Fresh Air Fiend (32 page)

The United States is the world's largest purchaser of Chinese clothes, $4.5 billion worth in 1992. I wanted to visit some textile factories, especially ones that produced designer goods—Ralph Lauren, for example. This would be a problem, I was told.

"Ralph Lauren and the others are very uptight about giving the locations of the plants they source from," I was told by a China expert in Hong Kong. "It is bad PR for customers to know that their suit costing hundreds of dollars is made for peanuts in China. And cheap competitors want to source from the same factories, so that they can pass their producers off as 'just as good as Polo'—or buy the surplus production."

 

Long before my driver Mr. Li and I were humming Mao hymns and dodging carnage on the Shantou Road, I visited a wholly owned American enterprise outside a major Chinese city—I promised my informant I would be circumspect. I was met by a fresh-faced American manager, who asked me why I happened to be interested in his company's product.

"I'm planning to write an article," I said, "about change in south China. And your part in it."

"Wait a minute," he said, becoming officious. "I don't want to be in your article. I don't want to be quoted. I don't want my name on it. Everything I say has to be off the record. If you want information, you can talk to our PR people in Hong Kong."

"It won't be much of an article if I use public relations brochures," I said, and thought that this was precisely the sort of unhelpful attitude I had met among old Commies and hacks in the older, Marxist-Leninist China.

"I'm sorry, I can't help you."

"I was just curious about your experience in China. I promise to respect your wish to be anonymous."

The Nameless American Factory Manager in the Nameless American Factory considered this and finally said, "We're doing very well. We're on schedule. Everything's going ahead. We have a great team."

He set his face at me as though defying me to find anything wrong with what he had just said. I found a great deal wrong. He was unhelpful and probably untruthful. It was the sort of thing you would hear from the cadre of the Revolutionary Red Star Work Unit during the height of the Cultural Revolution.

"How many people do you employ?"

"Eighty-five."

"So it's not very labor intensive?"

I had been told by another factory manager that if an industry was not labor intensive, there was almost no point in setting it up in China, since low wages and high productivity were the keys to Chinese success. On the other hand, if you wanted to sell something to the Chinese, the best position was to be wholly owned and to saturate the market, as this company obviously wanted to do.

"We have a lot of machines," the Nameless American said.

"What do you pay people?"

"See?" he fumed. "That's the wrong question! Why don't you ask whether they get transportation? What about cafeteria privileges, holidays, overtime, all the rest of the benefits?"

"I was coming to that," I said (and he might have added haircuts and showers, two other joint-venture perks for Chinese workers). But seeing that I had stung him, I persisted with my wage question.

"About five hundred a month—maybe less."

Call it 450 yuan, $80 a month at the official rate of exchange. It was slightly above the going rate. The clothing factories, run mainly by Taiwanese and Hong Kong businessmen, paid 200 yuan or less a month. If you are wearing a garment marked "Made in China," chances are good that the person who cut and stitched it earned a little more than $5 a week. Your Chinese-made umbrella? Your children's toys? The angels on your Christmas tree? This easily made stuff was probably produced by Chinese earning less than $5 a week.

"That's a very good salary here," the man said, and it was likely he was earning 250 times that amount.

"What if your workers didn't think it was adequate and decided to go on strike?"

"They'd have a problem. We're a non-union operation in the States. We don't deal with unions—we deal with individuals. My door is always open to anyone who's got a complaint."

I doubted that anyone would risk it. Even in our brief conversation this Nameless American seemed to me to be a rather forbidding person.

He told me that he had been living in a hotel in the nearby city for almost seven months. Formerly a manager of a U.S. plant in one of the western states, he had never lived in China before.

"How do you like it here?" I asked.

"It's an incredible place," he said.

"I think Guangdong is horrendous."

"I've seen fewer beggars here than in Santa Cruz."

"Have you been to the railway station? Every third person is bumming money."

"Maybe you're right. I wasn't counting that. But there's no hippies. In Santa Cruz you find hippies everywhere. Guys with long hair, just living off the government. I've got a personal pet peeve against graffiti. Santa Cruz is full of it. You don't see that here. And even if a person lives in a humble house, they're still neat and clean. I like that."

Very soon, he signaled that the interview was at an end and that it was time for me to leave the building. He did not offer to show me the plant. What I realized afterward was that in the course of the conversation he had, without realizing it, more or less parroted The Thoughts of Chairman Mao. He believed in obedience, respect for property, cleanliness, thrift, learning by doing, and hard work; he wanted each worker to be the "rustless screw" of Chinese ideology. He was opposed to the sort of organized mass dissent that a trade union represented. He would not go on the record with me, and obviously did not care enough about freedom of the press to realize that such freedom depends on truthful sources. I was sure he had voted for George Bush and was a staunch Republican, but that was only further proof that, in his heart, he was a Maoist.

I had the distinct notion that most American businessmen in China were Maoists in the same sense—not dreamers like the old man, but resembling the monopolistic-minded bureaucrats who followed him, the hard-liners
(qiang ying pai)
and extreme leftists
(ji zhou pai).
A "leftist" in China is actually very repressive and right wing, and to their delight many foreign businessmen find they have a great deal in common with the enthusiasms, prejudices, and obsessions of hard-liners.

The more commercial-minded Chinese, like the Japanese before them, have created ways of circumventing the rules. They seem to be able to make anything, and to sell it anywhere, in whatever quantity they wish. They sell rockets to the Iraqis. They sell automatic rifles to anyone with money to buy them. It might be true to say that the indestructible AK-47, sold by North Industries (
NORINCO
) in Beijing, has made war all over the world cheap, deadly, and endless.
NORINCO
has been described, by a U.S. Treasury official, as "the Kmart of arms manufacturers." "No other rifle design has shown the rugged dependability of the series AK," the
NORINCO
catalogue states. "Through harsh climatic conditions ranging from rain to dust to snow the series AK has proven itself valuable."

The Chinese sell tin pots in African countries, baseball caps in America, and, ever since the pit closures in Britain, might well be shipping coal to Newcastle. There is hardly a gift shop in America that is not stocked from top to bottom with candles, carvings, baskets, and nameless knickknacks from the many kitsch-producing Chinese provinces. Those pretty masks and doormats and mailboxes and Santa Clauses and almost-Hummels and toy classic cars that are so sensibly priced in any number of Olde Worlde Gyfte Shoppes? They're from China. Those English pub signs?
The Red Lion. The Cricketers. The Horse and Groom.
They are carved in a factory in Liaoning and bought by the quarter-containerload for about a dollar each.

 

Except for the rockets, rifles, and tanks, which are sold at the annual Chinese Arms and Armaments Fair, much of this stuff is bought at the Chinese Export Commodities Fair, often called the Canton Trade Fair. The first fair was held in 1920. I went to the seventy-third, describing myself on my application as "in publishing."

A frenetic ten-day bazaar, the fair fills one of the largest buildings in Guangzhou. Before Deng's reforms, the trade fair was the only way foreigners could do business in China, since they were forbidden to pass beyond the Canton (Guangzhou) threshold. These days, foreigners travel to factories around China to place their orders, yet the trade fair is the main focus of Chinese commerce and a wonderful way to window-shop. In past years the fair's areas have been demarcated by varieties of merchandise—carpets here, electrical appliances there, hairpieces and bikes over here, and so forth. But this year, for the first time (and perhaps the last; it proved very chaotic), the fair was divided into provinces: Jiangsi here, Shandong there, Inner Mongolia right down the stairs. It costs about $10 to register as a delegate and have your picture inserted into an ID badge, and the rest is easy, like a long, vulgar browsing trek through the biggest gift shop on earth.

In the lobby is a musical fountain with responsive lights flashing to the piano of Richard Clayderman, playing "Don't Cry for Me Argentina." The buyers, bused in from their hotels, are mainly huge, sweating men and feverish-looking women from all over the world, squinting and poker-faced like most bargain hunters.

"Zis bench grinder—tell him I want two sousand pieces," a Frenchman is saying to his interpreter.

"When these shirts arrive Lebanon?" a Levantine woman is saying.

A man is buying an orange lifeboat, another haggling over cotton baseball caps made in Shanghai, which cost $7 a dozen, at one thousand dozen per color, minimum order.

A German is ordering sleeping bags, made in Tianjin in a factory that employs twenty-four hundred workers. Two million are exported, a great number to Germany. The wholesale price for these well-designed ones—warm, light, easily compressible—is $11.80 a bag.

I drifted over to a stall where a sign read "Foshon Hardware & Plastic Factory," and in this one small space I saw fishing rods (eight sizes), mortise door locks, hammocks, pipe joints, cups, plastic flowers, brake shoes, welding electrodes, hinges, washers, faucets, windshield wipers, spoons, small toy dogs that jumped and yapped, and an assortment of cigarette lighters—fifty or more—one of which was a panther whose eyes lit up as its mouth expelled a jet of fire.

In other stalls you could get a floor-length raccoon coat for $418 (including delivery to the West Coast). A Chinalight New Magnetic Massage Cushion ($14). Black Dragon in-line skates made in the remote northern province of Heilongjiang ($13.60 a pair, delivered)—the skateboards were cheaper. A wig made of Chinese human hair, dyed blond, Shirley Temple style, $10.25. A mountain bike was $50, cashmere scarves were $8, herbal remedies and surgical tools were all reasonably priced, and a Xingfu 250cc motorcycle was $663. The Wuyang bike I had seen on the road where the man riding pillion had been yakking on a cellular phone was $2,000, wholesale. There was every machine tool known to man. There was drilling equipment. There were inflatable toys. There were more Virgin Marys and plaster saints and crucifixes than you would see in a whole year's pilgrimage in Italy.

"We're raiding a stall tomorrow," a man in Guangzhou had told me. He worked for a law firm that represented a company that made the sort of peculiarly repellent-looking porcelain animal in which the Chinese seem to specialize. Another company was copying this ugly creature, and I was being given a chance to witness the bust. A team of lawyers and heavies were going to approach the stall holder, tap him on the shoulder, and tell him to stop pirating this thing or else face the music. (In the end, the copyright infringement raid was canceled, because no one really knew what to do if the infringer made a fuss.)

I spent two days at the fair, taking a disgusted pleasure at the profusion of stuff and making a solemn vow never again to buy a basket or a candle or anything else at a gift shop in the States. They were all bought by the pound here and they cost next to nothing.

My most productive time was spent at the tea stalls, where all the varieties of tea in China were displayed. It was an industry thousands of years old, even if tea drinking itself had started (according to the French historian Fernand Braudel) only in the eighteenth century. My favorite kind of tea is Lung Ching (Dragon Well), from Hangzhou. It is green tea, and its flat, smooth leaves resemble the needles of a fir tree.

"Why is this tea so expensive?" I asked the man from Zhejiang, Mr. Jin.

"This tea is picked in a small area," Mr. Jin said. "The best is found on just one hill. There are not many trees, the season is short, only two tons a month of the best quality are picked in the harvest season."

I discovered Lung Ching on my first visit to China in 1980 and have drunk it ever since, buying it in Friendship Stores or in New York, where the best quality might sell for $60 a pound. But "expensive" is an impression you get only if you buy it outside China. This same tea at the Canton Trade Fair costs $2 a pound from the China Tuhsu Zhejiang Tea Import-Export Corp.

Walking through the exhibition hall, I came across a provincial stall selling herbal remedies, which included ginseng, royal jelly, anti-cancer pills (made of "myrrh, muschus, mastix and calculus bovis"). I also noticed something called Love Solution. As if mountain bikes and in-line skates were not proof enough, this was also one-in-the-eye for anybody who has criticized the Chinese for doing poor market research, probably the most up-to-date potion at the fair. It was concerned with health and sex, and claimed on its box that with it "100% of AIDS virus and chlamydia can be killed within two minutes." There was a spray version for men, a plunger for women. I read the label:

 

This product has the function to kill off the Diplococcus gonorrhea, staphycoccus aureaus, chlamydia and AIDS virus rapidly with no toxicity and no irritation to the human body. It is specially used for the prevention of bacterial and viral infection of womans pudenda. It also has the function of prevention and cure [of] vaginitis.