Perhaps more than for the actual coal, Shanxi Province is famous for the coal bosses, a class of nouveaux riches that became astronomically wealthy as the Chinese economy took off. They were legendary for their appetites, for showing up in Beijing and buying one of everything. The most expensive watch, the most expensive car—it was all fodder for a coal boss’s rapacious lifestyle. I had heard the tale, probably apocryphal, of a coal boss who, liking the looks of an apartment building under construction in Beijing, had decided to buy every unit with a southern exposure. Cecily told me that her friends would joke about marrying coal bosses, in much the same way, it seemed, that I had heard young American women joke about finding an investment banker or a hedge fund manager.
I suspect the coal bosses personified certain anxieties about the way capitalism was driving China’s transformation. They were a farcical overstatement of the consumerism that was spreading through the middle class in general. And worse, the coal bosses’ wealth was exploitative, in that it came from a dangerous and often illegal industry. China’s coal mines were notorious for collapses and explosions, with a cost in lives that outstripped any other nation’s mines.
But the golden age of the Shanxi coal boss was drawing to a close. The government had consolidated or closed thousands of coal mines, in a bid to increase efficiency and safety. And the future of the industry lay in less- developed provinces like Inner Mongolia, where huge reserves of coal waited in the ground.
Linfen isn’t really a coal baron town; I hear they prefer the provincial capital of Taiyuan. But even in Linfen, a crust of luxury is overlain on the economy. There was, for example, the Audi dealership—a striking mesh-clad box that housed a sleek, museum-like showroom.
“Our customers are mostly from coal mines,” said a young salesman called Yanlin. And he didn’t mean the miners themselves. Industrialists liked Audis, he told us. Executives from coal mines, metal mines, coke factories. They came here to buy their cars.
A brand like Mercedes-Benz attracts too much attention, Yanlin said. Audi is a good car, very good quality, but not as gaudy. It shows they are the boss, but is a little more low-profile.
Even so, an Audi could go for two million yuan—three hundred thousand dollars. And sales were still good, even with the recent consolidation of the coal industry.
Yanlin seemed to be getting a little nervous at all the questions, so we thanked him and went to roam the showroom floor. I was less drawn to the cars themselves than to the display cases of Audi-branded accessories: leather wallets and portfolios, pens, an iPod case or two, all stamped with the quadruple circle of Audi. The placard for a handbag read, in Chinese, “This purse is a miracle.”
A pair of cufflinks caught my eye. They were engraved with the logo for the Audi R8, a high-performance sports car. The face of each cufflink was mounted with a small, lacquered checkerboard of carbon fiber. This was probably a reference to carbon-fiber components used in the cars, but here, in coal country, the cufflinks took on special meaning.
“Everyone has to have their own style,” said Cecily, reading the placard. “These cufflinks show your spirit and taste. Made with real carbon and stainless steel.”
Were there Shanxi coal men driving around wearing cufflinks made of carbon? It was too good to be true, but one of the salespeople assured us that it was. He also told us that there were health benefits to wearing the cufflinks—the carbon in them absorbed toxins. But this harebrained theory was less interesting to me than the idea that the cufflinks were some kind of badge of honor, a Masonic ring for that brotherhood of men who are helping us seal the deal on climate change. (Order your own from the Audi Web site for $169.)
The dealership’s customer service director, a young man called Jun, had taken an interest in us. He had nobody to eat lunch with that day and offered to take us out. I noticed that he drove a Nissan.
I don’t make enough to buy an Audi yet, he said.
We had lunch at the Taotang Native Association, an ornate wonderland of executive schmoozing. It was a recent building, set down on a stretch of land not far from the Yao Temple and the Hua Gate, near the construction site of a huge shopping mall. We made our way through a warren of courtyards and corridors, into a small ballroom with a stage, and finally to a private room with a large circular table outfitted with a lazy Susan.
Jun ordered lavishly, without looking at the menu, and soon there were something like fifteen dishes on the table, including foie gras, shredded rabbit with cabbage, tofu, fried buns, garlic broccoli, and something Cecily translated as “specialized noodles.”
Jun was twenty-eight, with an attentive face and a crown of wiry hair bursting off his head. He smoked between his measured assaults on the food, and atomized the conversation into small sections divided by the rings of his two cellphones—one white, one black—sometimes stepping out of the room to talk. The white phone was for regular calls, he said. The black one was for his most important customers. The black one he answered twenty-four hours a day.
The guy was unstoppable. “Car sales depend on personal relationships,” he said, and pushed the turntable so the pile of foie gras was in front of me.
He told us that, in sales, you have to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Anticipate their needs. Become their friend. Then, when they have to choose a car, they will come to you. “Competition is very fierce here,” he said. “You win not by price, but by personal relationships.”
He had majored in car repair in college, but had been doing this job for four years now.
“So you went from servicing the cars to servicing the customers,” I joked.
He nodded. “That’s correct.”
There was nothing Jun wouldn’t do for his clients, whether it was helping them with personal business, running errands, or doing other favors. For one customer, he had recommended a stock pick—and promised to reimburse him if he took a loss on the investment. And he told of having to talk one powerful client down from a drunken rage after a relative received some minor injuries blamed on a faulty Audi air bag. Many of Jun’s clients were rude, he said. But no matter how rude they got, he couldn’t allow himself to lose his temper. In the end, the rudest ones ended up trusting him the most, because he tolerated their behavior more than anyone else would.
The most important part of his job, though, was to smoke and eat and drink without cease. He drank and smoked much more than before. Nothing got done in Shanxi without drinking, he said. It was a hard job. His family didn’t like it.
The conversation had somehow turned, and suddenly, instead of telling us about his ability to manage the personalities of truculent coal men, Jun was talking about how depressed he was.
He had taken a test on the Internet, he told us. A score above fifty meant you were depressed. He scored eighty.
He was under a lot of pressure, he said. He wanted to keep making his salary. He was making five times what he had hoped for when he graduated, and had bought a house for his parents, but he was too busy to enjoy life. He couldn’t relax. He had no time to socialize, and was starting to lose friends. They assumed he was avoiding them, that he thought he was better than them, because of the money he made. But that wasn’t it. He was just busy. The only people he really talked to, he said, were friends he had made online, whom he would never meet in person.
He wanted to have a plan for the future, he said. He wanted to get married. But he didn’t have time to think about himself, to think about his “self-strategy.” The only time he could think about such things was late at night. Or while sleeping.
He lit another cigarette. All he knew was that, if he left the car business, the connections he had built in Linfen’s industrial community would be valuable, whatever he did. Relationships weren’t important just for selling Audis.
I wanted an audience. I wanted to smoke and eat and drink with one of the coal princes of Shanxi. I wanted Jun to help me get a glimpse of the top of the food chain.
He shook his head, a faint smile on his face. It’s impossible to meet those people, he said. Then he got the check, and we rose from the table to go. But before we left, I took another bite of shredded rabbit. You have to eat the year, or it will eat you first.
The closest I got to meeting a coal boss was Liu, the driver who had picked us up at the airport in Yuncheng and driven us to Linfen, and whom we had hired again several times. A middle-aged man with a sleepy expression and a wry smile, Liu and his family had started a coal mine of their own. Only in Shanxi, perhaps, does a taxi driver
