Country Driving [157]
In Wenzhou, the pleather factories developed early in the city’s boom, before officials were concerned about pollution or health problems. But in recent years the city government has become determined to rid itself of the industry, preventing expansions and making it harder for current factories to renew permits. When I first started visiting southern Zhejiang, quite a few of the Wenzhou pleather plants were in the process of relocating to Lishui’s new development zone. In the global marketplace, it represents a natural path for an ugly industry. Americans certainly don’t want to make pleather, and even Wenzhou people have grown wary of the stuff, so now it finds its way to Lishui.
When I asked Director Wang about the industry, he responded carefully, claiming that Lishui would regulate it better. “They’ve never controlled the DMF tightly around Wenzhou,” he said. “Those factories were started early, and back then there weren’t good standards. We have rules about this now. The government’s Environmental Protection Agency came here this year and did a long inspection, more than a month total. They said we’re on the forefront of this industry.” Director Wang told me that Lishui was limiting the number of pleather factories to twenty-six, because they didn’t want this to become their dominant product. As a strategy, it seemed risky—invite a group of known polluters to your city in an attempt to jump-start the economy. But there weren’t many options for such a remote place, and Lishui was willing to take whatever it could get. If there were mountains in the way, they had no choice but to move them.
When I first began visiting Lishui, they were still demolishing a hill not far from the bra ring factory, and one day I drove to the site. Dozens of men clambered over the hillside, and the air was full of dust from all the vehicles: thirty dump trucks, eleven Caterpillar excavators, four big hydraulic drills on wheels. A foreman told me that they had been working here for more than a year, and already on this site they had lopped off 1.2 million cubic meters of dirt and stone. They accomplished this by packing the ground with dynamite, blowing everything to hell, and then carting off the rubble. For a year they had done this repeatedly, day after day, and thus far they had reduced the mountain’s elevation by about one hundred feet.
While we were talking, another worker wandered over. He wore a straw sunhat and he carried a cheap plastic shopping bag in each hand. A slogan was printed on the bags: “Quality Number One, the Customer Comes First.” The bags contained thirteen pounds of dynamite, and the man set them on the ground near my feet. He said, “Will you take my little brother to New York?”
Having lived in China for a decade, I was fairly accustomed to non sequitur conversations, but that introduction left me speechless. Anyway, I couldn’t take my eyes off those bags. The man smiled and said, “I’m joking. But he really wants to go to America.”
We chatted for a while, and then the man trudged up the hill; he said they were about to blow up a big boulder. That was a prelude to this morning’s main event. In less than an hour they planned to ignite another 9.9 tons of dynamite that had just been packed beneath one part of the hillside. I asked who was in charge of demolition, and the foreman said it was a person named Mu Shiyou. “He’s up on top of that hill,” he said. What he actually meant was: He’s up on top of what’s left of that hill.
“Can I talk to him?” I asked.
“Sure,” said the foreman.
I stood there for a while. The foreman watched the Cats crawling across the road. At last I said, “Should I just walk over there?”
“Sure,” he said.
“Is it OK if I go by myself?”
“Of course!”
I set off alone toward the doomed mountain. Big trucks barreled down with loads of dirt and rock, and I skirted the road, picking my way over the rubble. After a while I saw plastic wiring coming up from holes in the ground, and I realized that this was the area that had been packed with 9.9