"Country Driving"

The birth of factory towns:

• Fifteen years ago, this region was all farmland, but it boomed so fast that old village boundaries disappeared. Now you judged  transitions by advertisements on the side of the road, which featured local products.
• The director of the economic zone.. told me that in order to prepare for the factories they had leveled exactly one hundred and eight mountains and hills.
• Many men of Director Wang's age possess illogical resumes, full of disjointed transitions and unexpected career jumps. But when they tell these stories, it's the trajectory that matters, not the specific steps themselves.
• The Jane Eyre Series consisted of plastic switches and electric outlet covers that began at a price of two dollars and 97 cents.
• "Reading books" indicated that an applicant was lazy. Worst of all was a job candidate who said she spent free time on the Internet.
• He told applicants what they wanted to hear: he assured them they'd have at least ten hours of labor every day, and no more than one day's vacation every month. That was the Lishui version of a boss's empty promise.
• There was now a printing store - the first business to sell something other than food, phone cards, and construction materials.
• But the uneven syncopation ended with the factories. They had rhythm - their assembly lines hummed and sang with the regularity of a chorus.
• After the sale is made, and the farmers have moved off the land, the city can build basic infrastructure and reclassify the region as urban. And urban land-use rights can be auctioned off at market rates, to the highest bidder... Cities in coastal regions receive roughly half their fiscal revenue from real estate transactions.
• The Ministry of Land Resources simply didn't have enough staff to do the necessary on-site investigations. Sometimes they even relied on satellite images to try to figure out which cities were embarking on major construction projects.

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