Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (52 page)

After it was finished, the owner came to our table. “I’m sorry about the disturbance,” he said. “But you have to understand they weren’t really angry about the food!” He explained: it had all been planned by the boss of the other hotpot restaurant down the street. The competing boss had paid the men to have an early meal, get drunk, and make a scene. The goal was to ruin the grand opening, and the owner hadn’t recognized the stunt until it was too late.

He was earnest and soft-spoken, and he went from table to table, explaining the situation. But it was hopeless: Chinese complaints are highly contagious, sweeping through crowds like a bad germ. It has something to do with the group impulse, and people can’t seem to help themselves—if they see others behaving a certain way, they immediately catch the vibe. And here in the hotpot restaurant it happened at our own table. Master Luo commented that the place wasn’t very clean, and his friend remarked that the vegetables didn’t look so great. The broth was too salty; there wasn’t enough meat. It was low quality, too—they made this complaint while steadily dunking food into the oil and eating it with relish. That’s one thing about Chinese food criticism: it never interferes with the appetite. By the end of the meal, Cheng Youqin was even denigrating the tea. The baby was the only one with nothing bad to say—he remained calm as ever, inhaling secondhand smoke and sweating like a little pig in the hotpot fumes.

After the unsatisfactory food had been completely devoured, Master Luo’s friend dipped his chopsticks in beer and shoved them into the baby’s mouth. The little guy wrinkled his face—the most expressive
he’d been all evening. This encouraged the friend to embark on a series of reflex tests. He swung his hand as if to strike the baby, stopping just short of the button nose; the child remained unfazed. “He doesn’t really see it,” the man explained. “At this age they can’t see very well.”

“He can, too!” Cheng said.

“No he can’t!” The man swung his fist again: no reaction. “See, I told you!”

No mother likes to see her child maligned, and Cheng quickly came to the defense. She jabbed her chopsticks within an inch of the baby’s face—at last he blinked. “See!” she said triumphantly. “His eyes are good!”

“But he doesn’t see
this
!”

“Yes, he does!”

“Watch this—he won’t react.”

“He does, too! You just have to do it like
this
!”

“Actually, I’m getting a little hot,” I said. “Do you think we could leave now?”

On our way out, the owner gave us fifty yuan in coupons, by way of apology. “I won’t go back there,” Master Luo said, once we were out on Suisong Road. “The food’s terrible.” But he carefully folded the coupons and put them in his pocket. Outside, the air was cooler, and the baby stopped sweating. His eyes remained unblinking, calm as ever, ready for anything the next fifty days might throw at him.

WHENEVER I FOLLOWED THE
expressway from Wenzhou to Lishui, I stopped in small towns along the way. A number of them had been planned in conjunction with the highway: at every exit, new neighborhoods were being built, and sometimes a whole settlement appeared in what had formerly been farmland. One of the exit towns was called Shifan, and it was located about ten miles south of Lishui. I first visited Shifan before the expressway had even opened, when the town was still a construction site full of unfinished streets and scaffolded apartment blocks. A billboard stood at the head of the main street:

CHERISH THE TANKENG DAM,
SERVE THE PEOPLE WHO WILL BE RELOCATED HERE
THE FIRST STAGE OF MOVING WILL BEGIN IN:
32
DAYS

The sign had tear-away numbers, and sheets of paper from previous days still lay on the ground beneath the billboard. There was a 5 here, a 4 there, a crumbled 3 nearby: countdown to a new community. When I wandered down the main street, a man carrying a hammer approached me. “Are you here to buy an apartment?” he said. I told him no, I was a journalist on my way to Lishui. “Oh, you’re a journalist,” he said. “Are you looking for people who are unhappy about the dam?”

Those were the first two things I was offered in Shifan: empty apartments and unhappy people. I learned that it was one of a number of exit towns that were being built because of a hydroelectric project called the Tankeng Dam. The dam is located on the Xiao River, high in the mountains west of Lishui; construction will require five years of work and a total investment of over six hundred million dollars. Upon completion, the new reservoir will submerge ten towns and eighty villages, and over fifty thousand people must be relocated. All of these facts were printed on information billboards near the construction site, but apart from that it was hard to learn much about the Tankeng Dam. Few articles about the project had appeared in Zhejiang newspapers, and not one word had been published in the foreign press. The most remarkable thing about the Tankeng Dam was that fifty thousand people could be displaced in virtual silence, at least as far as the media was concerned.

Chinese dams are so common that they often don’t receive much attention, and domestic media is typically prevented from criticizing such projects. With air pollution an increasing concern, the government needs alternatives to coal-burning power plants, and hydroelectric is often the first option. This is especially true in a place like Lishui, which has high mountains, plenty of rainfall, and dreams of becoming a major industrial center. The region is already famous for its dam-building, and local electrical needs are only going to increase. In the development
zone, a government official told me that industry currently accounted for 70 percent of Lishui’s total consumption of electricity. This statistic was for the whole administrative region, which includes smaller towns and countryside. The percentage was so high because of all the heavy industry and mechanized manufacturing, but it also reflected low living standards. In the United States, in contrast, the industrial sector uses only one-third of the nation’s total power.

Inevitably, the Lishui standard of living will rise as the initial investment in infrastructure and industry pays off. In the first six months after the expressway opened, the number of Lishui households buying an automobile doubled in comparison to the same period a year earlier. People were moving into bigger apartments, like the Riverside development owned by the Ji family. In the northern part of town, another real estate company was building White Cloud, the city’s first neighborhood of stand-alone villas. Each White Cloud home came with a driveway and a garage—managers told me proudly this was another first for Lishui. But larger homes were bound to put more pressure on the city’s power grid, which already relied heavily on electricity purchased from other parts of China. The Tankeng Dam was an attempt to reduce such dependence, and it had the advantage of being located high in the mountains, where people were poor and less likely to resist a resettlement.

The largest town in the affected region was called Beishan, with a population of about ten thousand. In the fall of 2005, when it came time to move the residents, the government consulted a fortune-teller, who determined that the twenty-third day of the ninth lunar month was the most auspicious moment to demolish the place. On the morning of the twenty-third, I drove my rented Santana westward toward Beishan. The unnamed road was narrow, and it followed the path of the Xiao River, where the fast-flowing channel was braided around boulders that marked the valley floor. Occasionally a fisherman waded along the banks, but the Xiao is too shallow for boats and these regions are lightly populated. It’s a hard country for farming, too: rice paddies lie in the flatlands beside the river, but the mountains are too steep for
terracing. This rugged countryside seems to have nothing in common with the factory districts of Wenzhou, but in fact the city is less than fifty miles away as the crow flies. And these landscapes helped shape the business instinct of southern Zhejiang. Centuries ago, the mountains drove people to a life of trade along the coast, and more recently the natives learned to direct their entrepreneurial energy toward manufacturing. Now at last they have returned to the hinterlands as dam builders, hoping to create more power for their factory towns.

All along the road stood billboards for Red Lion Cement. There were few other advertisements, and most settlements were tiny and poor, but the road itself was full of traffic. A steady stream of vehicles poured down from Beishan: big Liberation trucks, beaten-up flatbeds with wooden rails, tricycle tractor-carts sputtering behind two-stroke engines. They carried crates and cupboards and stacks of furniture; dirty old mattresses had been lashed to the sides of trucks. They passed blue government signs that had been posted beside the road:

FINISH BUILDING THE TANKENG DAM

BENEFIT THE FUTURE GENERATIONS

OFFER THE TANKENG DAM AS A TRIBUTE TODAY

BENEFIT THE GENERATIONS OF TOMORROW

Most vehicles heading in the same direction as me belonged to profiteers of one sort or another. Cement mixers rumbled toward the dam, along with flatbeds carrying work crews. Scavengers drove empty trucks: demolition sites always provide plenty of bricks, wood, and metal that can be recycled. There were cadres in black Audi A6s, and cops, too—more police than I had ever seen in rural Zhejiang. Along the way to Beishan, I passed the location of the dam, where another billboard noted that the project would require a total of 164,000 cubic meters of cement. That was Red Lion Cement’s stake in this region, and most work was yet to come; the retaining wall was nothing but a sliver of scaffolded structures edging into the river. Up above, the scarred hillside
marked the location of the future dam—a huge groove in the mountains, running from one side of the valley to the other, like a massive puzzle waiting for its final piece.

I had visited Beishan once before, when the town was still thriving, but today the place was unrecognizable. A countdown billboard stood on the main street, a counterpart to Shifan’s sign. Here in Beishan the numbers had reached double zero, and demolition crews were finishing off the heart of the former downtown. Government-appointed teams wore white coveralls, and they went from building to building, checking for last residents. For the destruction itself they relied primarily on freelance scavengers. In Lishui’s development zone, market forces built a whole community, with factories and shops rising simultaneously; and here the profit motive was equally efficient at demolishing Beishan. There were tiles on the roofs, bricks in the walls, copper beneath floors—all of it could be sold. And so the crews passed quickly through town, like locusts in a fertile field, leaving only desolation in their wake.

It took ten minutes to drive to the former center of town, because of backlogged trucks carting off materials. At last, after fighting the traffic inch by inch, I pulled over and simply listened. In the factory towns, mechanical noises rule the day, but here in Beishan the demolition was mostly done by hand. Boards were ripped apart; nails were torn from walls; cement was smashed with sledgehammers. I heard the percussion of one scavenger destroying a wall—
rip, tear, smash; rip, tear, smash
—and then a final
thud
followed by nothing. That emptiness was Beishan’s destiny: the valley would never become home to the rhythms of the factory floor or the voices of nighttime workers. Instead it was bound for the stillness of the reservoir, the hush of walled water, and beneath fathoms of silence this place would die.

IN THE DEVELOPMENT ZONE,
foliage appeared in the span of two days during November of 2006. That was the same month government work crews finished installing the sidewalk tiles on Suisong Road, where they even posted trash cans. Previously, as entrepreneurs built the place, garbage was allowed to accumulate in the gutters, but now the
city instituted regular pickup. They started a public bus service to downtown, too, and work crews made their way along the development zone streets, installing nursery-grown camphor trees that were already eight feet tall. The trees appeared at intervals of every fifty meters, as regular as assembly-line stations. And all at once there was greenery in the factory district—a reminder that little more than year earlier, before the mountains had been blown up and the machinery had been installed, this region had been entirely rural.

A few days after the trees appeared, one of the girls who worked on the Machine’s assembly line celebrated her sixteenth birthday. Her name was Ren Jing and she was originally from a village in Anhui Province, not far from the hometown of the Tao family. Like the Taos, the Ren family migrated en masse: both parents, two daughters, and a son. The parents ran a fruit and vegetable stand that catered to workers, and the eldest daughter sold bootleg video disks. At the bra ring factory, Ren Jing worked alongside TaoYuran, the older of the Tao sisters; they sorted rings as they came off the Machine’s assembly line. All three factory girls usually spent time together in the evenings, when the work shifts were finished and their parents were busy with their stands. This was one reason the girls enjoyed their work routines—at night they were usually unsupervised.

On the evening of the birthday, they didn’t get off the assembly line until eight o’clock, because the factory was working overtime to process an order from another new customer. The Tao sisters bought Ren Jing a cake with frosting that said, in English, “Luck for You!” Ren Jing’s sister took time away from selling video disks and prepared a seven-course dinner. She was nineteen years old, and tonight she cooked grass carp, cubed chicken, cauliflower, and lotus root. They ate in the Ren family home, which consisted of a rented room in a house that once belonged to a local farmer. The place had cement walls and a rough tile floor; crates of oranges and apples covered most of the floor space. The girls sat on their parents’ bed, enjoying the banquet and toasting each other with shots of Sprite and Coca-Cola.