Ted Conover

by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today

  In other ways, though, the Chinese are still figuring cars out and doing things their way. Take the phrase used to describe our expedition, “self-driving trip.” It is called self-driving to contrast it with the more customary idea of driving in China: that someone else drives you. Until recently, everyone important enough to own a car was also important enough to have his or her own driver. Traditions grew up around this, like the chauffeur joining his boss at the table for meals while on duty—something still commonly seen.

  But those practices are growing fusty. What are new and explosively popular are car clubs. Some are organized around the idea of travel, like the Beijing Target Auto Club, and others around the idea of… well, simply fun. The Beijing VW Polo Club, for example, has an active Web site and hundreds of youthful members. (The Polo is a small VW model popular in Europe and Latin America—and was the car driven by Dr. Awni al-Khatib in the West Bank. It is now manufactured in China as well.) Club members meet regularly to learn about maintenance, deliver toys to orphans, and take weekend pleasure drives reminiscent of America in the 1930s and 1940s. To celebrate the forthcoming 2008 Beijing Olympics, four dozen members turned up in a giant parking lot to form the Olympic logo with their compact, candy-colored cars, each circle a different hue. Single members have found mates in the club, and at least one of their weddings featured an all-Polo procession through the streets of Beijing.

  In the West, cars can still excite, but the family car soon becomes part of the furniture. In China, however, it’s nothing of the sort. Li Anding, author of two books on the car in China and the country’s leading automotive journalist, told me why a few weeks later at a dinner with some of his industry pals in Beijing. “The desire for cars here is as strong as in America, but here the desire was repressed for half a century,” he began. All private cars were confiscated shortly after the Communists came to power in 1949, supposedly because they were symbols of the capitalist lifestyle. Having a car became the exclusive privilege of Communist Party officials.

  Li Anding’s colleague Li Tiezheng explained that “people my age loved Russian movies. They gave us the idea we should all own a car, and we all wondered why we couldn’t.” Li Tiezheng bought his first car, a Polish-made Fiat, when private ownership was finally permitted in the mid-1990s. But the stigma against ownership was still huge: “The pressure was so great, I couldn’t tell anyone. I lied that I had borrowed it.”

  That didn’t last long. By 2000, enough regulations had been removed, and enough people were making money, that car ownership became a reality for many Chinese for the first time. Li Anding, born in 1949, said he was still astonished at the change: “When I started writing about cars, I never expected to see private cars in China in my generation, much less some of the world’s fanciest cars, being driven every day.”

  As the men around the table listened to Li’s history and added to it, there was a palpable sense of pride. This wasn’t simply progress on the level of a convenience—analogous, say, to your neighborhood moving from dial-up to high-speed internet. To them it meant China was finally entering the world stage and participating fully in human progress. It had the additional meaning of something long denied that could finally be acquired, like a wrong being rectified. Over and over again, the group described car ownership with a term I would never have thought to use:

  “Once China opened up and Chinese people could see the other side of the world and know how people lived there, you could no longer limit the right to buy cars.”

  “This right is something that has been ours all along.”

  “Driving is our right.”

  When Li Lu noticed the sign for the Zhuozhou Service Area of the Jingshi Expressway, Zhu Jihong was on one of his favorite subjects: destinations. He had done self-driving to Mongolia and Manchuria, he said, to Xinjiang and to Xi’an and the Silk Road. He made a round trip to Tibet—fantastic!—and was considering one to Hong Kong. The main problem with our current itinerary, in his opinion, was that it was too short: “A week isn’t long enough to really feel like you’ve been away.” His wife was less and less interested in these odysseys, preferring, lately, to stay home and mind the hotel and restaurant he had bought near his hometown outside Beijing. His teenage son, the victim of untold days and weeks of bouncing around in the back seat, told me he was no longer interested in driving at all—he just wanted to play soccer.

  Li Lu interrupted Zhu and made sure he noticed that this was where we were to pull off and finally meet the group. Though it was early afternoon now and Zhu had been driving for hours, he barely looked tired. I peeked at the odometer of his two-month-old Hyundai as he slowed; it showed 7,700 kilometers, or nearly 4,800 miles. That was an annual rate of nearly 30,000 miles, most of them from pleasure driving.

  Though the first time most members of the trip had seen one another was in this parking lot, they had been talking for hours. In recent days each driver had stopped by the Beijing Target Auto Club office to pick up a CB radio and rooftop antenna. The rendezvous was on one side of the lot, and in the middle of the group was a vehicle with the biggest antenna of all, a thickly bumpered, sticker-plastered, red-flagged Korean-made four-by-four belonging to the president of the Target Club, Zhao Xiangjie.

  Zhao and his truck were decked out for safari: he was wearing a khaki utility vest with many zippers, busily greeting new arrivals. Across the lot, a self-driving group from Guangzhou was similarly mustered, easy to spot by the big stickers with numbers on everyone’s side doors and rear windows. And this, it turned out, was Zhao’s next duty, to adorn each vehicle in our group with its numbers. Zhu accepted his with great ceremony, cleaning his doors first to ensure good adhesion, making sure the number decals were straight and even. If one theme here was safari, another was road rally, with the decals suggesting that everyone was part of a speedy team.

  Though most Chinese car clubs are organized around the idea of trips, they come in many flavors. Some clubs are run by dealers (like a Honda dealership in Guangzhou), and others (like the VW Polo Club in Beijing) are nonprofit and organized around a particular model. At least one is the offshoot of an outdoor-recreational-gear manufacturer. Many are just for four-wheel-drive vehicles and aim to go to the back of beyond. Travel agencies sponsor some; others are run for and by motorcyclists.

  Maybe half of the vehicles in our group were SUVs. The rest were passenger cars—not the cheaper Chinese models that make up the majority of vehicles on the road, the Fotons, Geelys, Cherys, and JACs, but rather foreign brands like Toyota, Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, and Citroën, most of them manufactured in China in joint ventures with Chinese companies (some state-owned or-controlled), an arrangement the government hoped would encourage the growth of a domestic car industry. One of the foreign cars caught my eye: a flashy white Volvo S80, driven by a man who was also a distinctive dresser. With his white leather loafers, tight jeans, white belt with a big silver buckle, and white shirt (“Verdace,” read the logo), Fan Li, a television producer, cut an intriguing figure. He was accompanied on this trip by his pretty twenty-four-year-old daughter, Fan Longyin, who was recently back from film school in France. Longyin was quickly becoming friends with Jia Lin, a single woman in her thirties. Jia was a reporter for the Beijing Youth Daily but was traveling for pleasure, not work. She wore a tan leather jacket with a winged glossy-lip logo on the back that said “Flying Kiss.” Like me, Jia had come without a car, but it looked as if she would start riding with the Fans.

  And then there was the attractive young family in the white Volkswagen Passat, the Chens: Xiaohong (who uses the name Peter with English speakers), a personable information technology executive; his wife, Yin Aiqin, an electric power consultant; and their four-year-old daughter, Yen Yi Yi, who, I would soon learn, was already taking voice lessons at home from a member of the Beijing Opera.

  More nerdy but genial were the bespectacled Wangs in their Citroën Xsara: she ran part of the back office of Air China; he worked for an international freight firm. They,
too, had an unattached passenger who shared the driving and expenses. He was the urbane Zhou Yan, a partner in China’s third-largest law firm.

  Rounding out our group of thirty-odd people were the businessmen. Organized by a cement-plant owner, Li Xingjie, these ten or eleven men from the same Beijing suburb, Fangshan, rode in SUVs and tended to stick to themselves. Some of them owned coal-processing plants, which meant they were rich.

  Soon all eleven cars were bedecked with numbers and the club logo. Pit stops and snack purchases were completed. The service area looked a bit like one on an American toll road, though there was no landscaping, the simple restaurant was not a fast-food franchise, and the convenience store was not as elaborately stocked as one in the States. An attendant at the state-run Sinopec gas station filled the tank of Zhu’s Hyundai, and I paid in cash, gas and tolls being my contribution to expenses. (Sinopec stations only recently began accepting credit cards.) The gas was unleaded and a few cents cheaper than in the United States, due to government subsidies. Everyone piled back into their cars, and we hit the road. We would reconvene for dinner.

  Zhu and members of the Beijing Target Auto Club pause to sightsee on a new highway bridge over the Yellow River near Zhengzhou.

  Zhu’s mention of the Silk Road had gotten me thinking about ancient travel. Travel agencies hawked Silk Route tours to Xi’an and Lanzhou, Dunhuang, Urumqi, Turpan, and Kashgar, towns, now cities, that the network of trails between China and the Mediterranean had indeed passed through. But long gone were the pashas with their tolls, the traders and bandits and monks, epic sojourners like Marco Polo, the carriers of bubonic plague (which hit China in the 1330s and then made its way west, killing up to half of all Europeans in the Black Death of the 1340s), and the secrecy surrounding China’s luxury export, silk, prized by the West since Roman times. With the decline of the Mongol Empire later in the fourteenth century, the Silk Road had withered away. The search for a replacement ocean route to the Orient motivated a generation of European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Columbus among them.

  But weren’t we the modern version of a caravan heading through the desert, this rest stop our oasis? Centuries before, I suppose, we’d all have been mounting our camels or ponies just now, having watered or fed them, and setting forth at roughly the same time, for both companionship and safety. We’d reconvene at another way station to rest or sleep or eat. We’d be charged tolls along the way by authorities who controlled passage. We’d get to know our fellow travelers in the ways travelers do: seeing them react to the new and the unexpected, watching how they handled difficulty, learning how they felt about sharing and about strangers—all of this was exactly the same.

  China’s first modern expressway, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway, was built in the early 1990s by the Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Y. S. Wu. Wu studied civil engineering at Princeton in the mid-1950s, when construction was beginning on the U.S. Interstate Highway System. At the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike was being widened from four lanes to many lanes, and Wu has said it inspired him. (His powerful firm, Hopewell Holdings, is named after a town near Princeton.) Though Wu ran short of money and the ambitious project had to be rescued by the Chinese government, the toll road model of highway development caught on.

  Wu’s Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway was the beginning of an infrastructure binge that seems to be only picking up steam: the government recently announced a target of 53,000 freeway miles by 2035. (The U.S. Interstate Highway System, begun in 1956, presently comprises about 46,000 miles of roads.) Some new roads, especially in the less-developed western parts of the nation, are as empty as South Dakota’s: China is encouraging road construction ahead of industrial development and population settlement, assuming those will follow.

  The goal, of course, is not simply to replicate the boom of coastal areas, where the majority of the country’s population now lives. China’s larger aim is to consolidate the nation. Its version of Manifest Destiny—the “great development of the West” or “Go West” policy begun in January 2000—envisions far-western territories, like Tibet and the fuel-rich Xinjiang province (the name translates as “New Frontier”), fully integrated, ethnically and economically, with the rest of the country. It seems quite likely that local indigenous cultures stand to lose along the way. What the United States gained (and lost) with the Pony Express, covered wagons, and steam trains, China may achieve with roads and automobiles.

  If highways in China’s west are awaiting traffic, easterners have the opposite concern. As we headed south from Shijiazhuang toward Zhengzhou, the roads were packed with vacationers and truck traffic and Zhu jostled for position with all the other people who were late getting where they were going. His style of driving helped me understand better why China, with 2.6 percent of the world’s vehicles, had 21 percent of its road fatalities in 2002, the most recent year for which figures were available at this writing.

  Of course, there must be many reasons. The large number of new drivers is one; few of today’s Chinese drivers grew up driving, and road-safety awareness seems low. Many roads are probably dangerous—though not, I would venture to say, the beautiful new expressway we were on. It was like an American interstate, only sleeker: the guardrails were angular and attractive, not fat and ugly, and in the divider strip there was typically a well-pruned hedge, high enough to protect drivers from the glare of beams from opposing traffic at night. Beyond the guardrails, grassy embankments sloped down to buffer areas carefully planted with a single species of tree, often poplar. The road surface was perfectly smooth, transitions even, signage sparse but clear. Periodically we saw orange-suited workers hand-pruning the center hedge or sweeping the wide shoulder with old handmade brooms. There was never a maintenance truck nearby; wherever the sweepers came from, they apparently walked.

  It was the sweepers I worried about. Officially, there were two lanes of travel in each direction. But each side also had a shoulder, and on this expressway the shoulder was exactly as wide as the travel lanes. Thus Zhu and others used the shoulder as the passing lane, despite signs asserting that it was forbidden. Occasionally, of course, a sweeper would loom, or a disabled vehicle, and Zhu would slam on the brakes and veer into the truck lane. Once past the obstacle, he would floor it and swerve back out, brake once again, swerve, honk—it was almost like being in a video game, except that video games end or you can walk away. We, on the other hand, had a long way to go, and Zhu’s passion for risking all in order to move one or two car-lengths ahead showed no signs of abating.

  People traveling abroad worry about their plane going down and they worry about disease. More than one had asked me, before I came to China, if I wasn’t concerned about the recent SARS epidemic. I was a little bit, I confessed, but mainly I was worried about car travel. I knew that China’s highways were the deadliest in the world, and I knew that they were especially dangerous over these National Days holidays (more than six thousand people would die during this one). And I knew one more statistic, which, as I lurched from one side of my seat to the other, I wanted to share with our driver.

  “Li Lu, does Mr. Zhu know that the leading cause of death for Chinese men up to age forty-five—for guys like him—is road accidents?” I asked her. She translated. Zhu looked at me and laughed. “I think he didn’t understand,” she said.

  “I don’t want to be rude,” I said to her, “but I really would like to live to the end of this trip.” We consulted, and soon Li Lu announced from the back seat that we both really wished he would slow down a bit. Zhu looked at me sidelong and then, if anything, speeded up.

  The next morning Zhu was tired, finally, and asked if I wanted to drive. I hesitated for a moment. I had researched the issue and was fairly certain that foreign tourists were forbidden to drive between cities in China. Most Chinese seem never to have considered the possibility of foreigners behind the wheel. But Zhao, early on, had asked whether I would be willing to help with the driving, and I had said sure. Far be it from m
e to shirk this responsibility. So I climbed into the driver’s seat.

  This day’s driving was different from the previous day’s. As we moved farther from the coast and its expressways, we spent more time on national highways, which generally are two-lane and pass through a lot of towns. Everyone in the club stuck pretty close together, and there was a lot of chatting over the radio. Zhao began by apologizing for the previous day’s overlong drive. Even if there hadn’t been a highway closure due to fog, and slowness due to rain and holiday congestion, it was too long a drive for the first day, and he was sorry. But he was also upbeat and sounded excited about getting to Three Gorges Dam that afternoon. He moderated the CB chat that followed, prompting each car’s occupants to take turns introducing themselves. Some told a joke, some sang a song. Fan, in the white Volvo, put on an Elvis Presley CD and held his mike to the speaker, broadcasting “Love Me Tender” in honor of me, Elvis’s countryman. Not long after, another man recounted how he once got a ticket for urinating at the side of the road—a fairly common practice here. Soon after, as we passed through a village, a clamor rose for a pit stop.

  I take the wheel of Zhu’s Hyundai Tucson.

  The men had little trouble finding places to relieve themselves near the edge of town, but the women were in more of a bind. China’s car culture—not to mention consumer culture—had not yet reached the countryside, and there was no restaurant nearby, no fast-food joint, no gas station/convenience store. Chen Yin Aiqin, her daughter at her side, knocked tentatively on the door of a farmhouse and was soon welcomed inside and ushered to the latrine out back. Afterward, before their car pulled away, she dashed back to the farmer’s door with a small box of chocolate from Beijing.