Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

The lexicon had yet to catch up with China’s transformation. Driving through Zhejiang, we passed village after village. At least, that is what they were called and how they were designated on the map. But, like the Number One Village in China, these communities were far removed from the small, rural settlements usually conjured up by the word. For a start, many of them were bigger than the average European town, and they were heavily industrialized. And, as in Huaxi, the residents were still classified as “farmers” (another semantic anachronism), but most seemed to work in factories rather than on farms and were more used to handling pig iron than pigs. They were no longer cultivating the land, they were gobbling it up, expanding output, building market share, getting ahead.

We drove next through hills and forests to the town that fastened the crotches of the world: Qiaotou. Few people outside the local county had heard its name, but in twenty-five years this humble community had destroyed most of its international rivals to become the undisputed global capital of buttons and zips. Crops had been cleared for factories, farmers had become industrialists, and the river—the Ou—which used to be a clean source for irrigation, had deteriorated into an outlet for industrial waste emissions, some of which occasionally dyed the water purple and blue.

The first small workshop in the country was established in 1980 by three brothers who picked their first buttons off the street. Twenty-five years later, the town’s 700 family-run factories were churning out annually 15 billion buttons and enough zips to circle the world 5,000 times. Starting out with little capital, few resources, and the disadvantage of a remote location, the farmers decided to compete on the basis of cheap labor and a willingness to tolerate the smell and pollution associated with plastic and metal manufacturing.

“Qiaotou chose the zip-and-button industry because it is labor-intensive and flexible. You can start a zip business with just a few hundred thousand yuan capital. That suited us. We are a very small town surrounded by mountains. We didn’t have an industrial structure,” said our host Ye Kelian, the quietly impressive president of the biggest firm in the town and head of Qiaotou’s chamber of commerce. He was one of the more unassuming business heroes of a rags-to-riches generation. When he started Great Wall Zipper Group in 1983, it was only the second factory in the town. It had eight workers and one machine. But it could not have timed its rise better. Qiaotou began popping buttons just as China started dressing up. Out went the Mao suits and in came wardrobes of Western clothes. Overseas buyers rushed in. Three out of every five buttons in the world were now made in the town and a good share of the zips. Great Wall Zipper employed 1,000 people, ran three factories, and claimed assets of 80 million yuan (around $11.5 million).

Ye took me on a tour of the factory. It was a mirror of the town—functional, scruffy, and industrious. The lower level was thick with an acrid smell. Emissions of heavy-metal pollutants and dyes had eased thanks to an investment in new technology, but the problem had not gone away either here or in the button-making plants. Qiaotou was still dependent on the dirty manufacturing processes of leather-washing, paint-spraying, resin-dyeing, and metallurgy. Locals reported that, on the worst days, flakes of white plastic filled the air. A refinery had been built to deal with scrap resin, but it too became a source of pollution. The local government repeatedly promised a cleanup, but there was a limit to how much firms in this industry could do without losing competitiveness.

Ye explained how the movement of the zip business had tracked countries in the early stage of industrialization. “Zips were invented in Germany. For years, Germany, Italy, and the U.S. were the main producers. But then Asia quickly took over. First Japan, then South Korea, then Taiwan, and now the mainland. Today, China has 80 percent of the world zipper market. Developed countries don’t manufacture zips anymore.” The reasons were obvious: the business was dirty and labor-intensive and the profit margins were low—exactly the sort of job that countries outsourced as they moved up the value chain. Foreign companies wanted to produce and source in China because environmental and health-and-safety standards were as low as the price. 16

The true costs were never accounted for on corporate balance sheets. But they were written on the landscape and stained into river systems. Rapid industrialization degraded the quality of the water, air, and soil. The Grand Canal, which flows through Jiangsu on its route from Shanghai to Beijing, was so thick with foul-smelling green gunk that, as we saw earlier, it was too polluted to use for the South-North Water Diversion Project. Taihu Lake, a famous beauty spot, was choked each summer with blue-green algae blooms, a sign that the water was contaminated by nitrogen. 17Rivers and lakes sometimes became so contaminated that drinking supplies were temporarily cut. The coastal provinces became notorious for “cancer villages” and other clusters of disease, usually near chemical factories (see chapter 9). Birth defects in Jiangsu soared, a trend that doctors attributed to pollution. 18As the economy expanded, the media reported a litany of contamination cases that continued month after month, year after year.

Protests were also erupting in many parts of China as industrial ground was broken. 19The main complaint was the seizure of farmland for development, but fear of industrial toxins was another factor. In 2005, environmental concerns sparked 5,000 mass incidents involving at least 100 people, 128,000 smaller disputes, and more than half a million letters and complaints. 20The environment protection minister Zhou Shengxian blamed public anger on pollution and called on local environmental bureau officials to stand up to violating companies. 21

But there was little incentive for them to do so as their salaries were paid not by the state but by local governments that wanted to protect industry. Even if they cracked down and imposed penalties, the sums were often so small that it was often cheaper for a factory to pay fines than install expensive wastewater and emissions-treatment equipment. 22With corruption endemic and little other means of political expression, illegal protest and violence were commonplace and often more effective than using the law. With no democracy, China’s government was being held accountable by riot.

I witnessed this in Zhejiang in the aftermath of a pitched battle between roughly 2,000 riot police and 20,000 villagers, who were protesting against an industrial plant. The South China Morning Post had been the first to report the battles in Huankantou, sparked by a chemical factory that locals blamed for ruining their crops and their health. 23

Three journalists had been detained by police in the area a day earlier. 24To minimize the risk of that happening, I set out late at night, leaving my interpreter behind in case there was trouble. If I needed interpretation, we would have to do it by mobile phone. The precaution proved unnecessary. The police were in no position to seize anyone in Huankantou. They had completely lost control. I arrived after an hour-long taxi ride through dark streets and countryside, covering my head and pretending to be asleep at tollbooths and anywhere else I saw police. As we approached the town, there were more and more people milling about on the road. In the center were huge crowds but not one policeman.

Most of the people were riot tourists. Although the domestic media had been ordered not to report the demonstration, word had spread that the authorities had suffered a rare and bloody defeat. Residents had put the deputy mayor and more than thirty police in hospital (five critically injured) and defended their community from what they saw as a toxic invader. The mood was euphoric, almost festive. Order had broken down. Children had not been to school for days. Roadblocks barred the route to the chemical factory at the heart of the dispute.