Country Driving [153]
Daming set up shop in Xiamen, one of China’s “special economic zones,” designed to attract foreign investment. The boss—for the sake of the story, it’s simplest to call him the First Boss—imported a European-made Machine. In the early years that Machine essentially minted money. Labor costs were even cheaper than in Taiwan, and there wasn’t any local competition, because the sophisticated production process made it difficult for knockoff artists. Over time, First Boss came to rely heavily on a worker named Liu Hongwei, a migrant from rural Sichuan province. Liu had little formal education, but he was extremely intelligent, and over time he became an expert in the maintenance of the Machine.
Liu Hongwei also had the gift of remarkable memory. At Daming, in secret, he somehow created a detailed blueprint of the Machine. None of Liu’s coworkers ever saw him measuring or sketching the assembly line, and later they theorized that he must have memorized it section by section, studying the thing by day and then drawing it at night. After Liu finished his blueprints, he took them to the city of Shantou, another special economic zone in southern China. He met with Second Boss, who ran a company called Shangang Keji. In 1998, Second Boss hired Liu Hongwei and took the blueprints to a custom-tooling plant, which built another Machine. Initially the thing didn’t work—nobody’s memory is perfect, after all—but a couple months of adjustments solved the problems. Shangang Keji began producing bra rings, and soon Second Boss was rich, too.
It didn’t take long for Third Boss to enter the picture. He was also based in Shantou, where he started a company called Jinde, and he poached Liu Hongwei. Together they used the blueprints once more, custom building another Machine. By now the price of bra rings had already dropped significantly, but the margins were still good, and Third Boss did well, too. Nevertheless, he was furious when he heard that Liu Hongwei had secretly begun negotiations with Fourth Boss.
I first heard this story from Master Luo, who had worked alongside Liu Hongwei in the city of Shantou. Back then people said that Liu had received approximately twenty thousand American dollars for the sales of his blueprints, but nobody knew for certain. Master Luo did know, however, the exact amount of the bounty that was placed on the man’s head by Third Boss: one hundred thousand yuan, or more than twelve thousand dollars. “He just wanted information,” Master Luo explained. “He said he would pay that money to anybody who could tell him where Liu Hongwei had gone. He was really angry about what he had done.”
I asked what Third Boss planned to do if he found the man.
“You know how business is in the south,” Master Luo said, grinning. “It would be like killing a dog.”
But as far as profits went, it was already too late. Once the Machine became available on the open market, anybody with sixty-five thousand American dollars could buy one. Over the past few years, Fourth Boss had been joined by Fifth Boss, and Sixth Boss, and Seventh Boss, and on and on. By the time the Lishui company got started, there were already twenty major factories in China involved in the business, and the bulk price of a bra ring had plummeted by 60 percent. Nowadays the profit margin often comes down to transport, which is why Boss Gao and Boss Wang chose to make the product in Lishui. No other major bra ring manufacturer was located in this part of Zhejiang, and with the new expressway they would have an advantage in supplying the province’s brassiere factories.
Master Luo often talked about Liu Hongwei, referring to him as “the worker who tricked three bosses.” The story had the ring of myth, a laborer’s legend, and finally, out of curiosity, I flew to Shantou to try to confirm it. First Boss, Second Boss, and Third Boss all refused to talk—they clearly did not wish to revisit this incident. But I met with others who had worked with Liu Hongwei, and all of them told the same basic story, although certain details changed with