through the contract with Wang and that I’d start to work on Chen. It was well past midnight by the time we turned in, but at least we had a plan for the next day. I was still wide awake and only drifted off just short of three o’clock, so I was in a deep sleep when the phone rang at quarter to seven the next morning. ‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘I’ve just got back from a run.’
Mina and Wang spent the whole of the second day arguing about the timing of some obscure approval documents. I soon lost the thread of the argument, so I started working on Chen.
Chain-smoking Chen was twenty-four and had spent his whole life in Quzhou. Both of his parents worked at the chemical factory. He told me that he had never travelled outside the province, but when Wang assigned him to work on the carbon project, he’d grabbed the chance to come to Hangzhou. He was shy and reserved but he brightened up a little when he saw that I wanted to chat. After his first trip to Hangzhou, he had joined an evening class in English, dreaming of finding a job in a foreign company somewhere along the coast. But his mother and father lived in the factory; Chen was an only child so it looked as though he was struggling with the dilemma between his loyalty to his parents and his desire to break out of this country backwater. He was cautious and I found it difficult to draw him out.
By the second evening in the bar, Mina was becoming frustrated; I’d hardly said a word for two days. I sensed that she was losing patience and beginning to think that Winchester might have been right about me being a halfwit after all. A stream of anxious and distracting messages had been arriving from London all demanding updates on our progress. Meanwhile, Wang frequently revisited parts of the contract that we thought had already been agreed, so it was almost impossible to convey a clear picture back home. Whenever Mina tried to explain that Wang was switching back and forth, the team in London grew even more aggravated, which led to a further cascade of anxious messages. I encouraged her to be patient, but with the drumbeats from Mayfair getting louder and louder, I knew that it couldn’t be easy.
Throughout the whole of the morning of the third day, Wang didn’t even call us. He kept us cooling our heels at the hotel. Chain-smoking Chen had told us that the mayor of Quzhou was in town so we figured Wang was detained in meetings. That wasn’t a good sign; he seemed to be prioritizing routine meetings with a government official ahead of sorting out our contract. By the early afternoon, there was still no news, so we took a long stroll around the edge of the lake, wondering what to do. Suddenly, at about four thirty, Wang called and told us that a car was already waiting for us back at the hotel. He wanted to know where we were. Sprinting back around the lake, we changed into business clothes and were whisked off to another, much smarter hotel in a different part of town. There we were ushered into a large room with low chairs arranged around three sides of a square. Embroidered doilies were draped over the backs of the chairs and between each of them, a ceramic teacup with a lid sat on little wooden tables. After a while there was a commotion outside, and a man in an immaculate black suit strode in and shook Mina’s hand.
‘Ni hao!’ she said. Hello!
‘Ey!’ said the mayor, tilting his head back and smiling at Mina admiringly. ‘Nide Zhongwen zhen bang!’ Your Chinese is truly marvellous!
Mina stared back blankly, searching around for a translator.
The next thirty minutes were taken up with minor pleasantries: how far we’d travelled to get to China; how the pagodas around West Lake had been famous throughout history; how the scenery had been celebrated in Song Dynasty poetry. The mayor’s entourage nodded in agreement and laughed at all the appropriate moments. Next we had a description of the municipal transport systems; the number of Chinese tourists; the delights of the local fresh fish; the esteem in which Hangzhou’s dumplings were held throughout China. I could see Mina fidgeting and glancing at her watch. She’d arranged a call back to London for seven o’clock and it looked like we were in for the long haul. Just before six, we were suddenly whisked off to a banquet, stuffed with about fifteen courses, plied with several bottles of beer – each presented with a large white ceramic statue of Confucius – and, less than an hour later, loaded into a car and driven back to the hotel, puzzled by the whole episode. The project had never been mentioned.
When I saw Mina the following morning, she was at her wits’ end. She’d been on the phone all night and Winchester was beside himself with impatience. A meeting had been scheduled with the syndicate underwriters for the next day in the City and the pressure was mounting. Winchester ordered a further teleconference with the whole team in Mayfair as soon as they got into the office, which, given the time difference, was early afternoon in China.
When we arrived at the ‘Holding Talks Room’, Wang turned up late again and the conversation continued for the whole morning without much progress. Just before lunch, Wang wandered off again so I told Mina to take a break downstairs. I took my chance with Chen; there was no time left for subtlety.
I told Chen that I thought it was a pity that progress was so slow on such an important project. Perhaps there was some misunderstanding between the two parties; of course, if he had any suggestions, we would take them very seriously. He was cautious at first and just said that we should continue to talk with Wang. ‘This is a big project,’ he said, ‘so Wang reports directly to General Manager Gao.’
‘Manager Gao.’ I said. ‘I thought Tang was in charge.’
‘Gao is the head of the Shanghai listed company and he pays great attention to this project,’ said Chen.
‘So what does Gao think we should do?’ I asked.
Eventually Chen came to the point. ‘It’s all about the second line,’ he said. ‘Old Gao needs you to take in the second line.’
‘The second line?’ I asked.
‘Mina will know what I mean. Old Gao just says that the second line has to go into the contract.’
‘Well how about price, payment terms, all the other clauses?’
He just pursed his lips and the conversation drifted away. But at least we had the first clue.
I went out to look for Mina and found her sitting dejectedly in the lobby, sipping on a tall glass of chrysanthemum tea. When I told her what Chain-smoking Chen had said, she knew immediately what he meant. Inside the chemical plant at Quzhou, there were two separate production lines. At the start of the negotiations, Mina had tried to get both of the lines into the deal so that IHCF would get the maximum number of credits, but Wang had refused point-blank. The second line was huge; Mina told me that every year it spewed out gases with the equivalent warming effect of nearly five million tons of carbon dioxide. There had been weeks of discussions in the spring, but Wang wouldn’t be shifted and he refused to put the line into the deal. Eventually Mina figured that the carbon from the second line must have been sold to another buyer, so IHCF organized the syndicate to include only the credits from the first line. But now it appeared that Wang needed to reverse his position.
When Wang returned, we raised the issue directly and probed every way we could think of to avoid increasing the number of credits under the contract, but Wang was adamant. His position seemed to have become fixed and he was insistent that IHCF bought the credits from both lines. I switched into Mandarin and tried to persuade Wang to be more flexible. Whenever I asked him why he couldn’t just sell the second line to another buyer, he just said that it would be too troublesome to separate the two. But this made no sense; only a few months earlier, he’d been insisting on the opposite. Mina tried every idea we could think of – taking an option on the second line, cutting the carbon streams into two parts, taking some now with smaller amounts later – but Wang wouldn’t budge. It seemed as if we’d reached deadlock. I became more apprehensive about the phone call to London as the minutes ticked by and we failed to get
