“That, sisters, is Tank, the boy sitting across from me, bloodied but unbowed, brave and strong, standing up for the rights of workers—” She dissolved into giggles. Lu giggled too, he couldn’t help it. “Oh, sorry, sorry. Look, he’s a very nice boy, and not bad to look at, and the jingcha laid into his head and shoulder like they were tenderizing a steak, and all he was doing was insisting that he had the right to work like a person and not an animal. And he’s not alone. They call it ‘The People’s Republic of China,’ but the people don’t get any say in the way it’s run. It’s all corruption and exploitation.
“I thought the video was amazing, a real inspiration. And then I saw him, our Tank, wandering dazed and bloody through—” she broke off. “Through a location I will not disclose, so that the jingcha won’t know which video footage they need to review. I saw him and I told him I wanted to introduce him to you, my friends, and then he told me the most amazing story I’ve heard, and you know I hear a lot of amazing stories here every night. A story about a global movement to improve the lot of workers everywhere, and I hope that’s the story he’ll tell us tonight. So, Tank, darling, start with your injuries. Could you describe them to our friends out there?”
And Lu did, and then he found himself going from there into the story of how he came to be a gold farmer, what life was like for him, the stories Matthew had told him about how Boss Wing had forced him and his friends to go back to work in his factory, talking and talking until the water was gone and his mouth was dry, and mercifully, she called for another commercial.
He sagged into his chair while she got him some more water. “You should see the chat rooms,” she said. “They’re all in love with you, ‘Tank.’ The way you rescued those girls’ belongings in Shilong New Town! You’re their hero. There are dozens of them who claim that they were there on that day, that they saw you climbing the fence. Listen to this, ‘His muscles rippled like iron bands as he clambered up the fence like a mighty jungle creature…’” He snorted water up his sinuses, and Jie gave his bicep a squeeze. “You need to work out some more, Jungle Creature, your muscles have gone all soft!”
“How do you have message boards? Don’t they block them?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “We just pick a random blog out there on the net, usually one that no one has posted to in a year or two, and we take over the comment board on one of its posts. Once they block it—or the server crashes—we switch to another one. It’s easy—and fun!”
He laughed and shook his head, which set his headache going again. He winced and squeezed his head between his hands. “Sheer genius!”
Now the commercial was ending, and they both sat down quickly in their chairs and swung their mics into place. Lu was getting good at this now, the talk coming to him the way it did when he was chatting with his guildies. He’d always been the storyteller of the bunch.
And the story went on—he told of how the Webblies had come to him and his guildies in-game, had talked to them about the need for solidarity and mutual aid to protect themselves from bosses, from players who hunted gold farmers, from the game company.
“They want to unite Chinese workers,” Jie said, nodding sagely.
“No!” He surprised himself with his vehemence. “Uniting Chinese workers would be useless. With gold farming, the work can just move to Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, India—anywhere workers aren’t organized. It’s the same with all work now—your job can move in no time at all to anywhere you can build a factory and dock a container ship. There’s no such thing as ‘Chinese’ workers anymore. Just workers! And so the Webblies organize all of us, everywhere!”
“That’s a lot of workers,” she said. “How many have you got?”
He hung his head. “Jiandi,” he said. “We can all see the counter, and we all cheer when it goes up by a few hundred, but we’re a long way off.”
“Oh, Tank,” she said. “Don’t be discouraged. Tens of thousands of people! That’s fantastic—and I’m sure we can get a few members for you. How can my listeners join up?”
“Eh? Oh!” He struggled to remember the procedure for this. “You need to get at least fifty percent of your co-workers to agree to sign up, and then we certify the union for your whole factory.”
“Ay-yah! Fifty percent! The big factories have fifty thousand workers! How do you do that?”
He shrugged. “I’m not sure,” he said. “We’ve been mostly signing up small game-factories, there’s not many bigger than two hundred workers. It has to be possible, though. Trade unions all over the world have organized factories of every size.” He swallowed, understanding how lame he sounded. “Look, this is usually Matthew’s side of things. He understands all of it. I’m just the tank, you understand? I stand in the front and soak up all the damage. And you can’t talk to Matthew because he’s in jail.”
“Ah yes, jail. Tell us about what happened today.”
So he told them the story of the battle, all those millions of girls out there in the towns of Guangdong, and he found himself…transported. Taken away back to the cafe, the shouting, the police and the screams, his voice drifting to his ears from a long way off through the remembered shouts in his ears. When he stopped, he snapped back to reality and found Jie staring at him with wet eyes and parted lips. He looked at his phone. It was nearly midnight.
He shrugged, dry mouthed. “I—Well, that’s it, I suppose.”
“Wow,” Jie breathed, and cued up another commercial. “Are you okay?”
“My head feels like it’s being crushed between two heavy rocks,” he said. He shifted his butt in his chair and winced. “And my shoulder’s on fire.”
“I’ve really kept you up,” she said. “We’re almost done here, though. You’re a really tough bastard, you know that?”
He didn’t feel tough. Truth be told, he felt pretty terrible about the fact that he’d gotten away while his guildies had all been locked up. Logically he knew that they wouldn’t benefit from him being jailed alongside of them, but that was logic, not feelings.
“Okay,” she said. “We’re back. What a story! Sisters, didn’t I tell you I had something special tonight? Alas, it’s nearly time to go—we all need some sleep before we go back to work in the morning, don’t we? Just one more thing: what are we going to do about this?”
Suddenly, she wasn’t sleepy and soothing. Her eyes were wide, and she was gripping the edge of her desk tightly. “We come here from our villages looking to do an honest job for decent pay so that we can help our families, so that we can live and survive. What do we get? Slimy perverts who screw us on the job and off! Bastard criminals who destroy anyone who challenges their rackets! Cops who beat us and put us in jail if we dare to challenge the status quo!
“Sisters, it can’t go on! Tank here said there’s no such thing as a Chinese worker anymore, just a worker. I hadn’t heard of these Webblies of his before tonight, and I don’t know if they’re any better than your boss or the thief running the network sales ripoff next door, and I don’t care. If there are workers around the world organizing for a better deal, I want to be a part of it, and so do you!
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen next. Tank and I are going to find the Webblies and we’re going to plan something big. Something huge! I don’t know what it will be, but it’s going to change things. There’s millions of us! Anything we do is big.
“I have a confession to make.” Her voice got quieter. “A sin to confess. I do this show because it makes me money. A lot of money. I have to spend a lot to stay ahead of the zengfu, but there’s plenty left over. More than you make, I have to confess. It’s been a long time since I was as poor as a factory girl. I’m practically rich. Not boss-rich, but rich, you understand?
“But I’m with you. I didn’t start this show to get rich. I started it because I was a factory girl and I cared about my sisters. We’ve been coming to Dongguan Province since Deng Xiaoping changed the rules and made the factories here grow. It’s been generations
, sisters, and we come, we poor mice from the country, and we are ground up by the factories we slave in. For every yuan we send home, our bosses put a hundred in their pockets. And when we’re done, then what? We become one of the old grannies begging by the road.
“So listen in tomorrow. We’re going to find out more about these Webblies, we’re going to make a plan, and we’re going to bring it to you. In the meantime, don’t take any crap off your bosses. Don’t let the cops push you or your sisters and brothers around. And be good to each other—we’re all on the same side.”
She clicked her mouse and flipped the lid down on her laptop.
“Whew!” she said. “What a night!”
“Is your show like this every night?”
“Not this good, Tank. You certainly improved things. I’m glad I kidnapped you from the train station.”
“I am, too,” he said. He was so tired. “I guess I’ll call you tomorrow about the next show? Maybe we could meet in the morning and try to reach the Webblies or find a way to try to call my guildies and see if they’re all still in jail?”
“Call me? Don’t be stupid, Tank. I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can find somewhere to sleep.” When he’d first arrived in Shenzhen, he’d spent a couple of nights sleeping in parks. He could do that again. It wasn’t so bad, if it didn’t rain in the night. Had there been clouds that day? He couldn’t remember.
“You certainly can—right through that doorway, right there.” She pointed to the bedroom.
He was suddenly wide awake. “Oh, I couldn’t—”
“Shut up and go to bed. You’ve got a head injury, stupid. And you’ve just given me hours of great radio show. So you need it and you’ve earned it. Bed. Now.”
He was too tired to argue. He stumbled a little on the way to bed, and she swept the clothes and toys and handbags from the bed onto the floor just ahead of him. She pulled the sheet over him and kissed him on the forehead as he settled in. “Sleep, Tank,” she whispered in his ear.
He wondered dimly where she would sleep, as she left the room and he heard her typing on her computer again. He fell asleep with the sound of the keys in his ears.
He barely woke when she slid under the covers with him, snuggled up to him and began to snore softly in his ear.
But he was wide awake an hour later when ten police cars pulled up out front of Jie’s building, sirens blaring, and a helicopter spotlight bathed the entire building in light as white as daylight. She went rigid beside him under the covers and then practically levitated out of the bed.
“Twenty seconds,” she barked. “Shoes, your phone, anything else you need. We won’t come back here.”
Lu felt obscurely proud of how calm he felt as he stood up and, in an unhurried, calm fashion, picked up his shoes—factory workers’ tennis shoes, cheap and ubiquitous—and laced them up, then pulled on his jacket, then moved efficiently into the living room, where Jie was hosing solvent over all the flat surfaces in the room. The smell was as sharp as his headache, and intensified it.
She nodded once at him, and then nodded at another pressure-bottle of solvent and said, “You do the bathroom and the bedroom.” He did, working quickly. He guessed that this would wipe away anything like a fingerprint or a distinctive kind of dirt. He was done in a minute, or maybe less, and she was at his elbow with a ziploc baggie full of dust. “Vacuumed out of the seats of the Hong Kong–Shenzhen train,” she said. “Skin cells from a good million people. Spread it evenly, please. Quickly now.”
The dust got up his nose and made him sneeze, and sunk into the creases of his palms, and it was all a little icky, but his head was clear and full of the sirens and the helicopter’s thunder. As he scattered the genetic material throughout, he watched Jie popping the drive out of her computer and dropping the slender stick down her cleavage, and that finally broke through his cool. Suddenly, he realized that he’d spent the night sleeping next to this beautiful girl, and he hadn’t even kissed her, much less touched those mysterious and intriguing breasts that now warmly embraced an extremely compromising piece of storage media, a sliver of magnetic media that could put them both in jail forever.
She looked around and ticked off a mental checklist on her finger. Then she snapped a decisive nod and said, “All right, let’s go.” She led him out into the corridor, which was brightly lit and empty, leaving him feeling very exposed. She pulled a short prybar out of her purse and expertly pried open the steel door on a fuse-panel by the elevators, revealing neat rows of black plastic breaker switches. She fished in her handbag again and came out with a disposable butane lighter, which she lit, applying the flame to a little twist of white vinyl or shiny paper protruding like a pull-tab from an unobtrusive seam in the panel. It sizzled and flashed and a twist of black smoke rose from it and then the paper burned away, the spark disappearing into the panel.
A second later, the entire panel-face erupted in a shower of sparks, smoke and flame. Jie regarded it with satisfaction as black smoke poured out of the plate. Then all the lights went out and the smoke alarms began to toll, a bone-deep dee-dah dee-dah that drowned out the helicopter, the sirens.
She clicked a little red LED to life and it bathed her face in demonic light. She looked very satisfied with herself. It make Lu feel calm.
“Now what?” he said.
“Now we stroll out with everyone else who’s running away from the fire alarms.”
All through the building, doors were opening, bleary families were emerging, and smoke was billowing, black and acrid. They headed for the staircase, just behind the bound-foot granny who they’d met the day before. In the stairwell, they met hundreds, then thousands more refugees from the building, all carrying armloads of precious possessions, babies, elderly family members.
At the bottom, the police tried to corral them into an orderly group in front of the building, but there were too many people, too much confusion. In the end, it was simple to slip through the police lines and mingle with the crowd of gawkers from nearby buildings who’d turned out to watch.
Whether you’re a revolutionary, a factory owner, or a little-league hockey organizer, there’s one factor you can’t afford to ignore: the Coase cost.
Ronald Coase was an American economist who changed everything with a paper he published in 1937 called “The Theory of the Firm.” Coase’s paper argued that the real business of any organization was getting people organized. A religion is a system for organizing people to pray and give money to build churches and pay priests or ministers or rabbis; a shoe factory is a system for organizing people to make shoes. A revolutionary conspiracy is a system for organizing people to overthrow the government.
Organizing is a kind of tax on human activity. For every minute you spend doing stuff, you have to spend a few seconds making sure that you’re not getting ahead or behind or to one side of the other people you’re doing stuff with. The seconds you tithe to an organization is the Coase cost, the tax on your work that you pay for the fact that we’re human beings and not ants or bees or some other species that manages to all march in unison or fly in formation by sheer instinct.
Oh, you can beat the Coase cost: just stick to doing projects that you don’t need anyone else’s help with. Like, um…tying your shoes? (Nope, not unless you’re braiding your own shoelaces). Toasting your own sandwich? (Not unless you gathered the wood for the fire and the wheat for the bread and the milk for the cheese on your own.)
The fact is, almost everything you do is collaborative. Somewhere out there, someone else had a hand in it. And part of the cost of what you’re doing is spent on making sure that you’re coordinating right, that the cheese gets to your fridge and that the electricity hums through its wires.
You can’t eliminate Coase cost, but you can lower it. There are two ways of doing this. One is to get better organization al techniques—say, “double-entry book-keeping,” an earthshattering thirteenth-century invention that’s at the h
eart of every money-making organization in the world, from churches to corporations to governments. The other is to get better technology.
Take going out to the movies. It’s Friday night, and you’re thinking of seeing a movie, but you don’t want to go alone. Imagine that the year is 1950—how would you solve this problem?
Well, you’d have to find a newspaper and see what’s playing. Then you’d have to call all your friends’ houses (no cellular phones, remember!) and leave messages for them. Then you’d have to wait for some or all of them to call you back and report on their movie preferences. Then you’d have to call them back in ones and twos and see if you could convince a critical mass of them to see the same movie. Then you’d have to get to the theater and locate each other and hope that the show wasn’t sold out.
How much does this cost? Well, first, let’s see how much the movie is worth. One way to do that is to look at how much someone would have to pay you to convince you to give up on going to the movies. Another is to raise the price of the tickets steadily until you decide not to see a movie after all.
Once you have that number, you can calculate your Coase cost: you could ask how much it would cost you to pay someone else to make the arrangements for you, or how much you could earn at an after-school job if you weren’t playing phone tag with your friends.
You end up with an equation that looks like this:
[Value of the movie]–[Cost of getting your friends together to see it] = [Net value of an evening out]
That’s why you’ll do something less fun (stay in and watch TV) that’s simple, rather than go out and do something more fun but more complicated. It’s not that movies aren’t fun—but if it’s too much of a pain in the ass to get your friends out to see them, then the number of movies you see goes way down.