Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  Most learning is informal, although there are plenty of private courses. Young Chinese often enroll in classes for English, typing, computers, accounting; in factory towns they sometimes pay for specialized courses that teach them how to behave like educated urbanites. And there are driving classes—that’s one type of training that’s regulated by the government. National law requires every Chinese driver to enroll in a certified course, at his own expense, for a total of fifty-eight hours of practice. In China, you can’t just go to a parking lot with your father and learn how to drive. Anyway, there aren’t many parking lots yet, and most fathers don’t have licenses.

  One month I observed a driving course in Lishui, a small city in southeastern China. It’s located in the factory belt, where the boom economy produces a lot of new motorists. The institution was called the Public Safety Driving School, and I sat in on a course taught by Coach Tang. In China, all driving instructors are addressed as Jiaolian, “Coach.” It’s the same word you use for a basketball coach or a drill instructor, and it carries connotations of a training regimen. That’s the essence of Chinese driving—a physical endeavor.

  The course began with the most basic kinds of touch. On the first day, Coach Tang raised the hood of a red Volkswagen Santana, and six students huddled close. He pointed out the engine, the radiator, the fan belt. They walked around to the back, where he opened the trunk. He showed them how to unscrew the gas cap. The next step involved the driver’s door. “Pull it like this,” he said, and then each student practiced opening and closing the door. Next, Coach Tang identified the panel instruments, as well as the clutch, the brake, and the gas pedal. After an hour the students finally entered the vehicle. Each took turns sitting in the driver’s seat, where they practiced shifting from first to fifth gear. The motor wasn’t on, but they worked the clutch and moved the gearshift. Watching this made me wince, and finally I had to say something. “Isn’t that bad for the car?”

  “No,” Coach Tang said. “It’s fine.”

  “I think it might be bad if the motor’s off,” I said.

  “It’s completely fine,” Coach Tang said. “We do it all the time.” In China, instructors are traditionally respected without question, and Coach Tang had been kind enough to allow me to observe his class, so I decided to hold my tongue. But it wasn’t always easy. For the next step, they learned to use the clutch by setting the parking brake, starting the engine, shifting into first gear, and then releasing the clutch while flooring the accelerator. The motor whined against the force of the brake; the hood kowtowed with torque. One by one, students entered the driver’s seat, gunning the engine and going nowhere. By the end of the day you could have fried an egg on the Santana’s hood, and my palms broke into a sweat every time another driver hit the gas. I could practically hear my father’s voice—he’s a good amateur mechanic, and few things anger him more than mindless abuse of an automobile.

  Nobody was allowed to move a car until the second day of class. From the beginning, the students had circled the Santana warily, like the blind men and the elephant: they peered in the hood, they worked the doors, they fiddled with the gas cap. There were four men and two women, all of them under the age of forty. Each had paid over three hundred dollars for the course, which was a lot of money in a city where the monthly minimum wage was roughly seventy-five dollars. Only one person came from a household that currently owned an automobile. The others told me that someday they might buy one, and the college students—there were four of them—believed that a driver’s license looked good on a résumé. “It’s something you should be able to do, like swimming,” one young man named Wang Yanheng said. He was a college senior majoring in information technology. “In the future, so many people in China are going to have cars,” Wang said. “It’s going to be important to know how to drive.” The only student from a home with automobiles was a nineteen-year-old sociology major named Liang Yanfang. Her father owned a plastics factory, and he had three cars. When I asked what kind of plastics the family factory produced, the woman ran her finger along the rubber lining of the Santana’s window. “This is one of the things we make,” she said.

  The first ten days of class focused on what they called the “parking range,” and during that time they performed exactly three movements. They practiced a ninety-degree turn into a parking space, moving forward, and then they did the same thing in reverse. The third skill was parallel parking. Every day, for a total of six hours, they performed these three movements repeatedly. Like any good Chinese instructor, Coach Tang was strict. “What are you doing?” he said, when one student brushed a pole during the reverse parking. “You must have forgotten your brain today!” “Don’t hold the gearshift loosely like that!” he yelled at another man. “If you do, your father will curse you!” Sometimes he slapped a student’s hand. Whenever somebody turned his head, he shouted, “Stop looking behind you!” There was a strict rule against head turns. When reversing, you were supposed to rely on the mirrors only; the blind spot didn’t exist, at least not in Coach Tang’s eyes. Nobody ever wore a seat belt. I never saw a turn signal flash on the parking range at the Public Safety Driving School.

  The next step was the “driving range,” where students practiced an obstacle course of tight turns and learned how to stop within twenty-five centimeters of a painted line. The most challenging skill was known as the “single-plank bridge.” This consisted of a long concrete riser, slightly wider than a tire; students had to aim the car perfectly so that two wheels perched atop the riser. First they did the left tires, then the right; if a wheel slipped, they failed the exam. Students told me that they spent the majority of their road range time practicing the single-plank bridge. I asked the coach why it was so important.

  “Because it’s very difficult,” he said.

  That’s the underlying philosophy of Chinese driving courses: if something is technically difficult, then it must be useful. But the details of this challenge shift from place to place, coach to coach. There isn’t much standardization, apart from the required fifty-eight hours; sometimes a school emphasizes the single-plank bridge and sometimes they’ve developed some other obstacle. In this sense, coaches are like the martial-arts masters of old, developing individual regimens. Times have changed—instead of journeying to a mountaintop monastery, where a student might punch a tree a thousand times a day, he now joins the Public Safety Driving School and spends two weeks trying to park a Santana onto a single-plank bridge.

  The Lishui courses concluded with a week and a half on the road, and I accompanied one group on their final day before the exam. With the coach in the passenger seat, students took turns driving a Santana along a two-lane rural road, where they performed set movements. They shifted from first to fifth; they downshifted back to first; they stopped within twenty-five centimeters of a marker. They made a U-turn and braked at an imitation traffic light. The course was three kilometers long and it had not changed at all during the ten days of practice; there were no intersections and very little traffic. Students had been instructed to honk when pulling out, as well as before performing turns. They honked whenever they encountered anything in the road—a car, a tractor, a donkey cart. They honked at every pedestrian. Sometimes they passed another car from the driving school, and then both vehicles honked happily, as if recognizing an old friend. At noon, the class took a break for lunch at a local restaurant, where everybody drank beer, including the coach. They told me that a day earlier they had gotten so drunk that they canceled afternoon class.

  Later that day, the students returned to the road range for more practice, and one of them begged me to let him drive my rental car along the way. In a moment of extremely poor judgment, I decided to see what he had learned in a month of training. The moment the driver hit the open road, he became obsessed with passing other vehicles, but he had no idea how this was done; twice I had to yell to keep him from swinging wide on blind turns. Another time I grabbed the wheel to prevent him from veering into anothe
r car that was pulling up on our left. He never checked the rearview or side mirrors; he had no idea that there’s a blind spot. He honked at everything that moved. The complete absence of turn signals was the least of our problems. He came within inches of hitting a parked tractor, and he almost nailed a cement wall. When we finally made it to the driving range, I felt like falling on my knees to kiss the single-plank bridge.

  Foreigners in Beijing often said to me, I can’t believe you’re driving in this country. To which I responded: I can’t believe you get into cabs and buses driven by graduates of Chinese driving courses. Out on the road, everybody was lost—une génération perdue—but it felt a little better to be the one behind the wheel.

  IN NORTHWESTERN SHANXI PROVINCE, sections of Great Wall run alongside the Yellow River, and for nearly one hundred miles I followed the high loess banks. The driving here was easy, because the government infrastructure campaign had recently improved local roads. Propaganda signs celebrated the construction: “A Smooth Road Brings Prosperity and Drives Away Poverty” “To Protect the Road Brings Prosperity, To Destroy the Road Brings Shame.” In rural China there was still so little traffic that private advertisers had yet to sponsor billboards, which meant that a driver wasn’t bombarded with images of things to eat or drink or buy. Instead there were government slogans, whose language had distinctive qualities: simple but forceful, direct but strangely obscure. “People Embrace Soldiers”—a sign like that on an empty road gave my imagination somewhere to roam. In rural Shanxi I passed a billboard that simply said: “Self-Reliance, Struggle, Persistence, Unreserved Devotion.” There were no further details—and in the end, what more could you ask for? In Inner Mongolia, a local power plant slogan was so charged with wordplay that I had to pull over to figure it out: “Everybody Use Electricity; Use Electricity Well; Electricity Is Good to Use.” (My delayed response: “Yes!”) Often I passed billboards dedicated to the planned-birth policy, whose catchphrases ranged from tautology (“Daughters Also Count as Descendants”) to unsolicited advice (“Marry Late and Have Children Late”) to outright lies (“Having a Son or a Daughter Is Exactly the Same”). As I drove west, the messages became bigger, until barren hillsides were covered with slogans, as if words had swelled to fill the empty steppes. “Everybody Work to Make the Green Mountain Greener”—this in forty-foot-tall characters across an Inner Mongolian mountain that was neither green nor the site of a single working person. Across another particularly desolate stretch of wasteland, a poem had been spelled out in painted rocks:

  Plant grass and trees here in the mountains,

  Build flourishing agriculture,

  Build homes, raise sheep,

  Create a beautiful land of mountains and rivers.

  Above the Yellow River, signs warned farmers not to thresh crops in the road. For a while I wondered if this local campaign had been effective: the City Special hadn’t smashed a pile of grain since entering western Shanxi. But then I visited Sigou, a village high atop the eastern bank, where locals told me that they hadn’t harvested any grain crops at all this year because of drought. They were surviving on potatoes and government grain. While I was talking to a farmer in his cave home, the village chief stopped by with a sheaf of relief applications. The forms were entitled “The Two Lacks and the One Without.” The village chief explained the phrase: the people in Sigou lacked money and food, and they were without the ability to support themselves. Of all the slogans I had seen, that was the most brutally honest, and it marked a grim end to the north-central farmland—the last gasp of the loess plateau.

  Across the river lay the Ordos Desert and the beginning of western China. In ancient times, the Ordos represented one of the most troubling regions for the empire, and there is no other part of the steppes that played such a major role in the inspiration of the Great Wall. The Ordos is expansive—roughly the size of New England—and it’s defined by the great northern loop of the Yellow River. Within this loop, the loess plateau gives way to sand and scrubland, and in ancient times there was never enough water to support traditional Chinese agriculture. But resources were adequate for nomads, for whom the Ordos represented a perfect base: remote enough to avoid control by Chinese settlements, but within range for raiding trips. Some dynasties, like the Tang, were able to staff garrisons across the desert, but the Ming became too weak to fight in the region.

  Instead they constructed the Great Wall across the southern borderlands of the Ordos, in what is now Shaanxi Province. Driving west from the Yellow River, I searched for traces of fortifications that had been marked on my map. The pages had suddenly emptied: there were few villages and almost no roads. On the atlas, the white space was occasionally interrupted by short-lived streams—anonymous streaks of blue that came out of nowhere, flowed for a dozen miles, and then vanished back into the sand. Outside my windows the landscape was featureless. I drove through a town called Divine Tree, and then I continued to Yulin, which means “Elm Forest”—another hopeful name in this barren place.

  North of town the Great Wall was in the process of being buried. A huge Ming fort called Zhenbeitai stood stark against the horizon, and the wall ran southwest into the desert. It was made of tamped earth, a slightly darker shade than the sand that piled against its base. Sometimes the structure disappeared entirely beneath a dune. In the east, where I had started my journey, the wall had often accentuated the permanence of the Hebei landscape. Those had been rocky, solid mountains, and the structures of brick and stone seemed secure atop high ridgelines. Westward, Chinese geography became less stable with every mile, until from a driver’s perspective it felt as if the land itself was collapsing. I had moved from the stony peaks to the dry steppes, and then to the crumbling hills of the loess plateau, and now at last I had arrived in shifting desert sands. The Great Wall was still here, but it no longer spoke of permanence. The Ordos was creeping south, and even the most impressive Ming fortifications were nothing more than lines in the sand.

  Beyond the wall, people were trying to reform the barren landscape. This battle is common in the north—more than one-fourth of China’s land suffers from desertification, and the total area of stricken regions expands by an estimated 1,300 square miles every year. According to the United Nations, four hundred million Chinese live in places threatened by desertification. Various government projects attempt to make northern life more sustainable, and they range from local tree planting to major irrigation programs. The most ambitious is the Yangtze diversion. Realizing that parts of the south have plenty of water, the government has initiated a ten-billion-dollar project designed to rechannel some of these resources to the north. But it’s unclear how effective this solution will be, and in the end it may be pointless to bring water north while most young people are heading south.

  The Ordos is one part of northern China that never should have been settled by farmers in the first place. In ancient times only nomads inhabited this region, but during the nineteenth century Chinese pioneers began to move north, driven by poverty and war. After the revolution of 1949, the Communists encouraged mass settlement beyond the Great Wall, hoping that Chinese-style agriculture would flourish in the desert north of Yulin. They sponsored periodic campaigns to plant trees, grass, and even rice; the few local streams and lakes were diverted for irrigation. The natives, who were mostly Mongol herdsmen, invariably resisted these projects, telling officials that they wouldn’t work, but politics had a way of overwhelming experience. During the 1960s and 1970s, in the heat of the Cultural Revolution, one local township called Wushenqi became celebrated nationwide as a model commune. Other desert regions were instructed to follow its lead, digging irrigation channels and planting grain. But by the 1980s it was clear that Wushenqi’s efforts had been disastrous—the combination of increased population and non-native crops had destroyed precious water resources.

  In recent years the local government had adopted a new strategy. Instead of planting rice or grain, they seeded willow trees, and then they used the lea
ves to feed sheep. They called it “the pasture in the sky”—they plucked the sheep fodder straight from the willow branches, and the trees were also intended to halt the desert’s expansion. In some ways this worked: the township’s agricultural territory was holding steady at 10 percent of the total land, and locals had been able to expand their herds. I visited the home of one Mongolian family that cared for two hundred head of sheep. “Everything is better now,” the patriarch told me. “It’s easier to get food, easier to get clothes.” He spoke halting Mandarin, and he told me that he had grown up in a traditional Mongol ger, or tent. Now he lived in a brick home, where the walls were decorated with one poster of a Ferrari Mondial and another of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. There was also a map of China, two portraits of Genghis Khan, and a shrine dedicated to Mao Zedong. When I asked about the shrine, the man said, “Mao was a liberator, a great leader, and a good man.” He added that all true Mongols keep portraits of Genghis Khan. On another wall hung a framed government prize that the man had received for paying his taxes on March 20, 1997. In rural homes I often saw prizes like this—sometimes people got awards for keeping their houses clean.

  In Wushenqi, though, it seemed that any benefits of willow planting would be short-lived. A Chinese-born geographer named Jiang Hong was conducting research in the region, and she told me that the groundwater was dropping. The desert simply couldn’t support any additional agriculture, not even the willow trees. But Jiang Hong had also noticed that locals remained supportive of the planting project, despite the fact that they knew about the dwindling groundwater. This was different from the past, when there had always been resistance to heavy-handed government campaigns. Back then, projects tended to be abstract and collective: Mao would declare that China’s productivity needed to surpass that of Great Britain or the United States, and a herdsman in a place like Wushenqi was reluctant to destroy his environment for such goals. But ever since Deng Xiaoping, the economy had been driven primarily by individual motivation, and rewards were suddenly tangible. And the new mobility meant that many people had caught a glimpse of a better life.