Mr. China Read online

  This ancient method of flood control relied on the deliberate destruction of the dykes at key points in order to flood low-lying farm areas and relieve the pressure on the cities. It was a simple choice: destroy vast areas of farmland to the south or risk the waters bursting into the major industrial towns on the northern bank. Wuhan, a city of eight million people, one of the main industrial centres of China, lay on the northern bank further downstream.

  More than three hundred thousand people were evacuated from the southern flat-lands, sometimes forcibly. At Jingzhou, the decision was made to blast the ditches if the water reached a height of 148.5 feet, but the final decision was reserved for China’s State Council, or Cabinet. The Prime Minister himself arrived to inspect the preparations and the television showed dramatic footage of him plodding along the dykes and staring glumly out over the grey swirling waters. On the evening of 9 August, the river stood at 147.3 feet as the final peak water-crest surged out of the Three Gorges, eighty miles upstream, and poured out into the flat-lands. The authorities knew that in a few hours the peak would reach Shashi. During the night the water rose to within two inches of the limit, the highest ever recorded in history, but the government held its nerve. By the morning, the crisis had passed and the water began to subside.

  More than two thousand people died that summer and forty million homes were destroyed, but the Government had responded to the crisis and an even more serious disaster had been avoided.

  As the flood waters rose and ebbed, the talks with Chen dragged on. He came up with endless reasons to do nothing, chuckling all the time, showing his perfect white teeth and moving his hands around as he spoke. But there was one point that we weren’t going to budge from. He had to decide which business he wanted to run: ‘It’s ours or the Chinese partner’s but not both,’ I told him. We slowly turned the screws and eventually, in September, he agreed to resign from his positions on the Chinese side. We had a small celebration after we reappointed him as General Manager of the joint venture. In the following months, the business turned to profit for the first time and even Little Zeng seemed to relax.

  It seemed as if we were getting a new start but rumours soon started to filter back to Beijing that the Chinese partner was trying to go public on the Shanghai stock market. It was impossible to know what to believe, but the experience at Ningshan had taught us about the dangers of having a Chinese partner with independent sources of money. When I questioned Chen he assured me that it was all rumour but the word from Jingzhou got steadily louder and louder. There were stories that equipment had been transferred out to another site owned by the Chinese partner at Shihaolu. We had reports of long weekend meetings where the Chinese management debated how best to prepare for going public.

  Finally I received a fax from Zeng that changed everything. It was a notice sent out by the General Manager of the Chinese Partner. And it was signed by Chen Haijing. He hadn’t resigned after all.

  A familiar story was instantly recognizable. If the Chinese partner managed to raise capital on the public markets we would have a competitor on our doorstep. But this time it was different from Ningshan. We were early enough to take pre-emptive action. The only option was to fire Chen and put in our own man. On the surface, it seemed an easier proposition than ousting Shi from the tiny village of Ningshan where he was like a local warlord. Jingzhou had a population of nearly a million.

  But we still needed to find Chen’s replacement. I had been interviewing an overseas Chinese manager throughout the summer. Mr Hou was in his late forties and was an engineer by training. I had heard that he had handled some difficult situations where there had been labour problems, but he did not strike me as being particularly tough. He had been in China for nine years and managed a number of automotive factories. He was familiar with the business and gave the impression of unflappable patience – which would probably be needed at Jingzhou. He came with a strong record of team building and had worked in operations for many years. He was certainly no Chang Longwei but he seemed calm and capable and willing to take on the task so we signed him up and started to plan.

  Just as at Ningshan and Harbin our contract allowed us to remove Chen but we had to hold a Board meeting with the Chinese directors physically present. We had done that successfully with Shi but had let him strike back later. This time there would be no such limp-wristedness.

  We had three people working in Jingzhou together with Zeng. Little Li and Cao Ping were in exports and Zhao Xun was in sales. We called the team together and went through a rigorous planning session. We prepared letters to change the bank mandates and agreed to post people with mobile phones outside the banks all over the city waiting for the signal to go in. Notices to be pasted up around the factory, were prepared, announcing the change, and arrangements were made to seal off the file stores, lock the gates and impound movable assets. It would take a team of twelve people so we drafted in reinforcements from Beijing. Zeng and his colleagues were relieved and excited that we were finally going to do something about Chen. He had made their lives miserable in Jingzhou so I was confident that there would be no leaks.

  I flew down to Hubei a day early. It was my habit to go through the topics in advance with Chen so I kept to the normal arrangements to avoid raising any suspicions. It was surreal sitting opposite him and listening to his plans for reorganizing the factory; he described them excitedly but I knew that they would come to nothing.

  I couldn’t focus on the conversation and stared at Chen. I had no feelings of enmity towards him personally, more a sense of slightly bored confusion than actual anger. I stared at him again; why did it have to be this way? I was tired. I felt a kind of detached neutrality that would have been more fitting in a disconnected observer as I went mechanically through the first steps of throwing him out.

  That afternoon I went for a long walk alone around the lake in the middle of the city and stared across the reeds towards the humpback bridges in the distance. There was a fine autumn mist in the late-afternoon as the sun cast its last weak rays over the ornamental rocks beside the lake. I wandered down the pathways over a wet mass of squashed black leaves towards the small zoo on the far side of the lake. I stared for a few minutes at the fat three-legged tiger limping back and forth restlessly behind his bars and then turned back over the raised embankments by the lake. I felt listless. We were about to fire Chen and throw him out of his job. It made no sense – but what alternative was there? I turned my face away from the setting sun and shivered in the early-evening cold. Quickening my pace, I pulled my coat more tightly round my neck and turned back towards the hotel.

  I woke up early and, after a breakfast of fried twisted dough sticks and hot water-buffalo milk in a greasy restaurant by the hotel gate, Pat and I set off for the factory. The meeting opened in the normal way with Pat in the chair. The presentation of the results droned on in the background as blood throbbed in my temples. After half an hour, I looked at Pat and signalled that it was time. We stopped the meeting and asked Chen if we could meet with him in a separate room alone. Still apparently unsuspecting, he agreed readily and the meeting was adjourned.

  We went into a little side room with dirty windows. An old desk with some browning newspapers on it and a few old mops propped up against the wall added to the tatty appearance. There was an old black plastic sofa and a wooden chair.

  Pat and Chen sat on the sofa. It was a familiar conversation. Our investors needed to see some returns . . . not satisfied with performance . . . need independent management and so forth. Chen was clearly shocked and then asked if he could negotiate his personal settlement with me alone, so Pat left.

  As we discussed Chen’s deal, one of the cleaners came in and there was a brief exchange in the heavy Hubei dialect. I failed to catch its drift. The conversation went round for another ten minutes and then Chen excused himself to go for a leak. I wandered out and saw the other two Chinese directors disappear into the gents’ after him. With my nerves already jangling I sensed a p
lot. With their mobiles, there was no knowing what they might do to avoid being ousted, so I ran the length of the corridor and pulled a startled Chen from a cubicle and back into the little side room.

  I said, ‘Resign now or be publicly sacked,’ handed Chen the letter and said, ‘You have fifteen seconds.’ He signed it and I gave the signal to go into the banks.

  Within ten minutes the bank accounts were changed, notices were posted all over the factory, the file store was locked and all the gates were secured.

  The other Chinese directors, white with fury, took the news in silence. Chen tried to persuade them to sign the Board resolution removing him and appointing Hou as a temporary replacement, but two abstained and Qiu, the old accountant whom we had sacked the year before, put up a more respectable defence and voted against the resolution to remove Chen. It didn’t matter: we had a majority and Chen had already resigned, so there wasn’t much they could do.

  We called a meeting of the middle management staff and Chen went through the agreed face-saving formula. He said that he had chosen to remain as the leader of the Chinese company and had resigned from the joint venture.

  After the meeting broke up, Chen and I stayed in the room alone. I tried to persuade him not to fight. ‘Old Shi came back at us after we had fired him and look what happened there. Two years of legal fights and damaged reputations, all for nothing.’ He just mumbled that we’d made a mistake. Just then the office manager came in with the news that the file store was locked and that we had grabbed the chops. Chen gave me a wounded look. I just shrugged. There wasn’t much else I could do.

  Straight after the meeting, I went off to lunch with Wang Ping. He was a director in the Machinery Bureau of the Jingzhou Municipal Government. I had met him at the time we did the joint venture at some baijiu dinner. He had stuck in my mind as one of Mayor Huang’s few rivals in the whole of China for consumption of alcohol. Affably useless as always, he was much more interested in getting half a bottle of baijiu down me than in listening to the story about Chen, and he repeatedly interrupted with toasts. I plugged on anyway and he eventually came up with the throwaway remark that it was really up to the Board to decide what to do – and why didn’t I have some more bean curd? I left feeling thick-headed.

  Back at the factory, everything seemed normal. Chen was nowhere to be seen. Cao Ping told me that as he was pasting up one of the notices an old factory worker had said gai zao zuo – ‘It should have been earlier’ – as he read the notice. I guessed that Chen was probably licking his wounds in private, so we said goodbye to Hou and drove off to Wuhan for dinner with the Provincial Vice-Governor.

  As I drifted off into an uncomfortable sleep, with baijiu in my veins and a pounding in my head, the familiar flat-lands flashed past outside. As I dozed fitfully I felt pleased with the day and confident that we’d rescued our investment in the factory.

  The weekend was quiet. No news from Hubei was good news, I thought. On the following Monday, I flew to Shanghai. We had a visiting Japanese delegation from a company that might be interested in selling us technology for piston rings. I was at lunch when a phone call came in to Li Wei. He looked worried but said nothing.

  As we left, Li Wei drew me into a corner and told me that there was some trouble at the factory. Chen Haiping had arrived there as usual in the morning and a conversation between him and Zeng had turned nasty. Apparently they had exchanged insults loudly at the factory gates and had attracted a large crowd of onlookers outside the office building. Chen had been furious and had sent a letter to the Provincial Government complaining that he had been insulted. Like Shi, he was a People’s Deputy and he sent a formal demand that a team should come down from the Provincial Government in Wuhan to investigate.

  Apparently a similar confrontation had occurred after lunch. The two men had been screaming insults into each other’s faces when Chen had suddenly turned green and collapsed. He had been carried into the office building. Hou became seriously rattled when efforts to revive him failed. Chen was rushed into hospital where he had been declared critically ill and put into intensive care.

  The sight of Chen being carried out of the office building and the news that he was seriously ill caused a riot. The factory was a tinderbox after Chen’s sacking, with rival factions forming to support or oppose the decision. When the news spread, a huge surge of rage swept through the factory and about a hundred furious workers surrounded the office building, baying for blood. Hou and his team were still trapped inside. I heard later that they had been in a third-floor office when a full bottle of beer crashed through the window and exploded on the wall next to Cao’s head.

  Zeng and Hou had been separated and no one knew where they were. The others were bundled into the Factory Workers Union Building where Ma Xiatong, one of Chen’s assistants, leapt onto a table and, in front of a crowd of excited workers, delivered an impassioned speech saying that, ‘The factory belongs to the workers who built it with their bitter tears and blood.’ He urged the crowd to seize control and kick out the foreigners. Desperate calls to the police and local government met with no reply. The workers were trying to break down the heavy doors of the office building that had been locked from the inside. I gave instructions for the office in Beijing to try to contact the government and boarded the plane back to Beijing in a state of great agitation.

  In the two hours that I was out of contact, the situation stabilized. Wang Ping had eventually arrived. The Government was trying to calm down the workers. I hoped that at least this remarkably witless man would bore them all into a trance – as he would if his conversation over the baijiu was anything to go by. I eventually got through to Hou and his small voice came over the line. He told me that there was no immediate threat but that there were still fifty workers outside who were demanding that he hand over the chops. I said immediately, ‘There’s no way we’re doing that otherwise we’ll lose everything. You know that you can’t get at the bank accounts without the chops, so you won’t be able to run the factory.’ Inwardly I was confused. It seemed odd that workers would be demanding the chops. I was surprised that they had realized their full significance.

  Over the next hours there were many conversations back and forth. Hou was clearly very rattled. I told him just to sit down and do nothing. He wouldn’t come to any harm with Wang Ping there so he should just wait until it was safe to go back to the hotel. He was clearly wavering so I tried to be calmly reassuring but as the evening wore on he became frightened out of his wits.

  The conversation went round and round. ‘Think this through. Just sit there and do nothing.’ I said. ‘The workers won’t attack you with a government official in the room. You know that if we lose the chops we can’t manage the business and we’ll be finished. Just sit there and do nothing. I’ll come down first thing in the morning. Just sit there and wait.’ And so on long into the night.

  Matters were eventually taken out of my hands when a miserable Hou called and told me that he was going to hand over the chops. I had one final go at dissuading him but he just replied limply that he had no choice. I eventually persuaded him to give them to Wang Ping for safe keeping rather than hand them over to the workers. He said that he’d see what he could do. I put the receiver down at three in the morning and suddenly snapped.

  I threw the phone against the wall and screamed ‘Shit!’

  The news that awaited me in the office the next morning was even worse. Hou had been followed back to the hotel and his nerve had broken completely. He told the team to pack their bags and run. They were now on the plane back to Beijing.

  I couldn’t believe it! Handing over the chops was one thing but abandoning the post meant that we were completely lost. We now had no one at the joint venture and no one that I could send there. The workers knew that all they had to do was throw a few beer bottles around and the next lot would run as well.

  I knew that all the other factory directors were watching events closely. I had to stop the rot otherwise the team might c
ollapse entirely so when Hou arrived, I called him into my office and sacked him. I told the others we were going back in and we got on a plane for Hubei.

  When we arrived in Jingzhou, Li Wei went to the factory and Ai Jian to the hospital. They both came back worried. Li Wei had managed to negotiate his way in through the factory gates and had met with Chen’s deputy, Old Zhou. But it was soon obvious that Old Zhou was not in control. Halfway through the meeting, there was loud banging on the meeting-room door. It was locked from the inside but Zhou, obviously frightened himself, had taken some time to persuade the workers to go away. Ai Jian came back from the hospital with a couple of bruises. He had gone to ask after Chen but a large crowd had barred him from the room. There had been a scuffle and he had been kicked out of the hospital.

  The next day we asked for a meeting with the Chinese partner. Old Zhou and Qiu, the old accountant, came over to the hotel. They said it was too dangerous to go to the factory. They looked ashen and frightened, but they were absolutely adamant that we should declare the board resolutions invalid and that Chen should go back.

  Li Wei guessed from their anxiety that when we had dismissed Chen we had destabilized the loose coalitions within the Chinese partner. If they had been united, he would have expected them to be angry rather than worried. He figured that with Chen absent and ill in hospital, no one was really in control and the prospect of serious unrest had terrified the other Chinese directors. I tried to use this as a tactic to get them to work together with us to stabilize the situation, but they refused and after a call came in to Old Zhou’s cellphone the meeting ended abruptly.