Country Driving [147]
At 2:57 the bosses finished designing the ground level. They moved to the second floor, where Boss Gao reached once more into his quiver of State Express 555s. He handed out the cigarettes and then flipped over the sheet of paper.
“This is too small for an office.”
“Put the wall here instead. That’s big enough.”
“Can you put a wall in here?”
“It’ll be too dark if you do it like that.”
“This room isn’t for workers anyway.”
“Budui! That doesn’t look right.”
The two bosses conferred and the uncle scribbled out another wall. In twenty-three minutes they designed an office, a hallway, and three living quarters for factory managers. They moved to the top floor. Two bathrooms, a kitchen, nine dormitory rooms for workers: fourteen minutes. All told, they had mapped out a 21,000-square-foot factory, from bottom to top, in one hour and four minutes. Boss Gao handed the scrap of paper to the Lishui contractor. The man asked when they wanted the estimate.
“How about this afternoon?” Boss Gao said.
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 went outside to discuss building materials. The contractor showed them two kinds of cinder blocks: one sold for 18.6 American cents; the other was 19.8 cents. Boss Wang chose the cheaper blocks. When it came to plaster, he said, “We just don’t want that kind that rubs off on your clothes when you brush against it.” The contractor asked if they needed a detailed estimate, with square footage itemized and calculated, but Boss Wang didn’t have time for that. “Just give us the price,” he said. The last thing they discussed was doors. The new factory would require fifteen total, and for some reason this particular item concerned Boss Wang.
“Don’t buy those cheap five-dollar doors that look terrible,” he said sternly. “We want the ten-dollar doors. And don’t try to make money by getting cheaper materials. That’s not the way you make money. I’ll tell you how to do it—do a good job now and then we’ll hire you again. That’s how we make money in Wenzhou. If you do it right, you’ll get more business. Do you understand?”
ALL ACROSS CHINA THE people of Wenzhou are famous for their entrepreneurial skill. In a nation where millions have made the transition from countryside to city, from farming to business, the natives of southern Zhejiang are the prototypical peasant-entrepreneurs. Back in the 1980s, when China’s private economy took its first tentative steps, the Wenzhou people responded so quickly that the central government began to praise the “Wenzhou model” of rural development. As a business strategy it couldn’t have been simpler: low investment, low-quality products, low profit margins. Low education, too—even today, after two decades of a booming economy, nearly 80 percent of all Wenzhou entrepreneurs have fewer than nine years of formal schooling. But somehow it works, and the city has come to dominate certain industries. Today, roughly a quarter of the shoes sold in China come from Wenzhou. The city produces an estimated 70 percent of the world’s cigarette lighters. Over 90 percent of the Wenzhou economy is private—unlike other parts of the nation, state-owned industries have played little role in local development.
Over time, Wenzhou entrepreneurs have spread out across the south. Often they follow new roads, which was part of the plan for the Jinliwen Expressway: it was designed to transport factory goods to the coast, but it would also allow businessmen to travel into the interior. This had already happened along other routes, like Highway 330. Wenzhou businessmen often came to a village, started a few factories, and then locals picked up on the idea. Many of the one-product towns began in this manner, and it had contributed to the overall success of Zhejiang Province. Despite having been relatively