China's black market city: welcome to Wenzhou, where the mountains are high, the emperor is far away, and people are busy creating their own economic miracle.

AuthorGardner, Bradley
PositionWenzhou, China

CHEN MINGYUN has lived here all his life, but he still gets lost every time he drives into Wenzhou. "All the roads in this town were built by businessmen, so none of them make any sense," Chen says as we back out of what we just discovered is a one-way street. For the last 30 years, private citizens in this southeastern China metropolis have largely taken over one of the least questioned prerogatives of governments the world over: infrastructure.

Driving down the cluttered and half-constructed streets of this 3-million-strong boomtown requires frequent U-turns and the patience of Buddha, but every road even-really leads back to a factory. Each factory is in turn surrounded by a maze of roads filled with hundreds of small feeder shops selling spare parts, building materials, and scraps. Every haphazard street in this town seems to have an economic purpose.

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We are driving to see Cai Shuxian, the manager and majority owner of a clothing factory in which Chen owns a 10 percent stake. Cai, a lightly built 32-year-old, is typical of the entrepreneurs who have made it big during Wenzhou's three-decade boom, vaulting from shop-floor grunt to factory owner in a dizzyingly short period of time. "We earned very little in those days," the high-school dropout recalls of his first job, "about 600 yuan [roughly $100] a month." Within six years Cai was able to leverage his money and know-how into building a factory of his own, which now employs more than 100 people.

Cai glides over the source of his start-up capital, although it definitely was not one of China's state-owned banks. "Banks only give you money when you don't need it," he says. He explains that during the 2009 financial crisis, when banks were aggressively lending as a form of stimulus, people would reinvest the money in Wenzhou's underground financial system, where deposit interest rates are higher than the official lending rate.

Cai says his Horatio Alger story is "typical of Wenzhou." And it is. Only a few days later I am introduced to the manager of a factory making transmissions for South Korean cars. Although he had the advantage of finishing high school, his starting salary wasn't any higher. Cai's dismissive attitude toward the government is also typical. Wenzhou has become one of the richest cities in China under a regulatory regime that borders on anarchism.

The Wenzhou Model

Foreign businessmen, politicians, and journalists who fly into Beijing or Shanghai often get the impression that the Chinese government is the main driver behind the jaw-dropping development of what was until recently one of the worst large economies in the world. In Shanghai you fly to a state-built airport, ride on a state-built maglev train through the Pudong district, and behold a city of skyscrapers that appeared out of nowhere a little more than a decade ago with the help of generous government subsidies and investment from state-owned enterprises. Whatever local company you're interested in, chances are the government is interested in it as well.

In southern China, things look rather different. The Chinese say that in this region "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away"--in other words, the government isn't paying much attention. Companies are mainly small or medium-sized enterprises, government services are slight, and laws are routinely ignored. According to official statistics, the three southern coastal provinces of Zhejiang, Guangdong, and Fujian have the first, second, and fourth wealthiest citizens, respectively, in the country. They are the center of China's export sector and the primary destination for China's millions of internal economic migrants. Here is where the real Chinese miracle is happening.

The city and region of Wenzhou play an important role in this story. The Wenzhounese have a reputation for both an uncanny sense of business and an almost pathological disregard for the government. The mountains here are no metaphor: Seventy-eight percent of the Wenzhou prefecture is covered by mountains, a fact that proved pivotal to the area's early development and the central government's response to it.

In 1978, when China's economic reforms were just being launched, Wenzhou was extremely poor, about 90 percent rural, with smaller land allocations than other areas and poor connections to larger markets. Even today, the vast majority of local entrepreneurs have less than eight years of formal education, and the...

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