Shan Jinhao, a 73-year-old private entrepreneur, hanged himself in his long-abandoned factory at 2 a.m. on Aug. 1, 2015. Before that, he had been running for more than four years to get the factory out of trouble, and in the end he did not wait for the day when the dawn came.
He had hoped for a just outcome through his own drastic efforts. But the truth, like most tragedies of this era, was drowned in the noise, like a tree falling from decay in a deep forest.
The loud bang was only for his family, to the outside world, he was just “a stubborn old man committing suicide”.
The rejected appeal
On Friday, July 31, 2015, at noon, the director of Quzhou Shuanggang Development Zone, Sun Jinhao, found Shan Jinhao and said that the court had rejected their appeal.
The previous month, a department of the People’s Liberation Army had been stationed inside the Tianhang factory, and on the last day, the troops had not yet been completely withdrawn. After hearing the news, Shan Jinhao did not make a sound. He said, wait a minute, wait until the troops are all gone.
Director Sun comforted him a few words. In the past few years, he has been watching Shan Jinhao struggling for the factory, feeling quite sympathetic, but there is nothing really effective countermeasures. He left after giving notice. Xiao Chen was on the side and noticed that Shan Jinhao was not in a high mood, but he didn’t see much more.
Xiao Chen is the office secretary of the Tianhang factory. He was born in 1985, dark skinned, with a pair of thin black-framed glasses, and looks gentle and honest. He is a Quzhou native and has followed Shan Jinhao for the longest time. After the shutdown of Tianhang, the finances were very difficult, and Xiao Chen did not get the money for a while, but he never left.
That day, Shan Jinhao suddenly asked Xiao Chen how many years he had been with him. Xiao Chen said, several years, right. He insisted that Xiao Chen sign a piece of paper, and Xiao Chen said, “What are you doing here?” The single said, “(factory) things are endless, sign a letter a little protection. You still have to pay your salary in the future.”
After a long hiatus, several wood processing workshops and staff dormitories in Tianhang have accumulated dust. After the factory was abandoned, Shan Jinhao felt some pity, one after another in the original intention to build the second phase of the land planted poplar trees, some did not take into account the place is growing weeds.
At the end of July in Quzhou, the weather was hovering around 38 degrees, and the heat was hard to be overcome. Because of the grass, mosquitoes and flies, single Jinhao’s office building does not even have screens, there is no other way but to close the windows and play air conditioning. He always live in the West House air conditioning broke down, has been dripping, only the East House air conditioning can still be used. After the arrival of the troops, the East House to the head to live, and now the troops withdrew, the East House is also empty. So before Xiao Chen left, he moved Shan Jinhao’s bedding to the east side.
“Shan Jinhao called her ‘take care of yourself’ on the phone, and then sounded a little impatient: ‘Old couple, so hypocritical for what?'” (Photo: CFP) “Shan Jinhao called her ‘take care of yourself’ on the phone and sounded a little impatient: ‘What’s the point of being so hypocritical when you’re an old married couple? (Photo: CFP)
After Sun left, Shan Jinhao insisted on sending two groups of guests, but by the time the third group left, Shan Jinhao could not go downstairs again. It was as if a happy feast had come to an end and there was no more breath. He was alone upstairs and gave his wife Ying Guiqiu three consecutive phone calls.
Ying Guiqiu is 6 years younger than Shan Jinhao, but also 67 years old. When Shan Jinhao called, Ying Guiqiu was busy with her grandson. The single family’s economy has been deteriorating over the past few years, and Ying Guiqiu has to give her second son a hand with the children in addition to growing vegetables. She was unable to take care of them, so when she heard Shan Jinhao call her “take care” on the phone, she sounded a bit impatient: “Old married couple, what’s the point of being so hypocritical?”
Within two minutes, Shan Jinhao called Ying Guiqiu again, saying the same thing: “You take care.” Ying Guiqiu guessed that Shan Jinhao was probably lonely. She originally wanted to go over next Tuesday to bring some dishes to Quzhou, but Shan Jinhao mentioned the bankruptcy, she changed her mind and softened her tone: “Either I come back on Saturday and Sunday? It’s good to keep you company.”
Shan Jinhao said forget it, he laughed and said, “You accompany? Forget it. Just come back on Monday.” He thought about it and added, “Let’s do it on Tuesday.”
Now Ying Guiqiu recalls this incident with great regret. She didn’t expect that to be her husband’s last phone call – “I didn’t have any forewarning.”
Throughout the afternoon, Shan Jinhao called his family, including his oldest son, Shan Xiang, and his second son, Shan Yi. Shan recalled his father’s last phone call, which was also without warning – Shan Jinhao simply asked his grandson about the situation when he reported for school in Beijing, asking if he had filled out the registration form, “Where is the registration manual? Have you prepared it?” Shan Xiang replied, “It’s all done.
Xiao Chen’s mother was in hospital for two days, and since it was already Friday, Xiao Chen planned to leave early to send some rice to his mother. Shan Jinhao said, forget it, what they have to eat when the time comes, do not bother.
“He does not know how to cook”, said Xiao Chen, “he cooked noodles, rice cooker inside the water is not boiling, noodles to put in.” The water was not even boiling, so how did you put the noodles in?”
Can’t cook, Shan Jinhao can only swallow one meal after another.
From the factory to now, the factory has been Shan Jinhao’s home. He lives and eats in the factory. More than a meter of the desk is full of its night office wear out the traces, the office and bedroom between only a door separated. In the bedroom there is an old wooden bed, the bed is piled with old bedding that can not be distinguished from the original color. The room was high and unfit, with wires hanging haphazardly, and the wires were covered with dust. The original white walls are all the size of water stains, and then leaned out, but also just long mold.
And Shan Jinhao stretched late in life, in this dilapidated factory at a glance: its living conditions are not even comparable to a rural nursing home.
A doomed bureau
This artificial board factory was built in 2002. In the 1970s, after his discharge from the army, Shan Jinhao worked for a while as a buyer for the Bureau of Materials, and then he opened the Tianhang Stainless Steel Factory in the Kakeqiao area of Hangzhou. His talent for business was shown, and Tianhang Stainless became one of Baosteel’s largest agents in Zhejiang.
In 2002, the Quzhou Municipal Government came to Hangzhou to attract investment and gave a very favorable policy. After discussion, Shan Jinhao decided to move his family to Quzhou for a second time to start a man-made plate factory, still under the name of Tianhang.
Nowadays, Quzhou Shuanggang Economic Development Zone has factories in succession, such as lotus leaf fields, but according to Ying Guiqiu’s recollection, when they just came over, water and electricity were not connected, 161 acres of site, only by the couple to lead the water, only gradually take off.
After 2003, the business of Tianhang artificial board began to enter the right track, and this good situation has continued until 2011. In this year, things took a very different turn – the factory was shut down.
About the reasons for the closure of the factory, the district government and the single family each said. The single family recalled that at that time, because the development zone planning to establish a comprehensive service center, Tianhang company was classified as a planning plot, Ke Cheng District leaders had verbally expressed the will of storage, requiring them to stop production to cooperate with the work.
From a document provided by the single family, between August and November 2011, the district government commissioned Quzhou Huachuang Real Estate Appraisal Co., Ltd. to evaluate the assets of Tianhang and gave an appraisal price of more than 80 million yuan, which was regarded by the single family as the default at the official level.
However, the district government considered that the Tianhang factory, like the Public Security Driving School, the west side of Donggang 8th Road and the three Yangmeigang Panjiarang Reservoir plots, was only one of the alternative blocks.
At this time, Tianhang was suffering from an increasingly bad economic environment both internally and externally. Since 2010, countless private enterprises like Tianhang at the bottom of the manufacturing industry were stumbling and were pushed down by the torrent of the times.
Regardless of the reason, the result is the same: after many trade-offs, the comprehensive service center was finally located in the Public Security Driving School. But at this time, a single Jinhao has sold the equipment, shut down the factory, and took out a debt of 4 million to dismiss the workers, “to cooperate with the government’s work.
Idle 161 acres of land has become a single Jinhao difficult to relieve the heart – affected by the suspension of production, waiting for more than a year of storage, in order to repay previous debts and interest, the financial gap has been expanding, excluding a large number of bank loans, but also includes a surge in the amount of private loan sharks.
With the ever-increasing debt, the single family was so burdened that Shan Jinhao could only turn to the local government for assistance, and the land transfer was started again.
In September 2012, Shan Jinhao submitted the application for storage again and prepared all the application materials for storage, but it was stopped without entering the procedure, as the ponderous debt problem of Tianhang discouraged the principals. The government of Ke Cheng District asked Tian Hang to deal with the debt problem first and then implement the bidding procedure. However, at that time, Tianhang was deep in the whirlpool of debts and could not get out of it alone, so the transfer was again declared a failure.
During these four and a half years, Shan Jinhao was running around for the land recovery of the factory, looking for ways to save himself and be saved, but he kept going round and round, wandering in the same place. There were times when he thought that the dawn of light, the long night is near, but the fact is that the day has not really come.
The letter written to the first inspection team of the provincial party committee on July 17 became the last blog before the life of Shan Jinhao, but what waited earlier than the response of the inspection team was the bankruptcy notice of the district court.
Aged self-hanged
After the decline of the factory, family members have left Quzhou, only a single Jinhao chose to stand alone. Because of his depressed mood, during the four and a half years, Shan Jinhao ate less rice and drank more wine. A row of empty 1-liter plastic liquor jugs placed along the office wall became his only solace in his bleak old age.
In July, when the troops were stationed at the factory, it was a rare time for Shan Jinhao to show his face in his last days: he was the second in line for meals, and the young guards called him “grandpa”, so he finally managed to pick up his long-lost dignity.
And the troops left, pushing the rusty truth in front of him again.
On August 1, at 2:20 a.m., 73-year-old Shan Jinhao finished writing his suicide note, put the crutches he had used for years on the edge of the table, pressed his glasses against the note to prevent it from being blown away by the wind, and put the only $1,000 next to it. Then he sent the electronic version of the suicide note to the group of comrades, went into the bathroom and hanged himself in the east lavatory.
The best relationship of single Jinhao is also a group of old comrades. They always reminisce about the past in the QQ group, talking about “the present is not the past”. At 4:00 a.m. that day, out of a strange omen, comrade Zhu Fusheng suddenly woke up and saw the message in the group, he rushed to call Zhao Zilong.
Zhao is a year younger than Shan, from the army, is Shan Jinhao’s closest friend. Zhao Zilong’s call to Shan Jinhao was not answered, so he had to call Shan Xiang, and called an ambulance. But when the single family rushed to Quzhou, it was already ten o’clock the next morning, the ambulance staff just came out of the office building, saying that people are gone, directly to the funeral home.
The single family is very stunned at this turn of events.
In 2013, for the sake of the factory, single Jinhao once said to jump, when also wrote a letter of desperation. But it’s been more than two years, and everyone didn’t take it to heart.
After the accident of Shan Jinhao, everyone put this matter back in mind.
In mid-August 2015, Shan Jinhao’s factory was filled with condolence wreaths, from the doorway to the office building, several old comrades in the single Jinhao wake, Shan Jinhao’s black-and-white posthumous photo is placed in the center of the first floor. This somewhat blurred photo intercepted from one of his former meeting photos, “when still young, look good.” Ying Guiqiu said.
The death of a small business owner at the bottom: Please cooperate with the government
The east washroom is where he hanged himself, with fully dried blood stains still on the floor. After the body was removed, Ying Guiqiu used to wipe the blood stains alone. Now she squatted down again, stroking the spotted blood stains, and told me, “It hurt so much to touch my palms at that time. It’s as if the pain is real and vivid.
Shan Jinhao saw the relocation of the factory as the biggest mistake of his life. He had naively hoped that death could bring about a change in the fate of his family, before, in a letter to the leadership, Shan Jinhao once said he “had no time to live, death is not enough”, “only willing to seek a just result”, he wrote sadly He wrote sadly that “private entrepreneurs are weak and powerless in front of the government.”
But the truth is that his death, like most tragedies of this era, was drowned in the noise, like a tree falling down from decay in a deep forest. The loud bang was only for his family, for the outside world, it was just “a stubborn old man committing suicide”.
The death of his son Shan Xiang
The first son of Shan Jinhao, Shan Xiang, came to my colleagues at the newspaper on August 10, 2015, asking if there was any possibility of reporting on this matter. 20 August, I intended to run to Quzhou, but ended up getting off at the wrong station midway, Shan Xiang said on the phone, either he drove directly to Jinhua station to pick me up.
Shan Xiang is tall, flat head, wide face and thick eyebrows. Due to overwork, early forties, but the hair has been some gray. After leaving the station, I saw an old Volvo, and he waved from the car.
He said, once his father was a soldier here, the place is quite familiar, but that day the road is very strong, we have been in the Jinhua city inside the wrong road, and encountered high-speed traffic jams, the plan is ten o’clock to Quzhou, the result is more than twelve o’clock barely arrived.
He accompanied me to the government, but we only met with an office secretary, the substance did not ask too much. Shan Xiang blocked some of his mother’s speculations, “Let’s not talk nonsense if there is no basis”.
It was cloudy on the way from Quzhou to Hangzhou when we returned from the interview with the single family factory. Shan Xiang took two phone calls on the way and was silent thereafter. Shan Jinhao passed away, the body was sent to the funeral home, only Shan Xiang has seen his father’s remains, “that look …… hard to call”, he said to me, “close your eyes at night, that’s what he looks like. “
“I later thought, he did this when the brain is very clear”, Shan Xiang said, “he even funeral expenses are ready.”
After his father’s death, Shan Xiang had carefully inspected the red cotton rope that had decayed in color, and then, suddenly and painfully, said, “That rope, is the rope I used to tie the futon.”
57 days after Shan Jinhao hanged himself, that is, at noon on September 26, Shan Xiang also left.
The Shan family had agreed to discuss what to do next at noon that day. But at 11:00 that day, Shan Yi made three phone calls to Shan Xiang, but none of them were received. Shan Yi was a little nervous and rushed to Shan Xiang’s home to find him alone on the sofa, breathing, with only the TV still on.
After sending his son to Beijing to study, Shan Xiang has been living alone in his old home in the west of Hangzhou. He had previously approached the local government about Shan Jinhao’s suicide, hoping that bankruptcy would be put on hold, or at least that he would be able to keep the only house for his family to live in. But later, when he spoke to his friend Huang Fuxiang on the phone, he said that his son had no money for his studies and that he still had to sell his house because he had to raise money for college tuition.
Shan Yi learned a little bit of first aid knowledge, he did 15 minutes of CPR, he also felt little hope. 11:30 or so, the emergency vehicles finally arrived, 11:53, Shan Xiang was sent to the Greentown Cardiovascular Hospital located on Gudun Road, in the resuscitation room, the doctor officially declared his death.
Responsible for resuscitation is the doctor Liao Xinmin, he recalled that Shan Xiang died of myocardial infarction, “came without a pulse”, the cause of the infarction is very complex, he said to me, unless autopsy, who does not know.
The Shan family did not want to probe further into the cause of Shan Xiang’s death. They accepted the fact with pathos. Shan Xiang was changed clothes are scattered pile under the resuscitation room bed, he lay in the innermost bed, his hair has been all white. The blue curtain gave way, and his family had changed him into a beige suit; death makes a man light and changes his appearance. He also had a tie with navy blue and white dots, which looked particularly stark and out of place inside the pale resuscitation room, as did the cries of the single family member. Ying Guiqiu touched her eldest son’s shoulder as if he were still alive.
The last person to see Shan Xiang before he died was probably Ahua, Shan Yi’s wife, who remembered seeing him alone in the house watching TV at the time. This position was maintained until his death.
Shan Xiang was the person who carried the most pressure in the incident of his father’s suicide.
Before because of business trivialities, Shan Xiang once had a dispute with his father, for which he ran to Hangzhou alone in anger to restart the stainless steel business.
He believes that this is also the main reason for the desperate situation of Tianhang – because of his departure, his elderly and straightforward father was not able to play well with the local government. This speculation makes him very self-conscious. There are other assumptions, such as, if he had arrived earlier, if they had heard Shan Jinhao’s will to die on the phone, if he had not left his father alone at the factory ……
These “ifs” are no longer possible. If only for the living, for the dead, everything is a foregone conclusion.
The last glimpse of the human world
The single family is not the only company suffering from the change in land transfer policy. Previously, more than a dozen enterprises in the development zone had a collective petition to the district government, to which the Ke Cheng District Government responded in writing that “there is a great deal of uncertainty in the adjustment of government policies” and that “it is recommended that enterprises come out of the dilemma independently through a market-based approach”.
The single family received a notice with the same wording. In front of the single family’s hearth, Shan Xiang had carefully looked over this notice, found and he received the same letter, can not help but laugh.
Two months later, Shan Xiang passed away suddenly.
In mid-September 2015, Tianhang was forced to take over by the court and entrusted to Hangzhou Jindu Law Firm to take over. Once the wreath has been removed, there is no trace.
Xiao Chen’s phone has a video of Shan Jinhao’s last death. It was the morning of July 31, Shan Jinhao wore a light blue background white fine check pajamas pajama pants, hands behind his back, and Xiao Chen slowly walk along the factory. In the four and a half years since the change from industrial to commercial, Shan Jinhao has snowy white hair and staggering gait, and Xiao Chen used his Apple phone to film his walking back. Realizing that Xiao Chen was filming himself, Shan Jinhao turned around and stopped to look directly at the camera.
This became the last glimpse of Shan Jinhao left in the world.
Only the corporate poster at the entrance of the gate remained forever in 2011. On the poster, Shan Jinhao wore a helmet, with workers doing fire drills, and a notice of the party activist in the year of Xiao Chen. Although through the glass, but the poster has not been able to withstand the erosion of the wind and dust, which makes it look less like a poster and more like an old and dismal mark.
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