Ted Conover

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

  On one patio, an entrepreneur had set up a large plaster lotus leaf, painted pink. For a few yuan, he would let you sit cross-legged under it and be photographed by your friends. The first taker in our group, of course, was Zhu, who I was glad to see had an appreciation of camp. He pulled his loafered feet under his legs, placed his hands together in front of him in prayer, and tried not to smile too broadly as we took his picture.

  One small temple had a dark and narrow passage around its periphery. Li Lu explained to me that walking the passage, in conjunction with making a cash donation, could help certain wishes come true. It was too claustrophobic for me to attempt, but after conferring a moment with the attending monk, Jia Lin made a largish donation (100 yuan, more than $12) and disappeared into the passage. Li Lu explained to me that Jia really wanted to find a husband and hoped to effect that result. This was, in fact, the reason she came on this trip, which she imagined to be the kind of exciting adventure where you might meet a man. So far, however, things weren’t panning out for her.

  Prayer, then, was alive in China. What was less clear to me, after my brush with the police in the mountains, was how many in the urban, affluent world of self-driving tourers still believed in government authority.

  My test question was speeding. National highways were typically posted with limits of 50 miles per hour, and up to 75 miles per hour on expressways. The orientation brochure that each driver had received from the Beijing Target Auto Club insisted that we adhere to those limits. (“This is only self-driving, not car racing!” the brochure read. “Speeding is not necessary.”) Yet all the drivers, including Zhao, paid the rules no attention whatsoever, often driving 100 miles per hour or more. Police cars were seldom seen; when drivers spotted them, to my surprise, they totally ignored them. The cops rarely used radar, it turned out, and they almost never tried to pull you over.

  What did concern Zhu and the others, though, were the speed cameras mounted unobtrusively on poles in the median. If you went too fast past a camera, it snapped your picture, and a ticket would arrive in the mail. Zhu knew the location of most of the cameras along his normal routes around Beijing, but whenever he headed farther afield, the tickets piled up, costing $70 or $80 a month.

  His solution? Friends in the police department. They had given him a special red license plate that was affixed beneath his regular one. He believed this stopped a lot of the tickets in their tracks. But Zhu, like many others on the trip, was also intrigued by a device in the Nissan SUV of Li Xingjie, forty-two, the leader of the Fangshan businessmen’s group. The short, bald man was widely envied among members of the tour for his radar detector, which was to detect not only radar but also cameras. I joined him one afternoon, and he proudly demonstrated that indeed was the case; the device also gave advance notice of tollbooths and service areas. Made in Taiwan, the detector cost Li $350 and, as it stated in English on its bottom, detected “all speed equipment on mainland!” He used to pay about $1,250 annually in fines, but now paid very little.

  “But isn’t this kind of seditious?” I asked via Li Lu. “Isn’t this Taiwan helping to undermine the laws of the mainland?”

  On the contrary, Li said, “This detector helps me obey the law. You have to obey laws. We have to obey the government!”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was sincere. As we blew by an aging police cruiser at more than 100 miles per hour (the cruiser, by my reckoning, was traveling closer to 50), I asked him to help me unravel more mysteries of Chinese highway law enforcement. “Why isn’t anybody worried about those police? Why don’t they chase anybody and give out tickets?”

  That’s just not how it’s done here, Li said. Occasionally you were hit with an expressway fine when you stopped at the next tollbooth, but ordinarily, unless there had been an accident or some other irregularity, cops wouldn’t chase you. Police cars were slow, but the mails were reliable.

  Li portrayed himself as very straight: “Twenty years ago, I was driving a tractor—I was a model peasant! There were almost no cars in China. I didn’t learn to drive until 1988. Under Deng Xiaoping, I got lucky because I was uneducated. Educated people think in traditional ways, but Deng said we should take chances.” He did, and now he owns the Beijing Fangshan Banbidian Cement Factory, which he started when he was twenty-eight. Li was mild-mannered and unassuming, but when I later showed Li Lu his business card, she was in awe: “This cell phone prefix means he has had the phone a long time—since they were really expensive. He is very, very rich!”

  I considered this as the group reconvened for the last time, just on the other side of a glitzy new toll plaza, its lines limned in neon that had been illuminated as the sun started down. All of the cars in our group, like the majority of cars you see in China, were recent models. Almost all the wealth of the drivers was first-generation. The digital cameras, the shiny wristwatches—where I come from all of it said nouveau riche. But the pejorative back home is the normative here: practically every wealthy person is nouveau riche, so the idea is meaningless.

  The more instructive comparison, as we stood on this fancy bit of highway surrounded by rice fields and, here and there, people at work in them, was with the rural poor, the peasantry, the hundreds of millions of Chinese who do not yet (and, you imagine, will not in their lifetimes) share this prosperity. Many villages still are not connected to roads at all. When an expressway just south of here was completed last year, I was told sotto voce in Beijing, a series of demonstrations by peasants at a toll plaza delayed its opening. They were angry because the road had taken their land, and this, we are now seeing, is the story all over China: the government counted nearly 80,000 mass protests in 2005 alone. The country’s economic growth is fantastic, the urban atmosphere heady, but the cost is growing inequality, that invidious distinction the Communists worked so hard to erase. The agricultural poor are called nongmin, Peter Hessler explains in River Town: “City dwellers … can recognize a peasant at a single glance, and often they are victims of prejudice and condescension. Even the word for soil—tu—can be applied to people as a derogatory adjective, meaning unrefined and uncouth.” Spotting the nongmin in a Chinese city hardly takes a trained eye: they are the people, mostly men, in coarse clothing, burlap bags at their feet, standing around in public places looking utterly from another planet. China’s problem, and it’s hardly new, is these city nongmin represent hundreds of millions of others: they constitute about 75 percent of the population of China. Whether in a city taxi or here, on the highway, you can see them through the glass, almost standing still while people like Zhu and Li and Lucy and I zoom by.

  Zhu, ex-nongmin himself, was not squandering any of the opportunities associated with his rise in status. By the time I arrived with my suitcase at our room in our four-star hotel in Luoyang, Zhu had already welcomed two sleek female “massage therapists” to our room. They were perched glamorously on the edge of my bed—legs crossed, lips glossed, high heels dangling—and beckoned me to join them. Zhu chortled with glee at my reticence, and I wondered which part of car travel he enjoyed most: the hours behind the wheel or the hours just after? Certainly, he seemed to take full advantage of all of them.

  Temporarily exiled from my room, I repaired to the hotel’s “business center” to check my e-mail. The attendants had me fill out a chit—internet access cost 65 yuan, or about US$10 an hour—and logged me on to one of the four terminals. I was the only customer, so I was a bit surprised at how sluggish it was: downloading a single e-mail took two or three minutes. Finally I asked the attendant about it. Oh, she explained, it’s probably because we’re downloading movies, and she pointed to her monitor. “Only a few minutes left.” From the progress bar on her screen, it looked as though it would be a lot longer than that.

  “You know, I think I want my money back,” I said. That would be easier than discussing her incompetence. She cheerfully handed back the chit.

  I called Lucy on a house phone, and she said she’d meet me at the hotel bar. Most of the other cust
omers appeared to be beautiful single massage therapists, and they eyed me like raw meat. This was the last night of our trip. I ordered a whiskey and thought about the real versus the virtual. The internet could show you a glass of whiskey, but it could not supply the smell or the taste. It could show you a naked woman but it couldn’t rub your back. At the very least, I appreciated how Zhu wanted the real thing. He wanted rapid acceleration and curves in the road, that new car smell, and women you could touch.

  Lucy arrived and ordered a soda. We talked about her ex-husband and the desires of men. She said that, even after all these days with the group, she still didn’t really get the driving thing. But I thought that now I did: I told her how, like my sisters after me, I’d gotten my learner’s permit on the very day I turned fifteen years and nine months old, and how I’d tried to get my parents to let me practice driving every single evening thereafter until I earned my license. Our learning car was the huge gold Pontiac Catalina station wagon with its V-8 engine, three rows of seats, and skylights. My dad had been pretty nervous with me behind the wheel, occasionally stamping the imaginary brake pedal on the floor in front of him when he thought I was slow to do so. But my mom had just mixed herself a bourbon-and-water, climbed in, and said, “Okay, you drive!” Unsurprisingly, I drove better with my mom.

  Anyway, to me the license was freedom—a way to go places with friends, a private space outside of the house—as it still is to millions, including, now, grownups in China, like Zhu.

  The end of the trip the next day was an anticlimax: everyone was heading back on the same expressway, and Beijing was less than a tank of gas away, so there was no further need to stick together. Chatter on the CB dropped off slowly until the radio was utterly quiet, and the group dimension of the trip was over.

  Li Lu seemed pleased as Zhu’s Hyundai eased into the perpetual traffic jam that is Beijing, chatting excitedly on the phone with her friends as we were slowly enveloped by the bad air of the city. Zhu, however, seemed a bit disappointed to be off the open road. When Lucy got off the phone, he told her he wanted to treat us to dinner at a favorite noodle restaurant near the city center. First, of course, we had to get there.

  Creeping along on the highway, we talked about how the Beijing government was trying to control the huge new popularity of cars. One solution to the growing chaos of the streets has been to severely restrict motorcycle use in the city. Zhu thought that was better than Shanghai trying to cut down on car ownership by setting a high price (presently almost $5,000) on car registration. Trying to ease traffic and cut down on accidents, Shanghai had even banned bicycles from many main streets, news that surprised me. But as the outlines of buildings grew fuzzy with all the smog, I thought how one could make a public health argument for keeping cyclists out of all the exhaust.

  That very same month, the journal Nature had reported that Beijing’s air pollution was much worse than previously thought. Concentrations of nitrogen dioxide had increased 50 percent over the past ten years, and the buildup was accelerating. According to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing’s sulfur dioxide levels in 2004 were more than double New York’s, and airborne particulate levels more than six times as high. The World Bank says that of the twenty cities in the world with the dirtiest air, China has sixteen. Vehicle exhaust accounts for 79 percent of the air pollution. In 2005, China enacted its first comprehensive emissions law, but it was expected to have little effect on the transport sector’s copious carbon dioxide emissions, which are predicted to be the highest in the world by 2030.

  That distinction, meanwhile, belongs to the United States, and Chinese have a point when they say that those in developed countries who complain about China’s pollution are like ex-smokers who walk into a room of people smoking and declare, “No smoking!” When you are the world’s factory you necessarily make a bit of a mess, and most of it, after all, affects you more than anybody else.

  One could also note, in China’s defense, that the typical Chinese person’s carbon footprint remains tiny. The average person in China travels about 1,000 kilometers (621 miles) per year, compared with 15,000 kilometers (9,320 miles) per year for Europeans and over 24,000 kilometers (14,913 miles) per year for Americans. In 2004 there were only 9 cars per 1,000 people in China, compared to 700 per 1,000 in the United States, “400 in Japan, 350-500 in Europe, and 150-200 in middle income countries like Mexico, Brazil and Korea.” Per capita, the Chinese in 2006 stood where Americans were in 1915.

  Of course, everything was changing rapidly. The rate of Chinese “motorization” was shooting up. We inched along in the end-of-holiday Beijing traffic, willingly immersing ourselves in a miasma of smog, one of those things you do that you know isn’t good for you but you go right ahead and do because to do otherwise would mean rearranging your whole life. We did the same thing in Denver during the smog-filled 1970s, descending from the Rockies after a day of skiing, into the Great Plains at an angle that let us get a good look at the “brown cloud” from above before we cruised down into it like hamsters put back into a dirty cage.

  At least there wasn’t this traffic. If this was early in China’s motorization, how would it look in 2010, 2015, or 2030, when the Chinese were projected to have as many cars as Americans? Was a state of full-time gridlock a theoretical possibility? Could you get to the point where nobody could move, and it was harder and harder to breathe? China had all the ingredients required to conduct the experiment and find out.

  A policeman friend of Zhu’s met us at the restaurant and even picked up the tab. (Zhu’s rapport with the police department was quite impressive.) I asked him about street racing in the city, which I had heard was becoming a problem. Yes, he said, he had heard of it but had not seen it himself, yet. Zhu looked a bit too interested in the subject.

  A few days later, Zhu entertained me and others at the restaurant-hotel he ran as a hobby on the outskirts of Beijing, in the shadow of a big dam. The food was surprisingly fine. Then Zhou the lawyer treated a group of us, including the Wangs of the Citroën, to a fabulous dinner on Houhai Lake. Clearly, nobody wanted the trip to end. (“Was it really that relaxing?” I had asked several of them, many times, after twelve-hour days at the wheel. All had sworn that it was. Several of them said they liked the fact that since you were with people you didn’t know on an organized self-driving trip, you could really be yourself. In other words, you didn’t have to watch your step as you would around people in higher positions.)

  My longest reunion would be with Zhao, the driving club owner, who invited me to accompany him to a weekend summit of other club owners, the 2005 Auto Clubs and Fans CEO Forum, in Tianjin, a couple of hours from Beijing. Zhao lived in one of the spanking-new, car-friendly suburbs of the capital, and we rendezvoused at a local hotel. Zhao parked his big Korean SUV (“Galloper,” it said on the dash) in the semi-circular drive in front of the hotel and came into the lobby to get me. By the time we returned to his car, a Volkswagen Santana had parked a couple of feet behind him. As he started to leave, Zhao somehow didn’t notice the Santana and backed into it forcefully.

  To my surprise, he did not get out to see if there was damage, but instead tried to drive away. Alas, his vehicle had a poor turning radius, and he had to back up again to extract his car from the space. While he was thus maneuvering, there came a loud whack on his window: the owner of the VW was standing outside, and he was furious. Zhao ignored him; he must have thought, A couple more inches and I’m out of here! As he shifted again, the guy pounded his door again—really hard this time.

  Zhao was now the very picture of obsequious apology. He got out, and together the two examined the damage: a bent license plate and a scrape to the plastic bumper, Zhao all the while trying to place his hand lightly on the aggrieved man’s shoulder, bowing, extending his business card, looking contrite. It took ten or fifteen minutes before the man cooled down enough for us to leave.

  Zhao didn’t want to talk about the incident as we drove; instead, he wanted to tell me about his agenda
for the conference. Car clubs and in fact the entire automotive service industry needed more government involvement if they were to evolve in an optimal way, he said. This conference was for, among others, car club organizers, car industry executives, magazine editors, and television producers who felt the same way, and wanted to get the word out.

  Our hotel was adjacent to a rebuilt stretch of the Great Wall. Some seventy people had paid roughly $100 each to attend the gathering, sponsored by Auto Friends, a government-affiliated magazine. There was an executive from Chery Automobile (which hoped to begin low-priced exports to the USA) and one from Fiat China. There was a representative of a motorcycle club. There was somebody from SinoLube, the government oil company. Perhaps most important, there were some high officials: the deputy secretaries general of the China Automobile Dealers Association and the China Automotive Maintenance and Repair Trade Assocation (both quasi-governmental groups), and the manager of the office that leases all the retail space to car dealers around the Asian Games Village area, a major car-selling zone of Beijing.

  Zhao, dressed in suit and tie, was clearly a player in this world. He had worked as a composer, filmmaker, and official celebration organizer; success in business, for much of his career, had consisted of knowing important government officials and getting them to steer work his way. His auto club offices are in the government-run Olympics Center. As he gave his talk to an attentive audience, it occurred to me that Zhao probably wouldn’t mind being China’s first undersecretary of car clubs.

  I spoke too, at Zhao’s behest, mostly about how families have fun driving in the United States. While driving clubs existed, I explained, you didn’t actually need a club in order to take a trip; there were motels and restaurants along every main highway. In fact, you could even fly to another city, rent a car, and begin your trip there. Many hands went up at this idea. How would you know whom to rent from? I was asked. I explained about travel Web sites and nationwide car rental franchises. What if you broke down? I spoke a bit about groups like the Automobile Association of America. What about robbers? It was not a major worry on American roads, I said.