Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  81. After passing another vehicle, you should

  a) wait until there is a safe distance between the two vehicles, make a right-turn signal, and return to the original lane.

  b) cut in front of the other car as quickly as possible.

  c) cut in front of the other car and then slow down.

  117. When approaching a marked pedestrian crossing, you should

  a) slow down and stop if there are pedestrians.

  b) accelerate in order to catch up with the car directly in front of you, and then cross closely behind him.

  c) drive straight through, because pedestrians should give vehicles the right of way.

  80. If, while preparing to pass a car, you notice that it is turning left, making a U-turn, or passing another vehicle, you should

  a) pass on the right.

  b) not pass.

  c) honk, accelerate, and pass on the left.

  Lots of answers involve honking. In a Chinese automobile, the horn is essentially neurological—it channels the driver’s reflexes. People honk constantly, and at first all horns sound the same, but over time you learn to interpret them. In this sense it’s as complicated as the language. Spoken Chinese is tonal, which means that a single sound like ma has different meanings depending on whether it’s flat, rising, falling and rising, or falling sharply. A single Chinese horn, on the other hand, can mean at least ten distinct things. A solid hooooonnnnkkkkk is intended to attract attention. A double sound—hooooonnnnkkkkk, hooooonnnnkkkkk—indicates irritation. There’s a particularly long hooooooooonnnnnnnnnkkkkkk that means that the driver is stuck in bad traffic, has exhausted curb-sneaking options, and would like everybody else on the road to disappear. A responding hooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnkkkkkkkkkkkk proves they aren’t going anywhere. There’s a stuttering, staggering honk honk hnk hnk hnk hnk hnk hnk that represents pure panic. There’s the afterthought honk—the one that rookie drivers make if they were too slow to hit the button before a situation resolved itself. And there’s a short basic honk that simply says: My hands are still on the wheel, and this horn continues to serve as an extension of my nervous system. Other honks appear on the exam:

  353. When passing an elderly person or a child, you should

  a) slow down and make sure you pass safely.

  b) continue at the same speed.

  c) honk the horn to tell them to watch out.

  269. When you enter a tunnel, you should

  a) honk and accelerate.

  b) slow down and turn on your lights.

  c) honk and maintain speed.

  355. When driving through a residential area, you should

  a) honk like normal.

  b) honk more than normal, in order to alert residents.

  c) avoid honking, in order to avoid disturbing residents.

  I PICKED UP MY first hitchhiker on the way to Smash the Hu. At sunrise I had taken down my tent, and after studying the map I decided to try a route that paralleled the north side of the Ming wall. This turned out to be the worst road thus far—it began as a dirt track, high on the mountain, and then it descended steeply. Water runoff had badly rutted the surface; the City Special lurched and groaned. To my left, the Great Wall perched neatly atop a ridgeline—it seemed to float effortlessly while I banged down the broken road. Halfway to the valley floor, a young woman stood beside the dirt track, waving madly. I rolled down the window.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “Smash the Hu, then Slaughter the Hu,” I said. In Chinese those village names really roll off the tongue.

  “Can I get a ride to Smash the Hu?”

  “No problem,” I said, pushing open the door. The woman carried a sack of fresh pork, the fatty meat glistening white and pink against the plastic. She set it on the floor and hesitated before entering.

  “How much is it?” she said.

  “How much is what?” For a moment I thought she was talking about the pork.

  “To Smash the Hu,” she said. “How much?”

  Good question—how can anybody put a price on destroying indeterminate nomadic tribes? “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m going there anyway.”

  Her name was Gao Linfeng, and she was twenty-seven years old. She told me that she had grown up in Smash the Hu but now she worked in a factory in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. She was traveling home in order to see her grandmother—the pork was a gift. In these parts, transport was rare; she had caught a ride on the Ninglu bus, which only took her as far as the pass. From there she had planned to continue on foot until a ride came along. She wore a new gray business suit and fresh makeup, and her hair was neatly styled. How was it possible to look so good on a dirt road in Inner Mongolia? I was dressed in an old gray T-shirt and dirty trousers; it had been two days since somebody last washed my hair.

  Like many rural Chinese, Gao had left home to find work in the city. In 1978, at the beginning of Reform and Opening, approximately 80 percent of the population lived in the countryside. As the economy boomed, it created an increasing demand for construction workers and factory staff, most of whom came from rural regions. Chinese farms had always been overpopulated, and young people were glad to leave; by 2001, an estimated ninety million had already left home. To drive across China was to find yourself in the middle of the largest migration in human history—nearly one-tenth of the population was on the road, finding new lives away from home.

  Most migrants went to coastal regions, but there were also opportunities in provincial cities like Hohhot. Gao told me that she had started on the assembly line but worked her way up, and now she was in management. Her factory produced wool sweaters for export. She had a three-year-old son in Hohhot, and they rarely returned to Smash the Hu. “It’s so poor here,” she said. “Farming is hard, because of the elevation and the dryness. Look at that corn.” She pointed outside, where a field of dusty green stalks bordered the road. “In most places it’s already been harvested, but everything happens so late here, because it’s so high.”

  After we chatted for a while, she said, politely, “You’re not from our China, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Which country are you from?”

  It was tempting to say that I was Hu, but I told the truth.

  “My factory exports sweaters to your country!” she said happily.

  Like many young people in the factory towns, she had studied some English on her own, although she was too shy to practice it with me. She was curious about life in America—she asked how many people were in my family, and if farmers lived in my hometown. “Do you drive on the same side of the road as in China?” she asked. I said yes, although at the moment it was irrelevant, because our route had deteriorated to a single pair of tire ruts. And if there was any irony in having a friendly conversation with a foreigner just beyond the Great Wall, on the way to Smash the Hu, Gao Linfeng didn’t show it. I dropped her off at the town’s massive entrance gate, which had been built by the Ming; she thanked me and waved as I headed off toward Slaughter the Hu.

  The towns along this road were heavily fortified, and they were also emptying fast. Everywhere I stopped, residents told me that most young people were already gone. Life here had never been easy—there was a long history of instability, and for centuries these remote areas had been shaped by the impersonal and sometimes violent demands of the outside world. In the old days, these were the borderlands: places like Smash the Hu could engage in Chinese-style agriculture, sometimes marginally, but north of here the land was suitable only for grazing. Herdsmen naturally developed a high degree of mobility, whereas the Chinese were rooted to their farms. They made for good targets, and the clash of cultures was often vicious. “They come like hurricanes and disappear like lightning,” a Chinese minister wrote during the second century BC, describing the nomads. “Moving with no constant settlement is their way of life, which makes it difficult to control them.” One emperor said that fighting the herdsmen “is like attacking a shad
ow.” Another official described them as “covetous for grain, human-faced but animal-hearted.”

  Most nomads weren’t invaders—generally they had no interest in occupying land. They wanted Chinese goods, not Chinese culture; and this perplexed emperor after emperor, dynasty after dynasty. It wasn’t like that in the south, where the empire spread largely through cultural impact rather than military force. The American historian Arthur Waldron has written a book called The Great Wall of China, in which he describes some of the clashes in the north during the Ming dynasty. He told me that it’s critical to understand the Chinese perspective. “To them, it wasn’t Chinese civilization,” he said. “It was civilization. It would naturally appeal to anybody, regardless of their ethnicity, in the same way that dentistry with Novocain would appeal to anybody. And by and large that was the case. As the empire expanded to the south, it wasn’t that Chinese people moved in, but that locals changed their customs. They cooked up phony family trees, they built shrines—they did the same thing that anybody does when they’re trying to enter a new culture. To this day, this is the strength of the Chinese. It’s not force. It’s not that they’ve got spies or secret police. It’s that there is something about being a part of this Chinese world that is appealing to the people around it.”

  “The horse nomads are the first people to whom this has no appeal at all,” Waldron continued. “And this baffles the Chinese, because they’ve always banked on any outsider getting hooked on the culture. But the horse nomads don’t do it. They just come in and they rape and they pillage and burn. It posed the same problem for the Chinese as Americans have with al Qaeda, with the people who just hate us. Americans often feel like they just need to know us better. Give them a good old American barbecue, show them what life here is like; they’re bound to like it! But it just doesn’t work. There was a similar fault line in Chinese culture. There was a fault line between a tremendous confidence in the strength of the culture and an awareness that force may have to be invoked.”

  Over the centuries, the Chinese response fell on both sides of this line. Sometimes they attacked the nomads, and their methods could be just as brutal as anything done by the “barbarians.” Chinese soldiers searched out camps, and they slaughtered women and children. They engaged in ecological warfare—they set fire to miles of pastureland, to prevent nomads from feeding their horses. And the Chinese prepared defenseworks, building miles of walls across the north. This tactic was especially important to the Ming, who were often too weak to take the offensive.

  The problem of the nomads was complex, and so was the Chinese solution. A dynasty like the Ming combined strategies: they tried offensive maneuvers; they built walls for defense; and they also relied on trade and diplomacy. Ming emperors sometimes gave goods and official titles to Mongol leaders, and they sponsored trade fairs at key points along the border. Slaughter the Hu was one such site—during the Ming it became a famous market where people from beyond the wall could exchange goods with the Chinese. But trade was always imbalanced, because nomads had few products that the Chinese wanted, apart from horses. And the government administered such sites closely, in part because they didn’t want Mongols to trade for metal that could be used to make weapons. In the end, the cultural divide was insurmountable. The Chinese were good at producing grain and goods, and they controlled the trade fairs; the Mongols didn’t have the administrative capabilities but they were brilliant raiders. Sooner or later, the conjunction of these two very different groups always resulted in violence.

  Nowadays, foreigners still wanted Chinese goods, but they didn’t have to go all the way to Slaughter the Hu to find them. And once again the demands of the outside world had changed this remote place. The Great Wall still ran through the middle of town, which had high garrison walls, and ruined towers rose throughout the valley. It was the most fortified part of the north that I had visited thus far, and it was also the quietest. The main street was little more than a truck stop—a sleepy row of cheap restaurants and auto repair shops that served people going somewhere else. That was all that remained of the local economy; the lure of southern factory jobs had defeated this place in a way the nomads never had. Slaughter the Hu was dying—I didn’t see a single young person out on its dusty streets.

  DRIVING SOUTH AND WEST, I followed a long line of signal towers that paralleled the Cangtou River. Ever since I had left Hebei, the land had been getting steadily poorer, and now I reached the highlands of north-central China. The people here live atop loess—thin, dry soil that was originally blown south from the Gobi and other deserts of the northwest. Over millennia, wind redeposited layers in this part of China, where the yellow earth can be as deep as six hundred feet. The soil is fragile but fertile, and at one time the region was forested, but centuries of overpopulation stripped it bare. After the trees were gone, people began carving the hills into terraces, until the landscape acquired the look of a desperate human construction: a layered cake of dust. Rainfall is rare—around ten inches annually—but even such small amounts of water can tear through the brittle soil. Creekbeds disappear into gullies; sometimes a tiny stream burrows its way hundreds of feet below the surrounding hillsides. Most peasants live in yaodong, simple cave homes that have been dug out of the loess. The caves are cool in summer, warm in winter, and disastrous in an earthquake. Ming dynasty texts report that a major tremor in 1556 killed hundreds of thousands of people.

  The Great Wall wasn’t a primary reason for the environmental degradation, but undoubtedly it contributed. Everywhere the wall went, it swallowed resources, and the Ming administrators documented the costs of construction. In recent years, an American historian named David Spindler has analyzed the figures for one wall-building project, estimating that for each brick that was fired and set in the wall, soldiers had to burn sixteen and a half pounds of wood. Even in areas where they built the structure out of tamped earth or unquarried stones, they needed wood for cooking fires, and garrison income depended heavily on logging. Spindler’s research shows that during the Ming, only 60 to 70 percent of the wall’s operating budget came from the state, and the rest was made up for by soldiers, often through logging. Some officials complained that this was counterproductive—by stripping the land bare, they only made it easier for horseback raiders.

  Four centuries later, the tamped-earth structures seem like the only permanent features on this fluid landscape. I drove past hillsides that had collapsed into ravines, and crop terraces that seemed likely to crumble away tomorrow—but the signal towers still looked ready for war. Their square forms were visible for miles, riding the tops of the terraced hills. Beside the road, one tower had been decorated with a single character: . The word was twenty feet tall, painted in white, and it means “Earth.” Not long after that, I saw another: , “Water.” If the signal towers were sending a message, I wasn’t getting it, so I parked the City Special. Scanning the horizon, I realized that four consecutive towers had been inscribed with characters. Together they created a single sentence that spanned a mile, leaping across rivers and valleys and broken hillsides:

  PROTECT WATER, SOLIDIFY EARTH

  The line of inscribed towers ended at a huge Ming fort atop a mountain. I followed a side road up to the fort, where the view was stunning. It overlooked a half-dozen valleys, and most hillsides had been pockmarked with thousands of holes that had been dug in order to plant trees. Each pit was two feet across and a few inches deep; depending on the angle of the hillside, they had been carved into squares or crescents. The pits were empty, and they continued as far as the eye could see—a galaxy of holes waiting for new saplings. Another message had been whitewashed across the walls of the Ming fort:

  USE THE WORLD BANK’S OPPORTUNITY WISELY HELP THE MOUNTAINOUS AREA ESCAPE FROM POVERTY

  Having been constructed to keep the barbarians out, the Great Wall was now welcoming the World Bank. I contacted the local government, to see if somebody could give an introduction to the project, and a cadre agreed to meet me. He w
as the director of the Youyu County tax bureau, and he told me that over the past two years the local government had received nearly three million dollars in loans from the World Bank. It was one of many projects that the organization sponsored on the loess plateau. Over the years, World Bank loans had funded the construction of mini-dams that conserved water, and their tree-planting campaigns had successfully reduced erosion in many areas. Here in Youyu, they intended to plant pines—all told, the county’s project would cover an area of two hundred and seventy square miles. The director escorted me to a village where earlier antierosion campaigns had been successful. The local Communist Party Secretary told me that now almost every family could afford a tractor; we met a villager who had just purchased a motorized cart to use for trade. Nearby, two observation stations had been specially built on hilltops to provide clear views of the project.

  Everywhere we were chauffeured in a black Volkswagen Santana. After weeks of driving, it felt strange to sit passively in a car, but the routine of the official tour was familiar from my work as a journalist. In the provinces, the government cars were always black, with heavily tinted windows, and there was always a driver. If an area was wealthier, you rode in an Audi; poorer regions had Santanas and Jettas. At every stop you were served tea and statistics. Here in Youyu County, the government was proud of their World Bank project, and figures piled up in my notebook. They intended to plant 1,400 hectares of trees around the Ming fort; currently Youyu County had successfully controlled erosion in 28 percent of their target region; their final goal was 53 percent. The Chinese government is amazing with numbers, and it always has been. Even in the days of empire, the bureaucracy churned out statistics—during the Ming, wall-building projects were sometimes measured and documented down to the inch. Since the Reform years began, this age-old tradition has helped make China an ideal client for the World Bank. The government can mobilize labor; it can produce statistics; and it can pay loans back.