Yang Hua, a Bag Minder at the Zoo Market, and His 38 Years in Beijing

A personal life caught in the crosswinds of national policy.

350,000 square meters, 12 wholesale markets, more than 3,200 stalls at its peak, 9,700 people employed directly, more than 100,000 visitors a day, annual turnover above 20 billion yuan — this was the Beijing Zoo Wholesale Market, once the largest garment wholesale market in northern China.

The long goodbye took 1,052 days. On January 11, 2015, Tianhao Cheng became the first market to close. On November 30, 2017, Dongding Market would shut its doors — and the Zoo Market era would end.

We set down the story of one of its people.

[The following is an update from the afternoon of November 29.]

Dongding Garment Wholesale Market was packed. By noon, lunchtime already, a glance inside still showed wall-to-wall people. It had been this way for days.

Some customers sat on the floor to rest, dozing for a few minutes at a time, their newly bought goods beside them — usually large black plastic bags, one after another for those who had bought a lot.

Some shops had already shut. Inside a store called Carlo, the whole staff was packing merchandise, parcels stacked across the floor. They were moving to garment markets on Beijing's outskirts to keep trading, and the staff would follow. Tonight. By tomorrow this Dongding shop would not open.

Many customers had the same thought: come tomorrow, far fewer stalls would be open, and there would be less to buy.

A lot of the original traders had already left. On November 13, Dongding had issued a notice fixing its final closing date. In the two weeks since, many customers had come back several times. Quite a few noticed that the people selling now were different merchants — vendors who had foreseen the crowds of Dongding's last days and rented stalls just to clear stock.

Li Huaqiang (a pseudonym) was one of them. He had held a stall at the Tianhe Baima Garment Wholesale Market next to Dongding, which had closed just over two weeks earlier. Within days of that closure he came to Dongding and rented a stall — the previous tenant had already found somewhere to go and left early. Li Huaqiang took the shop for 3,000 yuan a day, hoping to move a little more stock before Dongding closed. He had not dared rent a ground-floor shop, where the rate ran to 6,000 yuan a day — higher cost, with no guarantee of better sales.

So while the rented shop sold goods, he stood at the elevator entrance to sell more himself. He was selling winter clothing — stock he had bought in spring and summer — but just as the season for winter clothes was getting going, Tianhe Baima closed, and it all piled up.

He did not know whether he would stay in Beijing. "Maybe go back home to Fujian. But if I go back, I certainly won't be doing this kind of business anymore."

This was Beijing. November 29, 2017.

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Dongding Market closure timeline (Sources: Beijing Evening News, 21st Century Business Herald)

January 2015 — Tianhao Cheng Market

July 2015 — Shishang Tianli Wholesale City

September 2015 — Tebie Te Shoe City

November 2015 — Xinde Times Mall

December 31, 2015 — Julong Foreign Trade Mall; Huitong Yongyuan Market

February 4, 2016 — Jinkaili De Market

July 11, 2017 — Wanrong Tiandi Market

July 30, 2017 — Zhonghe Market

October 6, 2017 — Shiji Tianle Market

November 13, 2017 — Tianhe Baima Mall

November 30, 2017 — Dongding Market

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[The following is the original article.]

This year, Yang Hua's life has ridden the gusts of national policy.

He left Beijing, where he had lived for 38 years, and went home. Home was no longer what it had been either. He used to introduce himself as a native of Xiong County in Hebei, and would have to spend a while explaining by way of places like Baoding or Baiyangdian. Now he need only say "Xiong'an."

On April 1, 2017, China announced it would develop the Xiong'an New Area. That name, out of nowhere, means the house Yang Hua bought for 300,000 yuan five years ago has now drawn an offer of 5 million.

Less than half a year earlier, on November 1, 2016, Beijing announced it would move non-capital functions out of the city. Under the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Coordinated Development Plan, "low-end" wholesale markets and the like were to be relocated out of the capital. That policy stripped away the foothold he had relied on to make a living in Beijing.

Now he and his wife, Luo Hongxia, live in that apartment — its paper value suddenly more than ten times what it was — with nothing to do.

On November 15, I went home with Luo Hongxia. We rode the elevator up and pressed the button for the 12th floor. At the door, Luo Hongxia turned her key but could not get it open. After a moment a middle-aged woman opened the door, showing half of herself: "Whose door do you think you're opening?!" We had gotten off on the wrong floor — this was the 10th.

Change, and having nothing to do: that kind of disorientation surfaces now and then.

The age problem of Yang Hua, bag minder at the Zoo Market

Yang Hua is from Xiong County in Hebei. Luo Hongxia is from Henan. They met and married in Beijing more than twenty years ago. In 1991 they had a son, and the family lived in Beijing. Yang Hua speaks Hebei dialect, Luo Hongxia Henan dialect, their son Beijing dialect.

After marrying into Xiong County, counting the time she spent there to give birth and recover, Luo Hongxia had been in Xiong County less than six months in all. Baiyangdian, the famous wetland right beside the county, she went to see for the first time only on this trip back.

Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia worked at the Shiji Tianle Garment Wholesale Market in Beijing, minding and forwarding goods for traders. The market was part of the Zoo garment wholesale cluster. Merchants buying in bulk needed somewhere to store their purchases. Storing a parcel cost 20 yuan; forwarding one cost another 10. Every morning Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia left home at four or five and came back at seven or eight in the evening. Many people did this work; Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia were one such household.

On October 6, Shiji Tianle was shut down. The government counted garment wholesale markets as a "low-end" industry, a non-capital function to be moved out of Beijing. Shiji Tianle was the tenth garment market in the cluster to close; after it shut, only Dongding and Tianhe Baima were left.

On November 13, Tianhe Baima closed. The last to go was Dongding: in mid-November, Dongding — first told it would close on December 25 — issued a new notice moving the date up to November 30.

Yang Hua had a friend from Heze in Shandong. After Shiji Tianle closed, the friend went to Dongding to keep minding bags, but with only Dongding left he could now mind just four or five bags a day. Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia ran the numbers: at that rate you were only scraping by — with rent to pay and meals to buy, if you didn't clear 100-some yuan a day you were working for nothing.

On October 8, just two days after Shiji Tianle closed — and while the expressways were toll-free over the National Day holiday — Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia hired a vehicle, hauled everything they owned in Beijing back to Xiong County, and moved into the apartment.

Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia had moved house eight times in Beijing. They had always lived in single-story dwellings. For their last two or three years in Beijing they rented a single-story house outside the West Fourth Ring Road — but then the landlord's divorce left the landlord with nowhere to live, and the house was taken back. Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia moved to Wukongqiao and spent their final two months in Beijing there.

The Wukongqiao house stood next to the railway tracks, "demolish" painted on the walls. Beijing had many such compounds — rows of brick rooms, around a hundred to a compound, built specifically to rent. This compound had stopped taking new tenants back in March, again because of the relocation policy, and the residents had all left. Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia rented a room there for 700 yuan a month, paid monthly. Four or five other households lived there too. The "landlord" had said up front: the house could be demolished at any time; whenever that came, they would leave; no refund on unused rent.

Word of the relocation had come out the year before, and Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia had long since decided to return to Xiong County. Their identity cards listed them as only in their early fifties, but in fact both were in their sixties. When their cards were registered, neither was home, and someone else had written down a random age for them. It cut into their pensions. They had gone to the local police station about it and were told it could not be changed. Now it had become a worry. They had even had the thought that the only way to fix it might be to break the law — because once you broke the law, the authorities would dig into your records. But they knew, too, that they could never do such a thing.

After the new area was set up, the matter grew harder still. Household registrations in the counties the new area covers had been frozen. There was still no firm word on demolition compensation or on how the new area would be planned. The one thing that was certain was something else: earth burial would no longer be allowed. Here, the old, strict customs of burial in the ground no longer counted. Yang Hua told his son: when his time came, just cremate him, and feel free to tip the ashes into a rubbish bin.

The new home Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia had moved into was not yet fully furnished. In the living room stood a single iron bed, padded with a large woven sack and an old overcoat laid over it for a sofa. An iron filing cabinet served as the TV stand, a television of twenty-some inches resting on top.

Yang Hua designed the new home himself. Its most striking feature was four curio shelves recessed into the walls, filled with ornaments and a few bottles of baijiu.

Sitting in the living room, the other large pieces in view were a plain folding table in the dining area and, beside the television, a satellite dish — what they called the "big pot." In Beijing they had always lived in single-story dwellings and could use the big dish. But after moving into the apartment in Xiong County, they did not dare hang it on the outside wall for fear it would fall and hurt someone. For now they had switched to a small receiver mounted outside. The big one just sat in the living room.

The moment he was home, Yang Hua would walk visitors back and forth between the south and north windows to look out, down at the houses people had built for themselves. "One floor, 11 units; one building, 3 floors; the two buildings together, 68 units — all privately owned. And that's not even big. In our village there's one with 140 units, 20 to a floor, seven floors high." The bus station Xiong County uses now is called the new station, though it was actually built more than ten years ago. But what "new" means was plainly about to change. People talked, anxious and excited at once, about all the great changes that might come. Everyone knew what this was called: "a plan for a thousand years." On the expressway into Xiong'an, a baijiu brand called Qiannian Xiong'an — "Xiong'an for a Thousand Years" — had claimed a tall billboard.

We had interviewed Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia twice before, in August and September, at Shiji Tianle in Beijing. Back then Yang Hua rarely spoke and rarely had a moment to stand still. He always stood with a grave expression, a hand cart beside him, ready to work at any moment.

But at home in Xiong County, Yang Hua had more to say. He talked about the past, telling one episode after another. Luo Hongxia would occasionally add something — sometimes a necessary fact, sometimes a correction or a doubt, on the important principle of "being accurate." But so much time had passed that the episodes stayed fragmentary and blurred.

Yang Hua, an honest man, in a government compound

Yang Hua's father died young. His mother raised six children, all crammed into a room and a half. Life ran in cycles of borrowing grain and paying it back: borrow a jin, pay back one and a half, then borrow again. At sixteen, Yang Hua left home to find a living. He started out driving horse carts for the production brigade — first locally, then in Tianjin, hauling cotton to a textile mill. He also helped put up housing there for a textile-machinery plant.

Yang Hua can fall asleep the moment his head touches the pillow. He might be talking to you one second and out cold ten seconds later. It is a habit he formed driving the cart. The day had its own work; at night he had to feed the horse; there was only a sliver of time to sleep, and he had to drop off the instant he lay down.

Later Yang Hua dealt in lard, buying it in Beijing and carrying it by bicycle to sell in Hebei and Shandong. He bought at 0.72 yuan and sold at 1.78, or 1.56. After his costs and his food, he barely cleared anything — just enough to feed himself.

"In the seventies, leaving home still meant registering at the police station — you had to put down how many days you'd be in Beijing. This would have been 1979, 1980. A stall cost 0.30 yuan a day to rent. The government was encouraging it back then — encouraging out-of-towners to come to Beijing. Otherwise how would Beijing have gotten so rich? If you don't pay tax, if you don't pay tax, how do they put up the buildings? Back then everyone was — invited in. Now everyone's being — chased out."

Thirty-eight years ago, Yang Hua was "invited" to Beijing.

He started at Qinghe, winding wire coils for a news agency to use in receiving signals. Then, still at Qinghe, in Beijing's northern outskirts — a place so bleak it was known as Beijing's "Great Northern Wilderness" — he raised fish and chickens. For that he even did two months of fish-farming training in Haidian.

In winter there was no fish to raise, so no workers were needed. Yang Hua went to work at Great Wall Lubricants, stoking the boiler. But in summer the boiler wasn't needed, so he went to Jimenqiao to work in construction. When winter stopped the construction, he went back to stoking the boiler.

A friend's wife worked at the Fifth Urban Construction Company. She got him a job helping renovate the family compound of State Council Reception House No. 2. They were laborers — pushing barrows of sand to tip into the cement mixer. They worked day and night shifts, and when the men were worn down with exhaustion, someone would shout: "Don't fall asleep! Stay awake! Fall asleep and you'll drop off and die!"

That was 1985. Among his fellow workers was a kid from Sichuan, seventeen or eighteen. Yang Hua said the boy was terrified — he would tremble at the sound of the machinery.

Once the building was done, Yang Hua went to cook at a guesthouse. Partway through, the guesthouse put him in charge of a renovation crew for a while. He tried many ways to manage them, but the result he remembers most clearly is that the tough ones ended up with the tough ones and the meek with the meek — and in the end the tough ones bullied the meek.

While he was cooking at the guesthouse, the National Price Bureau took him on to run its canteen. The pay was about the same, but someone told him government offices had better benefits. So Yang Hua went to cook at the National Price Bureau. Its deputy director then was a man named Ma Kai, now a Vice Premier of the State Council.

It was during this cooking job that he came to know Luo Hongxia.

Luo Hongxia had come to Beijing in 1988, working first at a neighborhood nursery, looking after the children. There were a dozen or twenty of them. She made their meals, felt their foreheads for fever during the afternoon nap, and at the end of the day got the children dressed and tidy for their parents to collect.

After meeting Yang Hua and marrying him, Luo Hongxia gave birth to their son in 1991. Once the boy was past two, she went back to work. He started kindergarten on September 1; on September 2, Luo Hongxia started at the National Price Publishing House, sending the publisher's books out to railway stations around Beijing.

Each night several tonnes of books had to be loaded. She packed them first — 25-kilogram bundles, one in each hand — and carried them onto the trains. She also had to go pay the freight. Her supervisor would hand her more than 10,000 yuan in cash, and she would thread through the railway station with the money wrapped in her hands to make the payments. Later they switched to cheques.

At the publishing house, Luo Hongxia's wages started at 7 yuan a day. "Later a demobilized officer from the Zhongnanhai Guard Regiment transferred in to head a department at the price publishing bureau. His wife came to work at the publishing house, and on her coattails our wages rose to 8 yuan a day. Later they went up again to 15."

When they talked about the past, the odd shadowy bigwig would flicker through the story.

"One year, books on 'accountancy,' 'people's insurance,' and 'a comprehensive guide to food' were selling like mad — we were forever shipping them out. Around 1994 or 1995 there was also a Comprehensive Guide to Real Estate that sold extremely well. And one set of books that was sent to Zhongnanhai — several sets, probably five — one per person. One set each to all the provincial liaison offices in Beijing. I can't remember the title anymore."

On the iron filing cabinet in the new Xiong County home — the one used as a TV stand — delivery slips from the publishing house are pasted up. Luo Hongxia's son had played with them as a child, taking them home from her and sticking them on the cabinet.

After the child was born, the family lived in the Price Bureau compound. One evening, after hours, a woman from the work unit came to buy steamed buns. She and Yang Hua were from the same hometown, and on the strength of that he refused to sell them to her. He said: "We're from the same place. If I charge you, people will say I didn't. If I don't charge you, people will still say I didn't. I'm not selling you these buns."

The woman was furious and made a scene, and word reached everyone at the work unit. The leaders decided Yang Hua was honest and began putting him in charge of keys and procurement. But later he gave the keys back himself. He felt that with his wife and child living in the compound, it was like a weasel in a henhouse — whether or not the weasel had eaten the chickens, everyone would say it had. To stay clear of suspicion, he handed the keys back.

The Price Bureau was at No. 2 Yuetan Bei Xiaojie. For groceries he would go to the hutong beside Exhibition Road — what is now called the Zoo area. Back then it was called Hong Kong Street, and the hutong beside it sold all manner of things.

One rainy day, Yang Hua rode a flatbed tricycle to buy groceries. A bamboo basket sat on the flatbed, the payment cheque tucked inside it. He pedaled along, all clatter and jangle, never noticing that the basket and the cheque had long since fallen off. When he realized, he turned back, skipped making dinner, lay down on the bed, and his mind went blank. There was no way he could repay that money; all he could do was pick a panicked fight with Luo Hongxia.

In the end the leadership settled it: he would repay half, the unit the other half. The leadership had a unit tricycle repaired for him, and the repair cost was set against his share of the debt.

Then the National Price Bureau was dissolved and folded into the State Planning Commission.

"It all fell apart."

That line closed the book on Yang Hua's career more than once.

Yang Hua went out to repair bicycles on the street. Luo Hongxia stayed on at the publishing house. That was 1997. One day, while Yang Hua was fixing a bike, a department head from the Price Publishing House happened to pass.

The department head said: "Old Yang, right at your own doorstep and you don't even say hello." Yang Hua replied: "I'm too ashamed to face you. Didn't feel right to say hello."

By 2003, the Price Publishing House had moved its offices to Fengtai, and Luo Hongxia's commute by bicycle alone would have taken two hours each way — too far. So not long after the SARS outbreak passed, she stopped going in. That same year, Luo Hongxia went to the Zoo Garment Wholesale Market.

She started by collecting recyclables to sell. In 2008, outside vehicles were barred from entering Beijing, and the price of recyclables fell too. Plastic bottles had once fetched 0.15 yuan each; in 2008 you could get only 0.10 for three. Cardboard boxes were priced low as well, and nobody was collecting them anymore. So Luo Hongxia switched to minding bags for people outside the market.

Yang Hua's roadside bicycle-repair trade was poor. Only in June, July, and August — hot, sunny months — could he make a little patching tyres. In other seasons there were days he couldn't even earn a few jiao pumping up tyres. Since the Zoo Garment Wholesale Market was booming by then, and Luo Hongxia could not manage the bag-minding alone, Yang Hua joined her at the Zoo to mind bags — from his fifties into his sixties, right up to 2017, when Shiji Tianle shut down.

Yang Hua, who "likes to remember all sorts of odds and ends," always has an explanation for why things are the way they are

Minding bags at the Zoo Market, even at an open-air "gap stand," still meant paying rent to the building management. At first it was 2,000 yuan a month, later rising to 3,050. In that time the city-management officers would come to levy fines — 600 yuan a tricycle, and 1,500, 2,000, or 3,000 yuan a bag. Fined and fined, paid and paid, not even a receipt to show for it — but these were basic costs. Yang Hua always kept track of the figures.

Yang Hua's son went to nursery, primary school, middle school, and high school in Beijing — every stage with temporary-residence fees, out-of-district fees, and tuition. Yang Hua said: "Senior high cost the most. An extra 30,000 yuan. I stood there with the money in my hand, pointed at an Alto, and told my son: look — this money could buy a car."

"Whatever we earned, we handed it all to them." Yang Hua kept every tuition receipt. "A whole stack like this. I wanted to know in my heart how much we'd spent." He had even worked out what each character his son learned had cost. In first grade, say, the fees came to such-and-such; there were 160 new characters to learn that year; so each character worked out to so much. Yang Hua told his son: "If you don't study properly, the money's wasted."

On the little iron bed in the new house lay a book — Stories of Beijing's Scenic Places — that Yang Hua had been reading. He knows Beijing well. The places of Beijing, and the things that had happened there — anything he could see with his own eyes, he mostly knows about.

On a visit to Baiyangdian, Yang Hua talked about his old trips there selling lard. In summer he would circle the lake from village to village. Once he got heatstroke; he bought up every ice-lolly from a street vendor, pillowed his head on them, and only came around a long while later.

In winter the lake froze solid, and you could ride a bicycle straight out to the villages on the water. They were tiny places. Houses were cramped, land was tight. If someone needed to pass, the other person had to turn sideways to make way. But lard sold well there — the moment he arrived, people scrambled to buy.

These days Baiyangdian no longer freezes thick in winter. In the old days villagers would drive out onto the ice to cut reeds for weaving matting. Now a vehicle can't get out there, and the reeds just grow wild and unkempt. Luo Hongxia came for a look and found nothing but reeds and water. Asked whether she found it refreshing, she said, "The air is fresh, at least."

Compared with the time Yang Hua came to sell lard, he could see little change at Baiyangdian. It was a scenic area now, yet red paper "double-happiness" characters put up by villagers for a recent wedding still clung to the railings of the little bridge. Maybe because it was winter, there were almost no tourists either.

As we wandered Baiyangdian, beyond the lard, Yang Hua talked at length about the fine places of Beijing — what story went with which place, what was worth seeing. That was most of the conversation, the whole way around.

Yang Hua said: "I like to remember all sorts of odds and ends — how many people died in the Second World War before liberation, how many died in the Tangshan earthquake. I keep it all stored away. It's a kind of hobby, I suppose. I don't really understand history. My whole life I've just pushed forward, but I never got anywhere in particular."

Yang Hua's habitual cast of mind is, in truth, almost always to explain why things are the way they are. He might ask you: do you know why, on my lard trips, I used to sleep in cotton fields? Because the cotton fields were sprayed with pesticide — no mosquitoes. His way of making sense of the Beijing relocation went like this:

"The relocation is like a campaign — turning Beijing into a cultural center, driving out the people with no prospects. The big foreign-investment bosses come; you build a civilized city. These people — 'the ones with no prospects' — are useless, and also useful. The ones you really can't stand are the thieves and the robbers."

"Is collecting recyclables a bad thing? Cleaning up the environment — that's a good thing. Trade brings everyone convenience too. Go to a supermarket for your vegetables — once the street stalls are gone, eating anything becomes a hassle, an inconvenience. Never mind the rest — can you easily buy a sesame flatbread or a donkey-roll today? Go all the way to Hepingli Xijie, or to Daoxiangcun? Have you got that kind of time?"

"There are good sides and bad sides. Still, a shake-up isn't bad — for one thing, the roads were always jammed. Cars below the Santana grade should be scrapped. If you can't afford a Mercedes or an Audi, stay off the road. Aren't you the one causing the congestion? (You can't blame anyone else.) It's because you don't have the means."

"Eight buildings in the wholesale market, 2.1 billion yuan in income a day. The wholesale market makes that kind of money. And you say they have no ability?! And they're not allowed to operate?!"

"Clearing out the Zoo Market doesn't clear out one person — it clears out you, your children, your wife. The logistics companies, all those people, all of them caught up in it. Traffic jams, hard to manage, and Beijing is the country's face to the world. Never mind the beggars — even people on subsistence allowances are being pushed out."

"The sales guides who used to work in the markets — a guaranteed base of 15,000, 10,000, 8,000 yuan a month, plus commission. The market gets torn down, everyone goes home, and they can't make 100 yuan."

On the subject of contribution he went on talking, with a mix of feeling and gloom.

"I'm over 60 — I could still earn something. Right now I'm sitting here doing nothing, eating through what we've saved. The new high-tech zone — there's nothing I can do there either."

"The work we did — young Beijingers would rather live on the 1,300-yuan subsistence allowance than do it. They'd choose to stay home playing chess."

"After Jinkaili De closed, they said they'd do something else with it, but it sat empty for years and brought in nothing. Julong shut down too — nothing came of that either. But the traffic got better. Pollution, public order — those got better."

"A whole month, and not the slightest contribution. To be able to do a bit for the country — earn a little, put in a little effort — and then that money gets spent back into the country anyway. Isn't this a waste? Think how many people are out of work."

"If not for minding bags there, I couldn't have bought this apartment. Farming back home — could that have put a college student through school? There's nothing I can do now; I'm just being wasted. Can't contribute to the country, and I'm wasting myself too. Die and just get cremated."

"As long as I'm alive one more day, I ought to be doing something for this society."

In the month or so since returning to Xiong County, Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia had been eating two meals a day, and spending most of the hours between them outside, walking. After breakfast they would head out and wander until three in the afternoon before coming back. Yang Hua could cover ten li. Walking with him, Luo Hongxia would tire and sometimes just sit down and wait for him where she was.

"Well, it's all right. I can't contribute to the country anymore, but at least I'm saving on grain. When I was working at the Zoo Market, it was four buns a meal, plus rice porridge. Now I eat half — half a bun, at most one steamed roll."

(At the interviewees' request, the names Yang Hua and Luo Hongxia in this article are pseudonyms.)