Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

In Huaxi, the steel mills held pride of place. We crossed Textile Bridge—named after the garment-making industry that was another of the village’s main sources of revenue—passed smokestacks and giant mounds of coal, then rolled up at the gates of a factory. As we donned our yellow safety helmets, the manager—inevitably, one of Wu’s grandsons—proudly told us Huaxi Steel was the biggest company in the village. 11He took us to the flat-bar production line, where the heat shimmered above the long belt on which steel strips 100 meters long were fed along rollers to a cutting machine. Five years earlier, the young Wu told me, China had to import flat bars, but now Huaxi sold them for 3,000 yuan ($429) apiece. “Those are not piles of steel,” he said. “They are piles of money.”

The mix of communist politics and capitalist economics was well named as GDPism. Everything was sacrificed for growth. Though Huaxi took this to extremes, it was far from unique. The coastal belt from Jiangsu down to Guangdong had become the workshop of the world. From the Number One Village I traveled south to Zhejiang, another rich coastal province that was famous for its entrepreneurial, rule-breaking spirit. I got an immediate introduction to the ethos when I took a bus across the border. My assistant asked the woman at the ticket booth how long the journey would take.

“It should be five hours but it can vary quite a bit,” she said.

“What do you mean? By how long?” I asked.

The saleswoman was vague. “It can be a number of hours.”

“Why? Because of traffic?”

“It depends on circumstances. But you had better hurry. The next one is about to leave.”

We rushed to the bus. It was a little shabby and, to my surprise, we had bunk beds instead of seats. Why? If the journey took five hours, we ought to be there before dark. But as we quickly learned, the schedule, like any other rule, it seemed, went out the window if there was a chance to make money. Five minutes outside the bus station we made our first unscheduled stop. The driver popped out and came back with an armful of boxes. Mysterious, I thought. Ten minutes later we halted again so the driver could pick up a few bags. From then on we constantly stopped and started, but strangely it was usually only the driver who got on and off. The route was peculiar too: no highway, but several side streets and even an industrial estate. What was going on? I was beginning to get frustrated. At this rate, we would never reach our destination on time.

The passenger in the neighboring bunk noticed my unease. “Relax. The driver’s just making a little money on the side.”

“Eh?”

“Doing deliveries. Picking up extra fares.”

“Is that allowed? Is it normal? What about us, the passengers? Don’t we get a say?”

He shrugged as if my question was absurd. “Don’t worry. He’ll get us there eventually.”

Nobody else seemed in the least bit bothered, though we seemed to have the Warren Buffett of the bus-driving world as our driver. He had business every few kilometers along the road. After a couple of hours, my patience ran out.

“Come on,” I said to my interpreter. “This is ridiculous. We won’t arrive until morning at this speed. Let’s get a taxi.”

We bailed out at the next town, flagged down a cab, and set off on a highway flanked by farm fields and factories. I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, we were making progress. No moneymaking detours would slow us now. Foolish me. The entrepreneurial spirit blew in with the sea breeze in this part of China. Drivers of taxis, no less than buses, were masters of squeezing a few extra kuai from their fares. We crossed the broad expanse of the Yangtze and then a couple of hours later our driver pulled up alongside another taxi, wound down the window, and started talking.

“Why have we stopped? What’s going on?” I asked my assistant.

“They are haggling,” she replied.

“Over what?”

“Over us,” she grinned.

“What?!”

“Our driver wants to sell us. This other driver is from Yiwu and wants to go back home with a paying passenger so he is buying part of our fare. Don’t worry, you won’t have to pay any extra.”

I was outraged, then amused. As we hauled our luggage out of one trunk into another, I laughed at the indignity. We had been haggled over like cabbages in a market. This was human trafficking! But I marveled too at the business mentality of Zhejiang.

“Obviously, they haven’t heard the saying ‘The customer is god’?” I grumbled. “I just hope we fetched a good price.”

The entrepreneurial spirit reached its apex at our destination, Yiwu. If China is the workshop of the world, this was its showroom. Selling everything from hair clips and costume jewelry to engine parts and cranes, the town’s local market had grown from a few dozen street stalls fifteen years earlier to become the world’s biggest commodity trading center. Yiwu was often described as the modern equivalent of the bazaars on the old Silk Road that provided exotic goods to the world. That might have been true in terms of scale, but not quality.

Yiwu was more like the planet’s dollar store. The six hangar-sized malls contained 34,000 stallholders, selling a stunningly colorful smorgasbord of goods. 12Almost all of the merchandise was cheap junk. The variation was staggering: corridors full of bead shops, rows of glitter sellers, alleys full of plastic crocodiles and inflatable guitars, forests of fake plants and plastic flowers, football pitches full of every size and color of ball imaginable. There was no discrimination, no religious boundaries. In the alleys of portrait peddlers, every god and cultural icon was framed and for sale, often displayed side by side: Jesus Christ and Harry Potter, Buddha and Bob Marley, Krishna and Luke Skywalker, Koranic scripts and Shrek, Mao Zedong, and Madonna. I saw two shaven-headed Buddhist nuns from Wutaishan in Shanxi who were bulk shopping for prayer beads, Buddha icons, and amulets at 7 yuan ($1) apiece. Soon after, we came across Muslims from Gansu looking to make large orders for scrolls and framed Koranic scripts. Business, it seemed, was a great spiritual leveler. Yiwu enshrined the modern global values of mass production, mass consumption, and low quality.

Its goods were in great demand. Wholesale purchasers came here from the Middle East, Russia, and eastern Europe. 13These modern, mini–Marco Polos snapped up containers of accessories for resale in gift and souvenir shops in Europe, the Middle East, and Japan. Local business leaders hoped this was just the start. Over copious cups of green tea, Hu Yanhu, the chairman of the China Trade Centre’s operating company, told me Yiwu wanted to become the world’s biggest supermarket. 14

“We offer more variety, have a good reputation, the transport is convenient, and the price is low. Buyers can make a big profit here. You can get stuff here for one yuan and sell it in the UK for a pound.”

“How do you make the price so cheap?”

“Because Chinese labor costs are low, because we are a window for small- and medium-sized enterprises, because we are big and benefit from economies of scale.”

Such advantages had speckled the countryside of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Fujian, and Guangdong with manufacturing communities that dominated global markets. Billions of the world’s teeth were being brushed with bristles from Huangzi, the toothbrush town. Its cigarettes were being lit by the sparks of Zhangqi, the cheap-lighter capital. Countless necks were decorated by the tie-makers of Shengzhou, feet supported by the shoe factories of Wenling, and breasts uplifted by the bra-strappers whose arresting billboards I had encountered in Chendian. These manufacturing hubs helped China’s exports double at twice the speed of Britain at the height of its industrialization but at a cost of increasing dependence on overseas markets, and an influx of polluting, energy-intensive industries. 15