Country Driving [148]
The Wenzhou people themselves love to talk about the mystery of their success. In general, the Chinese are highly attuned to regional differences, and they’re quick to bring up the shortcomings of some other part of the country. Beijing natives ridicule the low class of the Henanese; people in Shenzhen disparage migrants from Hunan and Sichuan; lots of folks have something bad to say about women from Shanghai. But Wenzhou has an unusual taste for self-analysis. At the airport bookstore, an entire section is devoted to volumes about Wenzhou business: The Collected Secrets of How Wenzhou People Make Money, The Feared Wenzhou People, The Wenzhou Code, Actually You Don’t Understand the Wenzhou People. These books are popular with visitors, but it’s also common for natives to read up on themselves. Once I saw Boss Gao studying a book called The Jews of the East: The Commercial Stories of Fifty Wenzhou Entrepreneurs. He asked me if I knew any Jews in America, and I said yes.
“Are they good at business?” Boss Gao said.
I said that some of them did business, and some of them did other things.
“It says here that Jews in Europe are famous for doing business,” he said.
“I guess that’s true historically,” I said. “But it doesn’t mean that all Jews do business nowadays.”
“This book says that the Jews are the Wenzhou people of Europe,” said Boss Gao.
It took me a minute to wrap my head around that one. But eventually I learned what to expect in conversations about Wenzhou development. Entrepreneurs often asked the same question: “Why do you think that we Wenzhou people are so good at business?” It pleased them if I said, “The environment.” This response agreed with the Wenzhou books, which generally propagate theories of environmental determinism. The region possesses little arable soil, and during imperial times there were poor transport links to the interior, because of the rugged landscape. With few options, Wenzhou natives turned to the sea, and they had already developed a strong trading culture by the end of the Ming dynasty, in the seventeenth century. They also built a tradition of migration, and pockets of Wenzhou émigrés gained footholds in port cities around the world. These networks survived the isolation of the Mao years, and so did the Wenzhou business instinct. Once the Communists allowed them to leave farms and start factories, the local economy took off.
The environmental theory makes sense, but there’s also an element of self-determinism. People in southern Zhejiang believe in their business acumen, and they take pride in their ability to cut margins and develop trade networks. They have faith in themselves, and they have faith in business—there’s no shame in being a cold-blooded entrepreneur. A few years ago, a Wenzhou newspaper called Fortune Weekly ran a special Valentine’s Day supplement that included a survey of local male millionaires. The newspaper asked the men where they liked to have romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, and it listed the gifts they purchased for their wives and girlfriends. One question called upon respondents to recall “the time in your life when you felt the deepest emotion.” The two most common responses were “When I started my business” and “When I got divorced.” Another question asked: “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.
BY MY THIRD TRIP to Zhejiang, I learned how to return a rental car with an empty tank. The first couple of times I miscalculated, bringing back the Santana with plenty of gas, which obviously pleased the men who ran the Wenzhou Prosperous Automobile Rental Company. The trick was to never fill the thing up: I added gas in five-and ten-dollar increments, and at the end of a journey I timed it so the low-fuel light flashed just before I made it back to Wenzhou Prosperous. And it was obvious that so