Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  But everybody knew the basic principle of the Reform years: It’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission. For more than a year, Wuhu’s leaders negotiated with the central government, and in 2001 they finally received permission to sell their cars nationwide. (Reportedly, they paid a financial settlement to Volkswagen, which decided not to sue.) They named their company Qirui, two Chinese characters that have connotations of good fortune. It sounds a little like “cheery,” but the English name was Chery. Chery officials said the name was missing one e because the company would always be one step away from the complacency that comes with happiness. Almost immediately they began to transform the market, producing cheap cars that contributed to a price drop across the industry. It wasn’t long before Chery declared their ultimate goal: to become the first Chinese car company to export to the United States.

  EVER SINCE I HAD started driving in China, I was curious to know where the cars came from, and one year I went to Wuhu and accompanied some engineers on a Chery test-drive. They were working on two prototypes, the T-11 and the B-14, neither of which had been given a proper model name yet. The vehicles were top-secret—they had taped plastic wrapping along the sides, to foil any industry photographers who might be looking for a surreptitious shot. The B-14 was a crossover, and the T-11 was a small sport-utility vehicle that bore a remarkably close resemblance to the Toyota RAV4. That had become Chery’s specialty: they were notorious for making cars that were suspiciously similar to market leaders. The T-11 wasn’t destined for American consumers—Chery’s quality still wasn’t up to U.S. standards—but the vehicle was supposed to represent a step in that direction. They were aiming for the new Chinese middle class, the people with outdoor interests who hadn’t been around when AMC first developed the City Special.

  An American engineer named John Dinkel had been brought in as a consultant, and his specialty was test-driving. “You find out how good a car is when you do bad things,” he explained as he guided a T–11 out of the main Chery factory. I sat in the front seat, serving as translator; three young Chinese engineers were in the back. None of them wore a seat belt.

  Outside the plant, a big transporter truck was loading stacks of new Chery sedans. Dinkel drove the T-11 past the truck, and after he reached an open road he ran through a series of tests: accelerating, braking, turning. “It’s picking up a wheel,” he said in the middle of a tight turn. “The wheel is spinning. You need a limited slip differential for that.” He accelerated to ninety miles per hour, cruising through the industrial district where Chery was located, and glimpses of the factory world flashed past: a tractor cart full of bricks, the gate of a new air-conditioner plant, a row of temporary shacks for construction workers. A boy stood beside the road, pissing in the grass; his head swung to look when we flew by. Dinkel braked suddenly and a bus honked. I turned to the three engineers in the back.

  “What if the police see us?” I said. “He doesn’t have a Chinese license.”

  “There aren’t any police around here,” one engineer said. “Even if there were, they’d understand what we’re doing.”

  The three engineers were all in their early twenties, dressed in blue company jumpsuits, and they watched intently, hoping to pick up tips from the American test driver. Dinkel embarked on another series of maneuvers, shifting fast and then braking; he switched lanes rapidly. The three engineers clutched at the ceiling. Outside, we zipped past a truck loaded with construction materials, and finally one of the Chery employees asked me to relay a request: “Do you think we could go to a place without any other cars?”

  He suggested that we head north, where Wuhu was in the process of building a new factory zone. The construction crews were still at work, and Dinkel dodged materials along the way; he swerved around an earthmover and he steered between piles of bricks. A big construction truck made a left turn across our lane without signaling. “That in America would be called an idiot,” Dinkel muttered, and I left that remark untranslated. He drove by a complex of half-built apartment blocks, their frames skeletal in the misty morning. He said, “Tell them the gearbox is very notchy from second to third, and from fourth to fifth.”

  Dinkel was sixty years old, and he lived in Orange County. When I asked where he was originally from, he said, “What’s it to you?” which meant Long Island. He was alert, good-humored, and small-framed—he weighed only 140 pounds. He told me that as a graduate student at the University of Michigan at Dearborn, back in the late 1960s, he was the only guy in the emissions laboratory who could fit into the driver’s seat of a Mazda Cosmo. He had never had any particular interest in becoming an engineer. When I asked him why he’d originally taken that path, he said, “I didn’t have a very bright guidance counselor.” Dinkel had graduated from high school in 1962, during the heat of the space race and the boom years of American industry, when people believed that anybody with good math scores should automatically become an engineer. He worked briefly at Chrysler and then switched to journalism. He was at Road & Track for twenty years, including two as editor in chief. “I’ve tested cars for thirty years,” he said. “I’ve driven practically every car that’s ever been on the road.” He told me that Wuhu’s empty streets reminded him of the old days in California, when they could still test cars in the beanfields of Orange County.

  Wuhu is located on the banks of the Yangtze River, about five hours from Shanghai, and it’s one of the new frontiers of the southern economic boom. When we drove through the city’s industrial zone, it was still in the early stages: roads had curbs, sidewalks, and even street signs, but few people were outside. Most factories were still half-built shells behind high walls and impressive gates, all of them waiting for the machinery to be installed. In an odd way, it reminded me of the villages I’d driven through in northern China. In places like Smash the Hu and Slaughter the Hu, everything had been surrounded by massive fortifications, but most residents had already left. Here in the development zone it felt similar: big walls and gates, lots of structures, few people. If you were transported directly from a northern village to a fledgling factory strip, you’d wonder, Where is everybody? But that’s the nature of a country in transition: something is always being abandoned while something else is always being built. The people are in constant motion—they’re on trains, in buses, on boats. They stand beside rural roads, petting the invisible dog, looking for a ride south. In half a year this Wuhu factory strip would be finished, and after that the young people would arrive in droves.

  In the T-11, we reached a roundabout that was still under construction. To John Dinkel, it looked a lot like a skid pad. He accelerated to forty miles an hour, and we flew past a pile of dirt, a half-dozen bags of cement, and a stack of bamboo that would someday be used to scaffold another building project. Dinkel held the turn, tires squealing; we spun around again and again. Construction materials flashed by: dirt, cement, bamboo; dirt, cement, bamboo. In the back of the T-11, the three Chinese engineers were thrown against the side of the car. They still weren’t wearing seat belts.

  The one in the middle was named Qi Haibo. He was twenty-two years old, and he could have fit into the driver’s seat of a Mazda Cosmo, along with a sack of groceries. He’d grown up just beyond the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia, in the Ordos Desert; his home was the region where the government was trying to plant willow trees in an attempt to support local herdsmen. Qi Haibo was ethnic Chinese and he told me that his grandfather had originally moved to the Ordos from Shaanxi Province. (“Probably because of famine or war.”) In the desert, the grandfather had scraped by as a farmer raising wheat, sunflowers, and corn. Qi’s father attended school for only five years; his mother had even less education, giving up after the first grade. In the 1980s the family tried to grow watermelons, but they never moved beyond a state of subsistence farming. Qi could still remember the day they first got electricity. But his parents encouraged him to focus on his studies, and at the local school he became the top pupil. He always knew that someday he’d head south,
across the Great Wall, and he didn’t plan on coming back.

  After high school he tested into Wuhan Polytechnic University, a good institution in Hubei Province. He had never had any particular interest in engineering, but like John Dinkel he happened to come of age at a time when his nation was at a critical moment. “I wanted to go to a good university,” Qi said, “and I heard that computers and electronics were the best subjects for careers nowadays. So I chose those specialties when I took the entrance examination.” At university, he was assigned to an engineering department that focused on transport vehicles, because that’s the fastest-growing market in China. As a senior he attended a job fair and met some Chery recruiters. “They offered me a job, and people at the school said it was a new company, a company that was developing fast. So the next day I signed a contract. I figured that a young person could learn a lot there.”

  By Chery standards, Qi wasn’t particularly young—the average age of a company employee was twenty-four. Qi worked six days a week, for a salary of less than two hundred dollars per month, and he lived in a factory dormitory. There were four engineers in his room; they shared a bathroom with dozens of others who lived along the hallway. Qi would have preferred his own space, but the dorm conditions were a lot better than anything he’d known in the Ordos. He hoped for a long-term future at Chery. “I also like the fact that it’s not a joint venture,” he said. “It’s China’s own auto company.”

  After the test-drive, I asked Qi Haibo what he had learned from John Dinkel. Qi said the T-11 had a slight problem with driveshaft length, which meant that the outside wheel slipped on tight turns. The rear end of the B-14 floated a bit at high speeds. In particular Qi admired Dinkel’s skills behind the wheel. The Chinese engineer, whose job involved quality control and test-driving, had received his license only one month earlier.

  DRIVING IN CHINA OFTEN made me feel old. So much of the nation’s energy comes from the very young, the recent migrants and the fresh-faced college grads, and new companies like Chery constantly shift the economic landscape. On the road, most people are in their thirties or forties—anybody much older encounters legal restrictions. By law, an applicant for a truck or bus driver’s license must be younger than fifty. Nobody over the age of seventy can operate a passenger car. Only the young have the fortitude for Chinese traffic, and time seems to accelerate once you begin to drive. After I got my license, I understood how fast roads are being built, and the flood of new car models caught my eye. That’s part of the rush of the open road—a sense that the crowds are close behind.

  I liked Beijing’s Capital Motors for the opposite reason, because the rental company felt slow. It was still state-owned, a throwback to the old Communist economy, and its corporate culture was a world apart from a place like Chery. At Capital Motors most workers were middle-aged men who sat around smoking cigarettes and reading newspapers. Despite having been among the first to enter a promising market, they did virtually nothing to take advantage of their position. Eventually, Avis and others set up shop in Beijing, but my local Capital Motors branch never responded to the new competition. They didn’t upgrade their fleet of cars, and they didn’t streamline the paperwork. They didn’t get rid of the Jeep Cherokee, which nobody ever rented, and which sat sulking in the lot like a retired racehorse whose record is too bad to stud. Capital Motors never improved the gas-refill policy or bothered to enforce even the most basic rental guidelines. Their Appropriate Service Diction Rating held steady at 98 percent. And I kept coming back—I couldn’t imagine renting from anybody else in Beijing.

  Six months after my first drive across the north, I returned to Capital Motors and put down a deposit on the City Special. The mechanic showed me the spare, marked the gas gauge, and toured the exterior. There weren’t any new dents; the odometer had hardly budged since I dropped off the Jeep last autumn. In the office, Mr. Wang signed off on the papers with a smile and wished me good luck. He didn’t ask where I was going. The man was so unfailingly kind and polite that it seemed a form of discretion—as far as he was concerned, it was my own private business what I decided to do with a vehicle from Capital Motors.

  This time I intended to drive all the way to the edge of the Tibetan plateau. The last lines of the Great Wall are located in the high desert of Gansu Province, along the ancient Silk Road, and I hoped to get there in a month. I scheduled the trip for late April, when the weather is usually good; I stocked the City Special full of Coke, Gatorade, Oreos, and Dove chocolate bars. In Beijing I picked up a foreign hitchhiker: Mike Goettig, a friend from my Peace Corps days who was looking for a ride to the capital of Inner Mongolia. I figured it would take us a day at the most, and then I’d resume last year’s route along the trail of the Great Wall.

  On the morning of departure, a storm swept south from Siberia and cold rain pounded the capital. Downtown traffic slowed to a crawl; it took nearly an hour to escape the city. I headed northwest on Highway 110, a worn two-lane road that would soon be obsolete, because an expressway was being built. Bulldozers and cement mixers had been abandoned beside the new road—you know it’s bad weather when Chinese construction crews stop working. At the moment it was rain but I could see clearly what lay ahead; that forecast had been frozen atop the oncoming traffic. Most vehicles were big Liberation-brand trucks carrying freight south from Inner Mongolia, and their stacks of boxes and crates were covered with ice. The trucks had fought a crosswind on the steppes and now their frozen loads listed to the right, like ships on a rough sea.

  In Hebei Province we began to see advertisements for “Strange Stones.” The landscape was desolate, low rocky hills where the farming was bad, and the only color came from the red banners that had been posted beside the road. Each sign had big characters promising QI SHI—literally, Strange Stones—and the banners had been tattered and torn by the wind. The air had grown colder and now bits of ice and snow began to pelt the windshield. We passed a half dozen signs before either of us spoke.

  “What’s up with this?” Goettig said at last.

  “I have no idea,” I said. “I haven’t driven this road before.”

  The banners stood before cheaply built shops of cement and white tile. Strange stones is the Chinese term for any rock whose shape resembles something else. It’s an obsession at scenic destinations across the country; in the Yellow Mountains you can seek out natural formations with names like Immortal Playing Chess and Rhinoceros Watching Moon. Collectors buy smaller rocks: sometimes they’ve been carved into a certain shape, or maybe they contain a mineral pattern with an uncannily familiar form. I had never understood this particular obsession, and the sudden proliferation of Strange Stones in this forgotten corner of Hebei mystified me. Who was buying all this stuff? Finally, after about twenty banners, I pulled over.

  Inside the shop, the first thing I noticed was that the arrangement seemed odd. The lighting was bad, and display tables completely encircled the room, leaving only a narrow gap for entry. A shopkeeper stood beside the gap, smiling. With Goettig behind me, I squeezed past the tables, and then I heard a tremendous crash.

  I spun around. Goettig stood frozen; shards of green lay strewn across the concrete floor. “What happened?” I asked.

  “He knocked it off!” the shopkeeper said. He grabbed the hem of Goettig’s coat. “Your jacket brushed it.”

  Goettig and I stared at the scattered shards. Finally I asked, “What is it?”

  “It’s jade,” the man said. “It’s a jade ship.”

  Now I recognized pieces: a corner of a smashed sail, a strand of broken rigging. It was the kind of model ship that Chinese businessmen display in their offices for good luck. The material looked like the cheap artificial jade that comes out of factories, and it had absolutely exploded—there were more than fifty pieces.

  “Don’t worry about it,” the shopkeeper said brightly. “Go ahead and look around. Maybe there’s something else you’ll want to buy.”

  We stood in the center of the room, surrounde
d by the ring of tables like animals in a pen. Goettig’s hand was shaking. “Did you really knock it over?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t feel anything, but I’m not sure. It fell down behind me.”

  I had never seen a Chinese shopkeeper react so calmly when goods were broken. Now a second man emerged from a side room, carrying a broom. He swept the shipwreck into a neat pile, but he left it lying on the floor. Silently, other men appeared, until three more of them stood near the door. In the past I had heard about antique shops where owners broke a vase and blamed a customer, and now I wondered if this technique had been adopted as a roadside scam. It made sense: so many motorists in China are rookies with money to burn.

  “What do we do now?” Goettig said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we just buy something.”

  A few Strange Stones looked like food. For some reason this has always been a popular Chinese artistic motif, and I recognized old favorites: a rock-hard head of cabbage, a stony strip of bacon. Other stones had been polished to reveal some miraculous mineral pattern, but in my nervousness most of the shapes looked the same to me. I selected a smaller one and asked the price.