Mr. China Page 22

  Two hours later a fax arrived in Beijing demanding that we retract the board resolution and ‘accept responsibility for the economic damage caused by the abnormal situation.’ I had it faxed on down to me. It was signed by Chen Haijing. The signature was written in clear, bold characters. It did not look like the signature of a man who was critically ill. We decided to call the Government.

  We trooped in to see the Deputy Mayor of Jingzhou in charge of industry. The meeting was in the new Government building opposite Factory Number Two. As I arrived, I noticed that a large crowd had broken into the ground-floor reception. There was complete chaos, with a scrum of people shouting and crying. I managed to figure out from the protests that a local state-owned business had collapsed. An old woman was howling that with the factory gone, there was ‘no rice to eat’ and that all her ‘family had to run to outside places to look for work.’ Several government officials were patiently listening to the complaints, trying to calm down the workers, asking them to go home and promising to report to the Party Secretary. We managed to get through the melee and I clambered up the stairs wondering how the hell we’d get any attention with that fracas going on downstairs.

  Deputy Mayor Shang listened to our complaints and gave us the standard line that he would deal with the case in accordance with Chinese law. Old Zhou was there but he didn’t say much. After the meeting closed we tried to leave the office but the workers were still milling about in reception, so we were shown out of a side door and went back to the hotel to wait.

  There was absolutely no response. I was in Jingzhou for three weeks. Every day, we made calls to the Government but there was silence. Every day we sent faxes to the Chinese partner but there was no response. I couldn’t even persuade Wang Ping to share a bottle of baijiu with me. After Hou’s flight we were on the outside; Chen could safely ignore us. Just like at Ningshan, we’d blown it after a good start. Once again, we were engaged in protracted struggle on enemy ground. But now it was even worse. We couldn’t get into the factory this time so we were on the outside looking in. The only cause for hope was that Hou had handed the chops to Wang Ping prior to his flight. Without the chops, Chen could not operate the bank accounts, so he couldn’t make any payments. The business would slowly bleed to death. There was no alternative but to sit out a protracted siege until he was forced to deal with us.

  I was genuinely surprised by the severity of the Chinese reaction. Sure, Chen was bound to have been furious when we’d kicked him out. But there was something of a pantomime about the dramatic illness, the immediate diagnosis of a critical condition, the worker’s uprising and the flying beer bottles. It all seemed a little far-fetched to me. Something was missing; we hadn’t found all the pieces of the jigsaw and something in the puzzle was eluding me.

  Every day for those three weeks I walked the full circumference of the city on the little path between the walls and the moat, wracking my brains for a plan. A rhythm settled in as I tramped the path each day, waiting for the call from the local Government, hoping for some news of Chen. But there was silence as I walked. Over time, the sights of Jingzhou became routine and ordinary: the young boys climbing thirty feet to the top of the walls, pulling themselves up with their fingers gripping the cracks in the ancient brickwork; the damp odour and green moss under the gateways; the boats moving slowly and silently through the mist on the moats; the falling leaves and the fog; the baskets of persimmon in the orchards on the opposite bank. Seven miles every afternoon, racking my brains for a plan.

  After we had been expelled from the factory there was almost no news of what was going on inside. But there were ominous signs. Chen had not reappeared and he remained in his hospital bed. But it seemed that he was controlling events from behind the scenes. There were rumours of a purge where anyone suspected of cooperating with us had been fired or demoted. I remember that one day, during one of my long walks around the moat, I received a call from someone in the accounts office. Little Dong was suspected of leaking information to us. She explained in a voice shaking with rage that she was a university graduate but that she had been reassigned from the finance department to machine maintenance. She had been moved permanently to a filthy old workshop at the back of the factory. She was given a toolbox and a huge spanner and told to repair two enormous old metal presses. We eventually found her a job at another of our factories and she went off to Shanxi a month later.

  It was really Zeng’s persistence that gave us our chance – that, and a bit of luck. Zeng had noticed that the serial number on one of the joint venture’s land certificates didn’t match the number on a building certificate that had been issued some years earlier. It all seemed a little esoteric to me, so I ignored him at first but he was like the terrier that wouldn’t let go. I became irritated by his constant harping on the issue and told him to drop it. But he didn’t.

  Gradually I began to have my doubts as well. Land certificates are important in China because they are taken as conclusive proof of title to the land. Most importantly, the certificate can be used as collateral to raise loans from Chinese banks.

  My suspicions deepened after another meeting with Old Zhou. Incredibly, he left the handwritten notes that he had used to prepare for the meeting on the table after he left. There, among the mostly indecipherable scribbles, at the bottom of the second page was a reference to some transferred land certificates. Before Old Zhou came back we rushed to the next room where there was a photocopier. He returned puce in the face and out of breath, grabbed his notes and walked off, fuming.

  It looked as though we might have found something that we could use to put pressure on Chen. But to uncover the truth we needed someone on the inside, someone who would be willing to ferret out documents from within the Government. I put a call through to the General.

  Lawyer Xie had been a friend of the General for many years and readily agreed to help. He was in Changsha when we called him but said that he would drive over to see us. Changsha lies in Hunan Province to the south, some four hundred miles away from Jingzhou, and the roads were terrible. Xie arrived after sixteen hours in a taxi. Once he’d showered and eaten we looked through the documents together. We had taken copies of the original certificates at the time that we did the joint venture so I had them faxed down from Beijing. We could see that the serial numbers had been changed and didn’t match, and Lawyer Xie was as puzzled as I was. Something was wrong, but the only way to unravel the mystery was to go to the Land Bureau.

  Lawyer Xie spent hours on the phone with his contacts in Wuhan, the provincial capital. He eventually found the right person who agreed to try to arrange for him to have a private meeting with a low-level Land Bureau official who might be able to provide some clues. A call was made and Lawyer Xie set off.

  There didn’t seem much point in hanging around in the hotel so I went off for a walk around the city walls. I waited anxiously for a call on my mobile but I walked the whole distance without receiving any news. I was much too agitated to relax, so I went round again. When I finally got back to the hotel, it was past dusk. Lawyer Xie had just arrived back, carrying a bundle of photocopied documents wrapped up in brown paper. The copies showed that a large piece of land that was originally owned by our joint venture had been transferred out to the Chinese partner. There were copies of the old certificates in our name with a red chop that read ‘cancelled’ stamped across the face, a transfer document signed by Chen, and a new land certificate in the name of the Chinese partner.

  The story was out. I saw why Chen had been so desperate. When he had tried to take his company to the Shanghai stock market, he realized that it didn’t have sufficient assets. Chen had never intended to resign from the Chinese partner but was playing for time. When he discovered that the assets were insufficient for a listing, he came up with an ingenious solution. He transferred four million dollars’ worth of land out of our joint venture back to the Chinese company, thereby neatly solving the assets requirement and netting a huge gain. Chen had been caught
red-handed in a case that involved a huge amount of money. I thought that the Government would now have no option but to intervene on our behalf.

  However, requests for a meeting with the Government still came to nothing. I became more and more confused and frustrated. Every official we talked to made the same excuse: they had important meetings and they were too busy to get involved. So I was almost relieved when at last we received a request from the Factory Workers Union for a meeting. I guessed that Chen might be using the Union as a cover for serious negotiations. Avoiding direct contact might be a way of saving face. Li Wei was sceptical, but I thought that whatever happened at the meeting it would be a good opportunity for us to get information.

  The Union officials came to the little meeting-room in the hotel just behind reception. They opened by saying that they were very upset that they hadn’t been consulted about the change in management. I said that I was sorry if I had offended them, but that it was really the job of the Chinese partner to keep them updated. I thought to myself that it was probably an opening ruse to put me at a disadvantage. It was a standard tactic to start a meeting by trying to capture the high moral ground prior to making a concession.

  The discussions continued in a rather directionless fashion for about half an hour when I noticed suddenly – and uneasily – that there were now about thirteen people on the other side of the table whereas at the start there had only been six. One of the newcomers became quite aggressive and kept interrupting in a harsh croaky voice that what we had done was ‘fei fa, wei fa; fei fa, wei fa’ – ‘illegal and invalid; illegal and invalid.’ He was being deliberately provocative so I responded aggressively in English and when it was translated there was a storm of protest from the other side, with the workers standing up and shouting over the table and shaking their fists in my face. By this time several more workers had squeezed into the room so I got up to leave, only to find that my exit was blocked. I could see through the door that there were about another sixty workers in the reception hall, milling around and in a state of some anticipation. My heart sank as I realized that I had so innocently fallen into a trap.

  We were held for about nine hours in the tiny room. It had space for a meeting of maybe ten people; the only window had bars across it. At one point there were more than forty screaming workers pressed into the tiny space. One of the original six had been trying to get me to sign a piece of paper that overturned the board resolution. I glanced at the paper. It read, in badly typed English:

  The 29 October event, an illegal activity under Foreign partner’s elaborate plot, which snatched the Chinese partner’s management right under the contract by way of swindle and compulsion, disrupted the normal operating system, and the Foreign partner should take the whole responsibility

  I didn’t get any further. I was amazed that he seemed to think that I might actually sign it. My instinct was to tell him to shove it up his nose, but surrounded by workers baying for blood I opted for the less heroic option of stubborn silence. The worker who was pressing me to sign the document was scruffily dressed and smoked heavily. He wore a blue cap pulled over his forehead. He seemed unusually confident and when someone shouted from the back of the scrum that, under Chinese Law, the Chinese side should appoint the Chairman of any joint venture, he responded immediately that the recent Chinese Company Law had changed the regulations. I realized that this ‘worker’ was no worker at all. He was a local lawyer in factory uniform that the Chinese partner had drafted in to try to get me to revoke Chen’s dismissal with a letter that would stick.

  Throughout the nine hours of shouting and fist-shaking, I didn’t have much time to think. My nerves were ragged and my head was aching, but I was only seriously rattled once when a couple of workers came in, their faces red. They had obviously been drinking heavily and stood in the doorway, swaying gently. Even the Union leader seemed worried at that point and I just prayed that no one would do anything stupid and that there were no knives about. I clung to the hopes that most of the workers were just play-acting and curious about the foreigner.

  As the time rolled on, I became sure that Chen had drafted them in to put pressure on me. But there was no way that I was going to sign the document so we just sat there. I could see that, with one or two exceptions, the workers weren’t bad people. Towards the end of the afternoon they started to get bored, so I started chatting with one of the workers during a lull in the protests. He responded amicably enough until he remembered where he was and snapped back into mock aggression.

  Li Wei was masterful. He just talked the workers out: talked and talked and talked, in the same circuitous rambling fashion, never getting to the point and exhausting them on the way. In the end, they got bored with it and by early evening they were hungry. They started to drift off.

  I finally got out in the early evening and realized suddenly how exhausted I was. It had been a very unpleasant experience. As I walked up the stairs back to my room, I glanced through a door into one of the many private dining rooms in the hotel. Seated at the head of the table, face sweating and reddened with alcohol, stuffing local freshwater crabs into his mouth, was Mayor Shang. The man who’d promised to sort out the mess had been carousing upstairs with his cronies while his foreign investors were held hostage in a room below.

  After seeing Mayor Shang upstairs in the hotel, I had almost given up hope of getting any help from the Government but two days later Li Wei came in with the news that the Party Secretary of Jingzhou, Liu Heji, was having dinner in a private room in the hotel. I put on a suit and went downstairs. We sat outside the Secretary’s room and waited. Shortly afterwards Secretary Liu’s office manager came out. I was obviously causing embarrassment inside so he asked what I wanted. ‘Five minutes with the Party Secretary’ was my reply and after a brief disappearance the office manager came back with the message that Secretary Liu would meet us after dinner.

  Liu Heji was the Prefectural Party Secretary. It was a position of considerable power within the Chinese hierarchy and several rungs higher than Secretary Wu in Ningguo, which was just a small municipality. Jingzhou Prefecture, which included the towns of Jingzhou and Shashi plus the surrounding counties, had a population approaching ten million. Secretary Liu, unusually, had been in his position for at least five years, which was ample time for him to have consolidated his position in the area. Although it was usual for officials to be rotated regularly from place to place, somehow Secretary Liu had managed to stay put.

  He was a small, neat man who initially gave little away in his words or expressions. I remember being surprised that he was wearing a tweed jacket more appropriate for an English country squire than for a Chinese Party Secretary. We met in the little meeting-room where I had so recently been trapped by the workers. It was a short discussion. I used the deliberately vague language of Chinese officials. Li Wei had suggested that I should embed the key sentence concerning the stolen land in among other remarks and use the ambiguous expression zichan guanli queshi you wenti: ‘the asset management indeed has problems.’

  I could gauge from his expression that Secretary Liu knew exactly what I meant. He replied, equally vaguely, shi chu you yin: ‘when something happens there is a reason’ and told me to wait for a week. It was a classic exchange with a Chinese official. They go to great lengths to avoid any directness that might lead to confrontation and use an extreme form of vagueness, pregnant with hidden meaning. Secretary Liu’s remark said everything and nothing all at the same time.

  He ended the meeting and told me that he would instruct the Government to find out what had been going on.

  Exhausted, bored and rapidly gaining weight after weeks of sitting around in Jingzhou, we returned to Beijing. I thought we should give Secretary Liu some time to clarify the facts and come up with a solution to the land but these illusions where broken when a couple of days later Li Wei came into my office and told me that three court officials had arrived from Jingzhou. They were looking for me. I called Lawyer Xie and he told
me that I should meet with them but that I should not sign anything. He would come over immediately.

  The court officials were stiff and formal and I tried to relax the atmosphere with small talk. The leader of the group, a woman, wore a green uniform with huge gold epaulettes and a large peaked hat with badges that looked decidedly military. She got straight down to business. They told me that our joint venture in Hubei was owed a large amount of money by our Beijing office and that it had sued us. They had come up to Beijing to seize our assets as security and they had already frozen our bank accounts. I couldn’t understand what had happened. The court officials seemed to be telling me that we had sued ourselves and frozen our own assets. How could the joint venture sue its controlling partner? I looked at the writs and slowly the picture came into focus.

  The joint venture did business with a company whose name, when translated into Chinese, was similar to ours. That company did owe the joint venture some money so Chen had found our bank details in Beijing and filed a claim in the Jingzhou Intermediary People’s Court freezing all our assets in China. This was madness: any claim to the Court had to be chopped by the company seal. Hou had handed all the chops over to Wang Ping at the Machinery Bureau and when I compared the chop on the court papers to the original on file we saw that it was a different chop. In China, using a false chop is a criminal offence.

  I could see that the fight was beginning to paralyse the whole of our operation, so we put a call through to the General.

  The Chinese press, like that of any other country, wields enormous power. Mao regularly used it to attack his opponents within the Government as well as outside. The Government still controls the newspapers but it has cautiously allowed wider reporting in certain areas particularly in exposing corruption or wrong doing by mid-level officials. The press has almost been used as an informal police force by the Central Government in its campaigns to root out corruption. But it a dangerous weapon for the journalists concerned; if they attacked an official and failed to bring him down, the journalist would be finished.