Barbarian Lost (22 page)

Too much fire wears you out, she cautions, causes turbulence in the body and mind. Periodically we must eat motherly foods to restore, to soothe and to rebuild. Eating is a kind of balancing act, she explains.

The Chinese believe that the forces of yin and yang exist in all things, including us humans. Imbalances can exist in the world, in the body or in the soul; they are causes of misfortune and ailment. So one is constantly seeking to manage these forces in one's behaviour and surroundings. The old sayings give much guidance in these pursuits. And nowhere are these pieces of information more pronounced than where food is concerned. Foods have numerous meanings and auspicious uses, depending on how they are prepared and eaten. They're medicine for body and soul.

In prepared dishes, the various permutations of the yin and yang pair are many. It's perhaps easiest to understand these two prime forces in their sensual dichotomy: yang, the male element, is in strong-flavoured and spicy foods; yin, the female element, is in soft and mild foods but also in the bitter and cold. Yang gives; yin receives.

“If we keep eating all this spicy food, I'm going to burn out,” Viv complains.

“I seek fire at all times unless I am sick,” I tell her.

“Sounds exhausting,” she says.

“Maybe. I long thought that a great bonfire is what was needed inside. Until there was nothing left to burn and all passions were extinguished.”

“You believe this?” she asks with worry.

“Maybe not anymore. Maybe the bonfire might just burn my whole life, and I'd be forever without peace.”

“Then you might be coming around to the Chinese way. Balance your passions and you will be able to enjoy them until the end.”

“Yes, Vivien, but don't think this will stop me from ordering pickled-pepper pork flank.”

Early the next morning, we take a bus to Wuhu. The town sits on the Yangtze plain. Everything downstream and east of Wuhu is part of the heartland of central China: Nanjing, Suzhou, Hangzhou and Shanghai. As an element of this important trade and manufacturing region, Wuhu has prospered.

The bus station area is new. Our hotel is part of the commercial development that has blossomed around the busy terminal. The establishment touts itself as a business hotel and is modern and incredibly inexpensive. The rooms are cramped but clean and well appointed. Many hotels throughout China sell small wares in the rooms—shower caps, toothbrushes and condoms—all labelled with a price. This hotel has pushed the concept further and offers up a variety of perfumes, condom styles and even packages of racy underwear. Clearly, all sorts of business goes down at this hotel.

Viv has called our contact at Chery Automobile and arranged a meeting at the hotel just after lunch. The hotel has no restaurant but it's connected to a mini-mall with a food court. The new food courts in China function efficiently: customers pay at a kiosk for a plastic card charged with credit, then wander among the stations offering various dishes, samples of which are on display. For little money, a customer can quickly amass a wide selection of dishes. Each station has its speciality: hot or cold dishes, say, or types of foods, like barbecued meats or noodles. Sometimes they focus on regional cuisines: a counter specializing in southwestern cuisine, another in dim sum, for instance. In one food court in north China, a particularly memorable kiosk had a large colourful sign featuring a banner-sized photo of a friendly-looking ass, forever transfixed with its wide, toothy donkey grin. The braised meat proved succulent if somewhat stringy.

After an enjoyable lunch, we head out to meet our contact from Chery Automobile. Unlike JAC in Hefei, only recently moved from heavy trucks to cars, Chery has a well-established line of automobiles. It's one of a small group of nationally recognized automobile brands. The brand name is pronounced “cherry” in English. The different spelling projects a Lenovo-like aura, something familiar combined with something strange. Toyota and Kia were once strange names to us as well, and like them, Chery products are meant to compete. In recent years, Chery has been turning out automobiles emulating the Japanese, Korean, European or American cars we drive. The Chery machines are also increasingly fitted with all the sensors and filters that make our cars legal, and all the lights and gadgets that make them appealing to mass consumers. The retail price of Chery vehicles at the current yuan rate is significantly less than even the most affordable vehicles
on the North American markets. Chery's planners have realized that automobile manufacturing is more than merely churning out product. A product is not just an object but a way of life. And Chery wants to be a part of the new Chinese way of life.

As with JAC, our contact with Chery is again a junior public relations officer. He's alone and drives a Chery car as if it were his personal vehicle and we, his guests. It makes him seem somewhat more powerful than were he driven around by a colleague. A man alone with his car projects an image of personal freedom, and to North Americans, this image seems more potent and appealing than rigid hierarchies.

The Chery industrial complex is at the edge of town among immense rice plots; the people who work at Chery may well be descendants of the disciplined workforces that have laboured in these fields for millennia. The compound is fairly new. We pass a long barbed-wire fence beyond which a giant parking lot is filled with row upon row of new cars still partially cloaked in plastic. I can make out several huge white hangars where production must occur.

Mr. Wu, our host, engages us in light banter. There's a muted confidence to him. He's a little unsure of who we are but can see that we're clearly not corporate big shots. Still, his instincts tell him to be candid only to a certain point in his answers to our questions. Yet Viv and I try to turn questions in such a way as to not demand difficult answers that might potentially embarrass our host. Although requiring more patience, the soft approach often rewards us with spirited candour in appreciation for our courtesy. Wu takes us for intellectuals and shares with us his mostly unsatisfied desire for a more intellectual life. But he confesses that climbing the corporate ladder brings him satisfaction, even if it's mostly materialistic.

Our visit to the Chery assembly lines repeats many of the experiences of JAC. There are also notable differences. At each step of the way, we are joined by a production engineer with expertise about the vehicle and its assembly. Our technical questions are answered frankly and in detail. Chery is far more geared toward corporate relations than is JAC. Tours like ours are more routine. The workers here are more urbane, and pay us no attention.

We visit a production room high above on a gangway. It's the engine assembly, something we did not see in Hefei. Big red boxes house hermetic forging and welding processes. Engine machining is far too precise a task to be left to humans and is completely automated. These great machines that make the engines are not made in China but have been purchased from Japan and Germany. The Chery engine aims to be as detailed and computerized as its counterparts in the developed world, but the technical precision to produce the metamachines that make sophisticated car motors still eludes the Chinese. They seem to have accepted that this niche capacity is one they cannot reach for the moment.

Everything is more organized at Chery than it was at JAC: the way we are kept at a distance from the production and hosted by specialists, the way the assembly lines are articulated. There are no chambers where car parts are piled up haphazardly. No frolicking of the workers as they wait for an item or get ahead of the chain. The process unfolds with a minimum of excess and looseness. The branches of production flow together and form a single movement forward.

We forgo visiting the body presses. Viv explains that we visited this part of assembly at JAC, and our Chery hosts confirm that the process is both extremely boring and scarcely visible, since, like
the machining of the engine, much of the manufacture happens within big machines.

Chery produces a line of sedans from the economical to the mid-size. They have small engines. They are low on metal and high on plastic. They are highly functional yet inexpensive. They compare to the starter cars many westerners purchase when they first buy a new car, and in many ways, this is exactly what Chery offers: the first-car experience.

As we witnessed in the Hefei restaurant the night before, there's a growing class of consumers who will own the car as they own a television set, a rice cooker or an air conditioner. These consumers can now be spotted on any road or highway. At least ten million Chinese must join the middle class every year. But to whom, then, do we refer when we talk about a Chinese middle class? I picture people who buy cars and apartments and who frequent big restaurants. People who make choices: what to do, what to wear, what to eat, what to buy. Whom to marry. Who to be.

Beneath them are those who have few choices and almost no mobility. Circumstances force their hand, and they accept whatever work they can, usually for very small amounts of money. They can afford only what is cheapest—and very little of it. These people are several hundred million strong in China, but their numbers are declining.

Above the middle class is the group whose notion of choice is again blurred as possibilities multiply. Plus the management of wealth for its own sake brings on a whole gamut of expectations and responsibilities—a sparse group to be sure but one whose numbers are also growing.

Of course, manufacture for the middle class is where the big money is. Selling to hundreds of millions is far better business
than selling luxury items to the chosen few. So Chery squarely targets the so-called middle class. Its brand speaks to the modest yet honest success of the gainfully employed. It's a car built for the quiet pride of new beginnings, not for the exuberant pretention of established standing.

Outside brands have been courting the Chinese for several decades. A walk through any shopping mall in new China makes clear the exposure to foreign fashion brands. Although I often suspect that, outside the biggest cities, the luxury clothing stores are only marginally profitable, these shops are prestige stores aimed at raising a shopping centre's profile. The Chinese love to shop in the vicinity of these stores, without actually buying the expensive products.

Still, the majority of Chinese industry exists for the export market, not the domestic one. With automobiles it's different, though. They are for the Chinese. The export market was initially not even an option. But increasingly, Chinese-made cars are being sold into countries throughout the developing world.

If a free global market truly existed, a large proportion of automobiles on earth might soon be manufactured in China. But automobile manufacture is a long way from a free-market affair, remaining a sacred cow for developed economies. Essential in government labour schemes, automobile plants are mostly spared the merciless mechanics of free trade. Although parallel products like generic tractors or mechanized farm implements are exported from China for sale by Western retailers under various brands, Chinese cars still have little to no access to Western markets. Instead, Western car makers that have been
lured into China aim to produce their brands for the massive Chinese market.

Viv has secured for us a private tour of the General Motors factory in Shanghai. A massive and advanced production facility, it's a piece of an empire. China now accounts for a third of GM's global sales.

To get to the plant, Viv and I take a long taxi ride through the sprawling new industrial districts, far from the city's historical core. The GM lot, near the coast on the way to the city's new airport, is huge and efficiently organized. We meet our contact in a showy front pavilion. With its glass facade and atrium, it feels like a dealership, except it houses only a single glittery demo car, a Buick. Our contact is a tall thirty-something woman with a business-like attitude. She has the cold politeness you'd expect. GM is all about public relations in China; as much as it is selling a car here, it's also selling a brand, and an efficient style of industrial production.

The GM production facility in Shanghai is state-of-the-art. Everything about it is high-tech. We follow the assembly lines from gangways, looking down on a process that is meticulously organized. The diverse streams of assembly are calculated from the start. The smallest gadget is produced in synchronicity with all the other constituents of an individual automobile, the elements carried along production lines to merge at precisely the right moment. There's no surplus production and no wasted time. Exactly the right elements are produced at the right moment.

We're told that the large majority of vehicle components are produced on site: body, frame, motors, instruments, and so on. We briefly check out earlier phases of production, but there isn't much to see. The components are produced in closed and automated
circuits that originate all over the immense compound and flow toward the assembly proper in a huge chamber; the multiple circuits converge upon a single line along which cars slowly materialize. Depending on which components are fed to the assembly, slightly different models are produced by the same line.

The workers, with whom we have no contact, are older than the workers at the other factories we visited. They're not the happy youngsters we observed in Hefei but grave forty-year-olds. They go about their work with unflinching seriousness. They earn a fair bit more as well—based in Shanghai, this GM factory has access to a skilled and mature workforce but must pay much higher wages than its counterparts.

Along the assembly line, the workers are organized into teams, each responsible for a specific phase of production. A team's work is gauged by a traffic-light system. A green light means the team is on or ahead of schedule. A yellow light means the team is falling behind in the assembly process. A red light means the team has caused a delay in the production, forcing the downstream production to wait. A female voice chimes over a public address system to encourage a team that has been accumulating green lights or to chide the one that is causing a delay.