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By Root 4033 0

he showed tea-stained teeth. He had the extreme thinness that you often find in the countryside, where people are slightly malnourished—if not for the Prada clothes and the bodyguard, this man would have been indistinguishable from a peasant. And his multimillion-dollar company raised money in the peasant way, relying on guanxi and acquiring loans from individuals. Ji Shengjun told me offhandedly that it had cost him $1.25 million to open the nightclub. I never met his fiancée. The pretty young woman in the VIP room was sucking a lollipop. She stroked Ji’s arm and cooed in his ear; from appearances it seemed romantic, but then I caught a fragment of their conversation. It was strictly business: she was pleading with Ji to help her acquire a visa so she could look for work in Portugal.

ONE JULY AFTERNOON, AT the start of a summer rainstorm, the bra ring factory received an express mail envelope. It was pleather weather—in the development zone, the initial stages of a downpour consisted of big dirty drops. The deliveryman held the envelope over his head, to guard against the filthy rain, and once he was inside the factory he wiped the package on his trousers and handed it to Master Luo. The envelope contained nothing but four nylon bra straps. Each was a different color: pink, white, brown, and light blue. There was no letter, no invoice—no explanation of any sort. The straps were a kind of semaphore, and Master Luo knew who could interpret them. “Xiao Long!” he called upstairs, to the factory dormitories. “Delivery!”

Xiao Long was the factory chemist. His full name was Long Chunming, but everybody called him Xiao Long—“Little Long.” He came downstairs wearing a pair of plastic flip-flops and a blue-and-white basketball uniform. In bigger factories, workers dress in company jumpsuits, but the bra ring plant was so small and informal that everybody wore whatever they pleased. Little Long’s shorts and tank top were nylon knockoffs of the Puma brand, and they gave him the appearance of an athlete at game time. He studied the envelope’s return address: it came from a brassiere assembly plant in a city called Dongyang.

“They ordered rings a couple of days ago, and these are the colors,” he explained. It was easy to remember because the bra ring factory still had so little business. At the moment, they had only four regular buyers, all of whom were small. Boss Gao and Boss Wang were often away from the plant for days at a time, trying to woo new customers, but the bosses usually returned with long faces and short tempers. Workers had started to gossip—there were rumors that the factory was in financial trouble. The bosses had already laid off some of the young women on the assembly line, and they called the Tao family into work sporadically, when orders arrived. Only a half dozen technicians like Master Luo and Little Long were still working full-time.

After Little Long deciphered the envelope, I followed him to the factory lab, which was located next to the Machine room. Dressed in the Puma uniform, Little Long picked up his playbook—a loose-leaf notebook filled with dozens of rings taped in rows, their colors changing incrementally from page to page. Next to each ring, Little Long had inscribed the dyeing formula and an English name. These descriptions sounded exotic: a red ring, for example, was labeled as “Sellan Bordeaux G-P.” Little Long didn’t speak the foreign language, but he had copied long lines of inscriptions from other sample books:

Padomide Br. Yellow 8GMX

Padocid Violet NWL

Sellanyl Yellow N–5GL

Padocid Turquoise Blue N–3GL

Padomide Rhodamine

“I already know how to make the pink and the blue,” he said. “But now I have to do the brown.” He cut off a piece of the strap and compared the color to other browns in the book, trying to gauge the formula. Then he took out three powdered dyes: blue, yellow, and red. He poured each powder into a beaker and weighed them on a balance scale. He wrote down the ratios on a new page in his notebook. “This will take more blue and yellow, less red,”