18

The Dalian Dance Card

I heard it was the arrogance of the Chinese that really got John Bassett going. He was in China with ’em and they were braggin’ about how they were gonna take over the whole industry.

—DELANO THOMASSON, COLLINSVILLE FURNITURE MART OWNER

Years earlier, on a buying trip to Hong Kong, back when the company was still importing 8 to 10 percent of its goods, Wyatt arrived at his hotel late one night, and when he awoke the next morning, there were twenty phone messages waiting for him from importers and agents who’d been tipped off by people at airport customs and were eager to show him around. Those were the dance-card days of the late 1990s, back when American companies were racing to nab OEM contracts with factories in Asia. Those who couldn’t risked becoming wallflowers in globalization’s dance.

“The saying was ‘The dance card’s filling up,’ ” Wyatt’s brother, Doug, told me. “If you didn’t sign up with a factory quick, you’d get left out.”

By 2002, the dance cards were starting to get tee-totally full, as they say in Galax. Especially the ones in Guangdong, the southern coastal province that was fast becoming China’s factory hub. As one executive noted at the fall High Point Market, “I’ve seen most of the people in this room over in Asia more than here.”

If the factory the Americans visited was large, it usually had English-speaking salespeople on-site. If it was Taiwanese owned (and most were), the owners/managers were bilingual and well-versed in doing business with Americans—or at least savvy enough to steer the Virginians and North Carolinians to restaurants that served easily palatable spaghetti Bolognese. “I ate spaghetti all over China because I figure they’ve been making noodles for two thousand years,” Wyatt said.

Furniture imports from China had jumped 121 percent from 2000 to 2002, now capturing as much as 50 percent of the U.S. market in some areas. By 2003, seventy-three thousand jobs had already evaporated from furniture and fixture factories in the United States. Twenty of those shuttered factories were owned by Furniture Brands, the industry giant whose CEO, Mickey Holliman, told Furniture/Today that domestic manufacturing was now reserved solely for companies that were “standing on principle.”

Tilting at windmills, people in the industry called it.

John Bassett dispatched his Dalian delegation to help him figure out just how far he was willing to tilt into globalization’s windmill. Soon, some of his oldest industry friends would be calling him a protectionist.

“Bless him, there goes Don Quixote,” they chortled behind his back.

In the spring of 2002, a few months before Wyatt and Rose left for their first trip to Dalian, Wyatt and his dad looked all 334 of the workers at their Atkins plant in the eye and told them they were sorry, but the layoffs hadn’t been enough to stem the bleeding. They were closing the factory for good. Virginia House was supposed to have been the Cadillac line of their business, a factory that specialized in high-end solid wood furniture. “The trouble was, solids lost their panache as the imports came in,” sales manager Bob Merriman said. “People just didn’t wanna pay for it, and the young people coming along liked the Restoration Hardware look better; they didn’t care whether it was solid or not.”

Looking back, JBIII said, buying Virginia House was probably his biggest strategic mistake. “I don’t know, maybe it was hubris,” he said. In this battle, the Chinese clearly had him beat.

A thirteen-hour plane ride away, in Shanghai, Larry Moh and his son, Michael, were about to announce their own entrée into the higher-end furniture scene. Larry Moh had promised not to compete in the industry for the ten years following his sale of Universal to Masco in 1989, and now he was back, his entrepreneurialism unfettered by contractual restraints.

He’d spent the past decade developing a fiberboard-and-laminate flooring-supply business, called Plantation Timber Products, based in the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan, a place even remoter than Dalian. “Labor was less of a factor with this one, which was all about being where the trees were,” Michael Moh said in a Skype interview from Shanghai. In the small city of Leshan, the Mohs had provided work for five hundred rural peasants and rare cash for wood for five hundred thousand subsistence farmers, he added.

In the interim, Larry Moh had also made a bundle off a considerable heap of AOL stock. As Tothill, his old supplier buddy, recalled, “He liked to make risky investments, and he was very good at picking them out. He was highly intelligent but also a very emotional man.”

In 2002, the Mohs flew a hundred American retailers to Shanghai for the opening of their brand-new Fine Furniture Design and Marketing, a high-end furniture-making and -selling enterprise based in Shanghai with American headquarters in High Point; additional operations across the Middle East, Russia, Australia, and Korea; and forty-five retail stores in China. Having opened just two months before Larry Moh’s death from lung cancer at the age of seventy-six, FFDM became the furniture legend’s coup de grâce to American competitors like Virginia House. It was also his parting shot to the American furniture makers, who had long dismissed the quality of Chinese imports with the adage “You show me a horse but you deliver a donkey.”

Larry Moh had insisted on going out first class, with a plant that boasted 2.5 million square feet and a one-and-a-half-mile-long finishing line. He’d wanted the world to know that China was finished being the poster child for cheap labor, his son said. He did it by educating his factory workers to focus on quality, not just quantity, and this time the furniture would sell solely under his company’s logo, not OEM-style for Bernhardt, Lexington, or some other American brand. Moh had already intuited that labor rates would increase as the country began making products not just for export but also for its own growing consumer class.

His forecast, as usual, was right. By 2012, FFDM was paying its workers the equivalent of four hundred dollars a month, plus pension and benefits—a tripling of pay in just ten years. “We’re constantly evaluating our future,” Michael Moh told me in late 2012. “We could move again, absolutely. That’s the global phenomenon we’re in. As costs go up, you go, ‘Where are you going next?’ ”

Dalian is a seaside city in China’s remote northeastern corner, where the Yellow and Bo Hai Seas meet. Once the country’s largest trade port, the city was designated a Special Economic Zone in 1984, with the goal of putting people to work. Much of the ensuing industrialization was spurred by Mayor Bo Xilai, who would go on to govern the entire Liaoning Province and, as his stature in the Communist Party grew, become the head of China’s Commerce Ministry.

Bo drove the transformation of Dalian, turning it from a drab port city into a showcase of China’s rapid economic growth. Before the 2012 political scandal that rocked Beijing and made international news, he was best known for banning motorcycles in Dalian and turning traffic circles into large, lush parks by planting expensive imported grasses. He transformed the city into a hub of machine manufacturing, petrochemicals, oil refining, and electronics long before the corruption scandal that ended with his wife in jail for murder and his own incarceration for bribery, embezzlement, and abuse of power.

During the initial fact-finding mission to Dalian in 2002, Wyatt and Rose were in Bo’s territory, and the Bo-led growth was still in its early stages. The factories they toured looked like something out of Galax, Virginia, circa 1930. They were poorly equipped and inefficiently laid out—one was four stories high and looked like a very old Hampton Inn. “You could tell these factories had been there long before anybody was exporting to the U.S.,” Wyatt said. “And now they wanted to get in on it, like the people in the south of China.”

They hired a driver and spent the first two days touring five plants, acting like gracious potential buyers while all along scanning each assembly line for the Louis Philippe. Every night, when Wyatt phoned his dad at 9:30 (9:30 a.m. in Virginia) to report that he still hadn’t located the dresser, the response was always the same: keep looking.

Rose stayed busy on the phone, calling supplier friends in the finishing industry. One friend referred her to another, who happened to supply a factory called Dalian Huafeng Furniture Company. It was deep in the Liaoning Province, an hour northeast of Dalian in the town of Zhuanghe—fewer than a hundred miles from the North Korean border. Huafeng translates to “bright prosperity,” Rose knew. Based on what her friend told her, this could be the one.

When they arrived in the small city of Zhuanghe, they found it to be filthy, full of dirt roads and gray cinder-block buildings. For almost two decades, Dalian Huafeng had been making furniture for the Chinese market and exporting to Japan. Its flagship factory was housed in a three-story cinder-block building that employed eight hundred people, Rose said. Not all the workers were squatting near the ground to work on the furniture, as many did in southern China. But some were, as a new conveyor system was only partially built.

NO SPIT! ordered a sign on the stairwell. The building was unheated, and outside, the brisk September winds moaned.

“The people worked slowly—probably because they were so cold,” Rose said. “They were like soldiers. No one smiled. The whole place, it was like there was no life in it.”

Then Wyatt and Rose spotted a logo on a box in the shipping department that matched the logo on the back of the mystery dresser. Their eyes grew wide, and they looked at each other knowingly but didn’t say a word. This was definitely it.

Later, when Wyatt ventured that it didn’t look like the factory had enough room to expand fully into the American market, the sales manager suggested they get back in the car for part two of the tour. She had something to show them on the outskirts of Zhuanghe.

Turned out the company was building an entire factory complex dedicated to the American furniture market. Tucked away in the middle of nowhere and surrounded by fields, Rose recalled, “It seemed hidden away like a secret.”

For now, the enterprise was dwarfed by a giant billboard promoting the complex that owner He YunFeng intended to build on the site: six different factories, all dedicated to making bedroom furniture for Americans, with a giant warehouse in the middle. They would be modern factories with the same kind of German- and Italian-made equipment John Bassett had installed back in Galax. The billboard stood near the entranceway to the hundred-acre building site, and fanning out from the new construction debris sat neatly stacked piles of timber, some twenty feet tall.

The lumber came from Russia, the sales manager explained. She made no mention of how the wood was logged—by a Russian Mafia–controlled company that was later implicated in an environmental corruption scandal. In 2007, Walmart was criticized for selling baby cribs that had been made from lumber taken from protected Siberian tiger habitats and produced at Dalian Huafeng, according to the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency. (Several months later, Walmart announced it would investigate its suppliers more rigorously and joined the Global Forest & Trade Network.)

Dalian Huafeng would be happy to make samples for Vaughan-Bassett, she told them as they toured the premises and learned more about the company’s plan.

Months earlier, there had been a grand-opening ceremony to unveil the plans for what owner He YunFeng was calling the American Furniture Industrial Park. Rose read about the event in newspaper clippings, featuring photos of He YunFeng with Bo Xilai, then the governor of Liaoning. He YunFeng predicted it would “force American domestic furniture manufacturers to close their doors,” as he told the government-controlled newspaper the Liaoning Daily. The complex would hold twenty-two thousand employees operating thirty different finishing lines with the capacity to ship five thousand containers a month.

Most of the Zhuanghe workers were young men in their twenties, many of them migrants who’d been bused in from northern and western China. They wore uniforms and lived in dormitories that typically housed ten people to a room. They were paid 20 percent less than those working in southern China, where in 2002, workers earned a hundred dollars a month, including meals and housing (compared to the approximately two thousand dollars a month it took to keep an American furniture worker employed).

“If you believed their billboard, they were gonna be the biggest thing in bedroom anywhere,” Wyatt said. “The question was, was this what I call a giant-billboard expansion?” He’d seen several promotions like this before in southern China, and when he returned to the sites the following year, the grass was a foot taller and the billboards crumbling. “On one hand, a billboard’s a billboard; how seriously do you take it?

“On the other, between their square footage and all that lumber we saw, if these guys had the financing, they were gonna be the most formidable guys ever.”

Dalian Huafeng planned to ship one hundred thousand bedroom suites to the United States every month, more than the top four or five U.S. producers combined. The company had piles of lumber sitting nearby to prove it. In the local press, He YunFeng said he’d begun modestly with just ten employees in 1984 but now planned to become “the No. 1 furniture maker in the world.” The government would help turn Dalian Huafeng into a furniture-making “superpower,” Bo Xilai told a reporter, by helping to zuodazuoqiang—“make it powerfully strong.”

The moment Wyatt described the project to his father on the phone, John Bassett wanted to see the place for himself. To stretch out this snake, he needed a meeting with He YunFeng.

It was turning into a devil of a year. Profits were tanking, and with the Virginia House closing—which set the company back nearly four million dollars—morale was low at Vaughan-Bassett’s remaining three plants. Raises were frozen. In two years, the company’s sales, production, and employment had all dropped 20 percent.

John Bassett saw the stack of TAA application papers on his desk, each representing one of his displaced workers, and he knew: It was going to take some new ideas and new energy to pull the company out of the morass it was sinking into. Something fun.

Fun, as in a new furniture line named after the biggest celebrity in American history. Fun, as in a blue suede sofa with fringe.

Fun, as in a recliner with room for a six-pack in the chair arm.

Fun, as in an April 2002 furniture market introduction featuring Burnin’ Love mirrors, a Love Me Tender bed, and an armoire with Elvis Presley’s signature in frosted glass on the door.

Why not? Lexington had Bob Timberlake, the artist who’d helped it design one of the bestselling collections in industry history. Hooker had Faith Popcorn, the author and consumer-trend forecaster. And Bernhardt had Martha Stewart—before she lied to federal government investigators.

John Bassett was already casting about for a celebrity license to call his own when his son Doug returned from a sales event in Tupelo, Mississippi, and announced that he’d been late getting there because it was the anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. Not only could he not get a hotel room in Memphis, but there was not a single rental car available to get him to Tupelo.

“Dad, they’ve shut down the whole city,” Doug said.

And so the 2002 Vaughan-Bassett showroom at High Point was transformed into a miniature version of Graceland, with Elvis on the karaoke machine, rhinestone-studded outfits pinned to the walls, and employees wearing tinted aviator-style sunglasses (painted gold, with a line of holes running down each earpiece—and made in China, of course).

The glasses were such a hot item that when one middle-aged woman stepped onto an elevator and saw a salesman wearing a pair, she ripped them from his face. “I’m sorry, but I just have to have these!” she said, then bolted before the elevator doors closed. The company ran tapes of the King’s concerts on a large-screen television, and more than a few women stood transfixed before it, some with tears streaming down their faces.

It was a beautiful, although unprofitable, distraction. Newspapers from Memphis to Germany covered the premiere of Vaughan-Bassett’s Elvis Presley line of furniture. ABC let John talk about it on Good Morning America. And John Bassett says he’ll never forget the sight of fifty-year-old women “bawling like they were fifteen-year-old girls!”

But Elvis people tended to buy Elvis records, key chains, watches, and bobbleheads. Not twelve-hundred-dollar suites of Elvis furniture. “It was like being next to a pot of gold, but you couldn’t figure out how to get your hand in the pot,” JBIII said. The line became the Edsel of the industry.

A regional sales manager phoned in from Elvis Week, a Memphis event the factory had sent him to following the line’s premiere. “Bob, people who live in mobile homes are not gonna buy the suites,” he said. At the end of the season, the collection was reduced to closeout status, with four-hundred-fifty-dollar beds retailing for two hundred dollars. As one retailer friend told Merriman, “I wouldn’t give you fifty for it!”

It was a fabulous public relations success, as it introduced Vaughan-Bassett’s furniture to stores that had never heard of the company. But the business took a one-million-dollar loss on the enterprise, a clunker that John Bassett came to call his glorious failure. “It was so bad, you almost had to stand back and admire it,” he said. “What we learned was, Elvis people are fun, but they don’t have a lot of money for furniture.”

Even with her legal jam on the horizon, Martha might have been the more prudent choice.

Cardboard cutouts of Elvis still dot the landscape of the Vaughan-Bassett offices, not far from the last Hunka Hunka Burnin’ Love mirror—gilt-framed and heart-shaped—which hangs above the office coffeemaker, around the corner from the decoupaged Elvis clock.

If JBIII was going to keep his business vibrant, he needed a better idea, a bolder move. Recycled celebrities, cost-cutting, and factory-tweaking—that had all been tried. What had never occurred to John, a lifelong Republican, was turning to the government for help.

Nobody remembers who at the American Furniture Manufacturers Association first came up with the idea. Some say it was Paul Toms, the chairman of Hooker Furniture. Others say it was Paul Broyhill, the retired magnate who’d run Broyhill Furniture before he sold it to Interco in 1980. (It’s now part of Furniture Brands International.)

Furniture-factory workers were losing their livelihoods because of offshoring to China, just like the textile workers before them had. It was a fact. But was there any legal recourse to make it stop?

The furniture industry didn’t have the corporate heft of, say, the Detroit automakers. But wasn’t there a law on the books somewhere that might protect it from unfair and maybe even illegal trade?

Joe Dorn knew there was. He’d already successfully argued the nuances of the Tariff Act of 1930 on behalf of American producers of magnesium, who were being undercut by Chinese imports. He did it again for the makers of gray Portland cement, who alleged that the Mexican company Cementos Mexicanos (Cemex) was lowballing its cement in an effort to push American companies out of the market.

Dorn is a respected trade lawyer at the top-shelf King and Spalding, a multinational firm with trade headquarters at 1700 Pennsylvania Avenue—a block away from the White House. It’s fair to say there are corners of Mexico and China in which Dorn is reviled. When Cemex CEO Lorenzo Zambrano met him in person for the first time in 2006, he greeted him with “You cannot be Mr. Dorn. You don’t have horns!”

Dorn told me this story during an interview that lasted exactly one hour. (He was sorry I had driven more than four hours to talk, but he had clients, paying ones presumably, who were waiting for him.) We were seated at a long table flanked by high-backed leather chairs in a conference room that had a view of DC’s bustling Lafayette Square. There was just a trace of his native North Carolina in his polite, measured speech. Asked if he’d ever traveled to China, Dorn deadpanned, “I’m afraid to go there.”

Among the details the furniture makers learned from him at the 2002 AFMA meeting was that a coalition of American companies or their workers had every right in the WTO-governed universe to ask the U.S. Department of Commerce to investigate factories in another country for underselling, or dumping, as it was known. The practice of selling exported goods at artificially low prices designed to drive domestic producers out of business, dumping can also occur when exporters sell products cheaper in foreign countries than in their own. Dumping isn’t illegal by WTO standards unless the domestic producers can prove harm—that is, show that the dumping has led to factory closings and higher rates of unemployment.

While American producers tend to prevail in two-thirds of antidumping cases brought before the U.S. International Trade Commission, the process is lengthy, complicated, and expensive. Just to commission an initial legal study would cost seventy-five thousand dollars, the lawyer told the furniture makers in a statement that was classic Joe Dorn: exact, understated, and lacking any whiff of emotion.

But the guys representing the industry in the room didn’t need Dorn to provide the emotion. It was already there in spades.

Most of the furniture makers in the AFMA were now investing mightily in their own importing infrastructures—all those fax machines and interpreters, all those tasseled loafers on the ground in Dongguan and Shenzhen. If duties were imposed on China, it would result in their paying more for goods.

JBIII talked the manufacturers into ponying up money for the study. But six months later, when they reconvened to hear Dorn’s report, most were importing even more.

“The last thing they wanted to hear was any news that China may have been breaking the law,” JBIII said, recalling the way the audience response graduated from a low hum to near shouting as Dorn spoke—until he was no longer audible at all.

If people lost their jobs because of illegal race or gender discrimination, JBIII interjected at the meeting, how was that different from people losing their jobs because of illegal trade? Wasn’t all of it illegal?

But the retailers will hate it, one CEO pointed out. “They’ll put your picture in Furniture/Today, and they’ll boycott you,” he said. “They’ll boycott all of us.”

But what made the furniture makers so sure the retailers wouldn’t skip all the middlemen and buy directly from the Chinese factories? That was already happening at Bassett Furniture. In 1999, Bassett and J.C. Penney had celebrated selling one billion dollars in furniture together with a big party in Dallas, near the company’s Plano headquarters. When Penney complained the following year that Bassett’s prices were too high compared with the imports’, Bassett redesigned—or “value-engineered,” as the marketing people called it—its bestselling Penney suites, slashing prices by as much as 33 percent.

Over the course of the next three years, Penney cut its Bassett orders drastically, replacing them with similar Chinese-made products until the Bassett line was entirely phased out. Later, Penney officials insisted they had dumped Bassett because of quality problems, not price—a claim Bassett CEO Rob Spilman disputes to this day.

“For years it was all about ‘loyalty, loyalty’—and turned out, it was all just bull,” said Joe Meadors, the retired Bassett sales executive who helped manage the J.C. Penney account for many years. “They said, ‘We’re goin’ offshore; we’re not gonna buy from you anymore.’ ”

At the AFMA meeting’s end, as Joe Dorn was stuffing his papers into his briefcase, John Bassett pulled him aside and said he’d visit him in Washington if Dorn would finish his presentation. After they met, over the course of the next several months, John picked Dorn’s brain about the process, calling weekly and learning about other cases brought on behalf of other clients, including the shrimp, magnesium, and polypropylene-bag industries.

To petition for a Commerce Department investigation, Dorn explained, JBIII would need at least 51 percent of his industry committed to pursuing an antidumping case against China. Had John thought of the notion two years earlier, before imports had reached a critical mass, the support would have been a cinch. It wasn’t quite the eleventh hour. But the tipping point, as Dorn explained it, was perilously close.

The dominoes tended to fall the same way in every industry hit by offshoring. “First, companies begin importing defensively from China, then they gradually start relying more and more on imports, and as you take the volume out of your U.S. plants, it makes the remaining U.S. volume less cost-effective,” Dorn told me. “And it’s a downward spiral from there.” The earlier an industry organizes against unfair foreign competition, the likelier an antidumping coalition is to prevail.

Dorn wasn’t sure John “could herd all the cats together,” he said. “There were a lot of players, a lot of different voices that were independent. I had my doubts about whether it was even possible to bring together a coalition.”

But Dorn was learning about John’s propensity for legal pads and weekend telephone calls, not to mention his General Patton–style patter. JBIII wasn’t Dorn’s first client to travel covertly to an offshore factory—or send an entourage—to validate rumors of predatorily low pricing.

A lawyer’s lawyer, Dorn had a career-long habit of working every Saturday morning at the firm, and Saturday mornings suited John Bassett fine. He made sure he had Dorn’s direct office number.

The Chinese were about to feel the attack dog’s bite.

In November 2002, Wyatt and Rose made their second trip to Dalian, with JBIII in tow, under the guise of quality control: they would peruse the Louis Philippe samples Dalian Huafeng had made for them, and, the company hoped, place an order.

This time, John Bassett saw it with his own eyes—the cinder-block buildings, the cold, crouching workers, the sky-high timber stacks. And because John was the top dog at Vaughan-Bassett, not just some presumably spoiled owner’s son, manufacturer He YunFeng offered to meet with him personally to discuss plans for his burgeoning American Furniture Industrial Park. He even sent a driver to ferry them around the site.

John was used to dealing with Taiwanese businessmen who wanted to financially gore him.

He sat fairly speechless as He YunFeng, a Communist Party official on his way to joining Forbes magazine’s list of the richest Chinese people, had the gall—or maybe it was just the new-to-capitalism naïveté—to describe how he intended to shutter every American bedroom-furniture factory, including John’s.

No drinks were proffered; there was no back-slapping, no five-course meals.

Just these words, spoken by his stone-faced interpreter: Dalian Huafeng intended to become the number one furniture maker in the world.

And this was exactly how: He YunFeng would sell the Louis Philippe for a hundred dollars because he considered that to be the “tuition” price of doing business in America—a loss he would have to take in order to capture the market share, he explained.

“He was not belligerent, but it was just like you were speaking to a judge,” John recalled. “He was absolutely serious and confident in what he was saying.”

Who’s going to carry all this inventory? John wanted to know.

YunFeng’s eyes went blank, John said. “And finally, he smiled, and his eyes lit up, and he told the translator, ‘The American retailer will own the inventory.’

“And I said, ‘Good luck with that.’

“It had never dawned on me until then that you’re dealing with a bunch of Communists who have never had any competition whatsoever, and they’re coming up with how they’re gonna succeed right in front of you, and they actually think that every competing store in every community in America is going to carry the same suite of furniture,” JBIII said.

“This guy even wanted to put the Taiwanese in southern China out of business, and those people were already hurting us. It was clear that this was a bigger threat than anything we’d been exposed to before.”

Then He YunFeng looked at the grandson of Mr. J.D. Bassett, who actually had been the largest wood furniture maker in the world, and made an even bolder statement.

Close all three of your factories, he told him, and put the business of Vaughan-Bassett entirely in my hands.

Close his factories? Because a Chinese businessman wanted him to turn tail and run? Because this guy thought he could woo JBIII with fatter profits and promises to rid him of operational headaches like health insurance and the interference of all those acronymic regulatory agencies—EPA, OSHA, and EEOC—not to mention those pesky factory employees?

The conversation soon ended. That’s when JBIII remembered the Taiwanese businessman saying, back in 1984, that Americans were all the same: If the price is right, you will do anything.

On the way out, the friendly sales manager asked Rose to help her buy a subscription to the trade publication Furniture/Today, saying she hoped it would help the Chinese understand the American industry. The Dalian Huafeng managers in northern China were confident, but they were still fairly naive about Americans and their cowboy capitalism. (Rose obliged—partly out of politeness, partly to keep up the ruse—and was later reimbursed.)

That naïveté would soon disappear, just as that forest of Russian timber near the construction site would disappear, turning into dressers and beds. The company had figured out how to export to Japan, after all. It would figure this out too.

Within a year, Rose heard from friends who were witnessing the metamorphosis of Dalian Huafeng. In reports she typed up for Wyatt in 2002 and 2003, her sources described one American buyer after another visiting its Liaoning factories—folks from Value City, Rooms To Go, Lewis and Sons, even Pat Bassett’s Galax cousins from Vaughan Furniture. At least one American supplier sent two managers to live temporarily in Zhuanghe to teach the Chinese workers about American furniture and finishing systems, according to Rose’s reports.

On the car ride back to Dalian, company lore has it that John Bassett looked over at his son Wyatt and invoked the name of Mr. J.D. Bassett. “My grandfather would roll over in his graaaa-ave,” he announced, the story goes. He’s repeated that line so many times since that neither he nor Wyatt nor Rose can remember if he really said it or not.

But people back in Bassett were saying it, he knew, every time another factory closed. He stared at the ceiling of the car, and he worried.

Back home, he picked up the nearest legal pad and got his top-shelf lawyer on the phone.