Country Driving [177]
After the city acquired the Xiahe territory, they built a network of roads and installed a sewage system, and then they sold the development rights to a private company called Yintai. Yintai planned to build an apartment complex, and Zhang Qiaoping had heard that they paid around thirty-six million dollars for the land. After talking with him, I visited Yintai’s main office, where the director of development showed me documents certifying the actual price: thirty-seven million dollars. In other words, Lishui had bought land for one million and then, in the span of three years, flipped it for thirty-seven million. And much of this had been done openly—even the peasants knew the ballpark figures. When I asked Zhang Qiaoping if the deal was fair, he shrugged. “They have the right to buy it,” he said. In truth, his plot of land had been worth at least two hundred thousand dollars, but he hadn’t protested about his fifteen-thousand-dollar settlement. Instead, he took the cash and invested in a small shop directly across from Yintai’s planned apartment complex. The project was being built day and night, and construction workers often stopped by Zhang’s new shop to buy food and drinks. Knowing that he couldn’t fight the system, Zhang had done what he could to profit from it.
The new apartment complex was called Jiangbin, or Riverside. It consisted of twenty-eight buildings, the tallest of which would be eleven stories. The planned centerpiece was a musical fountain larger than a football field. For this construction project, Yintai had borrowed more than twenty-eight million dollars, much of it from individuals hoping to earn high interest rates. In Zhejiang this is common—companies often raise money through private investors, because it’s easier than getting bank loans. Technically, such fund-raising is illegal, but it’s widely tolerated in a country where capital tends to be in short supply. At Yintai, company officials didn’t believe there would be any problem paying the money back, because their timing seemed to be perfect: during the past five years, the average price of a Lishui apartment had risen sixfold. The vice chairman of the board at Yintai told me that they expected to profit nineteen million dollars total from Riverside.
The vice chairman’s name was Ji Shengjun, and he was the son of Yintai’s founder. Back in 1978, when the reforms began, the Jis were a poor peasant family in the town of Qiaotou. The patriarch worked for private construction crews, eventually starting his own company. He caught the early wave of the building boom, expanding his business all across Zhejiang, and now he worked with all three of his sons. Ji Shengjun was the youngest, at twenty-seven years of age. In addition to the family development company, he owned a number of businesses on the side, including a local nightclub called Masear. One evening I met him there, in the upstairs VIP room. He wore black Prada loafers, black Prada trousers, and a red and black Versace shirt. He carried a gold-plated Dupont cigarette lighter that had cost over six hundred dollars. He smoked Chunghwa cigarettes, naturally. Like everybody else in the VIP room, I was served Ji’s drink of choice, which was Old Matisse Scotch sweetened with green tea and served in a wineglass. Every once in a while, after taking a drink, Ji leaned over and spat directly onto the carpet, rubbing it in with his Prada loafers. He wore no socks.
There were a half dozen people in the VIP room. The door was monitored by Ji’s personal bodyguard, a well-built man in a tight T-shirt. One of the bodyguard’s daily responsibilities was to carry Ji’s Louis Vitton clutch purse as he cruised around Lishui. In the club, a pretty young woman sat close to Ji, her hand on his lap. When Ji told me that he was about to have a wedding, I made the mistake of referring to this woman as his fiancée, which made everybody laugh. Ji was friendly and easygoing, and whenever he smiled