Country Driving [130]
“He has his own objectives,” he said. “Everybody has his own objectives.”
The Shitkicker’s motivation was as obvious as the unfinished walls of his house. And it was just as clear why Wei Ziqi represented a logical candidate. He had learned to negotiate the worlds of both the Party and Huairou, and nobody else’s status had risen so rapidly. In 2003, the Wei family business earned thirty-five hundred American dollars; in 2006 they made more than eight thousand. Once, when I asked him about the business income, he qualified his success with a telling remark. “It’s the highest known income in Sancha,” he said. “There might be other people with more money, but it’s not open. As far as farming and business go, I make the most money.”
In June of 2006, as the local political campaign gained momentum, the Party members traveled to Chengde on their annual junket. The city lies to the northeast, and during the Qing dynasty it was the summer retreat of the Manchu rulers. Emperors went there to hunt; the court stocked game parks with deer and boar. Now the parks are open to tourism, and people can wander through the palaces and temples that once served the Manchus. The Sancha contingent visited all the sites, and in the evenings they shared baijiu banquets at the hotel. Upon his return Wei Ziqi showed me photographs, which looked like the ones from previous trips. In every picture the Sancha Communist Party members stand in a long row and stare at the camera. They wear casual clothes but nobody smiles. It’s hard to tell that they are vacationers, and their relationship is also unclear: they could be coworkers or neighbors or even extended family. There is, however, a striking combination of intimacy and distance to their pose. These people aren’t necessarily close friends, and their union may not be by choice; perhaps they even dislike each other. But it’s clear from the photographs that they spend a great deal of time together.
ONE MORNING IN AUGUST, Wei Ziqi telephoned to announce that he was standing at an intersection near my apartment. As usual, the call took me by surprise, although this time I guessed the reason for the trip to Beijing. For half a year he had been thinking about buying a car.
Nobody else in the upper village owned one. In recent years motorcycles had become more common, and a couple of locals had the kind of three-wheeled mini-trucks that are used for freight in the countryside. One man purchased a used Lada sedan—but as Wei Ziqi said, that didn’t really count. The old Russian-made car was in such bad shape that it could hardly be driven, and the owner got rid of it almost immediately. As far as the village was concerned, the parking lot at the end of the road was still waiting for the first locally owned automobile.
Ever since acquiring his driver’s license, Wei Ziqi had been saving money. He stocked guanxi as well—whenever he went to Huairou, he asked friends if they knew of any good secondhand vehicles. But the biggest stroke of luck came when a used-car salesman from Beijing happened to stay at the guesthouse. Wei Ziqi filed away the man’s business card, and a few months later, after he had saved enough, he called the number. The salesman told him to meet just after noon at the Beijing Old Car Transaction Market.
Wei Ziqi and I took a taxi to the market. The moment the cabbie heard the address, he perked up. “You buying a car?” he said. “How much you want to spend?”
Wei Ziqi said shyly that he hoped to keep the price under fifteen thousand yuan, which was around two thousand dollars.
“You should get a Xiali,” the cabbie said. “They save gas and they’re easy to repair. If you’re getting an old one, this is a really good time to buy. A lot of the old Xialis aren’t registered legally, so the police check them more often. People are afraid of getting hassled, so they’re less likely to buy them. That’s why the prices are good right now.”
That’s a Chinese market fluctuation: police problems go up, prices go down. And the Xiali is a classic Beijing car, with a distinct owner stereotype: