All the Pearls in China

After visiting the Forbidden City, we had lunch and visited a cloisonne factory. This was a government-run facility. If you're like me, you had no idea what cloisonne was or how it was made. But you've seen it before, ranging from the completely gaudy to the insanely beautiful.

When we entered, we could see workers engaged in every step of cloisonne fabrication. So now I know how it's made. The typical cloisonne piece is a vase. First, a vase is made from copper sheeting, soldered together and beat by hand into the correct shape. Then the pattern is applied. Thousands of thin strips of copper are applied to the vase to form a series of shallow pools on the surface of the vase. I don't know exactly how they are affixed, but it didn't seem to be via a soldering or welding process, but rather by the use of some sort of adhesive, which is quite surprising, really. The people doing this have a pattern to which they refer, and that pattern seems to be copied onto the vase directly, perhaps via carbon paper.

The next step is enamel. This looks like a powdery dye immersed in water. It is more or less spooned into the pools and left to dry. Apparently, there is no set color scheme for a given pattern, this is left to the taste and judgement of the worker. I saw the same pattern with several different color schemes, in fact. And I didn't see any patterns or references at their worktables.

When the enameling is completed, the pot is fired in a kiln. I presume this is done to cure the enamel, which has already dried somewhat, or else it would run out when you turned the pot over to work on the other side. After firing, a worker with a lathe uses a cloth and some sort of liquid abrasive to polish it and remove an outer layer of scorching from the kiln. It probably smoothes off the topmost layer as well, where the copper dividers would have a tendency to extend past the enamel.

We were told that a pot like this might take 400 hours to complete. In the factory showroom you could buy such a pot for the equivalent of $50 in US currency. That's 10 cents an hour for what is really highly skilled labor.

In the showroom, there are salespeople everywhere. prices are marked, but negotiable. If your gaze lingers on a piece for more than a second or two, someone will come up to you and tell you about it, and tell you how much. Their English was good enough to carry out the process of selling, that's for sure.

The showroom was very large, perhaps as much as four full-size basketball courts, and stuffed with items of all size and shape. It was entirely clear to me that the operation out front could not produce all the material being sold in the showroom, even if some of it moved slowly.

Which raised the question, where, and how, was it being produced? I didn't want to ask these questions, as I thought it might embarrass our hosts, and I didn't really have a need to know.

For example, our tour leader, my daughter's high school art teacher asked them what they did with pieces that ended up with defects. This question seemed to puzzle them, and they said that never happened. This isn't credible to our ears. People drop stuff, glue doesn't hold. Sometimes, the polishing lathes aren't hooked up correctly, or stuff gets caught in them. (The workplace was full of reminders that there's no such thing as OSHA in China.) But they said that defects don't happen.

One of the other oddities is that there are very few cash registers evident. Not just in this place, or the other "factories" we visited. And most hotels as well. When I wanted to buy something, I would negotiate a price with a salesperson, who would write the agreed price on a printed ( and carbon papered) slip of paper which I would take to the cashier. The cashier would take my money, make change for me, and put the cash in, variously, an envelope, a drawer, or a shoebox. The slip of paper would be stamped as paid, and the duplicate filed in another box. This procedure was followed even at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco when I got my visa.


I'm not entirely certain that capitalism is the same thing as commerce, but it is entirely clear that the Chinese understand commerce. In fact their embrace of commerce and selling is, er, bracingly vigorous from the perspective of us Americans.

Every time we stepped of the tour bus, there were street vendors there. They had many products to sell. Most common were postcards of where ever we were at, followed by watches. The would call "hello" to get you to look. They would touch your sleeve, or stand in your way. If your eye lingered on their merchandise for more than a moment, they would follow you for blocks. In short, they went for the jugular as aggressively as the worst telephone solicitor in this country.

In all, we visited several of these government factories. Besides cloisonne, there were factories for cultured fresh-water pearls, silk, jade, and a gallery for calligraphy and ink painting. In each case, the process was the same; a short demonstration and lecture on the process, followed by a stop in the showroom to buy. Some places were fixed price, with a discount announced by the person greeting and giving the lecture, while others allowed negotiation.

Retail is theater, they say, and these stores reflected that. The point of these places was not to make the stuff, but to sell it to us. I'm sure that they were meant to sell to Americans, and Europeans. I'm not sure why, though. To concentrate the English speakers? Are the prices subsidised to generate goodwill? Or to accomodate the needs of the Western tourist, who isn't used to negotiating and has very little time to do so.

Our tour director alluded to this. "We Chinese like to take our time shopping for something nice, and try and get the best price, but you don't have time for that," she said. Fixed price saves time. Of course, the need to save time is connected with the price of labor, which is very cheap in China, even ignoring the effect of currency peg.

Unlike the Western nations, which allow the relative prices of their currencies to be determined on an open market, the Chinese government fixes the price of the Yuan relative to the dollar. It is set low, to make it easier for them to sell stuff to Americans.

However, internally in China, there is plenty of evidence that labor costs are low. From the scads of salespeople in any particular store, to the ridiculously low cost of handmade items, to the lack of cash registers. Labor is used where we might use capital goods to save labor costs, because there's no point. Jackhammers and backhoes are not used to dig holes in the streets, men with picks and shovels are.

This struck me as a straightforward economic decision. Why invest in labor-saving devices when labor is the cheapest thing there is. And because of the currency peg, anything they can't make in country, such as backhoes, perhaps, is going to be very expensive, artificially expensive.


The final observation I took away from all this is about intellectual property. The artists we saw were simply duplicating a pattern someone else had made, whether that was in cloisonne, jewelery, silk or painting.

At the gallery I looked at a stack of hand painted, roughly 8x10 pictures of bamboo. They sold for maybe $5US. Each one was different, though they all looked the same. To my eyes, at least, it would be very hard to see the artist in that painting. These artists undergo rigorous training in line and drawing, and the result is a high degree of uniformity.

We saw some oil paintings also, and they were a bit more uniform. But it seems the culture places very little reward on discovery and creation, and certainly very little on self-expression. Which will make it difficult for it to accomodate the West's demands for greater respect of IP, even though the Chinese know that this is necessary.