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By Root 4021 0

” he began. He explained that during the Cultural Revolution he had been sent down to the countryside, like many city youths, and afterward he was assigned to a job in a dynamite factory. Then he joined the People’s Liberation Army and trained as a tank driver. For five years he drove tanks, after which he left the military and was appointed to a banking job. Ten years of banking were followed by a cadre position in a development zone. After that, he moved from town to town, rising steadily through the bureaucracy, until at last he had been chosen to lead Lishui’s new industrial park. He had very little formal education, but his son was a graduate student in international finance at the University of Auckland. The fact that in two generations this family had gone from driving tanks to studying foreign economics was not particularly stunning. Many men of Director Wang’s age possess illogical résumés, full of disjointed transitions and unexpected career jumps. But when they tell these stories, it’s the trajectory that matters, not the specific steps themselves. Dynamite to tanks to banks to development zones—who can argue that this isn’t progress?

Director Wang still drew lessons from his days in the military. “In a tank, you go directly at your goal,” he said. “You can’t worry about whether the road is good or bad, or if something happens along the way. You have to be focused; you need the spirit of persistence. I’m that way here at the development zone. I don’t get discouraged by problems.”

He explained that his tank-driving years had inspired the slogan for the Lishui Economic Development Zone: “Each person does the work of two people, and two days’ work is done in a single day.” For Director Wang, the biggest threat was time. Development zones had already been functioning for twenty years in other parts of China, and new ones constantly cropped up. Their basic strategy was the same everywhere: prepare infrastructure, sell land-use rights at cut rates to factory owners, and grant tax breaks for initial years of production. If a city came late to this strategy and hoped to distinguish itself, there weren’t many options. Occasionally the local government discovered some major industry that was ripe for exploitation—this happened in Wuhu, the city in Anhui Province that decided to produce Chery cars. But such opportunities were increasingly rare, and nowadays it was far more likely that a latecomer ended up making products that other places hoped to avoid.

By 2006, Lishui had already become home to more than a dozen major plants producing synthetic leather. If cement and steel are the characteristic elements of Chinese cities, overused in construction projects, synthetic leather plays a similar role for consumers. Foreigners living in China call the stuff “pleather”—shorthand for “plastic leather”—and it’s amazing how many permutations can be found in daily life. Virtually every Chinese entrepreneur carries a pleather money bag, and the cooler ones wear pleather jackets. Women dress in pleather skirts; men have pleather loafers. I’ve visited apartments in which every piece of furniture is covered in pleather. The stuff is so plentiful that it seems like a natural resource—sometimes I imagined they were mining it straight out of the ground in some forgotten part of Shanxi Province.

In fact a lot of it comes from the Wenzhou region. Pleather factories first developed in the coastal suburbs, near the airport, and the industry’s effects are one of the first things that a visitor notices upon arrival: the air is a dirty brown and a sickly sweet smell lingers over the airport. The pleather industry is notorious for a solvent called DMF, or dimethylformamide, which is used in production. In the United States, studies have shown that people who work with DMF often suffer from watery eyes, dry throat, and coughing. They lose their sense of smell and they become intolerant of alcohol. Long-term exposure to DMF causes liver damage, and studies suggest that female workers have increased risk of stillbirths. In laboratory tests with