by Rob Gifford
CONTENTS
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Maps
Introduction: The Mother Road
1. The Promised Land
2. Dislocation
3. Things Flow
4. The Unfinished Revolution
5. “A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire”
6. Silicon Valley
7. “Women Hold Up Half the Sky”
8. “Put the People First”
9. Power
10. The Hermit of Hua Shan
11. Elvis Lives
Photo Insert
12. The Last Great Empire
13. Monks and Nomads
14. No Longer Relying on Heaven
15. “We Want to Live!”
16. Respect
17. The End of the Wall
18. The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas
19. Endurance
20. The Great Wall of the Mind
21. “China Is a Colonial Power”
22. From Sea to Shining Sea
23. A Road Is Made
Acknowledgments
Select Bibliography
About the Author
Copyright
for Nancy
Hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth has no roads to begin with…but when many people pass one way, a road is made.
Lu Xun, “My Old Home,” 1921
INTRODUCTION: THE MOTHER ROAD
The worn black road shoots like an arrow across the wide-open desert until it thuds into a low escarpment of rocks, which rises from the lunar landscape of the Gobi’s yellow scrubland. The craggy boulders form a ravine that soon encloses the road as it bends for the first time in a hundred miles, then dumps the traveler in a small town that had not been visible from the highway. The ravine gives the town its name, Xingxingxia, which in English means Starry Gorge.
Starry Gorge is a two-horse town, with just a few hundred residents. It caters to the truckers, the long-distance buses, and the occasional crazy traveler who chooses to cross the Gobi Desert by road. The town owes its existence to a small freshwater well, the only one for miles around, which has sustained man and beast for centuries on their journeys along this merciless section of the ancient Silk Road. Xingxingxia (pronounced Shing-shing-shyah) marks the traveler’s entry into what used to be called Turkestan but is now the Chinese region of Xinjiang. The gorge to the east and a large tollgate to the west provide the bookends for this shabby jumble of truck stops, residences, and one large gas station that poke out of the scorched desert earth and up into the clear blue Central Asian sky. The hostile sun is high, almost melting the tarmac, and I’m standing beside the road, trying to hitch a ride.
This is not just any old road. This is China’s Mother Road, and its name is Route 312. I’ve been journeying by bus, truck, and taxi all the way from the road’s beginning in Shanghai, nearly two thousand miles east of here. At the ancient city of Xi’an, it picked up the route of the Old Silk Road, which in ancient times ran through the Gobi Desert, through Starry Gorge, to Central Asia, and westward to Persia and Europe. I’m about two-thirds of the way along my three-thousand-mile journey, with a thousand miles left to ride to the road’s end, at the Chinese border with Kazakhstan.
I am unshaven and burned by the fierce desert sun, weary but exhilarated, after six weeks traveling, and weary but still exhilarated after six years of living in China as a journalist. This is my final journey across the country before I leave and move to Europe.
A group of truck drivers has gathered to chat at the gas station. I wander over to see if any of them will give me a ride west. Word has reached them that, just ahead on Route 312, a patrol car from the small Starry Gorge police station is sitting, waiting. They are all overloaded and will be fined if they are stopped. We stand and make small talk for ten minutes. Most of them are cautious about giving a ride to a Westerner. Finally, word comes through that the police car has gone, and the group disperses, each driver to his own truck. I’m left standing until one of them looks back at me and, with a short jerk of his head, motions me toward his truck. I follow, and jump into the cab. He fires up the engine, rolls the big blue beast onto the road and out into the hungry, golden Gobi.
“Where have you come from?” I ask him.
“Shanghai.”
“And where are you heading?”
“Urumqi.”
“What’s that huge thing on the back of your truck?”
“It’s an industrial filter, going to a company in Urumqi. And last week I was driving from Urumqi to Shanghai, with a truck full of melons.”
It’s a symbolic exchange. Fresh produce flows east for the consumers of China’s coastal cities. Industrial equipment flows west to help with the construction of the less developed regions inland.
Urumqi (pronounced Oo-room-chee) is the capital of Xinjiang, the heart of Central Asia, and the city farthest from an ocean in the world.
The driver’s name is Liu Qiang (pronounced Leo Chang). He travels back and forth along Route 312 from Xinjiang to Shanghai all through the year, driving alternately day and night with his buddy, Wang, who is asleep on the narrow bunk behind our seats. All the trucks have two drivers, so that they can travel twenty-four hours a day, stopping only when they need to use the rest stops along the three-thousand-mile road.
“How’s life as a trucker these days?” I ask him. “Can you make money?”
“Tai nan le. It’s difficult,” he laments, lighting up the first of many cigarettes and tossing his lighter onto the dashboard. “We have to overload our trucks to make any money, but the police lie in wait and fine us.”
He chain-smokes as he drives and talks with a rat-a-tat staccato.
“I get paid eighteen thousand yuan [about $2,200] to take a load from Urumqi to Shanghai or back again. I have to pay out about fifteen thousand yuan in tolls, costs, and fines to the policemen. So from a one-week trip, I earn about three thousand yuan [roughly $380].”
“That’s not a bad income,” I say. Many Chinese do not earn that in a month.
“Yes, but there’s wear and tear on my truck, and wear and tear on me. And I’m getting paid less as competition increases. Plus the fact that police fines are going up.”
I cannot think of a better traveling companion. Liu is that wonderful mix of modesty and bravado that characterizes many Chinese men. He’s built like a boxer, short and muscular, and despite just a junior high school education, he is a one-man philosophy department, with an opinion on everything. One minute he is lamenting the moral decline of China, the next he is telling me about the roadside brothels he visits along the way. He is a coiled spring of energy, with laughter and fury exploding in equal measures. Laughter just at life itself, in all its modern Chinese craziness. Fury mostly at corrupt Communist Party officials and policemen. Like so many modern Chinese people, he is torn between a deep love of his country and a deep anger at the people who govern it.
We travel for hours across the relentless Gobi, talking intensely at first but then with long periods of silence, during which he just drives, and I just sit, and Wang just snores in the bunk behind. The raw beauty of the desert—the implacable desert whose vicious sandstorms used to consume whole caravans of camels and their precious cargoes, the unquenchable desert that used to resist all but the most hardy travelers—rolls past outside.
Though still wild, it is slowly being conquered by an army of blue Chinese-made East Wind trucks. As roads such as Route 312 grow busier, and distant cities such as Urumqi are brought closer to the main centers of population farther east, the desert seems a little less dangerous now. An occasional truck whooshes past i
n the opposite direction, shaking us with its slipstream. Passenger buses rush past too, and occasional cars, but not many.
Liu Qiang talks of the development he sees every day, the transformation of a country changed by the loosening of government controls, by the influx of foreign money, and most of all by the movement of people untethered from their Communist past. But mobility and greater freedom have changed people’s characters, he says, and not always for the better.
“In the past, everyone was poor,” says Liu, “but everyone was honest. Now, everyone is more free, but there is luan, there is chaos. Money has made everyone go bad.” He uses the Chinese phrase, a hundred times more illustrative than its canine English equivalent. “Ren chi ren,” he says. “It’s man eat man now.”
This is a book about people such as Liu Qiang. Ordinary Chinese people caught up in an extraordinary moment in time. China in the early twenty-first century is, above all things, a nation on the move, as millions of rural people leave their villages and head to the cities, looking for work. Many still travel by rail, but increasingly people are traveling by road. Exact numbers are difficult to gauge, but most experts estimate that 150 million (possibly as many as 200 million) people have left their home villages in search of work in cities around China. It is the largest migration in human history.
Pushed by the timeless poverty of the countryside and pulled by the bright lights of the cities, this army of migrants is fueling the economic boom that is putting cheap toys, clothes, flat-screen TVs, and computers on the shelves of the world’s stores.
In China, the common people, both rural and urban, are known colloquially as the lao bai xing, literally the “Old Hundred Names,” who in Chinese legend were made up of just one hundred family names. The lives of Old Hundred Names today are being transformed as never before in Chinese history.
After five thousand years of continuous civilization and centuries of being the world’s foremost economic power, China was jolted out of its imperial isolation by the arrival of the European colonialists in the nineteenth century. Then, after a century of humiliation at the hands of the Western powers and Japan, it adopted militant Marxism, which kicked out the imperialists and wrenched the country from its time-honored past and its ancient traditions. After 1949, the Communist Party set out to remold the Chinese soul and succeeded in changing much in Chinese society. But Chairman Mao’s militancy in the end almost destroyed the country, and the Communist experiment failed. With Mao’s death, in 1976, China’s new leaders set about discarding the Marxist economic model as fast as they had adopted it.
Now, after thirty years of market reforms since 1978, China in the first decade of the twenty-first century stands on the edge of something very big, something very different from anything that has gone before. Its unique brand of man-eat-man capitalism (still known officially as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”) has brought unprecedented change to its society. China has overtaken Britain as the world’s fourth largest economy; it has accumulated foreign exchange reserves of roughly one trillion dollars and become the workshop of the world. Its hunger for energy and resources is influencing world markets in oil and commodities. Diplomatically too it is growing in importance, with an engaged foreign policy governed by pragmatism rather than ideology. In short, China matters more than it has ever mattered in modern times. Many take it for granted that China will be the next global superpower.
But if you look a little more closely, you will see that dangerous fault lines are appearing too, fault lines which suggest that the country might not be as stable as it seems, and that China’s much-vaunted rise may not be as smooth as many imagine. A journey west along Route 312 is a journey into China’s frailties. There is a growing gap between the urban rich and the rural poor, and this has led to many incidents of unrest in rural areas. The old safety net of free health care and cradle-to-grave provision by the state has collapsed, and this has left a lot of people much worse off than before. In addition, China’s explosive development has ravaged the environment. Sixteen of the world’s twenty most polluted cities are in China. There is a chronic water shortage, and many of the country’s rivers are dangerously contaminated. On top of all that, the whole society is shot through with corruption, the legacy of a one-party state that will not implement political reform and therefore has no checks and balances on its all-powerful officials.
Most Westerners who even think about China do not seem to consider the possibility that the pressures building up there could lead to a Soviet-style implosion. But I think the West needs to pay more attention to China’s problems, because there could well be a crunch coming in China. The less the Communist Party deals with its pressing social and political problems now, the bigger the crunch will be if it comes. China’s mobile twenty-first-century society is chafing more and more against its sclerotic Stalinist political system. If the government in Beijing doesn’t do more to address the growing inequalities and looming environmental problems, I think China could be in real trouble.
So as I prepare to set off along Route 312, there’s one big question in my mind: Which is it going to be for China, greatness or implosion? Can the country really become the twenty-first-century superpower that many predict? Or will it all collapse, like the Soviet Union, weighed down by the crippling legacies of the past, and sunk by the wrenching contradictions of the present? And if China does go on to greatness, what kind of country will it become? Can it ever make the transition to a modern state, with checks and balances on government power?
My plan is to answer these questions as I travel along Route 312 and as I meet the truckers and hookers, the yuppies and artists, the farmers and cell-phone salesmen whose lives reflect the complexity of modern China. And while I’m trying to answer my questions about China’s future, I hope to go some way to answering some equally important questions about China today: Who exactly are the Chinese people? And what has all this drastic change done to the Chinese psyche, and to the Chinese soul? China’s physical landscape is changing as the country is turned upside down by development. But so is its psychological landscape, and its moral universe—what people think, what they believe. In the West, there were more than a hundred years for the dust of the Industrial Revolution to settle before the Technological Revolution came along. In China, the two revolutions are happening simultaneously. The dislocation, both physical and psychological, is immense, and it is tearing at the fabric of society, even as the new roads and railroads knit the country more closely together.
In spite of all the change in China, the Western world is still stuck in its dangerously outdated, black-and-white view of the country, tripping over its own breathless superlatives about unprecedented growth and progress, or retreating into old Cold War stereotypes and warnings of “the China threat.” And Western images of Chinese people are dated too. The Chinese have always been the faceless masses in the Western mind. Whether the pigtailed coolies of the 1860s or the Maoist Red Guards of the 1960s, they have never been seen in the West as individuals. Now, though, individualism is emerging in China, as people take more control of their own lives. Chinese people, especially in the cities, have choices, and these choices are creating a whole new generation that is unknown to many people in the West. These are the people I want to meet, the individuals, the new Chinese people building the new China, the tremendous variety of people who live and work and travel along one Chinese road.
My adventure along Route 312 is also the end of a chapter in my own life. I am British, and I majored in Chinese studies at college in England in the 1980s. I first came to China as a twenty-year-old student in 1987, to spend my sophomore year studying the Chinese language in Beijing. After graduation, I became a journalist and spent much of the 1990s reporting on Asian issues. Most recently I have been based in Beijing for six years, as China correspondent for National Public Radio. Now I am leaving China, and within a few months I will be heading for Europe, to be NPR’s London correspondent. I could have stayed longer, but six
years seemed about the right length of time for a journalistic posting, and I’ve chosen to leave while I’m still enjoying the party. For twenty years, my life has been entwined with China, and my experiences here have shaped the person I have become. For now, though, it’s nearly over. And this road trip is a way of saying goodbye.
I had first traveled a section of Route 312, without knowing it, the previous year, while reporting in the wilds of Gansu province, not so very far from Starry Gorge. I had commented to my traveling companion how good the road was for such a remote area, and he had told me that it ran all the way from Shanghai to Kazakhstan.
I filed the idea away in my mind, waiting for an appropriate time to make the journey, and now that time has come. I had packed up our home in Beijing and seen my wife and children to the airport. They had flown to London ahead of me, to move into a new house and set up our new life. Now I have the summer stretching ahead of me, two months to explore China in all its contradictions, before I too get on a plane for London and leave it all behind.
Liu Qiang the truck driver drags on another cigarette.
“China is weak,” he says with a grimace, reflecting a widely held view among Chinese people, at odds with the country’s emerging image in the West. “We need decades and decades before we can be called a strong country, before we can compete with America.”
“But China is already a completely different country from what it was ten years ago,” I say.
“That’s true,” says Liu. “Never mind ten years ago, compared with five years ago, it’s a different country. But we are still a long way behind.”
Liu’s buddy, Wang, has now woken up and is sitting behind us on his bunk. It will soon be his turn to take over the driving, and Liu will take a nap. They are dropping me at the exit that leads into the oasis town of Hami.
I ask Liu if he thinks China can make the transition from a one-party state to a democracy.
