China Road

by Rob Gifford

  I sit in McDonald’s and observe the new middle classes bringing their chubby only children to gorge on Big Macs and McNuggets. The parents sit, watching their children eat, each perhaps subliminally hoping that a child who is brought here might be swept up into the stream of globalized culture that is coursing through urban China, and somehow end up at Harvard Business School.

  I wander down the back alleys in the poorer parts of town, looking for the flip side of all the optimism and the downside of all the globalization, looking for some angry people, some losers in the economic food chain. I find plenty of people who lament the wealth gap, as they grind out a living in their low-paying jobs on the building sites, in the kitchens, in the markets of the city. But even in the most squalid alleyways, where people live crammed into tiny, dirty rooms, you hear the story over and over again: “Yes, life is hard, and our work is hard, but it’s a million times better than life in the countryside.”

  That’s the problem with Shanghai: you don’t really see many of China’s problems. Of course, you notice that the maglev from the airport is no more than a quarter full at best. And you notice there are some empty stores in the shiny new malls and an increasing number of beggars on the streets. But the speed and the glitz and the sheer exhilaration of being in the legendary city mean that Shanghai blinds the visitor to what lies beyond. If you visited only Shanghai, you would leave thinking that China is undoubtedly bound for greatness.

  One afternoon I visit Lu Xun Park in northern Shanghai, a beautiful oasis of green that honors China’s most famous writer of the early twentieth century. Lu Xun (pronounced Loo Shoon) is buried there in a large mausoleum. Nearly a hundred years ago, he was at the forefront of the attempt to diagnose China’s problems and prescribe a remedy. He wrote searingly about the weaknesses of Chinese culture and of the Chinese character. He wrote of antiquity and modernity and tried to find a path between the two.

  Lu Xun’s literary vehicle of choice was the short story, and his most famous selection came out in 1921, the same year that the Communist Party of China was formed. Its title was Na Han, which means “call to arms”—not a military call, but a metaphorical one, a cultural one, a call to wake up from the arrogance and conservatism that the Qianlong Emperor embodied in his response to Lord Macartney, and that was still, more than a hundred years later, preventing China from waking up to the need for deep psychological and cultural change. In the introduction to Na Han, Lu Xun wrote this paragraph, describing his homeland and its culture:

  Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn? But if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.

  Thus Lu Xun gave literary form to a call to arms that has echoed down through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. The stories in Call to Arms all followed this theme; that the Chinese lived in an iron house of Confucianism and needed to escape. They needed to wake up and not just change the political system, but change their whole way of thinking.

  There are many problems and imperfections in China’s recent urban development. But the fact that Shanghai has the maglev, the world’s first commercial magnetic levitation train, can be traced directly back to the call to arms issued by Lu Xun in 1921, and to other writers like him who wrote about China’s need for a psychological revolution. It is the logical progression of those calls. The whole of Shanghai’s development, the roads, the skyscrapers, the high-speed Internet, are all answers to those calls. Finally, finally, after a century, Shanghai is rising, as China is rising, on the back of a century of humiliation before 1949, and then a half century of Communist chaos that came after it. The question of whether China will open to the world seems to have been answered forever with a resounding “yes.” But what a tortuous, painful, winding road it has been to get here, and what a road there is still to travel.

  The day before I leave Shanghai I meet two young members of the Communist Party. I want to ask them about what it means these days to be Party members, and to find out if they are as confused as the radio host Ye Sha suggests.

  We meet in Starbucks, not far from the house where the Chinese Communist Party (usually referred to as the CCP) was founded in 1921. The old house has been turned into a museum—actually more of a shrine to the Communist Party—but it is largely empty, located as it is next to one of Shanghai’s most popular modern shrines, a shopping mall called New Heaven and Earth.

  The Party members, both women in their twenties, are typical of the smart, connected younger generation, a million miles from the militant Red Guards of their parents’ generation. Both have chosen English names.

  Lucy works for a large multinational corporation. She has long dark hair and a polite, responsible air that suggests she might have been student council president of her high school. She is a study in modern urban confidence and success. She speaks excellent English and clearly thinks deeply about important subjects.

  “Yes, Communism collapsed in Eastern Europe, but that was because they weren’t doing it right,” she says. “I know. You Westerners think that, after capitalism, there will still be capitalism. We Chinese think that after this stage of capitalism, there might eventually be Communism.”

  I open my eyes wide. “Really? You really believe that.”

  She nods.

  Emily looks over. She is smaller, with thick dark hair and big eyes. “Many people grow up in this educational environment,” she says, which I take to mean that she thinks Lucy has been brainwashed. “I believe less than Lucy,” she says. “I’m quite unsure about it all.”

  “Why did you join the CCP?” I ask them.

  “My grades were good. I was a responsible student. I have no regrets at all,” says Lucy. “I believe this party can bring us a stable society.”

  “Now, the Communist Party members have nothing to do with ideology, they are simply the best students,” explains Emily. “It is considered an honor to join the Party, and all the best students are asked to join. That was the same with me.”

  I point out the irony of this, which Emily has already seen. But Lucy is still in earnest. She is the perfect example of how the best-educated people are often the most pro-government.

  “We need to study what the leaders are thinking,” she says. “We feel good about studying this. It’s good. And as for Communism, you should understand it in your own way. It means you should be a good and helpful member of society.”

  Lucy then relates how, at a recent meeting of the Communist Party members within the big American multinational where she works, two books were handed out. One was published by the Communist Party and contained all the latest Party directives. The other was a company book on how to be a better salesperson.

  Lucy and Emily are typical members of the new, young, urban middle class. They are not out on the streets demanding more democracy, as their predecessors in the late 1980s were. They are enjoying the fruits of prosperity. They support the Party because they say it has given them opportunities they could not otherwise have had. Although they are very patriotic, they are not ideological in the least. They are individuals. They believe in romantic love. They have chosen their own jobs, their own boyfriends, their own lifestyles. The pursuit of happiness has been deeply enshrined in their minds, if not yet in their country’s constitution. In short, they are not unlike two young women in any country in the Western world. I put it to them what the radio show host Ye Sha says, that the young generation of China is lost and confused and doesn’t know what to believe in or how to behave.

  “Why do you say that about China?” asks Lucy. “What about the West? Do Western people have anything to believe in?

  “I’m not lost,” she continues. “I don’
t believe in Jesus or Buddha, but I believe in self-struggle, an effort to improve myself and my country. You don’t have to have a faith to have a meaningful life.”

  Again Emily, the more pensive of the two, is not so sure. “I had a period when I felt lost, confused, when I was in college,” she says. “Now I’ve come through it. But there is some confusion generally among young people. For instance, everyone watches Western TV programs, like Friends, like Desperate Housewives, and we’re totally aware of how people live in the West. Lots of girls, for instance, want to live with their boyfriends, but that clashes with their parents’ wishes.”

  “But our generation is completely different from our parents’ generation,” says Lucy. “It’s a different world now. We have to look after ourselves.”

  Emily nods. “We are the ziwo yidai, the Me Generation,” she says, a little wistfully. “We believe only in ourselves.”

  My final interaction with the Me Generation of Shanghai occurs that evening. While searching for the International Cemetery in the west of the city, I stumble across Shanghai’s first branch of the restaurant chain Hooters.

  Hooters, for the uninitiated, is a chain of restaurants in the United States whose waitresses tend to be somewhat underdressed and, shall we say, rather buxom. But to make sure no one thinks the name is referring to anything risqué, the symbol of the restaurant is a large owl. Consequently, the name in Chinese has been translated as “The American Owl Restaurant” (there are some double entendres that just don’t translate).

  Having never dined at Hooters in the United States, I felt slightly sheepish stepping inside, believing it to be the home of stag parties and sad single men. The only people looking as sheepish as me, though, are the other single white guys, of whom there are not many. Everyone else is having a fantastic time. Three Japanese women are there with their children. Some Chinese guys seem to have brought their dates; a couple of businessmen appear to be discussing some kind of deal, oblivious to the Hooters girls, in their skimpy orange shorts and skimpier white T-shirts. There seem to be far fewer sexual overtones than you might find in an American Hooters. Somehow, the whole thing has been transformed into a rather wholesome family dining experience.

  It’s somebody’s birthday, so the Hooters girls do a little dance, calling for some audience participation, which I manage to avoid, and soon two sensible, suited Chinese businessmen are standing on chairs waving their arms in the air alongside the scantily clad Hooters girls.

  The young woman serving my table appears to be the only one of the ten or so waitresses who doesn’t seem comfortable, nervously smiling at the customers she is serving. We begin chatting as she serves me my burger and fries. She is from the city of Wuhan, four hundred miles inland.

  “Do your parents know you’re working here?” I ask her.

  “No, they don’t,” she replies with a nervous laugh. “Tamen bu hui lijie. They wouldn’t understand.”

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “My wife doesn’t know I’m here. She wouldn’t understand either.”

  3. Things Flow

  The next morning I climb into a taxi at the Astor House Hotel and tell the driver to take me to the start of Route 312, in the far west of the city. Shanghai is huge and sprawling, and the journey takes more than an hour, even along the elevated expressways. I feel that sadness I always have when I leave Asia’s most dynamic city, but it’s exciting at last to be on the road.

  Route 312 makes an inauspicious start. The road creeps out from under the shadow of Shanghai’s Outer Ring Road, a huge, elevated expressway that encircles the city. An exit ramp brings traffic down from the ring road onto 312 as it emerges from among the forest of concrete pillars that support the expressway. Two men in white coats are standing giving haircuts for fifty cents on the traffic island around the pillars.

  I get out of the taxi, hitch my rucksack onto my back, and start to walk. As I wander along the sidewalk of the first segment of the road, I am approached by three women, clearly from the countryside. Each has a small baby strapped to her back.

  “DVD,” they mutter as they gather around me. “DVD.”

  The hold out a selection of DVDs with pornographic scenes printed upon them. I shake my head and move on. Another young woman holding a baby is begging, the story of her woes laid out on a piece of paper in front of where she sits on the sidewalk. Her husband has leukemia and has no money for treatment. No one is throwing money into her paper cup.

  Boasting two lanes in each direction, the road rapidly gathers confidence as it emerges from the shadow of the expressway. Beside it runs a bicycle lane, separated from the main thoroughfare. Beside the bicycle lane lies a broad sidewalk, and behind that a long row of stores, continuing along the roadside as far as the eye can see. There’s a carpet store, a car showroom selling Volkswagens, a huge furniture store called Homemart, and a branch of Kentucky Fried Chicken, of course. (There are already a thousand branches of KFC in China. A new one opens every other day.)

  The road itself is a crazy mélange of mobile humanity. Every type of human land transportation is here, heading in both directions, as though a conference on the history of road transport is being held somewhere and representatives of every era are hastening to attend. It’s like one of those evolutionary diagrams of man, emerging from the transportational ooze. People walking with their knuckles scraping the ground (not really), a scavenger pulling a three-wheeled cart, ringing a bell and shouting out to no one in particular. Men and women on simple, rickety bicycles, going barely faster than the pedestrians. Men and women, helmetless, zipping past on little scooters. Men and women with helmets on, clearly further up the evolutionary chain, buzzing in and out of the traffic on bigger scooters. Cars, pickups, cement mixers, local buses, long-distance buses, superdeluxe long-distance buses are all here too. Then, pulling up at a traffic light is the Homo erectus of this Darwinian scene. A shiny white 7 series BMW. Where are you going, Mr. BMW Man? And where did you get the money to buy that car?

  Route 312 itself used to be the main road west from Shanghai, but for decades it was little used, because only government officials had cars, and most freight traveled westward by rail. It is not a freeway, like an American interstate, but what’s known in Chinese as a guo dao, a national road, with turnings off to residential areas or stores, just like a normal, busy city road. Since the frenzy of road building began in the 1990s, the equivalent of U.S. interstates have now been built, and one of them, known as the A11, runs almost parallel to Route 312. But its tolls are high, so Route 312 is still by far the busier road.

  Beside the entrance to a huge wholesale vegetable market, two Tibetan women are selling jewelry out of a suitcase. Nearby, Muslim Chinese belonging to the Uighur ethnic group from northwest China stand at long charcoal stoves, turning over lines of yang rou chuanr, lamb kebabs, sprinkled with bright red spices. And of course ethnic Chinese traders are here too, dominating the scene, running the small stores beside the road or selling shoes or clothes or belts or ties, laid out on pieces of cloth on the sidewalk, selling ice cream and candy, and pineapple slices hygienically placed inside small plastic bags to protect them from the fumes of the road. A sign on the eastbound lane says PEOPLE’S SQUARE 15 KM. Nine miles to the center of Shanghai. In the other direction a sign announces my first destination. KUNSHAN 48 KM (30 miles).

  A truck goes by with the name of a company painted on the side in large Chinese characters: RUI XUN WU LIU, it says, which means “Rui Xun Logistics.” A few minutes later, I see another truck, this one belonging to Wang Jing Logistics. Every few minutes another “logistics” company truck drives past. It’s the boom business in today’s China: removals, relocation, moving anything of any sort is covered by logistics. The word in Chinese, such a wonderfully logical language, is wu liu, which translates literally as “things flow.”

  In the Western mind, a road trip conjures up images of the 1950s and ’60s, of Jack Kerouac, of beatniks and hippies hitting the road to find themselves, or lose
themselves, whichever they needed to do. In China, traveling by highway is a very new phenomenon, and Chinese people have not yet fallen in love with the open road. Rather, it is a marriage of convenience. They are traveling mainly out of necessity, to find work, in order to feed themselves and their families. To come up with a more appropriate American comparison, you have to travel back to the 1930s and the Okies of John Steinbeck novels, fleeing westward from the Dust Bowl to California. Most road trips in China these days are still more John Steinbeck than Jack Kerouac, and in celebration of the fact, I have brought along a copy of Steinbeck’s classic The Grapes of Wrath, which is tucked into the top pocket of my backpack.

  Tian Yabin has never read Steinbeck or Kerouac. He’s a twenty-seven-year-old advertising executive who says he earns about six thousand U.S. dollars per month. That’s about sixty times the wages of the average factory worker in Shanghai. He has a shaved head and a slightly squeaky voice, and he smokes a pipe, giving him an air of eccentricity unusual even among the nouveaux riches of Shanghai. Tian’s friends call him Tintin, after the French cartoon character. Well educated and well connected, Tian has flourished in the new China. He has bought his own apartment, travels abroad for vacations, and keeps up with the latest technology. But his real passion is his Japanese-made jeep.

  I’ve found Tintin through the Shanghai Off-Roader Jeep Club, of which he is a member, and have hooked up with him just near the start of Route 312. Each weekend, the jeep club members get together and drive out of the city for a day or two, exploring the surrounding area. Our convoy today is only three cars. The week before there were eight. As well as Tintin, the group includes another twenty-something jeep owner named Little Liu, a software programmer whom everyone calls Camel, and a fifty-something businessman called Old Zhang. Liu’s jeep has an engine problem, so he is riding with Tintin and me.