Country Driving [214]
I remembered the explosion I’d witnessed in 2005, when the demolition crew was working near the bra ring plant. I drove back to the site, and the men were long gone; so was the mountain. In its place stood four new factories. One manufactured construction materials, another sold chemicals to DuPont, and the third produced polyurethane to be used by the pleather plants. The fourth factory had a big English sign: “Zhejiang Renli Environmental Protection Co., Ltd.” It consisted of a long low building with a huge smokestack emitting billowing white clouds. Nearby, hundreds of rusty metal barrels had been lined up beneath a makeshift rain cover. A slogan decorated a wall:
IN ORDER TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT,
EVERYBODY HAS RESPONSIBILITY
I wandered into the compound, where nobody minded that I was uninvited. A worker escorted me to an office, and a man in a dark suit handed me his card: Ye Chunsheng, vice president of Renli. He explained that Renli is a private enterprise that processes DMF, the poisonous solvent used in the manufacture of pleather. When Lishui’s pleather factories complete a production cycle, they end up with DMF as a waste product, which they cart over to Renli. All the rusty barrels outside were full of the stuff, waiting to be processed.
“This facility runs twenty-four hours a day,” Mr. Ye said. “We’re the only company in China that does this. We have one facility in Wenzhou and one facility here.”
I asked about the clouds of white smoke, and Mr. Ye assured me they were clean. “The government approved it all,” he said. He offered me a cigarette and shook my hand; he invited me to come back any time. On the way out, I counted a total of six hundred and forty barrels of DMF. It occurred to me that only in China could you visit a mountain and then, two years later, find it replaced by something called the Renli Environmental Protection Co., Ltd.
THE BRA RING FACTORY initially did well after moving. Their new location was in Ouhai, the marshlands south of Wenzhou, where it had been announced that part of the region would eventually be cleared of all industry in order to create a green belt. In Chinese cities, such projects are early signs that an environmental consciousness is developing, but there’s still a long way to go. In Ouhai, after the green belt plans were announced, people responded by moving in a lot of low-end factories that are heavy polluters. They figured that a doomed region temporarily enjoys less regulation, and rents are cheap, too. This was the main appeal for Boss Wang and Boss Gao—they saved a lot of money on their lease. Eventually they’d have to move again, but there wasn’t much reason to worry about that now.
Within a few months of the transfer, a neighboring entrepreneur secretly approached Master Luo. The neighbor had noticed the bra rings were selling well, and he wanted to get into the business, so he offered Master Luo a stake in a new company. But Master Luo turned it down—he decided that Wenzhou people are too untrustworthy. “I learned that from working with these guys,” he said. “If a Wenzhou boss makes a promise, you know he’ll break it.”
Nevertheless, the neighbor entrepreneur made an order with the Qingsui Machinery Manufacture Company, and soon there was another Machine in the Wenzhou region, cranking out bra rings. During one of my conversations with Master Luo, he told me that it would require only forty thousand American dollars for an outside investor to start such a business, so long as Master Luo was involved. He knew how to buy a Machine and assemble it, and he could find factory space.