42401 (588213), страница 9
Текст из файла (страница 9)
Opportunities have vanished faster than expected. A year ago, China's leaders worried about inflation and an economy that they believed was growing too fast. Since then, economic growth has dropped to its lowest point since 2001, and the World Bank is forecasting that China's growth will sink to 6.5 per cent this year, the lowest point in at least nineteen years. To check the slide, the government has announced a stimulus plan worth four trillion yuan, or five hundred and eighty-six billion dollars. Nearly half of that will go toward the construction of railways, roads, airports, and power supplies, and a quarter is earmarked for reconstruction following the Sichuan earthquake and other disasters. (Some economists warn that the effect could be limited, because part of that spending was already planned.) Unemployment and crime are increasing, and the state media have begun to warn that social unrest could rise. President Hu Jintao hasn't bothered to conceal the fact that the crisis has become a matter of political survival – "a test of our Party's capacity to govern," as he put it in the official People’s Daily newspaper.
As Cheung and I talked, her husband, Liu Ming Chung, ambled in and slumped into a chair beside her. He had been trained as a dental surgeon, but he now serves as the C.E.O of Nine Dragons. He is tall and approachably low-key, her physical opposite. When she speaks, she swats and grips the air for emphasis, alternating between Cantonese and Mandarin, which she utters with a pronounced Manchurian accent. To Chinese ears, this identifies her as a product of China's frigid northeast, a hard-drinking industrial domain known for its prolific production of two species: entrepreneurs and corrupt bureaucrats. Cheung spends much of her time in Hong Kong, a city that sanctifies aristocracy, yet the persona she projects is that of a harried manager. Her fingers are bejewelled, but she shows little interest in amassing influence, real estate, art, or any of the usual trappings of wealth. Over the years, she has shed a wardrobe of loud prints and lacy cuffs in favor of Chanel-style suits, yet she seems interested in name brands only insofar as, in her words, they represent "the kind of image" she tries to maintain. Her ambition is so specific to expanding her business that, had she not become a billionaire papermaker, she would, she thinks, have enjoyed being a stay-at-home mother. At the company's headquarters in China, she and her husband live in a large converted apartment on the top floor of a managers' dormitory. In America, where her two sons are in school, they own a ten-bedroom house in Diamond Bar, California, an affluent cul-de-sac town that is also home to Snoop Dogg.
While Cheung was describing her plan to shore up the business, her husband interrupted. “I have something to add," he said softly. "Recently, many people came to knock on our doors. So I say, if things are as bad for us as the press is saying, why are they still thinking of buying us? If I have a cold and am really sick, why do you still want to sit right next to me?"
"It means we're still very attractive!" Cheung said, and she howled at her own joke.
Cheung was born into a military family, the eldest of eight children. Her parents named her Xiuhua, a revolutionary-era catchphrase meaning "excellent China." She later swapped it for Yan, a more contemporary name. (She also goes by Zhang Yin, the Mandarin version of Cheung Yan.) She grew up in the coal-mining city of Jixi, which lies so far north-east — north of Vladivostok — that its inhabitants take a steely pride in being the first Chinese to see the sunrise.
Conditions were austere; the family ate meat only on holidays. Cheung's father, Zhang De En, had been a company commander in the Red Army, but during the Cultural Revolution he was branded a "rightist" and jailed for three years. Cheung rarely mentions this, and only to explain why she never went to college. She said, "I had eight brothers and sisters and my dad was in prison, so I went out to work when I was young, because my brothers and sisters were even younger." She added, "It taught me never to retreat, even if things are getting very tough, and that is something I would never have learned in college."
As the oldest child, Cheung cultivated a sense of discipline and rigor, according to her sister Zhang Xiubo. "There is nothing my sister hates more than lazy people," Zhang Xiubo told a Chinese interviewer. "We obey her unconditionally."
When Cheung was in her late teens, the family moved south, to a city in coastal Guangdong Province. At the time, China had recently begun its experiments with the free market. She found work as a bookkeeper in a fabric factory, and studied accounting at a trade school. She then moved to a bigger company to run the accounting and trade departments, which afforded her a good salary and contacts in Hong Kong. While working in the trade department, she befriended an older paper-mill boss from the northern province of Liaoning, who proposed that she move to Hong Kong, in order to get into the wastepaper trade. "I'm thinking, I'm going to go to such a cosmopolitan place to scavenge through trash heaps?" she recalled. "But he said, 'Don't look down on wastepaper. Wastepaper is a forest.' So now I think that old guy was pretty clever."
By the time Cheung was twenty-eight, she had saved thirty thousand yean (about eight thousand dollars), and she moved to Hong Kong. She met two partners and they formed a company, Ying Gang Shen, to ship wastepaper up the coast to Chinese paper mills. "She was shrewd, very gutsy, willing to learn," Ng Waitang, one of her former partners, recalled when I visited him at the trash yard that he runs in an industrial stretch of Hong Kong. More important, Cheung brought the pivotal asset: the paper mill in Liaoning, which promised to buy whatever they collected.
Ng, a thick, genial man with pillowy bags under his eyes, marvelled at Cheung's audacious charm, even when it seemed excessive. "We were three equal partners, but, in the beginning, she always picked up the check at meals," he said. That embarrassed us, so eventually we started splitting the checks equally." The partners set up shop in a bare four-hundred-square-foot office. They received an early lesson in surviving a business infested with corruption. "People would try to sell you wet paper or moldy paper that's not usable. It is heavier, so they make more money," Ng explained, as a fork loader rumbled past the office door. "After a while, you figure out who is good and who is not, who you can trust and who you can't." As in America, the Hong Kong waste-management business was dogged by organized crime, the syndicates known in China as Triads. "They would come and threaten us," Ng said. "But I would tell them, 'Go ahead and bum the place down! I work for a mainland company, so I don't care. I just get a salary.' They were all threats, no action."
China's new industries had a seemingly bottomless appetite for recyclable paper, and, after two years, Cheung headed to the mainland in search of more. But Chinese paper wasn't good for recycling; it relied heavily on vegetable sources, because the nation had been especially short of trees since the nineteen-fifties, when industrialization campaigns denuded the landscape. Instead, Cheung resolved to try the place known in the trash world as "the Saudi Arabia of scrap": the United States.
Americans use about thirty million tons of containerboard each year, more than any other kind of paper, and enough to cover every inch of the state of Massachusetts, with some left over. The material is made from trees and from what papermakers call O.C.C., for "old corrugated containers." Around three-quarters of all O.C.C. in America gets sifted from the trash and recycled, and that posed the ultimate target for Cheung's business. She arrived in Los Angeles in 1990, accompanied by Liu Ming Chung, whom she had met while working in Hong Kong. Although he was of Taiwanese origin, he spoke English with a Latin-American accent, because he had grown up in Brazil, where his parents worked as grocers. When they met, Liu thought, This is a beautiful girl. And very, very smart At Cheung's suggestion, he gave up dentistry for the paper business, and they went to America, where they married. (Cheung had a son from a previous marriage that had ended in divorce.) Together, they founded a company called America Chung Nam, which is Cantonese for America South China. They rented an apartment in Monterey Park, an area with a large concentration of Chinese immigrants; the apartment served as both office and home. "I was really happy in the early days of starting the business, no matter how hard it was," Cheung said. "At least we worked hard together." Their meagre business consumed only a few hours of the day. "My wife still remembers how I cooked fried beet for her," Liu said. "She says the last time I did that was seventeen years ago." These days, their offices are on different floors of the corporate tower, in public they refer to each other as "Chief Liu" and "the Chairlady." "At this stage, both of us are so busy we hardly do things together," Cheung told me. "So I’m delighted if we are simply on the same flight."
The new partners set out in search of scrap yards that were willing to sell to strangers. "They came knocking on our door — a cold call," David Cho, the chief financial officer of Bestway Recycling, in Los Angeles, told me. "They came together, in an old red Cadillac, but the initial impression was very positive. They were earnest." Not every deal went so smoothly. They had to fight their way in," Maurice (Big Мое) Colontonio, a paper recycler in South Jersey, told me. Colontonio is a fit and energetic man in his late fifties, with deep-set eyes and a lantern jaw, which give him a resemblance to Joe Tone, the baseball manager. His business, Tab Paper Recycling, works what could be called the Greater Atlantic City area, from a plant opposite a casino-supply outlet in the town of West Berlin.
“The Chinese came to us packers, and they said, “Will you sell to us?" Colontonio told me one afternoon as we sat in the plant office. "But it was always an old-boy network in this business. I sold to someone I knew, and that person sold to people he knew. And now we've got these people — we don't know them — and they're selling to China? How are we going to be paid? Who are we going to chase?"
In the years since, American paper mills have closed in large numbers, but recyclers like Colontonio have thrived, thanks largely to foreign demand. Мое — the son and grandson of "glorified trash-men," as he puts it — learned to ski in Aspen and to yacht in the Chesapeake. (He recently upgraded from a forty-six-foot yacht to a fifty-foot vessel, which he christened Paradise П.) After dinner at a nouveau-Italian place nearby, Colontonio steered his GMC Yukon Hybrid into the parking lot at Wal-Mart and around back to the superstore's trash yard, which had been fenced off to keep scrap thieves away. "Let's get out of the car," he said. "We're not going to get locked up. I know all the cops in this town,"
The wastepaper had been lashed into boulder-size bundles known as "sandwich bales," the kind that Colontonios guys collect and break open, in order to fish out the rotting garbage, which professionals call "organic." The smell was powerful, but Colontonio looked pleased to have brought me to the front lines of his business. The sandwich bales formed a wall of crushed cardboard boxes, each marked with a brand name — d-CON mouse traps, Kit Kat candy — packed layer upon layer, a geological record of modem New Jersey. More than half of it will end up in China. "We have become a country of purchasers, not manufacturers," Colontonio said.
(…)
Before lunch, Cheung had been meeting with yet another in a stampede of bankers. She and her husband were counting down the days until Thanksgiving, which they planned to spend with their children in America. “Both the kids, they don’t really have feelings towards Chinese New Year’s anymore. So I have to go back for Thanksgiving”, Cheung said. Her older son is in New York, where he is earning a master’s degree in engineering at Columbia. The younger son attends a boarding school in California, and Cheung is determined that he will end up in the Ivy League. At one point during lunch, her assistant passed her a copy of a college recommendation that a teacher had recently written on her son’s behalf. She fell silent to study it and then passed it back.
“His G.P.A. is 4.0 to 4.3,” she announced to the table. Then, with the pride of an autodidact, she added, “His head is full of American education. He needs to accept some Chinese education as well. Otherwise, he’ll be out of balance.” The company's problems were no secret to her younger son, she said “We talk about how much the stock has dropped. He asks about it, and we discuss it. He'll say, ‘Hey, oil is realty cheap today!’”
Earlier in the week, Liu had heard from the boss of a neighboring factory, one of the world's largest makers of steel upping containers. It was shutting its plant. Like cardboard boxes, shipping containers were an early economic casualty. Property prices, consumer confidence, and auto sales were all slumping in China, and gallows humor was prevalent among factory owners: get into the pajama business, because before long everyone will be unemployed and spending their days at home.
![](https://s.studizba.com/z.php?f=/templates/si/i/noavatar.png&w=100&h=100&t=1"){kind=avatar}
