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By Root 4044 0

house I heard it every time she answered her phone. Whenever I came to the village, she greeted me in a way that was both friendly and blunt: “Hey! You just get here?” But I knew that she was ambivalent about my presence, or at least that was her stance during the Communist Party meeting about foreigners in Sancha. She was shrewder than the Shitkicker, who played his hand immediately: he wanted us out, which meant that he was left with nothing when we were finally allowed to stay. In contrast, the Party Secretary avoided expressing a clear opinion—in China that often means you’re waiting to see how things turn out. After our first year in Sancha, as a gesture of goodwill, Mimi and I donated one hundred dollars’ worth of cement to the village, specifying that it could be used to make any necessary repairs to the new Sancha road. The Party Secretary took the gift and paved a perfect sidewalk to her house, and now she could ride her motorcycle all the way to the front door.

Wei Ziqi’s relationship with the woman—their guanxi, in the village sense—was deeply uncertain. Her husband was a Wei: he shared the same great-great-grandfather as both Wei Ziqi and the Shitkicker. Wei Ziqi respected the woman’s ability, and he told me that she was especially skilled at dealing with officials from higher levels. Most villagers appreciated that quality—they believed the Party Secretary had been instrumental in getting government funding for the new paved road. But I sensed some wariness in Wei Ziqi, and over time I recognized it as the caution of a potential rival. Without question they were the two most capable individuals in the village.

Wei Ziqi was not a member of the Communist Party. When I first came to know him, he told me that he had no interest in such affairs, and he was much younger than the village leaders—most were middle-aged or older. After Wei Jia’s illness, Wei Ziqi visited a Huairou fortune-teller, who read his palm and gave a warning: avoid politics at all costs. But in a village as small as Sancha, an apolitical position is precarious, especially for somebody starting a new business. There are countless ways in which local leaders can make things difficult for an entrepreneur, especially if he hopes to get a bank loan. Because Chinese farmers can’t use their land as collateral, they need village backing for any loan application.

Wei Ziqi never directly challenged the Party Secretary until the day he dropped off the Idiot at the township government. The subsidy was the woman’s responsibility, and she had ignored Wei Ziqi’s repeated requests for help with the matter. By going straight to the township government, he had circumvented her authority, exposing her to higher officials. In 2003, the subsidy began to arrive: six dollars every month. At Spring Festival, the government delivered a jug of cooking oil, a fifty-pound sack of flour, and a huge bag of rice as a way of showing support to the disabled man and his family.

After we had taken the Idiot into the valley, I initially believed that Wei Ziqi simply cared about the money. As time passed, though, I realized that he had also made a political statement: he proved that he could get things done without the support of local cadres. When I asked him about the Party Secretary’s reaction, he said that she had been mad, but there was nothing she could do, because the law was in Wei Ziqi’s favor. And he seemed pleased at the woman’s anger. “Lots of people in the village have been in situations like that,” he said. “But I went ahead and did something. Other people wouldn’t have had the guts to do that. She wasn’t happy, but now she knows what I’m capable of doing.”

THERE WERE MANY THINGS in the village that Wei Ziqi couldn’t control, and it was also true that he didn’t know his potential customers. He had little contact with the urban middle class in Beijing; all of his plans were essentially guesswork. But the man’s timing couldn’t have been better. He happened to expand his fledgling business in the spring of 2003, which turned out to be the Year of the Car: the most