Chapter 30 Burning Wenzhou Shoes

Compared with low-voltage electrical appliances in Liushi, "Wenzhou shoes" may have a greater "reputation" among consumers. Some people joked that in the past ten years, a product produced in a certain place has reached the point of "discussing the whole country". Apart from fake medicines from Jinjiang, Fujian, it is probably leather shoes from Wenzhou. However, what is intriguing is that the expressions of Wenzhou people when they talk about their leather shoes are much more complicated than when they talk about Liushi Electric. So far, in Wenzhou, many people still feel that the fate of Wenzhou shoes is more or less wronged.

"Speaking of Wenzhou shoes, it's hard to put into words." Shoemaker Wang Yuejin "I remember once, a foreigner walked by my shoe stall. I saw his leather shoes were very beautiful, so I closed the shoe stall and followed him. I followed him all the way to the hotel. He became suspicious, turned around and asked me why I followed him. I said, your leather shoes are beautiful, can you sell them to me. He said I have worn them for more than a year, how can I sell them to you? He must have thought I was crazy then. But I insisted on buying it, and I ended up paying a thousand dollars for his pair of Italian leather shoes that I've worn for over a year."

With this pair of shoes, Wang Yuejin hired three small workers to open his first shoe shop, and made tens of thousands of pairs of leather shoes according to the appearance of that pair of shoes. The story of Wang Yuejin is almost the history of the prosperity of Wenzhou leather shoes. Since the 1980s, starting from imitation, Wenzhou people have made domestic leather shoes catch up with the new trend of the world in a short period of time.They made China's first pair of pigskin leather shoes and the first pair of vulcanized viscose leather shoes. By 1987, the output of Wenzhou's leather shoes reached 24 million pairs, accounting for almost 10% of the country's total and surpassing Shanghai, the traditional leather shoe production base in my country. Thirty percent.Some people have estimated that one out of every two people in the country must wear Wenzhou leather shoes.

In Wenzhou, the largest shoe market appeared in Lucheng District, and the Laifumen shoe and leather market in the area was also the largest professional leather shoe market in China at that time.In this area, there are 1,254 leather shoe factories, large and small.The scale is astonishing. However, in those few years, the ghost "attached" Wenzhou shoes. In 1985, a consumer in Nanjing wrote a letter to Economic Daily, claiming that she bought a pair of high-heeled shoes, but they fell off after wearing them for a day. After a closer look, they were actually glued together with paste, and the so-called genuine leather was also Synthetic leather imitation cowhide.

As soon as this article came out, there was an uproar in public opinion. For a while, the hats of "one-day shoes", "morning and evening shoes", and "worship shoes" were put on the heads of Wenzhou shoes one after another.A newspaper also made a statistic that among the top ten major cities in the country, the leather shoes with the most complaints from consumers are Wenzhou shoes. "The Laifumen market at that time was like a sea of ​​leather shoes. The whole of Wenzhou was almost flooded by foreigners who came to buy shoes. The wholesale price of a pair of leather shoes was only 20 yuan, and a few years ago when prices hadn't risen That’s the price, and anyone with a discerning eye will know it’s not right.” Wang Yuejin recalled.

The climax came in June 1987. That month, first at Wulin Square in the downtown area of ​​Hangzhou, citizens piled thousands of pairs of Wenzhou shoes into a hill and burned them down.Then the fire spread to Nanjing, Changsha, and Zhuzhou... Soon, Wenzhou shoes were expelled from all major and medium-sized cities across the country. Numerous shopping malls put up signs saying "Advise customers not to buy lukewarm goods". Chen Wenxian, who just became the mayor of Wenzhou City at that time, couldn't help but smile bitterly when he looked back at that time. At that time, he would receive some inexplicable parcels every few days.When I got it back at the post office and opened it, it was a pair of broken leather shoes made in Wenzhou.

The result of "burning Wenzhou shoes" is to make the national business community have a bad impression of the Zhejiang market. With the footsteps of Wenzhou shoes, the sound of forced beatings continued all the way, and a jingle that embarrassed Zhejiang people also began to spread in the streets of cities and towns: "The crackdown on counterfeiting begins in Zhejiang!" "This store does not sell Wenzhou goods!" "Exhaust heat!" "In the market in Zhejiang, except for the real people, everything else is fake." What's even worse is that people scornfully call the Wenzhou products flying all over the sky: "Plague (Wen) epidemic."

It can really be said that "misfortunes never come singly".By 1990, a "flying misfortune" hit Wenzhou shoes again. September of that year.Xinhua News Agency broadcast a 700-word draft titled "Minister of Commerce Gets Scammed for Buying Shoes". According to the news, on July 12, when Hu Ping, Minister of Commerce, visited Wuhan Department Store while he was inspecting Hubei, he saw a pair of mesh-colored leather shoes in front of the leather shoes counter, so he paid 49.5 yuan and bought them. Come down, and put on on the spot, continue to visit. On the afternoon of the 13th, Hu Ping returned to Beijing. Unexpectedly, when he took off his shoes at home, he found that the heel of his right shoe had fallen off.He took a closer look and found that the pair of shoes had neither a trademark nor a manufacturer, only the word "Shanghai" on the sole.

A few days later, at the meeting of commercial directors of 11 cities, Hu Ping was very angry when he talked about this matter, saying: Fake and inferior products are really abominable.Minister of Light Industry Zeng Xianlin said that the matter will be investigated and an exhibition of fake and shoddy shoes will be held at the end of the year. Because this news is short and vivid, almost all newspapers, radio stations and TV stations in the country have adopted it.After reading the news, almost everyone "intuited" that the shoes on Minister Hu's feet must be Wenzhou shoes. Although subsequent investigations showed that the uppers of the pair of shoes were produced in Wuhan, and the soles were enough to be imported.However, the momentary outpouring of public opinion all fell on Wenzhou people.

Wenzhou leather shoes were once again suppressed in major cities across the country. Mao Yuejin said that at the beginning of that year, there were more than 10,000 Wenzhou people who set up shoe stalls and rented leather shoe counters in Beijing, and at the end of the year at least 70% of them were "driven" out of the capital.The Laifumen shoe and leather market, which was originally very lively, also became depressed after two shocks. "The reputation of Wenzhou shoes was too great at that time, and it was too stinky. There was nothing wrong with it. Complain." Speaking of that matter, Wang Yuejin could only shake his head.