By Jack LeBlanc

My resourceful friend Smile had already put me in contact with Jackson Long, a trader in building material and, according to local rumour, a person very well connected to the inside gangways of the Chongqing political elite. Long had named himself after the ‘most famous’ of American singers, according to Long: ‘The illustrious megastar, Michael Jackson.’

Our first contact was in the city centre, where he ran his building- materials empire. Most building contractors worth the name had to visit his offices to buy anything from bricks to bathroom appliances. Sitting on the sixth floor of a white-tiled office building garnished with blue windows, Long’s headquarters were something of a turn-off.

The building had an elevator but due to weekly electricity rationing it generally sat lifeless on the ground floor. Each visit entailed a tiring walk up and down scores of dark concrete stairs.

His emporium occupied the whole floor and was shared with his younger brother, who dealt in hotel kitchen equipment.

A big aquarium with opaque, olive-coloured water welcomed customers in the tiny reception. Red blotches sporadically moving in the murky green signaled that there was still life in there. A rundown fake-leather couch, too low and too soft, would engulf anyone who dared settle on it. For the unsuspecting, it was always awkward to get out. Inside, staff were moving files, reading newspapers or just deep asleep with their heads cradled in their arms on the wooden desks. Jackson’s office was at the back of the room, and consisted of a flimsy aluminum cage with glass windows all around so he could keep an eye on what took place in his emporium. His space consisted of a set of sofas similar to those at the entrance, a glass coffee table, a large mahogany desk with his black leather chair behind it, and a huge plastic-framed decoration with three- dimensional representations of black shrimps resting on light jade-coloured seaweed. His desk was always clear. It held only a telephone, a cup of tea and a little black stone horse prancing on its rear hooves. According to Smile he was the man, the one with the key to the front door of the illustrious palaces of guanxi, and all the extensive connections at the local government level.

Smile did the initial introductions. ‘This is Jieke who I told you about – he’s from Belgium and has some contacts in Europe for building materials, and is wondering if you’d like to do business with him.’ Jackson was a forty-something guy whose face bore the obvious marks of some rough times in the past. Old J, as we started to call him, had made his fortune during the unexpected dynamism that hit Sichuan’s major city beginning in the mid-eighties. He had left his position as building contractor in a construction company and leaped into the sea, or xiahai as the Chinese would say, to set up his own company, abandoning his iron rice bowl along the way. A chain smoker with heavily blackened teeth, he welcomed me with a huge smile. ‘Sit down, have some tea.’ A red metal thermos printed with chrysanthemums and plugged with a cork filled up three glasses, leaving tea leaves swirling around in the piping-hot water. From behind a waft of cigarette smoke he was assessing me, probably trying to figure out what the hell this barbarian could have to offer him. There was a moment of eerie silence broken only by the ringing of incoming telephone calls from behind the glass cage.

‘Sorry, I can’t speak a foreign language,’ he said to Smile. ‘No problem, no problem,’ Smile repeated, ‘Jieke is fluent in Chinese!’ I had spent the last couple of months brushing up my Chinese and had ended up with heavily Sichuan-accented Mandarin, but saying that I was fluent was complete hyperbole. I uttered something to the effect that I wasn’t really as fluent as Smile pretended I was. Anyway that seemed to have broken the ice. A brief presentation on the glass samples followed, and I handed him some of the picture slides with completed buildings using the glass curtain. Up to that point I hadn’t detected the slightest interest in the glass samples and how they might apply to his business. Holding the slides up to the light he peered at them, cigarette butt in the left corner of his mouth, but still appeared uninterested. Grabbing one of the samples he asked me how much it would cost. Explaining to him that it depended on the surface, the finishing, size and thickness seemed not to be the right answer. He wanted to hear a price, not all these questions from my side, so finally I threw out a dollar number.

‘Too expensive. At least forty times more than the local make! Like this it will be impossible to sell here. You need to give me a much, much better price.’ Old J mumbled something to Smile that didn’t get translated. The meeting lasted a little less than thirty minutes. Soon we were back on ground level, amid the hustle and bustle of Chongqing city life.

‘So? Will he buy? What’s this all about? Why is he not interested in the technical questions? Does he have a project?’ I asked Smile. ‘He’ll get back to us. He needs some time.’

Time in China is an unusual concept, a creature of quite different dimensions to what I was familiar with, and impossible to fit into a crisp Western model. ‘Some time’ was like aeons to me, but on other occasions ‘China time’ had already clocked in well ahead of schedule. Although I lamented to Smile that Jackson was letting us down as nothing had happened for weeks on end, Smile simply brushed off my complaints.

Jack LeBlanc, author of Business Republic of China, Tales from the front line of China’s new revolution.

This is the second part of “The great glass curtain walls of China”, next week we will publish the third part. Here you can find part 1.