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 provinceof 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 himat 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 thathad 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 lanternjaw, 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 itwas 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-CONmouse 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.
The larger fact, however, was that the slowdown was also accelerating a change that Chinese leaders and economists had sought for years. They had come to believe that China relied tooheavily on factories churning out low-quality exports, which fuel growth but also result in poor working conditions, environmental pollution, and a growing gap between the rich and the poor — “unsteady, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable”, as Premier Wen Jiabao said in March of2007. Chinese leaders wanted to ignite domestic consumption anduse the new labor law to bring the sweatshop era to a close. For many factories in Dongguan, evolution will mean adapt or die. Local politicians prefera more poeticimage: “emptying the cage for the new birds”.
But the slowdown was also politically precarious: cut back too fast and unemployment could lead to political unrest. "So far, there haven't been large-scale layoffs," Jiang Ling, a vice-mayor of Dongguan, told me when I visited him at city hall. But when I walked out of the building that day four middle-aged women with tanned laborers’ faces were clamoring, dashing through the topiaries toward the building’s front door. When security guards pushed them back, they sat down in the shrubbery and refused to budge. The young guard tasked with shooing me away told me that the women were shouting for greater welfare provisions from city hall.
The question of what will become of Dongguan is difficult to separate from the question of what will become of Cheung. The city is home to thousands of factories that are based on an outmoded business model, rooted in cheap, unprotected labor and thin margins. China would not be what it is today without them, but it's not yet dear who among them is prepared to splash out of the primordial free market into a new age. Closing the income divide is no longer an abstraction: life expectancy in the poor province of Guizhou is now a decade shorter than it is in Beijing; a child born on the remote Qinghai Plateau is seven times more likely to die than a child born in the capital Even some of China's most energetic cheerleaders of the free market sense the passing of an era. In a recent article on Cheung Van, the magazine China Entrepreneur declared, “In Chinese society five years ago, maybe a company that had achieved success in business, while not being perfect in other respects, would have been tolerated and worshipped. But things have changed”.
I mentioned to Cheung and Liu that I had spent time the previous afternoon in the nearby village of Da Sheng, where many of their employees lived. The town square looked like a meeting of rival armies. Each worker was color-coded by location in the factory food chain: blue coveralls for production workers, orange smocks for power-plant staff, and mint-green uniforms for the handlers of wastepaper. A production worker told me that the rumor around the factory was that it might be bankrupt in a month or two. Cheung lowered her chopsticks for a moment. She seemed irritated. “It's very strange that an employee would say that,” she said. “These days, there are people out there who don't even have food toeat! But we haven't withheld any salaries. Nobody has gone unpaid.” She seemed less bothered by the rumorthan by its implied allowance of failure, its apostasy. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “Some people are living in such good fortune that they don't know what fortune is anymore.”
By the beginning of this year, Cheung’s decision to halt construction and to repay loans ahead of schedule seemed to have improved the company's prospects. Mark Chang, of Merrill Lynch — which has since been acquired by Bank of America — told me in an e-mail mat the risk of failure “seems to be much lower now.” Chinese leaders were helping, too: the economy was souring so fast that they had decided not to let too many birds leave the cage at once. They have suspended minimum-wage increases and restored tax rebates to help some exporters, all aimed at preventing mass layoffs. On February 18th, Nine Dragons released a six-month financial summary that showed that its net profit had dropped 70.3 per cent compared with the same period in the previous year. Cheung said the company had faced a "bleak winter" but thanked government officials, banks, investors, and others for stayingsupportive. Nine Dragons, it seemed, had become "too big to fail," said Kary Sei, an analyst at ICEA Finance Holdings, in Hong Kong,
At one point during our lunch, I asked Cheung if she still hoped to be the world's largest cardboard-maker. She smiled, and answered, "I don't think it’s my goal to be № 1 in the world. What matters to me most is this market" She gestured around her, at China. Outside the cafeteria, we could hear the sound of semitrucks on the rutted road leading to the factory. And from the window the red-and-white striped smokestack of the company's power plant was visible, towering above everything around it.
Fruit was served, and Cheung attacked a small pile of longans, pulling them from their skins, one at a time. Perhaps it was fatigue, but, as she ate, her usually impregnable optimism seemed muted. "I think the market is going down so fast that some won't be able to turnit around," she said. She went on, "This time is reallydifferent. Large and small are all affected. In the past, the big waves would only wash away the sand and leave the rocks. Now the waves are so big, even some racks are being washed away."
An audio interview with Evan Osnos
ANNALS OF HUMAN RIGHTS
HELLHOLE
The United States holds tens of thousands of inmates in long term solitary confinement. Is this torture?
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
Children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact, although it was slow to be accepted. Well into the nineteen-fifties, psychologists were encouraging parents to give children less attention and affection, in order to encourage independence. Then Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, produced a series of influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.
He happened upon the findings in the mid-fifties, when he decided to save money for his primate-research laboratory by breeding his own lab monkeys instead of importing them from India. Because he didn't know how to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of the era cared for human infants — in nurseries, with plenty of food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild. Yet they were also profoundly disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating themselves.