Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  But the Sancha Party Secretary belongs to a completely different world. When she moves, things get done, and they get done fast. She performs the same farm labor as local men, and she works with them on village road construction crews. During breaks, if they drink baijiu and play cards, she does the same. She is in her late forties, with black hair cropped short; her handsome face ends abruptly in a square jaw. She is not a tall woman but she holds her head high. She has a gruff, booming voice—from my house I heard it every time she answered her phone. Whenever I came to the village, she greeted me in a way that was both friendly and blunt: “Hey! You just get here?” But I knew that she was ambivalent about my presence, or at least that was her stance during the Communist Party meeting about foreigners in Sancha. She was shrewder than the Shitkicker, who played his hand immediately: he wanted us out, which meant that he was left with nothing when we were finally allowed to stay. In contrast, the Party Secretary avoided expressing a clear opinion—in China that often means you’re waiting to see how things turn out. After our first year in Sancha, as a gesture of goodwill, Mimi and I donated one hundred dollars’ worth of cement to the village, specifying that it could be used to make any necessary repairs to the new Sancha road. The Party Secretary took the gift and paved a perfect sidewalk to her house, and now she could ride her motorcycle all the way to the front door.

  Wei Ziqi’s relationship with the woman—their guanxi, in the village sense—was deeply uncertain. Her husband was a Wei: he shared the same great-great-grandfather as both Wei Ziqi and the Shitkicker. Wei Ziqi respected the woman’s ability, and he told me that she was especially skilled at dealing with officials from higher levels. Most villagers appreciated that quality—they believed the Party Secretary had been instrumental in getting government funding for the new paved road. But I sensed some wariness in Wei Ziqi, and over time I recognized it as the caution of a potential rival. Without question they were the two most capable individuals in the village.

  Wei Ziqi was not a member of the Communist Party. When I first came to know him, he told me that he had no interest in such affairs, and he was much younger than the village leaders—most were middle-aged or older. After Wei Jia’s illness, Wei Ziqi visited a Huairou fortune-teller, who read his palm and gave a warning: avoid politics at all costs. But in a village as small as Sancha, an apolitical position is precarious, especially for somebody starting a new business. There are countless ways in which local leaders can make things difficult for an entrepreneur, especially if he hopes to get a bank loan. Because Chinese farmers can’t use their land as collateral, they need village backing for any loan application.

  Wei Ziqi never directly challenged the Party Secretary until the day he dropped off the Idiot at the township government. The subsidy was the woman’s responsibility, and she had ignored Wei Ziqi’s repeated requests for help with the matter. By going straight to the township government, he had circumvented her authority, exposing her to higher officials. In 2003, the subsidy began to arrive: six dollars every month. At Spring Festival, the government delivered a jug of cooking oil, a fifty-pound sack of flour, and a huge bag of rice as a way of showing support to the disabled man and his family.

  After we had taken the Idiot into the valley, I initially believed that Wei Ziqi simply cared about the money. As time passed, though, I realized that he had also made a political statement: he proved that he could get things done without the support of local cadres. When I asked him about the Party Secretary’s reaction, he said that she had been mad, but there was nothing she could do, because the law was in Wei Ziqi’s favor. And he seemed pleased at the woman’s anger. “Lots of people in the village have been in situations like that,” he said. “But I went ahead and did something. Other people wouldn’t have had the guts to do that. She wasn’t happy, but now she knows what I’m capable of doing.”

  THERE WERE MANY THINGS in the village that Wei Ziqi couldn’t control, and it was also true that he didn’t know his potential customers. He had little contact with the urban middle class in Beijing; all of his plans were essentially guesswork. But the man’s timing couldn’t have been better. He happened to expand his fledgling business in the spring of 2003, which turned out to be the Year of the Car: the most significant period in China’s auto boom.

  The boom came from all directions, as if every factor had been coordinated with precise timing: infrastructure projects, manufacturing strategies, consumer decisions, even mystery viruses. Beginning in 2003, the government embarked on a major two-year construction campaign in the countryside, paving 119,000 miles of rural roads. During that two-year span, the People’s Republic built more country roads of asphalt and cement than it had during the previous half century. Meanwhile, urban consumer patterns were changing, sometimes for unexpected reasons. In the spring of 2003, panic over the SARS virus swept across the nation, and for weeks the residents of major cities avoided crowds and public transport. Subways and buses were empty; taxis became suspect. In the end, the risk of the disease turned out to have been greatly exaggerated, but it had a lingering effect on the mindset of the middle class. People were newly inspired to learn to drive—in 2003, nearly half a million Beijing residents acquired their driver’s licenses, an average of over 1,300 people every day.

  At the same time, the market for cars was changing. By 2003, Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai had started production in China, and these Asian companies made an immediate impact. Meanwhile, Chinese automakers were becoming formidable competitors. In June of 2003, Chery, the company where I witnessed a test-drive, unveiled a new subcompact called the QQ. It was even smaller than a Mini Cooper—the QQ was less than twelve feet long, and it had a 0.8-liter engine. It looked almost exactly like the Chevy Spark, a vehicle that General Motors planned to unveil in China later that year. In fact, the cars were so similar that even the doors could be swapped. In China, it’s common for companies to knock off foreign products, but this was a new twist: Chery had found a way to produce something exactly like the Spark before the original even made it to market. There was speculation that Chery had somehow acquired the blueprints, probably through industrial espionage, but nobody was ever able to prove anything. (A lawsuit by GM was eventually settled out of court.) In the end, the price was all that mattered. A new QQ sold for around six thousand dollars, 25 percent less than the GM car, and for most consumers it was an easy choice. That year, Chery doubled the number of units sold from 2002. Along with other small manufacturers, they revolutionized the market, and automakers were forced to drop prices. Beginning in April of 2003, over a period of twelve months, the average price for which cars were sold to dealers dropped by 8.8 percent. In 2003, China’s passenger-car sales leaped by 80 percent. In Beijing alone, 339,344 new automobiles hit the road.

  Inevitably, some of them found their way to the top of the dead-end road. Weekends in Sancha became busy with visitors, and city investors began to notice. One Beijing businessman paved the lower reaches of the old footpath to Huanghua Zhen, and he opened a restaurant and guesthouse near the Sancha reservoir. It was the first real restaurant in the village: they had a dozen tables, an outdoor grill, and a big pond stocked with rainbow trout. The surroundings were stunning—high rock walls, the placid water of the reservoir—and Beijing people loved it; you could see the stress vanish from their faces the moment they cruised into the village. If they had continued on foot past the reservoir for another half hour, they would have arrived at the home of MaYufa, the hermit of Sancha, still living alone with his ticking clock. But there were rumors that investors wanted to develop that area, too. For years the village had been dying, isolated from Beijing, but now the tentacles of city life had begun to creep into the high valleys.

  Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei kept busy all summer. The new restaurant in the lower village didn’t affect them much, because there were always nostalgic city customers who preferred a traditional rural meal, served in a real peasant home. At least that’s what they said—they probably would have felt diffe
rently if they were served a bowl of elm-bark noodles. In fact they usually ate rainbow trout that originally came from Swiss stock. In recent years the foreign breed was introduced to the big fish farms down in the valley, and it became the standard meal for weekend visitors: practically every rural family that opened a restaurant had a sign that said “Rainbow Trout.” The new Chinese cuisine is full of such transplants and fabrications. In Beijing, the upper classes enjoy going to restaurants that serve “authentic” dishes from various parts of the country: there are Yunnan restaurants, Hakka restaurants, and Guizhou restaurants; and if you take these dishes back to their supposed regions of origin, the natives will be puzzled. The capital’s Sichuanese restaurants serve meals that I never ate in two years of living in Sichuan. But it’s natural in a country where living standards have risen so fast: the market demands new traditions, even ones of rural simplicity. As a child Wei Ziqi never saw a rainbow trout, and the fish is as local as a cuckoo clock.

  Trucks carried live trout into the hills, where they were delivered to small entrepreneurs like Wei Ziqi. He built his own holding pool, cement-lined and fed with springwater, and the trout did infinitely better than the leeches of old. Usually he grilled the fish for a price of roughly four dollars. In the new kitchen, Cao Chunmei worked over a massive wok, preparing dishes: scrambled eggs with tomato, fried pork and peppers, wheat pancakes. She was an excellent cook, and the customers often returned.

  In 2003, from farming and business, the family earned over 3,800 dollars. The income represented a 50 percent increase over the previous year, and it seemed that business should only improve; by midsummer they were already having repeat customers. But Cao Chunmei looked exhausted and Wei Ziqi seemed troubled. In the beginning, he lit up Red Plum Blossoms sporadically, whenever he met a new contact or greeted a guest, but now he chain-smoked to relieve stress. At night he often stayed up late drinking baijiu. Sometimes it seemed as if all the tension that the city folk discarded on their weekend trips went straight to the man’s heart. “Too much pressure,” he often said, when I asked him what was wrong. “It makes me nervous all the time.”

  I told him to be happy—for years he had dreamed of having his own business, and now it was off to a great start. But he worried endlessly about money. He had borrowed from family: the equivalent of over sixteen hundred American dollars from his relatives, and another thousand from Cao Chunmei’s older sister. I had agreed to pay several years’ rent in advance, for long-term security on my house, but that wasn’t technically his money. The house belonged to his nephew, so that was the equivalent of another family loan: nearly twenty-five hundred dollars. He had already spent all of the money on the renovations, and he prepared to apply for a bank loan, in order to build a guesthouse for next year.

  In China, there isn’t a tradition of credit for private individuals, and debt makes people uncomfortable. Credit cards are still rare, and so are bank loans. In 2003, the vast majority of those new car owners paid cash: fewer than one in five used a loan. Most Chinese save for years before making a major purchase, and if they have to raise capital they depend on family. It results in yet another type of guanxi, and Wei Ziqi was juggling them all: the political issues of the village, the new territory of Huairou business, the complexities of family loans. A year earlier, when his son’s life was in danger, Wei Ziqi had seemed completely calm. But he had been prepared for that experience: in Sancha, where everybody grew up poor, they know what it means to struggle with sickness and death. Success is the hard part—as an entrepreneur, Wei Ziqi stepped into uncharted territory.

  WEI JIA TURNED SIX years old that summer. For his birthday, his parents served him a special meal of instant noodles topped with a fried egg. The noodles were a rare treat, because the boy almost never ate packaged foods. Periodically his parents took him to Beijing for follow-up blood tests, and they all came back normal. He was bigger now, and he had started to develop a barrel chest like his father. Sometimes he was given chores around the house, such as sweeping the threshing platform. Around this time he learned to ignore the Idiot like everybody else. As a small boy, Wei Jia had sometimes played with the disabled man, and engaged him by making faces and gestures, but soon he recognized that there was something wrong with him. And now the Idiot was finally alone—once the last child in the village grew up, there was nobody left who perceived the man as normal.

  At the end of summer Wei Jia’s parents prepared him for school. He had missed nearly all of kindergarten, and in fact last year’s school had been condemned, because conditions were so bad. This year Wei Jia would attend first grade in Shayu, a village about six miles away, where he would board in the dormitory with other children. During the final weeks of summer, the boy’s parents trained him to sleep alone. Like most rural families, they usually spent nights together on the kang, but now they forced Wei Jia to occupy a bed in a side room. For the first few nights he complained and slept poorly, but by the end of the month he was used to it.

  The week before Wei Jia was to start school, I rented a Jetta and drove to the village. I offered to take Wei Jia and Cao Chunmei down to the valley for registration, and she said it would take place on either Sunday or Monday. “They still haven’t made the announcement,” she explained, referring to Sancha’s daily propaganda broadcasts.

  “There aren’t any other first-graders in the village, are there?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “He’s the only one.”

  “If there’s only one kid, are you sure they’re going to announce it?”

  “They’ll announce it,” she said.

  I wondered if perhaps it might be worth a phone call, but this is the way of the countryside: wait for the information to come to you. Sure enough, at precisely noon on Friday the speakers crackled to life. A shrill woman’s voice rang out across the valley, echoing off the cliff walls, resounding among the high peaks, alerting all relevant parties:

  ATTENTION!

  ALL FIRST-GRADERS MUST REPORT

  TO SHAYU ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AT 8:00 A.M.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING!

  ATTENTION!

  ALL FIRST-GRADERS MUST REPORT

  TO SHAYU ELEMENTARY SCHOOL AT 8:00 A.M.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING!

  ATTENTION!

  ALL FIRST-GRADERS MUST…

  Early Sunday morning, all first-graders in the village reported to duty, and every single one of them sat on Cao Chunmei’s lap in the front of my Jetta. Wei Ziqi remained in Sancha, because he expected guests that afternoon. Wei Jia had taken a bath the night before, and he picked out clean clothes for himself. He wore blue trousers and a matching shirt with a cartoon cat that said, in English, “Ready-Witted.” He still had the Mickey Mouse backpack from kindergarten.

  “Do you remember what happened last year?” Cao Chunmei said.

  “Yes,” Wei Jia said.

  “Are you going to cry again?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t cry this year,” she warned him. “You’re a first-grader now. If you cry, I’ll smack you.”

  Wei Jia grinned; this particular conversation had been recurring for days. He leaned forward as we cruised into the valley. The walnut season had returned, and we passed dozens of men armed with their long sticks. It was a beautiful morning—clear and warm, the sun about to rise above the eastern ridgeline. All along the road there were children in clean clothes, carrying new backpacks, heading toward Shayu. Our first stop was the dormitory, where Wei Jia checked in. He was assigned to room number four, bed number two. Eight bunks in all: rough metal frames with thin mattresses atop wooden boards. Windows were barred. The moment I saw these military-style quarters, my heart sank, but the boy seemed unperturbed. He liked the fact that he had been assigned a metal locker with a key.

  We still hadn’t seen his classmates, because the children were gathering in the schoolyard for registration. The three of us walked in that direction, and when we reached the school gate, Cao Chunmei stopped. “Now, you’re not going to be s
urprised to see so many children, are you?”

  “No,” said Wei Jia.

  “It’s not like last year, is it?”

  “No.”

  Inside the schoolyard, a teacher named Yang was arranging the first-graders into lines: one for boys, one for girls. The children were quiet—they listened intently as the teacher gave instructions. Slowly she moved through the line, greeting each child individually, and at the end she came to Wei Jia. “Good morning, what’s your name?” Teacher Yang said.

  “Wei Jia,” he said, and then he spoke in English: “Good morning, teacher!”

  “That’s very good!” she said in Chinese. “Who taught you that?”

  “My Uncle Monster,” he replied.

  “Who?”

  “My Uncle Monster!” The boy’s face was so serious that Teacher Yang couldn’t help laughing. And that was where we left him, standing in line in the schoolyard, the smallest child among all the first-graders.

  DURING THE FIRST SIX weeks of school, Wei Jia distinguished himself by an early interest in English, an unruffled demeanor, and a complete refusal to sit still. In a Chinese classroom, the group is the foundation for every endeavor, and each child always knows his place within that organization. Some positions are formally assigned to kids: the Homework Monitor collects assignments, the Politeness Monitor reports on bad behavior, the Class Monitor helps the teacher organize fellow students. In dormitories, each room includes a Room Monitor and a Vice Room Monitor, who make sure that daily cleaning is carried out. Peer discipline is crucial—children who misbehave are often asked to stand before the class, where other students help the teacher criticize the guilty party. At the beginning none of this seemed to faze Wei Jia. Having missed kindergarten, he had no concept of school routines; he talked out of turn and he played with pencils at his desk. He lost school assignments and he forgot homework. He wandered the classroom during lessons. One morning, the entire student body gathered outside to listen to a speech by the principal, and as usual the children were instructed to stand at attention—knees locked, heads up, arms stiff at their sides. All kids obeyed except for one: Wei Jia, who became bored by the speech and finally knelt down to play with pebbles in the dirt.