Mr. China (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.