A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China: Free to Fly Inside the Cage

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Although Beijing has declared that the economic reforms and the opening to the outside world will continue despite its political crackdown, the capital appears torn between leveling the playing field and letting the laws of supply and demand run their course. Not that there is much evidence yet that a province like Guangdong would salute if Beijing insisted that it slow its rush to prosperity. As a Guangdong official says, "When the belly is fat, the emperor is far away." Which is not to say that Guangdong doesn't understand feigned compliance. A visiting Beijing big shot might not be accorded the kind of reception Rob Lowe would get in the girls' locker room of an American high school, but as this Guangdong cadre says, "When the leaders come, we are very careful to treat them very well."

The Lun Feng stuffed-toy factory is one of about 1,000 Guangdong manufacturing operations that together employ more than 2 million people. As one of approximately 10,000 joint ventures established since 1979, most along the coast, Lun Feng represents both the promise and the problems that have accompanied Deng's economic reforms.

To upgrade Lun Feng for state-of-the-art stuffed-toy manufacture, which really means little more than loading an empty building with sewing machines, Lun Feng's Hong Kong joint-venture partner lent the factory's nominal owner, the town of Kai Kong, more than $1 million. (The national government got its cut by charging a fee for converting the Hong Kong dollars into Chinese currency.) Since then, Lun Feng has been on its own. Much of the fabric used by the factory comes from Taiwan. "No problem," says Lun Feng's operations manager, who happens to belong to the Communist Party. "This is business, not politics."

It is possible for a non-Communist to be a factory manager in China, but most managers are still card-carrying party members. Even so, there is always a party secretary to enforce Communist discipline. Before Deng's reforms, there was no question that the Communist secretary dominated, even if he was functionally illiterate in basic business precepts. Since 1984, though, Beijing has directed that party secretaries leave operations to the factories' designated managers -- a direct slap at Leninist ideology, which holds that since the party is the only body capable of enforcing the will of the workers, factories must be under party control.

On the ground, however, where nothing is ever simple, the power relationship varies from place to place. "It is nothing more than a normal battle for control," admits a factory party secretary in Jinan. "I don't know much about what my factory actually does, but that doesn't mean I don't want to be the boss." At Lun Feng, Deng's system works fairly well. Only after Tiananmen did the secretary actively meddle, but then just to direct that the radio be tuned to a mainland station rather than one in Hong Kong. The music the workers listen to all day is the same, but the news is different.

There seem to be three keys to Lun Feng's success. The first is its location on the Kai Kong River, which allows the factory to ship its goods by sea and not by the country's notoriously awful roads. Even in Guangdong, many of the paved highways are narrow, and virtually impassable when travelers stop to shop at roadside stands.