On a recent visit to Chongqing an American friend named Pat told me how he had become caught up in one of China’s frequent protests about unpaid wages.

He had nearly completed construction of a factory in Chongqing – in south central China – when the electricity to the facility and to the trailer that housed his command post went out. Pat and a manager named Jim stepped out of the trailer to find out why the electricity had suddenly gone dead. Jim was an engineer who had been visiting from their North American headquarters to give Pat a hand with the facility for a few months during the construction phase.

When they rounded the corner of the factory where the power transformer was they found it blocked by a group of about twenty men. The were ill-clad, dusty street clothes and well-worn faux-leather dress shoes dirty with months if not years of construction grime. They were agitated, though about what Pat was unsure. The men, it soon became clear, were not from the main contractor’s company; but, instead, were subcontractors the main contractors had not paid yet. It seemed that with only the finishing work to be completed, the main contractors were nowhere to be found. The subcontractors had not been paid for several weeks.

Now Pat is about 6’3 and built rather solidly, while Jim, shorter, is stocky and muscular. They braced themselves for what they expected to be a fight. To Pat’s mind, it was wrong that the subcontractors should be looking to him for their money, and it was wrong that they should have been interfering with his operation. If he had to fight his way to the generator to switch it back on and then fight to keep it on, then he would. He made a quick estimation: he could probably take about five, maybe six of the guys, while Jim could probably take another half dozen. Of course, that left another five or six they’d have to figure out how to handle as the time came.

Just as they were about to rumble, though, Pat’s Chinese driver came up from behind them. “Is there a problem here you need my help with, boss?” he asked Pat. Peng had been Pat’s driver for the two years Pat had been in Chongqing building the factory. He had been Pat’s second employee, after Pat’s assistant. Peng was a bald, overweight Chinese who smoked his cigarettes in long, uniterrupted chains and who cursed loudly at every opportunity – much like his boss. Peng seemed fearless in traffic, getting Pat wherever the American needed to on time despite Chongqing’a onerous traffic jams. Though Peng did not speak English, he and Pat were able to communicate in a pidgeon Chinese that Pat had developed in his four years in China building factories.

Pat answered Peng, “No, I think we can handle this, Peng,” though he was thankful for the extra hands should that extra half dozen they were unable to account for become a problem. He was sure Peng was an adequate fighter, and he never seemed to scare easily; but Pat did not want to escalate the situation any further than the current standoff.

Peng stepped from behind Pat and Jim to square off with the wall of men. He smiled menacingly at the group. He said something to them in a low voice, in the local dialect, which was as distant from Mandarin Chinese as Portugese from Italian. The group quieted down. The fellows in the front of the group shuffled their feet, uncertain. A low murmur rippled through the crowd. They dispersed, at first falling away like the rotten peels of a banana, in two’s and three’s. Eventually, the once-anonymous lump in the middle, now exposed, dissolved as well.

Pat looked at Peng, who shrugged. “What the hell did you say to them, Peng?” Pat asked. Peng smiled, lit another cigarette, and sauntered off back in the direction he’d come from. It was after Pat told his Chinese assistant the story that Pat learned his driver was a member of one of the more notorious mafias in the area, and that he was well connected.

Guess it pays to have friends in low places.