3 Days in Zhejiang: Selling to Survive - Yiwu

The Plan

The May holiday, part of the Golden Week holiday system in China sees the whole country (more-or-less) taking their holiday between the 1st and 7th May and is best avoided as a time for travelling in China if you have any choice. Those of us working in China do not.

I would be travelling with two other foreign teachers, good friends and colleagues of mine. Democratically, we had each chosen a destination and planned a route accordingly that would take us to:

Day 1: the town of Yiwu (义乌)
Day 2: the Double Dragon Caves (双龙洞) near Jinhua (金华)
Day 3: the film studios at Hengdian (横店)

On May 1st, along with uncountable millions of others across China, we began our journey.

Day 1: Yiwu: Finding Accommodation

The journey to Yiwu was pleasantly uneventful and fast, thanks to the driver requesting an extra 5RMB from each of us in order to take the highway and pay the toll. As usual, the small coach had no intentions of going to a bus station and dropped us off on the side of a road, somewhere in Yiwu. We bought a map and jumped in a taxi to take us to the bus station where we would be getting a bus the next day for Jinhua.

The South Bus Station was suitably busy and we queued for around 30 minutes to get our tickets for the bus to Jinhua. Then it was off to find somewhere to sleep for the night. The ease of our journey so far should have warned me that we would soon encounter our first obstacles.

Yiwu has plenty of hotels for foreigners. This is supposed to mean that they are of a comparative quality to overseas hotels – to keep us in the manner to which we are accustomed – but invariably means they are expensive. For those of us looking for budget travelling, when room prices start at 250RMB, we start looking elsewhere.

The locals seemed to be in on the scheme and whenever I asked for a cheap place to stay, the same expensive hotels were pointed out. I changed my tactic and asked for a lvguan (旅馆), the cheapest kind of accommodation I know of in China, resembling bed sits, where even the basics aren’t always guaranteed. We were soon following the directions of several locals to a street full of such establishments.

The first place refused to accept us, on account of us being “foreigners”. The second place happily followed suit. The third agreed to accept us, taking into account our foreign expert’s certificates as some kind of trade off that we were technically “living” in China. We were about to pay when the manager from the first place marched in, had a brief, heated conversation with the receptionists and it was soon clear that we would not be staying here either.

It was the fourth place we tried that eventually accepted us with little fuss and a photocopy of our passports. Only two ensuite rooms remained which I booked for my colleagues and I took a single room, no bathroom, for just 25RMB. The staple furniture in every 旅馆 is the same: a bed and a TV, mine also had a bin and a small night table. Each floor of the 旅馆 has two rarely-cleaned toilets and a sink shared between a large number of guests. The walls appear to be made of paper and sleep is not easy to come by – or keep, once you have it – I was woken up at 5am by a neighbour watching a movie that included a great deal of machine gun fire. Still, you get what you pay for.

Day 1: Yiwu: Finding Food

A Chinese friend of a friend had told my colleague that there was a huge market at Yiwu, hence our first stop and the three of us expecting to buy a few touristy souvenirs for friends. First though, we wanted to get some food.

Yiwu is, I guess, the only city in China where you have to work really hard to find a restaurant. In search of lunch and a stroll we headed to the brown tourist-signed Huangyuan Market (黄园市场) located on the edge of the Yiwu River. It is actually a great square block of shoe shops, stretching as far as the eye can see, and incorporating – fortunately for us – a single, tiny back-street cafe which served us up simple but delicious fried noodles, dumplings and cold beer.

Chouzhou Road (稠州路) stretches the length of the town and is the best place to locate a restaurant. Buses and taxis ply this busy road that leads up to the International Trade City (the name of the indoor market place where many of the goods are now located). We chose an Arabian restaurant with an upstairs dining terrace – the service was terrible but the food was excellent.

Day 1: Yiwu is The Biggest Small Commodities Market on Earth

Yiwu was in fact heralded by the World Bank in 2005 as the biggest small commodities market on earth and is now home to over 50,000 shops. Not exactly what we were expecting! Yiwu is where you come to buy things: big things, small things and most importantly CHEAP things. Quality is not an issue, it’s quantity that’s the name of the game and if you want to buy 20,000 or 50,000 of something, so much the better.

There is not one shop selling Christmas goods, but fifty. There are not ten shops selling umbrellas, but hundreds. There are not one hundred shops selling toys, but thousands. From pens to polythene, buttons to bags, hardware to Hong Kong souvenirs, clocks to cosmetics, kites to kitchenware every conceivable commodity lines every centimetre of space in a dizzying and monotonous maze: shelf upon shelf, shop upon shop, potential sale upon potential sale.

Flabbergasted remains the word I would use to describe my overall impression of Yiwu, the city where that cliché of inexpensive mass production “Made in China” not only originates but flourishes. I spent perhaps 2 hours covering a small part of the ginormous International Trade City with something resembling fascinated horror. It doesn’t seem possible that there are enough people on earth to buy what is for sale here. That there is, and that the plan to extend the selling area to cover 8,000 football pitches of space by 2015 is well under way, remains an incredulous reality.

Day 1: Yiwu: A Story of Entrepreneurship

This story of Chinese entrepreneurship began during the days of the Cultural Revolution when the infertile lands of Zhejiang Province meant the population was starving. An official called Xie Gaohua, using his initiative, revived an old trade of growing sugar cane and selling it in exchange for chicken feathers. The locals then made the chicken feathers into feather dusters and sold them. The rest, as they say, is history.

The town of Yiwu itself is inextricable from its industry and I felt it was ruthless, shallow and without soul. Avoiding starvation was the noble motivation behind the humble origins of the town which today epitomises the “get rich quick, retire early” dreams of East and West alike. Dreams as likely to have cheap labour and unfair trade at their core as anything else. Scratch the surface and there seems to be nothing underneath, nothing beyond the sell, sell, SELL unless you want to buy, buy, BUY – in bulk.

Yiwu: Information (May 2007)

Getting There:

From: Lin’an (临安) to Yiwu (义乌)
By: Small coach
Cost: 46RMB (+ 5RMB extra per person for the highway toll)
Time: 2 hours 20 minutes
Details: There are 2 buses every day at 7am and 7.20am

Accommodation

Small lvguan (旅馆) situated outside the South Bus Station
Single room with nothing, shared bathroom, no air-conditioning 25RMB/night
Single room with bathroom, no hot water and as above 35RMB/night

Many small budget hotels as above won’t accept foreigners. There are many very big and pricey hotels in Yiwu to choose from if you are not travelling on a budget.

Maps

There are a lot of foreigners in Yiwu and so all the maps are in English and Chinese. It also contains details of all bus routes and bus stations in English, which is really useful. You can buy a map from any small corner store, newsagent or street hawkers near the bus stations. Pay no more than 5RMB.