A Wenzhou Man in Hainan: 29 Years of Gains and Losses | 2018 Stories ④

He always tied the success of his own life to the future of this southern city — and the city's future, in turn, depended on policy and the wider climate. The only problem: neither was something Lin Weiwen could predict.

Apart from housing prices, Haikou in early April 2018 looked no different from usual. As Chen Jia remembered it, there were no banners or slogans in the streets either — he put that down to this being an out-of-the-way place where things had always looked that way, even though the Haikou Daily had been announcing since the start of the month that the city would "build an important window for a new round of reform and opening-up," "build a model zone for Chinese tourism in the new era," and "take the international island to new heights." But the mood existed only in the newspapers and on television.

When local friends said things like — "Hainan hasn't changed in over a decade; it's always been 'hot on the outside, cold on the inside.' The news on Hainan TV is 'pumped up every day like it's been shot with adrenaline,' but when you actually get here it's the same as before. You can't see any real change" — Chen Jia disagreed. That, he thought, was just grumbling from people who couldn't leave Hainan.

Chen Jia had come precisely for the change.

Housing prices in Haikou had been rising fast since before this year's Lunar New Year. On the west coast, "the price changes almost every day," said one woman who owned property there. By April, prices had climbed from around 7,000 yuan per square meter before the holiday to 17,000.

Chen Jia had heard that a group of people from Wenzhou went to Hainan to buy new apartments as early as February. A man who manages properties on behalf of landlords in Hainan said the investors from Wenzhou were not even the biggest group in the new wave; most of the new money came from the Northeast, Shanghai and Beijing. Another set of Chen Jia's friends had driven over from Wuchuan, a county-level city in southern Guangdong just over four hours from Haikou by car.

In fact, there were banners celebrating the 30th anniversary of Hainan becoming a province and a special economic zone. A local finance worker, who asked not to be named, said they not only existed but were hard to miss. She also said that as early as July 2017, a securities-industry counterpart in Shanghai had asked her to confirm whether new preferential policies would arrive for the 30th anniversary. "The rumor was everywhere — a 'big gift package' had been prepared for Hainan."

Talk of a gift package went back to 2010, when Hainan announced it would build an international tourism island. But this April the Boao Forum for Asia's 2018 annual conference was under way in Boao, with President Xi Jinping among those attending. With the 30th anniversary falling at the same time, rumor and speculation reached white heat.

During those weeks Chen Jia had dinner with friends from the provincial housing and urban-rural development department and from newspaper offices. These well-connected people were keen to guess at the new policies, and the talk around the table ran along the same lines: Hainan might become a free-trade port, and gambling might be legalized. On the second point especially — "all men love to gamble," Chen Jia said at the table — legal gambling would keep visitors on the island longer, "bring Hainan to life," and turn it into another Las Vegas, or Macau. By 2020, Macau's GDP per capita would be the highest in the world, entirely thanks to its gaming industry.

They guessed half right. On the afternoon of April 13, with no media announcing it in advance, a conference marking 30 years since Hainan became a province and a special economic zone was held. "The central government has decided to support Hainan in building a free-trade pilot zone across the whole island, and to support Hainan in gradually exploring and steadily advancing the building of a free-trade port with Chinese characteristics."

On social media, Chen Jia called the news "a triple jump for Hainan's status." That gambling went unmentioned left him and his friends disappointed. He announced, like a spokesman for the province: "I'd say every person in Hainan wants gambling legalized."

1

Chen Jia was not simply a property speculator, nor one of the "migratory bird" buyers who became common some years ago — people who bought an apartment just to fly in for the winter, or to live there year-round after retiring.

The stretch of his life Chen Jia most likes to look back on happened in Hainan.

He remembers his first arrival in Haikou clearly: October 22, 1989. He woke that morning in the ship's cabin; the boat had been sailing for 26 hours. Dazed by the heat, he saw the city in the distance divided into three layers: "on top the coconut trees, a green strip; in the middle the beach, white; and below that the sea."

Chen Jia was born in a village outside Wenzhou. In the 1980s the roads there were bad — 12 hours by bus from the village to downtown Wenzhou. Chen Jia's "ultimate goal" then was a job in the city. What stood in his way was not the distance. Under the planned economy, the only way to transfer into a city job was for someone in the city to want to transfer back to the county so the two could swap posts, and that almost never happened.

"When young people got together back then, all we talked about was how to break out and make something of ourselves out there."

At 16, Chen Jia finished high school with no job. His father was strict, couldn't stand to see his son idle, and scolded him often; in the end he ordered Chen Jia to study medicine with a doctor in the village, but "dealing with patients every day was too boring." His cousins were all carpenters, but he was left-handed, and "all the tools were made for the right hand." Chen Jia went off to work in Henan with others from the village, and came back a year later. Passing through Shanghai, he spent 13 cents on a book about photography.

Back in the county town, Chen Jia worked at an insurance company — his monthly salary was 62.5 yuan — and photographed villagers on the side. "I wanted an easier way to make a bit of money out of it. Among the trades, photography was the best one. One photo, one yuan." He sent submissions to magazines, hoping to become a writer — "shoot for a day, write for six" — but the rejections kept coming and nothing was ever published.

Chen Jia's other strength was a sharp nose for information. In 1984 the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily ran a photograph of construction workers holding boxed lunches as they worked high on a building. Hainan then became the second region to be opened up after Shenzhen. Under the plan, from April 13, 1988, it would separate from Guangdong province and become the country's largest special economic zone, "the most open province," where the state would apply policies that were "more special, more open, more preferential."

In April 1988 Chen Jia was already talking with a few friends about going to Hainan. At worst, he had decided, he could photograph tourists at Tianya Haijiao, the "End of the Earth" scenic spot. By 1989 he was the only one still set on going. The boat from home to Guangzhou had been canceled, so he changed trains in Jinhua, rode more than 30 hours by train to Guangzhou, and took a 26-hour boat to Haikou.

Haikou was full of motorcycles modified with a sidecar bolted on, and of young people anxiously looking for work. There were so many applicants that collecting application fees was a business in itself. Chen Jia later read the line "a hundred thousand talents go down to Hainan" in a newspaper, but he believes far more than a hundred thousand outsiders gathered in Haikou that year, most of them between twenty and forty and in their prime.

Chen Jia got a job at a Hainan newspaper, and that became the turning point of his life. For the first six months he was a green but unusually hardworking photojournalist. Then he realized that photography, still a fairly novel skill at the time, made it easier for him to land advertising sponsors, and he became an ad salesman.

To see how fast real estate grew in Hainan in those years, you only need to count the property ads in the newspapers. Most of them ran in the Hainan Daily, the province's largest-circulation paper. That helped make the Hainan Daily one of the first papers to break 100 million yuan in ad sales.

Chen Jia's paper was different. Policymakers took it seriously, but its circulation was small. No one could promise how much the ads accomplished, but Chen Jia knew how to build closer relationships with his clients. "What haven't those Guangdong bosses seen? But take their photograph and they're delighted." He also organized several large events, since sponsorship fees could become extra revenue for the paper. Before long he was promoted to head of the advertising department. At a 2 percent commission, Chen Jia says, his income reached 200,000 yuan a year at its peak.

He really did live what you could call a luxurious life: smuggled Nike shoes, factory bosses and celebrities treating him as an equal, the hottest singers at Wanghailou, a Taiwanese-style song-and-dance hall in Hainan, and no need to worry about a few-hundred-yuan ticket.

Around the Lunar New Year that year, Chen Jia went back to his hometown. He was in no hurry to get home; he stayed in the county town for three days, took the largest room in the county Party committee guesthouse, and received visitors who came just to see him. Heavy snow fell at home that year, and Chen Jia stood in it in a suit, laughing up at the sky. He had bought the suit specially for a reporting trip to Zhongnanhai. He still considers that photograph his masterpiece.

2

Chen Jia's detailed memories probably run only from 1989 to 1995. After that his account starts to blur. He looked at apartments in two compounds after arriving in Haikou in April 2018, for instance, but "I've already forgotten what those compounds were called."

Sorting out Chen Jia's relationship with Haikou after 1995 is both simple and not. The simple version is that he kept leaving and coming back. The version that isn't simple has to take in his tangled feelings about the city and his expectations of it. He always tied the success of his own life to the future of this southern city — and the city's future, in turn, depended on policy and the wider climate. The only problem: neither was something Chen Jia could predict.

On December 31, 1994, a magnitude 6.1 earthquake struck the Gulf of Tonkin, between Hainan and Beihai in Guangxi. Ten days later a magnitude 6.2 earthquake hit the same spot.

"Everyone said Haikou was about to be hit by a devastating earthquake." Chen Jia remembers people comparing it with the Great Hanshin earthquake that struck Japan's Kansai region in January 1995; the seismic patterns looked very similar, and the official count put the Hanshin death toll at 6,434.

The whole island of Hainan fell into panic. Chen Jia could not pull strings to buy a plane ticket on the island, and had to go by way of Sanya to Guangzhou.

Even without the earthquake, large numbers of people were leaving Hainan around the same time. Those who went first left mostly because of housing. The central government imposed macroeconomic controls on Hainan's property prices in 1993; before that, Haikou's prices had risen that year from just over 1,000 yuan per square meter to more than 7,000, and afterwards more and more capital flowed back to cities on the mainland. It also left large numbers of unfinished buildings across the province. After 2000 these problem-ridden shells were sold off to outsiders newly arrived to buy property in Hainan, and some buyers are still tangled in ownership lawsuits today.

Although Chen Jia says he "stuck it out" and never moved his household registration back to his hometown, in 1995 he sold every property he owned in Hainan. He believed then that he was leaving Haikou only for a while and would be back soon.

3

For the next 12 years Chen Jia spent most of his time in downtown Wenzhou. This was the city he had most wanted to live and work in when he was young, and now he felt out of place there. "People looking in from outside think it's a fine place, but the platform here is small. Hainan back then was an international city, the way Shanghai is now."

Using the connections he had built in Hainan, Chen Jia opened the area's first Adidas store. When it closed after losing money month after month, he decided it had simply been too far ahead of what local shoppers were ready to spend. He had another good idea: imported furniture. Around 2000 not everyone could reach overseas suppliers, but retail was a completely new field for him, and there was the problem of cross-border shipping. After both businesses failed, Chen Jia took a contract to sell advertising for a local newspaper, and before long the contract was taken back from him.

Chen Jia felt that in this period nothing in business or work went smoothly. Comparing it, without meaning to, with his life in Hainan only deepened the misery, and he often felt weighed down.

He went back to Hainan once, in 2007. He understood by then that the era when "however big your ambition, that's how big you can go" was over, but he still believed he could be more or less what he had been.

The turn in his life never came, and Chen Jia left again in 2009.

Seen from today, though, his 2007 stint in Hainan was not a total loss. He bought two apartments: a small one across from his office, and another of just over 200 square meters, which he had rented out ever since leaving Hainan.

The apartments produced a little value in 2010. That year Hainan announced it would build an international tourism island — and Chen Jia, well informed as ever, flew back to Haikou the next day. Prices jumped. He wouldn't say what his apartments were worth, but for comparison, a 50-square-meter apartment another woman bought in Boao went from about 10,000 yuan per square meter to 30,000 in under six months.

There is not much else to tell. He went to Beijing to study, and became a shareholder in an internet company there, founded by a friend. "The money you put in is a bottomless pit. I lost interest." He sent his daughter to study in the United States, hoping she would stay. In 2012 he began working as a marketing consultant for a commercial real estate company in Chengdu. The job didn't require him to move there, only to fly there often.

Set against the "gift package" rumors of 2018, Chen Jia looks back at the "international tourism island" label and thinks it could never have brought Hainan any major change. The government put in a limited duty-free policy, and it wasn't strong enough. At the time, though, everyone in Hainan thought something big was about to happen. In the end only housing prices changed.

4

After leaving Hainan in 1995, Chen Jia never moved his household registration back home. That gave a little more weight to the announcements he made every so often that he would settle there one day. And in fact there wasn't a single year he didn't come back to Hainan — but always to see friends or stay a while, never to build anything.

Then came the pivotal moment of April 13, 2018. Chen Jia's memory blurred again: he can't remember which day in April he reached Haikou, and hasn't tried to look it up. "Either way it was before April 13, and any day is as good as another. Maybe April 9."

He does remember his flight left at 11:25 in the morning and he landed in Haikou at two in the afternoon. Before leaving he wrote on social media: "I'll bring my camera the way I did back then and wait for you in Hainan, reliving the Hainan dream. To all the friends who came to make it in Hainan in those days — see you in Hainan."

Prices had risen steadily before this, and developers and agents, expecting more room to rise, refused to sell right away, which earned them warnings of penalties. Some Lianjia staff in Sanya were told to stop handing out flyers, and forbidden to tell clients that "Hainan housing prices will go up again tomorrow." Even after the province announced a blanket purchase restriction on April 22, people still lined up overnight to sign contracts.

News of the restrictions seemed to hold prices down for a while — or at least made some people drop their plans to buy. "There just wasn't time (to decide)," Chen Jia said. The friend mentioned earlier who drove over from Wuchuan arrived too late and no longer qualified to buy.

Chen Jia asked around among his friends. One friend at the local housing and urban-rural development department advised him to wait until the purchase restrictions were close to being lifted. Another friend, an economist, told Lin Weiwen in an airport VIP lounge that the restrictions would probably be lifted early, and that buying two or three years from now made more sense.

In the end he concluded, "housing prices don't matter anymore."

"But the trade island will matter. They keep pushing it, so it must be good for something." Chen Jia held firm, and again found himself at odds with the locals, who were broadly pessimistic about it. The finance worker quoted earlier worried that the "international tourism island" story would repeat itself. People also worried, she said, about what difference the "Chinese characteristics" attached to the free port would make.

On April 19 Chen Jia left Haikou. He and his mother turned up together at Yudai Beach in Boao. She had never been to Hainan before.

Last year Chen Jia renovated the old ground-level house back home. His father had been pushing him to do it for years, and only last year did he find the time. He had left the commercial real estate company; the property slump had made it hard for the firm to keep going. He had a new venture in mind and talked it over with plenty of people, but last year he called it off and stopped working altogether.

He still holds the two Haikou apartments he has owned all along.

This October, rereading what he had posted to his Moments in April — "I'll bring my camera the way I did back then and wait for you in Hainan" — Chen Jia felt a little embarrassed, and explained that it was just social-media flourish. He had gone back mainly to deal with the two apartments: one needed renovating before it could be rented out again, and the other needed a new tenant after the last one broke the lease early. But he also admitted that flying to Hainan in early April was deliberate.

"On this trip I wanted to look at housing prices." He added, carefully, "Just watching for now, seeing what people say."

He never wanted to look too invested in the business of the Haikou apartments.

At the interviewee's request, Chen Jia is a pseudonym.

Cover image from Earth on Unsplash, and Denny Ryanto on Unsplash