Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  For the remodeling, he hired a crew of three villagers. In Sancha, anybody who hires laborers also serves them dinner, and one evening I joined the remodeling crew. A worker asked if there was anything I don’t eat.

  “He doesn’t eat eggs,” Wei Ziqi said, before I could respond. “He won’t eat intestines or any other organs. He doesn’t like meat on the bone. He doesn’t like bean paste. He likes fish and he likes vegetables.”

  Villagers spend a great deal of time talking about food, and over the years the family had studied every quirk in my diet. Tonight the men discussed the evening’s dishes, and then the conversation shifted abruptly to international events.

  “Look how small Japan is,” one man said. “How many Beijings would fit inside Japan?”

  I told him that I had no idea.

  “Well, I’m sure it’s not very many,” he said. “Japan is such a small country, but they controlled a lot of China during the war. Look how small it is compared to Manchuria!”

  “The Japanese are originally Chinese,” another man said. He was the tallest in the group, and he spoke forcefully, stabbing the air with his chopsticks as if carving out space in the conversation. “Qin Shihuang sent soldiers across the ocean,” he continued. “He was searching for ways to live longer. That’s how they discovered Japan—they didn’t come back and they settled the place. So you can say that the Japanese are originally Chinese.”

  I mentioned that in the northern islands there are people called the Ainu who are racially different from the Japanese. “Some archaeologists believe that they were the original inhabitants,” I said. The man held his chopsticks still for a moment, as if processing this information. Then he said, “Qin Shihuang sent soldiers across the ocean. He was searching for ways to live longer. That’s how they discovered Japan. So you can say that the Japanese were originally Chinese.”

  Point taken—I decided to abandon the Ainu. The man brandished his chopsticks and slashed another hole in the conversation. “The Koreans were originally Chinese, too,” he said.

  “Korea was part of our country during the Qing dynasty,” somebody else said.

  “So was Mongolia.”

  “So was Vietnam. They were originally Chinese, too.”

  “The Japanese also controlled Korea during the war.”

  “Such a small country!”

  When Sancha men are at leisure, their talk moves in unexpected spurts, like a hawk that hovers motionless until it catches some invisible air current. Usually the villagers discuss mundane matters—food, weather, prices—but at any time the subject matter can shoot into the stratosphere. The villagers span oceans and continents; they soar from ancient dynasty to ancient dynasty. They like to talk about China’s former greatness, especially in contrast to today’s nation, and they have a fondness for sweeping discourses. Foreign subjects tend to produce staggering generalizations. These remarks aren’t mean-spirited; the men are curious about the world, and they like to draw connections between China and the outside. But it can be confusing as hell to follow such talk as it zings back and forth across the table. A man might begin with a statement that deserves at least half a minute of amplification—“There is no doubt that the greatest period in Chinese history was the Tang dynasty”—but one breath later he’ll describe a TV show about prostitutes in Africa.

  With the remodeling crew, all at once we landed on the Korean peninsula.

  “North Korea is still a socialist country,” somebody said.

  “They’ve been divided for fifty years.”

  “North Korea is even poorer than China!”

  Wei Ziqi turned to me: “Have you ever been to North Korea?”

  In 1999, I had spent some time on the northern border with China, and I told a story from my trip. That year, North Korea was suffering a famine, and refugees had been fleeing across the river. In the Chinese border town of Tumen I was walking along the banks when I came upon what appeared to be a child. I approached him from the back, assuming that he was ten or eleven years old; but then I glanced at his face. It was ageless: he could have been thirty; he could have been fifty. It was as if an old man’s head had been attached to a child’s body, and I stopped in my tracks, realizing that the person was a victim of the famine.

  The moment I finished the tale everybody at the table burst out laughing.

  “I told you North Korea is even poorer than China!”

  “He was as small as a child!”

  “He had an old man’s head!”

  “Imagine somebody like that trying to work! He wouldn’t last one day!”

  There was never any way of knowing what would happen when you tossed something into a village conversation. The men drank baijiu, and after a while Wei Ziqi got out the Johnnie Walker. I had given it to him years ago, after picking it up at an airport shop. There were two small bottles in a gift box with a clear plastic cover. Usually Wei Ziqi kept it in a place of honor at the front cabinet, but now he showed it to the men at the table.

  “How much was this?” he asked me.

  “I can’t remember exactly,” I said.

  “It was more than two hundred yuan, right?”

  “Probably more than three hundred.”

  The tall man with the chopsticks was impressed. “So expensive! You could buy ten bottles of Erguotou.”

  The men passed around the Johnnie Walker. After everybody had taken a good long look, Wei Ziqi returned the box to the cabinet. Originally I had felt a pang of guilt about the gift, because I knew he had a tendency to drink too much. But over time I realized that he would never open something so valuable; it was far more enjoyable to show it off.

  Periodically the Communist Party distributed presents to every member in the village. Often these were decorative items, usually connected to some anniversary or series of meetings. As a new member, Wei Ziqi displayed the Party gifts prominently, because they were a sign of status in the village. For August 1, the anniversary of the founding of the People’s Liberation Army, the Party gave all Sancha members a framed portrait of a tank gilded in gold. At New Year’s they handed out a calendar that celebrated major infrastructure projects. In Chinese government offices, it’s common to see such pictures, which often feature bridges or highways or cloverleaf exchanges. Usually the scenes are airbrushed to a brightness that’s almost lurid—development porn.

  On Wei Ziqi’s infrastructure calendar, photos were accompanied by numbered inscriptions that described the responsibilities of a Party member. The page for November said:

  The Duty of a Party Member (Number Seven): Integrate closely with the masses, propagate the Party’s positions to the masses, consult with the masses, promptly communicate the masses’ ideas and requests to the Party, defend the benefits of the masses.

  The most impressive gift that the Communist Party ever gave Sancha members was the “Computerized Digital Information Calendar.” Its plastic frame included digital readouts of the temperature, time, and date, both in the Western and traditional lunar calendars, and all of this surrounded a three-foot-wide framed photograph of an unnamed foreign city. The city in the picture was hard to identify: it consisted of an undistinguished cluster of midsize skyscrapers, all of them touched up to appear artificially bright. Railroad bridges stood in the foreground, where the photo editor missed some rust. The scene had the slightly decrepit and anonymous look of any sprawling city in the American Midwest, but I couldn’t recognize it.

  Wei Ziqi hung the portrait in a place of honor behind the dinner table, where customers often sat. Cao Chunmei’s Buddhist shrine was nearby. The first time I saw the photograph, I asked Wei Ziqi what the city was.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s some foreign place.”

  At first I thought it might be Cleveland or Detroit. Finally a friend from the States happened to visit, and he recognized it as Denver, Colorado: a pinup in the Chinese world of development porn.

  In 2005, the same year that every Party member in Sancha received the Mile-Hig
h skyline, they attended a series of meetings under the title of “Preserving the Progressiveness.” It was another local echo of national change—in Communist China, whenever a new leader takes office, he sponsors a slogan-filled study campaign as a way of consolidating power. “Preserving the Progressiveness” was Hu Jintao’s first attempt at theory, and the precise meaning of the catchphrase was characteristically vague. It was intended to resemble a grassroots operation, although of course all directives and study materials came straight from the top. And clearly the Party was concerned about its rural base; they had already started to increase funding in the countryside. Ouyang Song, a vice minister in charge of the study campaign, told reporters that so many migrants had left villages that there was now a shortage of young candidates for membership.

  In Sancha, Wei Ziqi and the others dutifully attended the meetings, where they studied the Party constitution and historic speeches by Mao and Deng. All of these documents were read aloud, a mind-numbing ritual—the Party constitution is 17,000 words long. Because Wei Ziqi was one of the youngest and most literate members, he was often assigned the task of reading. One afternoon during the heart of the campaign, I drove to the village and found him drinking baijiu alone. He appeared unhappy, and he was clutching the left side of his face, which looked swollen. I asked if something was wrong.

  “I hurt my tooth,” he said.

  “How did that happen?”

  “Opening a beer bottle,” he said. In rural China, where people often can’t be bothered to use a bottle opener, dental injuries are a common side effect of alcohol. Sometimes I wondered if that might be the next campaign: Build New Countryside, Preserve the Progressiveness, Stop Opening Bottles with Your Teeth.

  I asked Wei Ziqi if he planned to see a dentist, and he shook his head. He generally avoided any sort of medical attention, regardless of what sort of misadventure occurred in the village. One year he was bitten by a badger. Armed with only a stick, and acting more or less out of boredom, Wei Ziqi trapped the badger in a hole; it took a nasty bite out of his finger before he could beat it to death. “Badgers don’t carry rabies,” he said, when I suggested seeing a doctor in Huairou. I looked it up online and confirmed that this theory was wrong, but he didn’t care. He treated the badger bite with the same medicine as the injured tooth: repeated shots of Erguotou.

  After the attack of the beer bottle, we sat together at the table while he applied baijiu therapy. He told me that all morning the tooth pain had been doubly annoying because of the Party campaign. Today’s meeting had lasted five hours, and they had reached the stage of self-criticisms. I asked him what failing he had targeted.

  “Labor. I said that when the village had been repairing the road, I didn’t contribute enough physical work.”

  “What did the others say about you?”

  “The same thing,” he said. “They criticized me for not offering to do enough work.”

  “What did the Party Secretary criticize herself for?”

  “Bad temper,” Wei Ziqi said.

  Any tensions between the Party Secretary and Wei Ziqi had been set aside temporarily. He had done well since joining the Party—during summer he had been chosen to spend a week studying at the Huairou District Chinese Communist Party School. In China, such centers serve to train cadres, and the study session was a sign that Wei Ziqi was being groomed for a possible political position. At the school he reviewed local policies, and he returned to the village with a stack of Party books. One volume was entitled A Textbook for Urbanizing the Countryside. The book featured the usual spread of enticing photographs, mostly featuring road infrastructure around Huairou: broad downtown intersections, the recently finished road to Changping, the expressway that would soon connect with Beijing. The first chapter was entitled “Increased Urbanization is the Natural Choice for Huairou’s Economic and Social Development.” It read, “To have an upstairs and a downstairs, electric lights and telephones—these were the desires of people in the 1950s, and they reflected their concept of a modern life. Nowadays if we examine these longings, they seem superficial and naive.” Another chapter described the Party’s challenges in a semirural region like Huairou:

  With hundreds and thousands of years of feudal peasant habits, there is a pronounced trend toward small peasant thinking, in the way that people live, in their customs, in their cultural level. All traditions of the countryside have been deeply branded into the people, and this creates a conflict with the desire to urbanize and improve.

  One of the Party’s goals in rural regions was to give people some contact with the outside. Each summer the Sancha members were taken on a free vacation, and in 2005 they traveled to the beach resort of Beidaihe. It was the first time Wei Ziqi had ever seen the ocean, and he talked about the experience for weeks. Increasingly he spent time in Huairou, both for business and for the Party. His clothing continued to change—he upgraded his city shoes, and he bought a new pair of blue jeans and a black jacket made of artificial leather. He carried different cigarette brands for town and country. In the village he smoked Red Plum Blossom, the white packs, which cost less than forty cents. But in Huairou, where it was important not to look like a peasant, he made sure to carry the more expensive red or yellow packs. Sometimes a wealthy person stayed at the guesthouse and left a box of high-end smokes, which Wei Ziqi hoarded for crucial business situations.

  For a Chinese male, nothing captures the texture of guanxi better than cigarettes. They’re a kind of semaphore—in a world where much is left unsaid, every gesture with a cigarette means something. You offer a smoke at certain moments, and you receive them at others; the give-and-take establishes a level of communication. And sometimes the absence of an exchange marks boundaries. A city person has little to say to a peasant and naturally he will not accept his cigarettes. Even between two businessmen, one person might refuse a smoke as a way of establishing superiority, especially if he carries a better brand. All told there are more than four hundred different types of Chinese cigarettes, each with a distinct identity and meaning. Around Beijing, peasants smoke Red Plum Blossom whites. Red Pagoda Mountain can be found in the pockets of average city folk. Middle-class entrepreneurs like Zhongnanhai Lights. Businessmen with a flair for the foreign sport State Express 555. A nouveau riche tosses out Chunghwa like it’s rice. Pandas are the rarest beast of all. That was Deng Xiaoping’s favorite brand, and government quotas make them hard to find; a single pack costs more than twelve dollars. If you carry Panda, you’re probably just being pretentious.

  Most men don’t worry that cigarettes are bad for their health. In the southern city of Wenzhou, I once met a businessman in his thirties who described smoking as a career move. When I asked if he wanted to quit, the man looked at me like I was crazy. “No way!” he said. “I know it’s not good for you, but I’m young so I don’t feel any effect. And it’s important for business. If you’re trying to pull guanxi with somebody, you have to take him out to dinner, and you need to smoke and drink with him.”

  The Chinese government operates under similar logic. All tobacco companies are state-owned, and the industry provides significant revenue; it also directly employs more than half a million people. From the government’s perspective, smoking is important to stability, both economic and social. Some cigarettes are even subsidized—the cheapest brands cost as little as thirty cents a pack, because officials fear that farmers will become unhappy if they can’t afford to smoke. And the issue of health is essentially separate. In 2000, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention commissioned a study that showed that the health-related costs of smoking outweigh the revenue benefits. But that’s not the key calculus: all that matters is who pays what. Until now, there has been no nationwide health insurance, so the government has collected its cigarette profits without paying for the damage. Each year, over one million Chinese people die from smoking-related illness, and that figure is expected to double by the year 2025. Now that the government is trying to establish some form o
f universal health coverage, perhaps their attitude toward the tobacco industry will change, but for the time being it remains a source of revenue.

  Wei Ziqi put away more than a pack a day. He knew it was bad for him, and on several occasions he tried to quit. But the status was far more addictive than the nicotine. Once he told a story about a recent trip to the city. “I had dinner with a number of people I know in Huairou,” he said. “Some of them were government officials, and some were Party members from other villages. I had a pack of Chunghwa cigarettes that had been given to me by a customer. That made me feel good, to have cigarettes like that. There was one man at the table who had Red Pagoda Mountain, and another had State Express 555. But I was the one with the most expensive brand.

  “They were all important people,” he continued, smiling at the memory. “You could say that each one had some possible use to me. I’m thinking about installing a solar water heater for the guesthouse, and there’s a government program that pays for things like that in the countryside. One of the men at the dinner deals with that program. So it might be possible for me to install it for free.”

  AT HARVEST TIME THE old routines always return. The Party doesn’t hold rural meetings during that season, and farmers like Wei Ziqi put aside their Huairou trips; everything is aimed at bringing in the crops. By far the most important task is gathering walnuts, which ripen so quickly that villagers have to work in groups. That’s the only local harvest whose labor is still communal—a band of eight or nine will work together, starting with one person’s trees and then moving on to the next. The profits stay with each individual owner, but the labor is shared and so are the meals. Each evening, the group eats in the home of the owner of that day’s trees. Over the course of two weeks, they move steadily through the village, by day and by night—orchard to orchard, home to home.

  In September of 2005, I joined Wei Ziqi’s crew on the first day they harvested his trees. There were nine other people, mostly close relatives; they had already been working together for a week. We started at seven-thirty in the morning, and by nine o’clock it was already hot. The mid-September sunshine was still strong, filtering through the leaves of the orchard, covering the ground with a quilt of mottled shadows. The trees grew on terraced tracts, bordered by walls of stone, and already a scattering of fresh walnuts had fallen to the forest floor.