Country Driving [201]
The most ambitious Shifan industry involved online video games. A group of young men purchased computers, set up high-speed Internet connections, and began playing World of Warcraft for profit. World of Warcraft is the world’s most popular online game, and players build characters by accumulating virtual treasure. The game is so widespread that markets have developed in which these prizes can be bought and sold for real money. In America and Europe, players might be too busy to spend much time on the game, but they’re happy to pay somebody else to do the grunt work of developing a character. It’s called gold farming: essentially, the outsourcing of entertainment. For a time, the young men in Shifan made good money; they played World of Warcraft in shifts, twenty-four hours a day, selling the points to players in Germany. But then the game’s administrators cracked down on the practice, shutting down accounts in China, and finally the Shifan players gave up on their venture. They sold their computers and headed off on the expressway, looking for work in Wenzhou and other places. For most young people in the exit towns, that was the obvious solution to the lack of opportunity: they left.
But there was also a small corps of people who had been embittered by the Tankeng Dam project and now sought justice. During the resettlement, authorities had promised compensation according to the type of home and farmland of each resident, and people were given discount prices on new apartments in Shifan and the other exit towns. The degree of detail was remarkable: if a person’s former house had been made of brick, he received 220 yuan per square meter; if it was wood, the price was 180. Each stove was reimbursed at a set rate. A fee of 480 yuan covered transport costs. Any resident employed in a full-time job received another 480, to compensate for missed workdays during the move. If they had orchards, every individual fruit tree was noted, evaluated for maturity, and reimbursed accordingly. On the average, compensation came to over ten thousand dollars per resident, but often the actual amount was reduced by corruption. Virtually everybody in Shifan grumbled about the resettlement, and some had become so angry that they prepared official requests for justice.
Their goal was to contact a higher level of government. Like many traditional Chinese citizens, they had a deep-rooted faith in authority, believing that corruption was primarily a local issue. They visited Hangzhou, the provincial capital, where they waited in line at special offices, hoping some official would notice. I never heard of anybody in Shifan receiving justice from such a visit, but they kept trying. And almost every time I stopped in town, I was approached by somebody who wanted to tell the story of his case. I explained that I wrote books to be published overseas, and it wasn’t possible for me to print something in Zhejiang, but people wanted to talk anyway. Probably they just needed somebody to listen: often I sat for an hour while a displaced farmer flipped through his resettlement book. Inevitably he knew it all by heart, every detail, every injustice—his house had been brick but he had been paid only for wood, or the floor space had been miscalculated, or tangerine trees had been marked as young when in fact they were mature. These conversations made me feel helpless, because only a functional local press could deal with such issues, but Zhejiang journalists had been told to stay away from the dam. In a drive-by town, I felt like a drive-by journalist, listening to sad stories before I got back on the expressway.
It was particularly depressing because in a way the system worked well. It didn’t necessarily make people happy, and it certainly wasn’t fair, but it was extremely functional. The government was smart enough