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By Root 4030 0

ground. It’s a city of gawkers and loiterers; people often appear to be lost. They stare at seven-story buildings; they gaze into shop windows; they wander into traffic—a Huairou driver learns to be attentive. On sunny days, crowds mill around the former site of the Women’s Conference, which is now flanked by a KFC and a McDonald’s. These fast-food restaurants are always packed, and the same is true for the single department store in town, which is called Da Shijie: The Big World. The Big World is five stories tall and stocked with virtually everything a Huairou shopper could want—appliances, clothes, toys, books. Peasants go there to ride the escalators. They stand poised before the moving metal, waiting for the perfect moment to take the leap; after a successful mount they clutch the rubber railings like a gymnast gripping the parallel bars. At the end of the line they hop to safety. They have a tendency to stop dead after dismount, as if waiting for a judge’s score. Within the department store, there’s a lot of good-natured jostling: people bump each other at the end of backed-up escalators, and they plow through crowded shop aisles, and they step on the heels of folks who are rubbernecking the central atrium. The decorating scheme of the Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise. There are mirrors and glass railings and columns of polished steel; there are beeping lights and blaring loudspeakers; there are more reflective surfaces here than on a disco ball. It’s hard to imagine any place more different from a quiet mountain village, and people from the countryside love the Big World—they stagger up the escalators and blink happily in the glaring lights. That’s the trick of Huairou: it’s a city of transformation, where people change as quick as a peasant with a pair of Italy loafers.

Wei Ziqi had relatives in the city, an older brother as well as various cousins from Sancha, and they introduced him to hardware shops where he could stock up for his renovations. During the early months of 2003, he found businesspeople he could trust. These were new types of relationships—in the village, it was rare to have any sort of link that was strictly economic. Urban Chinese describe such associations as guanxi, “connections,” and a businessman learns to la guanxi. Literally the verb means “to pull, to drag, to haul,” and the description is apt: guanxi takes work. Wei Ziqi invited contacts to restaurants; he drank shots of baijiu; he handed out cigarettes. He began to smoke himself. Previously he had abstained, because he believed the habit to be unhealthy and a waste of money. But for a Chinese male doing business, sharing smokes is a crucial part of pulling guanxi, and whenever Wei Ziqi went to Huairou he carried packs of Red Plum Blossom cigarettes.

At the end of winter, after paving his threshing platform and building a new kitchen, Wei Ziqi constructed a fishpond. The old leech pool still stood nearby, a relic of his first attempt at business, but the new pond was four times as big. He planned to stock it with rainbow trout. For advertising he found a discarded truck hood that was dented beyond recognition. He painted the metal blue, added the name of his restaurant in big red characters, and propped the sign against some rocks at the end of the Sancha road. At a printer’s shop in Huairou he had business cards made up. For his restaurant, he had considered all sorts of grand titles—Sancha Farmyard Paradise, Sweet Waterhead Farmyard Villa, Sancha Great Nature Farmyard Leisure Paradise. But in the end he settled on something simpler: “An Outpost on the Great Wall.” Even as he learned to pull guanxi city-style, he knew instinctively that his best selling point was old-fashioned rural simplicity. The business cards listed all the humble activities that a visitor could enjoy in Sancha:

Climb Mountains, Climb the Great Wall, Admire Wildflowers, Drink Springwater,

Eat Wood-fired Meals, Sleep on a Heated Kang, Eat from the Five Grains,

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