Chapter 12 The only solution to Wenzhou riddles

In 1986, the famous economist Professor Dong Furen went to Qiaotou for inspection. The car was driving in the mountains on the north side of the Oujiang River. Professor Dong was enjoying the surrounding scenery with great interest. "How far is the bridge?" After driving for a while, Professor Dong began to care about the destination. "We'll be there soon." The accompanying person replied.Professor Dong looked ahead suspiciously, the mountains were still stretching, and there was no sign of excitement ahead. Suddenly, the car deviated from the Hangwen Highway and drove into a bumpy dirt road.

All of a sudden, the car was shaking, people were shaking, dust was flying, and the window was blurred. When the vision became clear, there were hundreds of stalls and thousands of people in front of us. The noisy and busy scene rushed towards me, and all of this seemed to suddenly emerge from the ground. "Why," Professor Dong discovered an anomaly with the sensitivity unique to scholars, "the button market is not located next to the Hangzhou-Wenzhou Highway, but in this corner of the mountain?" Theoretically, the location of the market is based on the convenience of transportation. However, many markets in Wenzhou are either in the mountains or on islands, often in some remote places with inconvenient water and land transportation.

Some people have measured that it is 3.5 kilometers from Qiaotou to Hangwen Highway. How can the people at Qiaotou use their supernatural power to "lead" the market to bend the dirt road for 3.5 kilometers? In 1990, Liu Suinian, the Minister of Materials Department, visited Wenzhou, and he went to Yishan. The local officials were eloquently introducing the situation. Suddenly, he blurted out a series of numbers, which aroused the suspicion of Minister Liu, who is famous for his rigor. "Stop, read it again." Read it again: The acrylic fiber market in Yishan needs to purchase 17,000 tons of acrylic fiber scraps from other places every year, which is equivalent to the cotton produced by 340,000 mu of cotton fields.Every year, 3 million pieces of old cotton cloth are purchased, and 200 million pieces of recycled acrylic underwear and 3 million pieces of recycled cotton cloth are sold from Yishan every year.

It seems that I heard correctly. Minister Liu shook his head and sighed: such a huge flow of materials is continuously transported from all over the country to a remote town without railways or national roads every year. This is simply unimaginable.What a huge amount of transportation, how many wagons are needed.Even if the Ministry of Materials dispatches it in person, it may not be able to work, but how did the farmers in Wenzhou do it? Yes, how did Wenzhou farmers do it? In 1986, Wanli, Vice Premier of the State Council, went to Wenzhou, and he went to Liushi as one of the stops: Walking in the busy electrical market, Wanli looked and asked all the way.

This is an electric coal lamp, this is an AC contactor, and this is a miner's lamp accessory... In front of a booth, Wan Li asked a Northeast merchant who was purchasing: "Why did you come here all the way?" "The things here are cheap, the goods are available, and the quality is not bad." "Why don't you buy them in big city stores or state enterprises?" The Northeast people laughed but did not answer. Before leaving Liushi, he asked Vice Premier Wan to say a few words, but the old politician fell into deep thought.The transcript of his speech at that time is as follows: "If this market appeared in the suburbs of Shanghai, people would understand it, but it was formed in a coastal town in southern Zhejiang far away from large industrial cities, which shows that there are still big loopholes in our country's industry. State-owned enterprises can produce such products."

Ordinarily, the equipment, technology, capital, and even the geographical conditions of state-owned enterprises are a hundred times better than those in Wenzhou.But why can't the state-owned enterprises compete with the family factories of Wenzhou farmers? The questions raised by the above three economists, ministers and vice premiers are just a small part of the countless "Wenzhou Mysteries". In those years, everyone who has been to Wenzhou left Wenzhou with one or two such questions. Some people say that Wenzhou hides countless mysteries. Some people simply say that Wenzhou as a whole is a mystery.

Wenzhou has also been surrounded by these mysteries, and it seems more and more mysterious. Now, we finally get to the heart of the questions posed in the opening paragraph: How did so many "accidental events" and so many market phenomena that violated "economic laws" become reality? "Have you ever been to the Hangzhou-Wenzhou Highway?" Zhang Renshou asked us quietly. Zhang Renshou, vice president of Zhejiang Academy of Social Sciences, is a middle-aged scholar who came out of the mountains of Wenzhou.In the past two decades, he has written papers of millions of words for Wenzhou, and he can be said to be the number one "Wenzhou expert" in Zhejiang academic circles.But he said that he only realized all the mysteries of Wenzhou when he stood on the side of the Hangzhou-Wenzhou Highway one night.

"Stand on the side of the Hangzhou-Wenzhou Highway for a while, and you will find several cars frantically driving past you almost every minute. It usually takes 13 hours to drive from Wenzhou to Hangzhou. People in Wenzhou usually leave in the evening. Arrive in Hangzhou in the morning, unload the goods and load another car immediately, and drive back to Wenzhou. In order to hurry, every car drives very fast. The lights on the whole road are connected end to end, non-stop around the clock, and car rollovers occur almost every night. There is a long section of this road along the mountain stream. When a car overturns, it will either hit the rocks or fall into the abyss. Deaths often happen. Some people say that this section of the road in China is the most dangerous. Among the drivers in China, the drivers in Wenzhou are the most savage and desperate, which may be true."

Zhang Renshou paused for a moment, and then said slowly, "And this kind of brutality and desperation is the answer to the mystery of Wenzhou." He said Yishan again. "When Minister Liu arrived in Yishan, Yishan was already connected with roads. But before 1989, from other places to Yishan, it took two transfers of vehicles and boats, and the ten miles of dirt road before entering the town, the trucks still couldn't drive, and the goods had to be turned over again. It can only be transported in by a smaller tricycle. In some villages, it is entirely on the shoulders of the peasants.Can you imagine?Tens of thousands of tons of acrylic fabrics are picked out one by one in this way every year, and after being woven into cloth and clothes, they are picked out one by one. "

Shoulder bleeding, people risking their lives, what are there too many mysteries in the Wenzhou market?In fact, all the inconceivable things that people have seen about the Wenzhou market over the years are the astonishment at the creativity of Wenzhou farmers. "Most of Wenzhou's top ten professional markets are located in relatively remote valleys or on the seashore. In fact, it is easy to understand. In those places, the constraints of the planned economy are relatively less. If the bridgehead is on the side of the road, it is likely to be banned before it prospers." .China's experience has proved that the initial breakthrough of the old system often occurs in areas where the old system is relatively weak. Transportation was originally the first element of material circulation, and equipment and technology were originally the primary conditions for market competition. Those times didn’t seem so important anymore.”

What is important? The important thing is: where the germ of modern commodity production—the cottage industry—has existed for a long time, the market impulse and passion of farmers are more obvious.The market-oriented reform will act like a catalyst, causing the impulsiveness and passion contained in those farmers to erupt earlier and more strongly than anywhere else——Wenzhou professional market is one step ahead of the whole country. Beyond the origin of the times: the solution to the riddle is here. More than a hundred years ago, when Marx argued the dialectical relationship between geography and productivity levels, he wrote: "The motherland of capital is not the lush tropics, but the temperate zone. It is not the absolute fertility of the soil, but its diversity and the variety of its natural products, which form the natural basis of the division of labor in society, and through the natural environment in which people live changes in their own needs, abilities, means of labor, and methods of labor." I don’t know if this text is enough to reveal the long and profound “necessity” hidden behind countless “accidental events”?