Council to the setting. Tom, his chief engineers, and, for some reason, myself, were seated on one side. The senior Party official and a number of sophomore and junior Party Officials were on the other. Everyone, including me, had to give a speech about iron ore and progress and friendship and such. I was pleased to be given a seat at the global economic table even if I (like many of globalization’s other guests) didn’t know what I was doing there.
Then we all went to the banquet hall and got drunk. There were more courses than you could shake a stick at—apt chiché, given the eating utensils of China. The Party officials laughed at my ineptitude. Then abalone was served with proper flatware, and I laughed at their knifing and forking.
You don’t sip your drink in China. And after six or eight rounds of Gan bei (“Bottoms up”), language barriers disappear. Mr. Feng, sitting next to me, spoke better English than I do anyway. He went to the London School of Economics. He was full of jokes about the government in Beijing, its muddles, and its meddling. These sent the local Party functionaries into helpless laughter. Mr. Feng proposed Gan bei after Gan bei, pouring and emptying glasses of Scotch. He had the kind of personality—both engaging and disarming—that probably could get you talking to him about anything, if you could get a word in edgewise.
Promptly at ten the Party members left. Tom and Mai and I saw them to the banquet hall door as their drivers, one after another, pulled up in black cars.
“They used to have Mercedes-Benzes,” Tom said. “But then the Central Committee told them they had to use cars made in China.” There was a great deal of head-banging and knee-cracking as the Party members clambered into the backseats of locally produced Volkswagens.
“Who is Mr. Feng?” I asked Tom. I examined the business card Mr. Feng had given me, printed with his vague title at a vaguely named trading firm.
“I don’t know,” Tom said. “But when there’s trouble with Communist Party officials—with regulation, bureaucracy, or courts—you go to him. The problem disappears. I think he’s secret police.”
On Saturday we went to the Nanjing antiques market. “Just walk around,” Lilly told me. “Don’t look interested. Then come back and tell me what you want. I’ll get it—Chinese price.”
Mao posters and buttons were gathering dust along with Little Red Books and other Cultural Revolution memorabilia. These used to be popular with the generation of Chinese young enough to think of Mao as funny. But the next generation doesn’t seem to think of Mao at all.
Mai and I had lunch with Mrs. Ng, whom Mai had known for a dozen years. Mrs. Ng got her start as Mr. Chen’s secretary and now owns a clothing factory. We were in a private room at a resort hotel located in the middle of an industrial park. Bridal couples were getting their pictures taken with the factories in the background. Three flags were flying in front of the hotel: China’s, America’s, and Pepsi’s.
“Congratulations on your MBA,” Mai said to Mrs. Ng. “
You got an MBA?” I said. “But you already own a clothing factory.”
“Most of the students are successful business people,” Mrs. Ng said. “They bring real problems to the seminars. The professors are expected to give practical help.” And there you have the greatest contrast to the American educational system that can be described in three sentences.
“There are forty-eight universities in Nanjing,” Mrs. Ng said.
When we were finishing lunch I mentioned that I didn’t have the slightest idea how clothing was made. Mrs. Ng put her afternoon on hold and showed me. Mrs. Ng’s driver took us to her 20,000-square-meter fleece fabric plant. We started with the bales of acrylic. (Acrylic comes in bales? But what had I thought? That it came in cans and bottles?) Then we went to the dye vats with the workers all tie-dye-splattered as though they’d been through an accidental American 1960s. The acrylic is spun dry in a leviathan Laundromat. The fibers are made soft and manageable with conditioner, like a bad hair day writ large, and carded and braided into thick rope with machinery from closed U.S. factories.
“I went to North
The ropes traversed the air above the factory floor—a spiderweb from a spider you don’t want to meet—and were fed into automated looms, computer programmed to produce patterns with up to six colors of yarn.
Mrs. Ng, in fact, has two factories. The other produces the garments themselves and covers 44,000 square meters. All sorts of cutting and stitching were going on at a speed that left me more confused about how clothes are made than I was before I’d seen it done. One thing that I could tell, however, is that in the garment industry, piecework is not “unskilled labor.”
Mrs. Ng’s fleeces and fake furs—in pink mink, disco leopard, shearling from sheep on the moons of Jupiter, and so forth—go out to the youth market in England, Europe, and America. As the father of daughters, the price tags made me pre-ticked-off.
“Ralph Lauren?” said Mai, who’d been talking to Mrs. Ng in incomprehensible female shorthand.
“Not innovative enough,” Mrs. Ng said.
The next day Tom had to go back to work in Hong Kong. Mai and I went on to Huzhou, to the southeast, halfway between Nanjing and the sea. Mr. Wu, who runs a woolen mill there, sent a car 230 kilometers to pick us up. And a wonderful car it was, a perfectly restored 1958 Cadillac limousine. We traveled on a new turnpike with rest stops indistinguishable form those in the United States, except for the police walking around the parking lots writing down license plate numbers.
At the border between Jiansu and Zhejiang provinces there was a long line of trucks on the shoulder. “They are waiting for the weigh station officials to take a nap,” said our driver.
We toured Mr. Wu’s woolen mill, which looks like the nineteenth-century New England woolen mill in the photograph that’s always trotted out when the subject of child labor is mentioned—the picture of the thin, sad, patched little girl handling spindles. But in Mr. Wu’s mill the little girl is plump, smiling, neatly dressed, and a grown woman. Also, there’s fluorescent lighting.
Then we met with Mr. Wu, a formidably undislikable man who’s almost as voluble as the Nanjing senior Party official, though with ideas instead of numbers. He took us to his showroom, as modern and stark as any in Milan. The wool coats of the next season were on display. We promised secrecy. But now it can be told. The “must” color of 2007 is burnt ocher.
Then we went to Mr. Wu’s conference room, as modern and stark as any in Milan. “China was very smart to follow Mr. Deng,” Mr. Wu said. I expected a paean to Deng Xiaoping’s combination of Marxist discipline and capitalist growth, but I’m not sure that’s what I got. “Because, now,” Mr. Wu continued, “whatever Italians can produce, we can produce. Please write that these products are not a threat to the United States. They are a threat to Italians.”
Mr. Wu said he was glad to be talking to an author. He had wanted to be an author himself. But he didn’t get into the university, because of the Cultural Revolution. He was sent to repair diesel engines on farm equipment instead. He said he believed a good author could be both a good entrepreneur and a good politician.
When the open-door policy began, Mr. Wu got a job as a worker in this very mill. He was promoted to supervisor, then to deputy manager, then general manager, deputy director, and now president and CEO.
“My position in textiles is a bit like yours in writing,” Mr. Wu said. This was serious flattery. I think. “Yours is like a boutique product,” he continued.
Mr. Wu said that he believed American authors write very fine articles. He’d read one article when he was young that quoted Richard Nixon. “Nixon said something that influenced me a lot. Nixon went to Moscow and gave a speech at the airport that was very good. Nixon said, ‘I understand the USSR is a very great country. I come to visit by means of peace. I understand that other means do not work.’ ”
Mr. Wu said that when he heard that I was an author, he thought of how many things there are to tell the American people. “Tell them,” he said, “that of the whole world’s GDP, the U.S. has one-third.* Send a message to President Bush that China is not dumping things on people. America’s policy is leading China to follow the same path as America. U.S. is like a tour guide.
“A lot of things we can learn from America,” Mr. Wu said. “Overall we have a lot of people, but our foundation is not quite steady yet. The way we are fighting with America worries me. We need your help. We need your help to solve the problem in Taiwan.
“At the moment,” he went on, “China is very stable. The people are happy with their life.” He cited Deng Xiaoping’s slogan: Growth is the only reason. “People support this policy. We have no reason to fight the U.S. We have our own internal problems to work out. For the time being we sell you a lot of products. We want to buy your high-tech products. But you won’t sell. And it’s damn expensive.”
Mr. Wu said to me, “You have a responsibility. Not all of Americans can come to China to find out what China is all about. Edgar Snow was the first guy to tell the world about the communist military and the U.S. help in the war against Japan. Maybe you can be the twenty-first-century Edgar Snow and change the opinion of the American people about the Chinese.”
Mr. Wu had gone to America some years before. “I had a very good impression,” he said, “especially the Twin Towers. When bin Laden hit the towers I said, ‘He’s a bad guy.’ ”
Mr. Wu saw his first Cadillac in America and said to himself, “I want a car like that.” Then he was in Taiwan at the Chiang Kai-shek memorial, and the tour guide said Chiang loved to ride in Cadillacs.
“We are going for democracy,” Mr. Wu said. “Please send the message. Russia had to go through a revolution. We are moving gradually. The American people should take time to understand. On surface we are socialist. Underneath we are capitalist. During the cold war there were lots of struggles, lots of revolutions. China’s was the only successful one. We accept America as a great country. President Washington was a great president and led the country to where it is today. The policy of America is correct. But every country has its own situation. You can’t use your country as a standard for other people. You love the people and peace. This is the right policy.”
Mr. Wu summed up: “You have the patience. We have the confidence.”
I had a headache—Nixon, Deng, Edgar Snow, Chiang Kai-shek’s Cadillac, George Washington, and I’m almost certain it’s supposed to be the Chinese who are patient and the Americans who are confident. Mr. Wu did, however, have one clear piece of advice: “America shouldn’t have too many policies.”
Mr. Wu took us to dinner with his wife, eldest daughter, and son-in-law. As was the case with several other wealthy people I met in China, Mr. Wu seated his driver and his assistants at the table with his family and his guests. They seemed to be expected to join in the conversation and, except the driver, the toasts.
Mr. Wu’s son-in-law was an official in the state-run banking system. I asked him about the number of bad loans that Chinese banks are said to be carrying. “It’s not a problem now,” he said. “The bad loans were within international standards—only ten percent.” (Of course 10 percent of loans going bad would be more than enough to start the U.S. subprime mortgage meltdown a couple of years later.)
Mr. Wu sent Mai and me in his Cadillac to Hangzhou. It’s a famous beauty spot on West Lake and, as famous beauty spots go, it’s nice enough. Mr. Wu’s youngest daughter, Wu Lin, who goes by Linda, has a fashion design company there.
Linda’s showroom itself was quite a piece of design, with brutalist concrete stairs, a lit glass disco floor, industrial-chic wrought-iron tables, and neo-Deco porthole windows. The clothes are, Mai testified, fabulous. Linda gave me an apple-green car coat to take home to my wife, who confirmed the fabulousness.
The designs are by Linda’s husband, Mike, the only beer-drinking regular guy women’s fashion designer I’ve ever met. Mike wanted to be an industrial engineer and build textile machinery. But in the wake of the Cultural Revolution China
Linda ran the business side. She was trained as a structural engineer (and would have been an unusually pretty one). “My father wanted me to go into a more serious business,” she said. “But in construction you need many people. In fashion you can do it by yourself. This business is very comfortable—no politics.”
We went to dinner at a pavilion on West Lake and talked about what Katie Holmes could possibly see in Tom Cruise. Katie is from my hometown, Toledo, Ohio. Linda and Mike were suitably impressed by the fact. “I don’t understand this Scientology,” Mike said.
I floundered around for an explanation.
“It’s American Falun Gong,” said Mai.
I watched CNN on television in the hotel room that night. There were brief, almost random-seeming blackouts of things the Chinese government didn’t want seen. A whole segment on U.S. criticism of Hu Jintao’s trade policies went missing. But I knew all about it because the government censors neglected to delete the caption crawling across the bottom of the screen.
Mai and I flew to Xi’an, deep in north-central China. Printed on the airplane’s seat backs, in Chinese, was “Empty space for advertising awaiting you.” On our paper coffee cups was “Advertising space available.” We were met at the airport by two assistants to Mr. Tian, a manufacturer of coke fuel for blast furnaces. He’d been the main supplier of the mill Tom had run. The assistants wore identical perfectly tailored banker gray chalk-stripe suits.
We were taken to a long, large, and hilarious lunch that went on until there was only an hour’s respite before a long, large, and hilarious dinner. The Chinese like beer, wine, whiskey, and their throat-searing maotai sorghum brandy. And they serve all of them at once.