From Bureau Courier in Jingdezhen to Businessman: One Jiangxi Man's 40 Years | 2018 Stories ⑨

"I'm a wave rider," he likes to say.

"To record the actions and the everyday life of ordinary people," says Walter Harrington. "In our trade there is far too little of that. Such stories record what people do, why they do it, what they feel, believe, resent, hope for, fear, achieve and long for as they search their lives for meaning and purpose. They help a person understand where he stands in the world."

He once wrote about a family whose teenage son had killed himself two years earlier. "I tried to explain to them the kind of story I wanted to write, how deep I wanted to go. The father listened for a long time, and finally said, 'So you want to know what I'm thinking when I pray alone in a quiet room.'"

At its simplest, Harrington says, it comes to this: how do people live, and what do they value?

All our lives together make up the world.

"2018 Stories" is a new column from QDaily.

"I'm a wave rider, and a plaything of the waves too. Everything the 40 years of reform and opening-up changed, you can see it in me."

Wang Dong is a man who praises himself after every episode he recounts. That sentence may serve as the summary of the whole. He is exactly 70 this year, from Leping, part of Jingdezhen in Jiangxi Province, and settled in Shanghai in the 1990s. He is 1.85 meters tall and does not stoop, wears his hair slicked back, dislikes logos but trusts brand names.

Apart from rising at six every morning, his days look nothing like a 70-year-old's. Three generations live under one roof, yet he barely touches the raising or schooling of the third. Two downtown Shanghai apartments totaling more than 200 square meters are set aside for his son and his daughter; he bought himself a new 150-square-meter place beside the Kunshan high-speed rail station and lives there alone, while his wife and children stay in Shanghai.

He has a porcelain business, but it is a sideline. The industrial company he founded in 2007 still runs, and every day he spends three hours on high-speed trains and subway transfers between his home in Kunshan and his office in Hongkou, Shanghai. Now and then he drives another 50 kilometers to a warehouse in Nanhui to handle a shipment or a quality problem. What is left goes to the porcelain shop — no more than ten hours a week.

Wang Dong originally rented a 3,000-square-meter warehouse in Nanhui, storage downstairs, offices upstairs. He then sublet the whole ground floor to a European port machinery company as its warehouse outside the bonded zone. In good times the rent alone brought in nearly 40,000 yuan a month in gross margin; with other storage charges and tire-mounting work, annual operating profit could pass one million yuan.

Even when the port machinery client's own orders fell and cut into Wang Dong's mounting and handling income, the site rent still landed in his account every month without fail. For a man who employed three workers, that left room for 300,000 yuan of profit a year.

But the industrial park where the warehouse sat failed its environmental review last year, and all 12 factories in it had to move out before New Year's Day this year — Wang Dong's included. He says he produces nothing and processes nothing; he mounts tires and stores them by hand, and he cannot see what that has to do with the environment.

On November 25, Wang Dong learned that the Shanghai Hongqiao Friendship Store, where his porcelain shop stood, was about to shut down, and that he had to find a new site fast. He had been planning to expand the porcelain business anyway and already had a few candidates in mind, including Takashimaya and the LV Tower, both in the same Hongqiao business district.

The clear-out notice that came the next day wrecked the plan. At four in the afternoon on the 26th, the mall's manager went door to door, bowing in apology. What Wang Dong wanted to know was whether he could get back the nearly 40,000 yuan he had spent on the fit-out. He signed the lease at the end of August, he grumbled, finished the fit-out and opened at the end of September, and nobody told him the mall would close this soon.

Worse, the mall gave him three days to clear out; November 30 would be the last. Everything in his shop breaks, and packing and storing it was no small job.

"Jumped into another little fire pit," Wang Dong said over the phone.

Ending at the same time was the storage contract between the foreign port machinery company and Wang Dong. Losing that — income guaranteed rain or shine — was the big pit, in his words.

Around 2015, Chinese heavy-industry groups including ZPMC began taking most of the domestic port machinery market, squeezing European and American giants such as Krupp and Cargotec — the company Wang Dong worked with among them. As its orders fell year over year in 2016, it stopped running its supply chain from one center and pushed some decisions down to the regional companies. The new China head took the tire-mounting work back in-house first. Next he cut out the raw-material middlemen: tires and wheel rims went to the group's own buyers, who shopped the market on price, instead of to men like Wang Dong.

Last came the third-party warehouses, whose leases were simply not renewed. Wang Dong complains that he got not one cent back of the 370,000 yuan he had spent fitting out the warehouse, and lost the 11 days of rent left unpaid on the storage contract.

His industrial business is now down to a single tire-mounting order from a heavy-industry group in Wuxi. He has taken a warehouse 400 or 500 meters east of the old one, built by local residents on their homestead plots: 280 square meters, 5,000 yuan a month. The Wuxi client will pay 20 yuan a tire, one-nineteenth of what Wang Dong used to quote. At 240 tires a month, that is 4,800 yuan.

"Forget the storage costs — that money doesn't even cover one man's wages," he says. "And the Wuxi client wants me to deliver whenever a run hits 80 tires, freight on me. One run costs 1,500 yuan, another 12.5 yuan a tire on average. Where's my money?" With three quarters gone, Wang Dong had posted his first loss in nearly a decade, six figures deep.

Back when business was good, around 2013 and 2014, Wang Dong had built up more than five million yuan of his own capital and wanted to borrow ten million from a bank to expand. He handed over the contracts with his suppliers and customers and his bank statements, as required, and the approval call never came. "The bank reviewed it and reviewed it and never told me straight whether it was yes or no — just that it hadn't come through. After a few rounds I understood: this is too hard for a small business like mine. So I dropped it."

Late last year he thought about closing the company, then couldn't think what he would do with the empty time. If he kept trading, whatever the goods, at least he would still be dealing with people. On a visit home to Jiangxi in 2017, his half-brother — same mother, different father — raised the idea of running a porcelain shop together. When the industrial business fell "off a cliff" this year, he put in 200,000 yuan and opened the shop "for fun."

What follows is Wang Dong's own account:

I was born in 1948 and had five years of schooling — I never finished elementary school. In today's terms, I'm illiterate. Blame the times, mostly. The family was poor too: seven children, and I was the sixth. My father died before I finished elementary school, my mother remarried, and that is how I gained two half-brothers.

I started working in 1961, at 14. The city sorted us by age, and I went to the Jingdezhen Yue Opera Troupe as an apprentice in props. The economy was very backward then and the folk arts were all sliding downhill; the troupe could barely keep itself alive. I asked to be moved. Times were bad, but the state still found you a job, and I was sent to the Jingdezhen Administration for Industry and Commerce as a courier. Telecoms were primitive. When one work unit sent documents to another, the couriers carried them to the gate of the municipal party committee and laid them out in a V, like street vendors, and every unit's courier went stall to stall as if at a market, hunting for his own papers.

My equipment was the unit's bicycle. Having a bicycle then was a fine thing. And I was excellent: fastest rider of the hundred-odd couriers.

Wang Dong lasted a year. The 18 yuan a month, the standard apprentice wage, did not satisfy him. He applied to the Jingdezhen labor bureau for a transfer and was assigned instead to the Jingdezhen porcelain factory to press saggars — a trade that exists only in the ceramics system. Firing porcelain used to require them: the craftsman put the porcelain inside the saggar and the saggar into the kiln. Saggars came in different sizes, and different sizes carried different grain rations, so Wang Dong pressed whichever size would earn him 42 jin (about 21 kilograms) of rice a month.

The decade of the Cultural Revolution and the "One Strike, Three Anti" campaign reached him too. "One Strike, Three Anti" was a political movement of the period: it struck at "counter-revolutionary sabotage" and opposed "embezzlement and theft," "speculation and profiteering," and "extravagance and waste." Unhappy that the labor authorities had assigned him to the Nanchang Sewing Machinery Factory, he and several fellow workers protested in the street, and for that he was sent to dig coal at the Yongshan mine in Leping.

The mine is still working today. An accident there in 2015 killed four people.

That was a long way down, you understand? I'd been a model worker in Jingdezhen — fastest saggar presser in the workshop and able to do more jobs than anyone, splitting clay and the rest. And now I was underground.

My spirits were bad and I took sick leave constantly. There were no scientific tests then; you went to the hospital, said some part of you hurt, and the doctor had no way to check. A sick note meant no deduction from your pay. They told me to work transport and I wouldn't go.

But I still had a head for making a living. I could earn money without going to work.

I loved photography — to this day I can recite the formulas for D-72 and D-76 developer. On my days off I'd put on an army cap and a pair of plain-glass spectacles, sling a Shanghai-brand camera over my shoulder, dress myself up and go out to the villages to photograph farmers. I didn't dare take cash. Take cash once and it's speculation and profiteering.

So I asked for eggs: six eggs a photograph. The farmers had no money anyway and were overjoyed to pay in eggs. When I had too many I invited people round to eat them, and the eaters couldn't believe their luck. In the end I had far more than I could give away, and once everyone I owed had been fed, I sold the rest. See — photographs for eggs, eggs for money. That way it wasn't speculation and profiteering.

I went down to the countryside once a week then, half a day photographing for eggs and half a day selling them. Local farmers with money but no chickens bought from me too. I sold each egg for one mao — 0.1 yuan — and it worked out to about 20 yuan a day, half a month's wages (38.87 yuan a month). When I married in 1995 my money was in poor shape; the few hundred yuan it cost came from photography.

It was on the first anniversary of Mao Zedong's death — September 9, 1977 — that I moved into purchasing. I remember the date too clearly.

Luck, perhaps: the mine never punished Wang Dong for the sick leave or the village photography, and after he was moved above ground he managed to transfer again, to the Jingdezhen Porcelain Chemical Factory as a general purchasing agent. Porcelain once more. "General" meant he bought whatever the factory was short of — lead, rhodium powder, and the rest.

Rhodium powder, you know it? I suspect it's worth more than gold even now. To buy it I went inside a vault for precious metals, somewhere near Sanlitun in Beijing I think, doors within doors, run by the Reserve Bureau of the State Materials Bureau. Gold was under state monopoly purchase and sale; rhodium wasn't, so anywhere could stockpile it, and I went wherever it was.

The state had already said it would push light industry hard, our Jingdezhen ceramics included. Without rhodium powder you can't fire porcelain, so on that argument it wasn't too hard to get. Other goods were another matter. It was a job with some challenge in it: China was short of everything, and most of what you had to buy was scarce. The factory wanted it urgently, so sometimes I had to beg. Maybe that's why I'm still so deferential with people.

I hadn't read many books, but I knew Beijing was the country's cultural, political and economic center, and that to get purchasing done you had to work Beijing. On foot, by bus, by subway — running everywhere. I made a storm of that job.

Around 1982 I pulled off something remarkable. The Porcelain Chemical Factory wanted to import an electronic color scanner for ceramic plate making, but the rules allowed each province one, and Nanchang had used Jiangxi's. I was the first purchasing agent in China to bring a second scanner into a province. Understand that the People's Printing Houses in Beijing and Shanghai had one each.

The application went up to the Ministry of Light Industry as technical renovation. The ceramics company's general manager took a group to the ministry and reported to Zhu Rongji, and I went along. Zhu Rongji approved 1.44 million yuan; my feeling at the time was that I had asked for too little. He approved it that day, smiling. Zhu Rongji ran the Technical Renovation Bureau of the State Economic Commission, and Jingdezhen porcelain came under the Ministry of Light Industry.

I was excellent, I'm telling you. Zhu Rongji approved 1.44 million yuan for the order, but it still had to pass the Ministry of Light Industry, the State Import-Export Commission, the State Bureau of Instrumentation, the State Economic Commission, the State Planning Commission and the Ministry of Foreign Trade. I collected six seals around Tiananmen in nine days.

I used to have a photocopy of the sheet with those six seals. I can't find it now.

The Gang of Four had not long been brought down, party and government conduct was very good, people got things done. I used a few small tricks as well. When I finished at the Import-Export Commission, they'd tell me where to go next — the Planning Commission, say — and I'd ask the Import-Export people to phone ahead for me. The ministries were all connected. A word in advance and my business went easier.

Wang Dong tells these stories with a shine on them, but almost none of it can now be checked. The second scanner, in fact, also rode a tailwind: the state was trying to revive light industry, printing included. And "one per province" is open to question. The Shanghai gazetteer of foreign economic relations and trade records that eight electronic color scanners were imported between 1979 and 1990.

After enough trips to Beijing, Wang Dong talked the company's party committee into raising the daily accommodation allowance from 3–5 yuan to 5–10 yuan, on the argument that "purchasing needs you to know higher-level people." He says it let him stay at star hotels — the Heping, the Beijing, the Friendship, the Xin Qiao.

Doing purchasing, I made one extra demand of the factory: a higher accommodation allowance. Only then would I meet people of a higher level. Our allowance for a Beijing trip had been three yuan, and after I raised it the party committee really did agree to five to ten. At ten I could stay at the Xin Qiao, which took foreign guests.

Once I knew Beijing well, officials from Jingdezhen or the province would come to me for everything — where to eat, drink and sleep. I was on very good terms with several Jiangxi governors, which is unheard of for a Chinese purchasing agent. Around 1985 I made deputy section chief at the Porcelain Chemical Factory, and I felt that was as far as my official career would go, since I could neither rise nor fall.

Various reasons. Jealousy, maybe; my thin schooling, maybe. People at the factory knew my web of connections was complicated. Another reason is that I had indeed grown a little pleased with myself and broken a taboo. Once the scanner purchase was approved, the factory sent me to Japan to learn to operate it. Before I left I had an exchange with our party secretary that I remember exactly: I'm off to Japan, thank you to the organization, from here on I feel I'm on my way up.

That was more or less it. And I was never promoted again.

So what was the point of staying? I applied to move to the sales department of the Jingdezhen Ceramics Company and ended up at the National Tourism Porcelain Office, selling porcelain. My colleagues all called me an oddball, because the others sold goods at an eight-point markup and the deals I handled returned over 100 percent.

You need a nimble mind. The sales department's habit was to supply small-commodity markets and department stores; the margin was the eight points the state set, and the goods became wholesale porcelain. I wouldn't do that. I sold it as tourist porcelain, and the people I'd met doing purchasing came in handy. I went straight to the Friendship Stores and the star hotels.

Then the old problem again: I couldn't climb. I did produce results, didn't I? The people above wanted to promote me, and someone said I had no education and couldn't be promoted. Another objection said my work was fine but I was hard to control, too mobile, too much capacity for action.

I told people around me I meant to leave, and nobody tried to keep me. At Chinese New Year 1985, the manager of the chemicals company under the Jingdezhen Materials Bureau came to my home to pay his respects and asked me to run supply and sales at the bureau's chemicals-and-light-industry company. The pay went from under 60 yuan a month to over 100, so I went.

Under the planned economy, China bought and supplied raw materials on a dual track: material inside the plan carried a single national price, material outside it was priced by the market. Wang Dong says he was good at arbitrage between foreign exchange quotas and those two tracks. The point of all the maneuvering was that buying raw materials with a foreign exchange quota counted as outside-plan allocation, yet the purchase price still followed the unified state price inside the plan — and every sales contract was executed at the outside-plan market price.

Some companies couldn't get materials; some places didn't know what a foreign exchange quota was. My advantage was connections on both sides — the foreign exchange administration and the materials bureau. Steel I bought from the metals company under the materials bureau, which had been my main rhodium supplier. I'd never traded caustic soda, but I put in an order for 300 tons and asked around, and people said, "Wang Dong, you can sell that to the Zhejiang Ningbo Chemical Fiber Company."

Business has to be done in hundreds of tons.

The materials bureau had its reasons for helping me. Being close to the foreign exchange administration, I had once spoken up and cleared an eight-figure quota approval for them. But I was careful, which was also what the exchange people asked of me. One official told me: "Cousin, walk inside the lines. Don't step outside them." Inside the lines meant don't break the rules.

So there I was, a man of the Jingdezhen Materials Bureau solving the national materials bureau's foreign exchange problem. Tell me that isn't something. And because I made so much money at the bureau, they sent people down to investigate me, and I walked out in a temper. I'm a man who cares about face.

I left as chief of the general section of the chemicals-and-light-industry company. Before I came, it couldn't even meet the sales quota the state set it. By the time I left it was one of the best-performing units in Jingdezhen.

As with the jobs before it, Wang Dong did not stay long at the materials bureau — two years. The difference is that this time he gave up his seniority and went into business for good.

After reform and opening-up began in 1978, and the National People's Congress created the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in 1980, province after province opened a liaison office in Shenzhen to court investment and handle outside contacts. Many of these offices ran two teams, one governmental and one commercial. Huagan Company was the other signboard of the Jiangxi provincial government's Shenzhen office, set up with provincial money; apart from the company's top leader and a few managers, nobody held a state establishment post — including Wang Dong, who gave up his seniority and went south in 1989.

Huagan paid him more than 1,000 yuan a month, ten times what he had earned at the Jingdezhen bureau's chemicals-and-light-industry company and more than six times the national average wage. The profit target Huagan set was steep to match: one million yuan a year.

When I left the materials bureau I was on a little over 100 yuan a month; at Huagan it was over 1,000. I'm a man who cares about face — when the bureau wouldn't release me, I gave up my seniority outright, and that was me in business.

Huagan belonged to the Jiangxi state assets commission, but it answered for its own profits and losses; apart from the party and government heads, nobody was inside the system. The conditions were good, and we had our own office building.

I have a classic door-opener story from there. In the early 1990s I got into a large, newly formed Shanghai chemical group — onto their supplier list. The price was a 20-ton rubber order sold at a loss of 500 yuan a ton, 10,000 yuan in all. My boss was furious: making money in business is skill, he said; anyone can lose it.

I had lost money, so I didn't argue. But then and now, the price was worth paying. They lacked nothing — not money, not foreign exchange quota, not a market — except raw materials; their allocation under the planned economy came nowhere near what they needed. Carbon black, industrial tire cord fabric, rubber, anything else: if I could find the supply at a sensible price, they wanted it.

In my second year at Huagan I asked to take the business on contract. The money was too easy.

"Wasn't I excellent. Second year at Huagan and I was on contract." Every stretch of his résumé ends with Wang Dong praising himself like this. But a trading partner of many years told us: "Lao Wang has a real head for business and real drive — that's true. But he could get into so many companies, and build relations with leaders at bureau and ministry level, partly because of the signboard behind him. When we agreed to let him supply us, one big reason was that Huagan had the Jiangxi provincial government behind it."

Eight years at Huagan left Wang Dong with assets of nearly ten million yuan. On the eve of Hong Kong's return in 1997, he fell out with the company over personal income tax, resigned at once and went back to Jingdezhen. "I thought, I've made this much money, I can make money anywhere, right? So I left and went home."

Out on his own, nothing went smoothly. Back in Jingdezhen he spent 800,000 yuan on a fully imported Infiniti, and five years of repairs cost as much as the car. Two million yuan lent to someone else vanished. Of three Shanghai apartments bought for four million, he kept two and gave one away. He put two million into four photo and print shops in Shanghai, and one survived. By 2007 he had 500,000 yuan in cash left. That was when he set up the industrial company he runs now. Some friends couldn't see the point: what was a man of nearly 60 knocking himself out for? Because he can't sit still, Wang Dong says. The savings draining away was the other reason. "The way I see it, you make money in order to spend it in style."

On September 6, 2007, I registered the company I have now, and through an acquaintance I started working with a port machinery company headquartered in Europe. The idea at first was to go back to my old trade and supply them OTR tires and the like. But they weren't changing tire suppliers just then, so they asked whether I could mount tires — I could start there. An OTR tire, like most wheels, is a tire and a wheel rim, bought separately, stored separately, assembled only when it's needed.

The financial crisis had just passed and Chinese imports and exports were booming; that company's warehouses in Waigaoqiao weren't enough. Once we'd worked together a while they asked whether I could find warehouse space outside the bonded zone, and if I could, they'd rent it from me. Of course I said yes. I asked in the morning and found it that afternoon, in Waigaoqiao, 1,000 square meters, later 1,400, then 3,000.

The rent margin was excellent — let me count it for you. Cost was 0.42 yuan per square meter per day, and I let it at 0.85, all 3,000 square meters on one lease. Mounting was 380 yuan a tire; 20 to 30 a day in the busy season, 10 to 20 in the slow one, about 4,000 tires a year, roughly 150 yuan net per tire. So mounting alone made 600,000 yuan a year.

Storage brought in another 400,000-odd a year. Anything else — goods in, goods out, one move of the forklift — I charged for: 25 yuan a ton inbound, 20 outbound, 200 yuan a forklift move. In a good month storage alone came to 150,000 or 160,000 yuan. Business has its ups and downs, of course. Around 2015 their orders to me started thinning. My own reading was that Chinese port machinery makers were cheaper and their quality had improved. For a comparable machine, the imported one sold at four million yuan and the domestic one at 1.5 to two million — half the price. The performance gap was maybe 20 or 30 percent, and the foreign companies' market went to the domestic ones piece by piece.

But here was the good part of working with them: whatever happened to their business, even with no orders for me, they kept paying for the warehouse. A bit over 100,000 yuan a year, rain or shine.

"But costs have climbed too fast these last few years, and the margin keeps thinning." The costs Wang Dong means are wages and benefits, taxes and storage. His workers, for their part, are not entirely happy with what he pays.

Tang Lei has worked for him since 2008. In the first year, after 400 yuan of social insurance came out, he took home 1,600 yuan a month. Ten years on, Tang Lei says he still takes home 3,000. With social insurance and the housing fund counted in, it comes to a little over 4,000 — a raise of 200 yuan a year. The only reason he stays is that the hours are loose enough for him to take his daughter to school and fetch her home.

Wang Dong sees it differently. By covering the employee's share of Tang Lei's 400 yuan of social insurance, he says, the company has already given ground. As for the raises, he shot back: "If I raise a worker's pay, can I raise his output? Raise it and he threatens to quit. His wages have gone up all these years and I've never touched his fixed mounting quota. We're the ones who've given way."

Last year's nationwide 1-percentage-point cut in value-added tax also left him feeling shortchanged.

His sales contracts with the European client are priced before tax; his purchases from Chinese suppliers are priced after tax. Take an item at 10,000 yuan pre-tax that he buys and sells at the same price. At a 17 percent VAT rate, both the purchase and the sale come to 11,700 yuan. When the rate dropped to 16 percent, his sale price became 11,600 while the domestic supplier still charged him 11,700. Wang Dong says that cost him a point of margin.

With the business shrunk to almost nothing, Wang Dong gradually handed the industrial company to his son and daughter, spent several months crossing half of China by high-speed rail, and took up selling porcelain.

But he still can't let the old business go.

In mid-November he went back to Jingdezhen to see an old friend, who is also a possible partner in the porcelain trade. It was nearly half past midnight as he neared his lodgings. His daughter sent three WeChat messages in a row, asking how to answer the Wuxi client's demand for a lower tire price.

That client is the only one he has left.

Wang Dong put on his reading glasses, opened the handwriting input and wrote, deleted, wrote again. He got out of the car with the reply still unsent.

At the interviewee's request, Wang Dong is a pseudonym.

Banner image: Chance Anderson on Unsplash; long cover image / Gong Fangyi.