Country Driving [155]
All along the highway, billboards touted cement brands: Golden Garden Cement, Red Lion Cement, Capital of the Immortals Cement. Those were the first advertisements, and the highway was also marked by information signs, which were the same shade of green as in the United States. Many Zhejiang road signs had even been translated into English. In Wenzhou, the exit read “Shoe Center of China.” The expressway’s lanes had been labeled “Slow Lane” and “Quickly Lane.” “Dirve Carefully”—that mangled notice was everywhere. Another commanded “Do Not Get Tired.” Periodically a strange couplet appeared on a sign beside the road:
PLEASE NOT TRY TIRED DRIVING
KEEP OFF THE TRAFFIC ACCIDENT
At Lishui, the exit led straight to the city’s Economic Development Zone. After the peacefulness of the new expressway, it was a shock to enter the half-built industrial park, where most roads had yet to be paved. Earthmovers and bulldozers worked around the clock, and rugged farmland surrounded the zone on all sides, a reminder of how this place had looked until recently. The scale of the construction project was impressive—nearly six square miles. The director of the economic zone, a man named Wang Lijiong, told me that in order to prepare for the factories they had leveled exactly one hundred and eight mountains and hills.
Chinese officials have a way with statistics—they rattle off overwhelming numbers in the most casual fashion. One of Director Wang’s government colleagues, a man named Yang Xiaohong, told me that from 2000 to 2005, Lishui’s urban population had grown from 160,000 to 250,000, because of all the migrants who came to work construction and factory jobs. With the new development zone, he expected the population to double to half a million in the next fifteen years. He also said the Lishui government had invested $8.8 billion in infrastructure from 2000 to 2005. During those five years, according to Yang, the city’s infrastructure investment was five times the amount spent during the previous half century.
Every time I met an official, I scrambled to write down the numbers, and then in the evening I’d look at my notebook and wonder if they could possibly be true. But Director Wang Lijiong’s remark about moving one hundred and eight mountains made me stop scribbling. I asked the man to explain what he meant.
“Pretend that this is a mountain,” he said, pointing at a spot on the table between us. He moved his finger a few inches over. “This is another mountain. Between them there’s a valley. So we take the tops off the two mountains, and we fill in the valley. We lower the high parts and raise the low parts, and we make it as flat as possible.”
He ran his hand along the table—perfectly flat. He continued: “There’s a saying here in Lishui. ‘For every nine acres of mountains, there’s half an acre of water and half an acre of farmland.’ With such a small percentage of good land, we had no choice but to move the mountains.”
Director Wang was in his late forties, and he dressed casually, in jeans and sweaters. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a gold Omega watch. He was a member of the Communist Party. In his pocket, he carried a laser pointer, and during our discussions he occasionally used it to illuminate some detail on the map of Lishui that hung on his office wall. It was a map of the future—the drawing featured all the roads in the development zone that had yet to be built. Director Wang was friendly and easygoing, and he answered my questions with a directness that surprised me. He also returned my phone calls—I had never known a Chinese official who did that. Most of them are wary and secretive; they see no reason to talk to a foreign reporter. But Director Wang was different, and once I asked him about his background.
“My experiences are very complicated,