Here, There, and Everywhere
As if having committed to visiting every province was not enough, one day I had a brainwave. I remember it clearly; I was walking to a restaurant to meet Heidi, who was particularly upset with me. I had been out all day Saturday playing football and then gone straight on to a stag night for one of my teammates. I had then spent all day Sunday in bed with a raging hangover. There must have been something about that hangover though, because as I trudged up to the restaurant, I had an idea. If I was going to go to every province, why not write a book about it? I had already written up a couple of stories to send to my friends back home – why not just write them all down and see how it came out? Writing a book had been one of those bucket-list items at the back of my mind for years without my ever having found the hook necessary to spark it into life. But here it was. Suddenly I picked up my pace and raced into the restaurant.
“Oh, so you finally made it up, then. I can’t believe you haven’t been around. Where have you been all weekend?”
“Don’t worry about that. I’ve had a great idea! I’m going to write a book about China!”
“What are you talking about? What about this weekend?”
“Don’t worry about that. This will be great! We can use our holidays to go to the other places, or I can see if I can get trips from work. I’ll write it up, and then I’ll see if I can get it published. I’ve always wanted to do it. How hard can it be?”
This idea was something to motivate me for many a Sunday afternoon to come, as I started putting pen to paper. It also completely bewildered Heidi, so much so that she failed to berate me any more for getting drunk. Result all round!
With this idea in mind, I doubled my efforts. Work, despite the shaky start when we had lost all our business during the stimulus, was now going much better, and I was managing to maintain the momentum of my job without spending too much time at karaoke. I was still travelling a fair amount, but thankfully not all the deals required flights; a couple of meetings were within day-trip range. Quite a few of these were in Jiangsu, which borders Shanghai directly to the north. If Shanghai is a big, multinational city, a base from which many local and overseas companies can direct operations, then Jiangsu province is the engine room, a place where factories abound and, put simply, things get made.
In my experience, the factories in Jiangsu less often make the retail or textile products that crop up frequently in, say, Guangdong or Zhejiang; they are more often heavy-industry factories. This is largely because the province borders the Yangtze River, which allows for deep-water berths all the way along both sides of its banks near the sea. Any company with access to the river can have its own loading and unloading spots for the largest of vessels; these spots are prized by those industries which are bulk buyers. The ones I visited were mainly steel mills and edible oil-crushing plants.
The steel industry in China, like that of aluminium, dominates the world. Over 40 per cent of the world’s steel is made in China, and that means that China imports most of the world’s iron ore in order to make it. My favourite commodity statistic that I used to quote to people (do not worry, it is more interesting than it sounds) is that China imports two million tons of iron ore. This is not every year, by the way; this is not per month or even per week. It is two millions tons of iron ore – per day. Every single day, around forty massive ships unload their Brazilian or Australian ore cargoes at Chinese mills, ready to be turned into steel. Some of this is used to build the Chinese future, and some of it is shipped back out for the rest of the world to use. If you are now sitting in a tall building whilst you read this book, then chances are there are some Chinese steel bars reinforcing the concrete and helping to keep everything together.
As you would expect, then, my visits to Jiangsu were not particularly glamorous and rarely involved tourist sites or unusual locations – unless you think seeing a steel mill the size of a small city is of special interest. I went to Zhangjiabang, on the Yangtze; Nanjing; Changzhou, which was just near Nanjing; and then up in the far north of the province to Xuzhou. With one or two notable exceptions, there was less heavy drinking at meetings with these clients compared to neighbouring Shandong – Jiangsu clients were just getting busy things built.
By now, I was completely in the swing of going to these meetings. I was even, dare I say it, getting a little spoiled in terms of the treatment I was expecting when I turned up. Going to visit a factory for the first time, I had think, “What do you mean, there is no photographer?” Or I had be going back to visit a client for the second time and notice, “They haven’t put my photo from last time up on the wall!” Even worse, one had put the photo up but with the headline that I was visiting from HSBC – I made sure to point that mistake out to them double quick. As for the time that I turned up to see the client had put up a welcome note on the electronic board: “Welcome to Ms Ian Mote and her party”, at least I found it funny. But the client was mortified and had the wording changed before the meeting was over.
Meanwhile, as I toured around various factories and smelters, I worked on perfecting my best pose for having my photo taken: hands behind back, leaning forward attentively, slightly curious look on my face to show that I was listening as we walked around the plant and was interested in what the host was telling me. Because, of course, I was.