Boom boom boom

An article of Peter Hessler for the National Geographic on the booming towns in Zhejiang:

"At 2:30 in the afternoon, the bosses began designing the factory. The three-story building they had rented was perfectly empty: white walls, bare floors, a front door without a lock. You could come or go; everything in the Lishui Economic Development Zone shared that openness. Neighboring buildings were also empty shells, and they flanked a dirt road that pointed toward an unfinished highway. Blank silver billboards reflected the sky, advertising nothing but late October sunlight.Wang Aiguo and Gao Xiaomeng had driven the 80 miles (130 kilometers) from Wenzhou, a city on China's southeastern coast. They were family—uncle and nephew—and they had come to Lishui to start a new business. "This whole area just opened up," Boss Gao explained, when I met him at the factory gate. "Wenzhou used to be this way, but now it's quite expensive, especially for a small company. It's better to be in a place like this."On the first floor, we were joined by a contractor and his assistant. There was no architect, no draftsman; nobody had brought a ruler or a plumb line. Instead, Boss Gao began by handing out 555-brand cigarettes. He was 33 years old, with a sharp crewcut and a nervous air that intensified whenever his uncle was around. After everybody lit up, the young man reached into his shoulder bag for a pen and a scrap of paper.First, he sketched the room's exterior walls. Then he started designing; every pen stroke represented a wall to be installed, and the factory began to take shape before our eyes. He drew two lines in the southwest corner: a future machine room. Next to that, a chemist's laboratory, followed by a storeroom and a secondary machine room. Boss Wang, the uncle, studied the page and said, "We don't need this room."They conferred and then scratched it out. In 27 minutes, they had finished designing the ground floor, and we went upstairs. More cigarettes. Boss Gao flipped over the paper."This is too small for an office.""Put the wall here instead. That's big enough.""Can you build another wall here?"In 23 minutes, they designed an office, a hallway, and three living rooms for factory managers. On the top floor, the workers' dormitories required another 14 minutes. All told, they had mapped out a 21,500-square-foot (2,000 square meters) factory, from bottom to top, in one hour and four minutes. Boss Gao handed the scrap of paper to the contractor. The man asked when they wanted the estimate."How about this afternoon?"The contractor looked at his watch. It was 3:48 p.m."I can't do it that fast!""Well, then tell me early in the morning."They discussed materials—paint, cement, cinder blocks. "We want the ten-dollar doors," Boss Wang told the contractor, who was a Lishui native. "And don't try to make money by getting cheaper materials—do a good job now, and we'll hire you again. That's how we make money in Wenzhou. Do you understand?"a sea of commoditiesThe Wenzhou airport bookstore stocks a volume titled, Actually, You Don't Understand the Wenzhou People. It shares a shelf with The Feared Wenzhou People, The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, and The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Businessmen. For the Chinese, this part of Zhejiang Province has become a source of fascination, and the local press contributes to the legend. Recently, Wenzhou's Fortune Weekly conducted a survey of local millionaires. One question was: If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be? Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn't make up their minds.From the beginning, an element of desperation helped create the Wenzhou business tradition. The region has little arable soil, and the mountainous landscape made for bad roads to the interior. With few options, Wenzhou natives turned to the sea, developing a strong trading culture by the end of the Ming dynasty, in the 17th century. But they lost their edge after 1949, when the communists came to power and cut off overseas trade links, as well as most private entrepreneurship. Even in the early 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's free-market reforms began to take hold, Wenzhou started with distinct disadvantages. Residents lacked the education of people in Beijing, and they didn't attract the foreign investment of Shanghai. When the government established the first Special Economic Zone, whose trade and tax privileges were designed to spur growth, they chose Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong.But Wenzhou had the priceless capital of native instinct. Families opened tiny workshops, often with fewer than a dozen workers, and they produced simple goods. Over time, workshops blossomed into full-scale factories, and Wenzhou came to dominate certain low-tech industries. Today, one-quarter of all shoes bought in China come from Wenzhou. The city makes 70 percent of the world's cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of Wenzhou's economy is private.The Wenzhou Model, as it became known, spread throughout southern Zhejiang Province. Although nearly 80 percent of all Zhejiang entrepreneurs have a formal education of only eight years or less, the province has become the richest in China by most measures. The per capita incomes for both rural and urban residents are the highest of any Chinese province (this excludes specially administered cities such as Shanghai and Beijing). Zhejiang reflects China's economic miracle: a poor, overwhelmingly rural nation that has somehow become the world's most vibrant factory center."




rest of the article at http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0706/feature4/