China Road

by Rob Gifford

  Most of the movement along Route 312 is east, toward Shanghai, as migrants flow into the cities to find work. These four fine representatives of the new Chinese middle class are going against the flow, heading west.

  Tintin weaves in and out of the traffic, as if he’s trying to lose the others, not lead them. As we move farther out of Shanghai, factories line the road. This is the industrial hinterland of Shanghai, which fuels the city’s growth, pollutes the city’s air, and keeps the price of consumer goods around the world ridiculously low. Everything is made here, everything that America buys—from Barbie dolls and Christmas tree lights, sneakers and clothing, to laptops and cell phones.

  Entrances to factories, showrooms, and markets flash past in a blur of dull, industrial gray. The Xijiao Wood Market, the Donghua Building Materials Market, the Fengbang Horticultural Village are selling everything you might need to build a country from scratch. One store is simply selling pillars. Ionic, Doric, or Corinthian, take your pick.

  All along the road are yawning building sites where more factories will soon spring up. There is so much earth being moved on these vast construction sites it is a wonder the world isn’t tipped off balance. Vehicular representatives of every earthmoving equipment company on the planet have been sent to participate. Kobelco, Komatsu, Hyundai, Sumitomo, Caterpillar, they are all here, almost outnumbering the cars, gorging on the rich soil beside the road. Cranes rise out of building sites too, wrestling with the hulking electricity pylons along the route, competing to form the ugliest backdrop.

  To a postmodern foreigner, traveling westward along this road is a journey back in time, to an industrial past that his own country has largely left behind. The whole scene feels like desecration. To the premodern Chinese migrants, traveling eastward into an industrial future they have never known, the smokestacks and the factories announce salvation, symbols at last of modernity and an opportunity to earn more than they have ever earned before.

  “I like your car,” I tell Tintin, genuinely impressed.

  He adjusts his sunglasses, looks at me in his rearview mirror, then basks in the praise of his foreign passenger. “It’s a smooth ride,” he concurs in his squeaky voice, clearly feeling nothing more need be said.

  He chats with Old Zhang on the CB radio and flicks on his Global Positioning System. “Most of the roads in China are now on GPS,” he says. “They’ve been mapping it for years now. If I get the time, I want to head out to the Muslim northwest next summer, and really make use of it.”

  Tintin has heard about that trip from his friend, Little Liu, who drove there last year. “You can do it in five days if you drive non-stop,” enthuses Liu.

  The Muslim northwest of China, at the far end of Route 312, beyond the Gobi Desert, is where I am heading. It is clearly also the cool destination for any self-respecting, SUV-owning yuppie these days, like heading for California on Route 66 in the 1950s. Many of China’s new rich are fascinated by the wilder corners of their country, partly because those areas are so different from eastern China. And if you can say you have been to Xinjiang, or Tibet (or even better, Thailand or America), your neighbors know that you have money to travel.

  “There are lots of interesting ethnic groups who are part of our country but not like us,” Little Liu explains. “The Uighur Muslims, the Tibetans. They’re very wild, you know.”

  Route 312 is just one of several roads heading west, but it’s the only one that goes all the way to Kazakhstan. There is something rather satisfying about knowing that it stretches three thousand miles, that I’m at the start of something very long and symbolically very grand. Small white concrete posts appear beside the road, with NATIONAL ROAD 312 inscribed in red, and the number of kilometers from Shanghai written underneath.

  Suddenly, the road widens. Now it is three lanes each way, but the concrete barrier down the middle disappears, and the enforced order evaporates. Cars pull out from factory gates without warning. Others do U-turns across the road. An old man on a bicycle suddenly appears, pedaling against the traffic in the fast lane in front of us. Tintin doesn’t even comment but simply swerves to avoid him, as though this is a normal occurrence.

  “This doesn’t feel very Communist,” I suggest, gazing out at mile after mile of factories. It looks how I imagine Pittsburgh (or Manchester, England) might have looked in about 1890.

  Tintin laughs, as if to say “Who cares?” and we talk about how practical and unideological the Chinese are. I tell them of the time I visited a racetrack outside Beijing where people were clearly placing bets on the horses. I was astounded to discover that this was going on, since gambling is illegal in China. I thought I would give it a try too, so I approached what looked like the betting window and said that I would like to place a bet. The woman told me that I couldn’t place a bet (betting is illegal in China, she confirmed), but if I wanted to, I could place a guess on one of the horses.

  A guess! I could place a guess on a horse! So I put down twenty yuan ($2.50), and stood cheering the horse on, hoping that my guess would win me some money. The horse didn’t win, but it didn’t matter. I would have paid a lot more than $2.50 for the experience and what it told me about modern China. That a horse-race track (not some secret basement gambling joint but an out-in-the-open, everyone-can-see-you horse-race track) was able to operate openly, taking bets on horses, simply by calling the bets something else is quite fantastic. And so it is with China’s political or economic system. Call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Call it whatever you want. If the Communist Party needs a semantic fig leaf, that’s fine, even though everyone knows that, in many parts of China, it is in fact raw industrial capitalism.

  Kunshan is a city of more than a million people in its own right, originally the hometown of one of China’s most famous ancient opera styles. Now, though, it is a sprawling mass of factories and development, completely joined to Shanghai in the east and to the city of Suzhou in the west. Eventually, the signs confirm that Kunshan has arrived. I pull out my cell phone and make a call to a Taiwanese factory manager, a friend of a friend I had spoken to the day before. We drive around for a while trying to find his place. Everywhere you look, it is just factory after factory, all of them annoyingly similar: a large retractable metal gate in front of a long, squat building clothed in white tiles, from which comes the sound of whirring machinery.

  Eventually, we find the one we are looking for, and the manager comes out to meet us. He is a friendly, relaxed type named Mr. Yang, who has left his wife and family back in Taiwan and joined the tens of thousands of Taiwanese businessmen investing in Kunshan. The city is known locally as Little Taipei, after the Taiwanese capital.

  I jump out of the jeep, thank Liu and Tintin for the ride, and head back to where Camel and Old Zhang are parked just behind to shake their hands too, wishing them well on their day out, heading west. They drive off back toward Route 312, to continue their adventure.

  Mr. Yang’s factory is making that most essential of exports, artificial grass for golf driving ranges around the world. It is the usual cookie-cutter factory, of which there are thousands along the Chinese coast, from Shanghai down to Hong Kong. There are of course some shocking labor rights abuses in Chinese factories, where workers are locked in and forced to toil in near-slavelike conditions. The conditions at this factory are more typical: basic but not bad. The workers have all traveled here from inland, by road or rail, and they receive $120 a month, plus the possibility of overtime.

  Stop at any factory here, and you will hear the same stories. “I’m a farmer. I earn more here in a month than I did in a year growing rice. Yes, it’s hard work, but it’s worth it. I’m putting my brother through high school. My wages are helping to support my parents back home.”

  Multiply this factory by thousands upon thousands upon thousands, and you have the start of the transformation of a nation. The area known as the Yangtze Delta, or sometimes in Chinese as the Golden Delta because it is producing so much “gold,” compri
ses hundreds of factory towns like Kunshan that together cover an area around Shanghai about the size of Kentucky (or slightly bigger than Portugal). Chinese statistics say that this particular sea of factories produces goods that make up roughly 20 percent of the value of the Chinese economy. That would mean that if the Yangtze Delta were an independent country, its economy would rank as the world’s seventeenth largest, just below Indonesia and Australia, and above South Africa, New Zealand, and Thailand.

  Mr. Yang is not thinking about such macroeconomics. He is just trying to get more orders from the golf ranges of North America. He seems to have excellent relations with his staff. We all sit laughing and joking over a basic but tasty dinner in the factory cafeteria. I had planned to head for Nanjing tonight, but after dinner Mr. Yang suggests we go sing some karaoke, which seems like too good an invitation to decline. So, with several of the workers who are left in the cafeteria, we jump into Mr. Yang’s van and head for the center of Kunshan.

  In China, wherever there are people, there are karaoke parlors. In fact, where there are no people, there are karaoke parlors. There is probably a karaoke parlor on the Chinese side of Mount Everest.

  Mr. Yang drives us to a very fancy one nearby, and I pay for a room, which is upholstered with purple velvet. The favored songs are Taiwanese, and not just to please their bosses. Just as the Pakistanis love Indian films, so for Old Hundred Names, music bridges the political divide with the archenemy across the Taiwan Strait. All of the workers sing a song, some sing two, as I manage to put off taking part myself. Soon, though, they won’t let me defer any longer, so I flick through the menu, past the Carpenters, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jackson 5, and past George Michael’s “Last Christmas” (which I secretly really want to sing), until I find a song that suits the occasion. The workers applaud politely as a sad, out-of-tune, but singularly appropriate rendition of “Desperado” by the Eagles croaks out into the hot Wild West summer night.

  The next morning, I find a taxi and head toward Zhenjiang, a city about three quarters of the way from Shanghai to Nanjing. Taxis are cheap and convenient in China and, of course, have the advantage over buses of allowing you to stop when you want. I plan to make only a brief stop in Zhenjiang (pronounced Jun-jyahng), a sort of personal pilgrimage to visit memorials to two Ocean People whose lives have had an impact on my own.

  The coastal megalopolis of Shanghai, which has sprawled to encompass Kunshan and then the ancient city of Suzhou, has extinguished the agricultural past of southern Jiangsu province. But as Route 312 leaves Suzhou behind, a little greenery begins to appear between the towns. We pass the grimy industrial cities of Wuxi and Changzhou before reaching Zhenjiang, which turns out to be a wonderful place, full of surprises. It is famous for its production of vinegar, the smell of which lingers everywhere, and there is a surprisingly good museum of traditional Chinese art, porcelain, and bronzes. This is also the first place where you can see the Yangtze River, which has run parallel to, but out of sight from, Route 312 since Shanghai. The river is a beautiful sight to behold from the high ground at the center of Zhenjiang, as wide here as an inland sea, glistening timelessly beyond the changing city.

  Zhenjiang (formerly spelled Chinkiang) was in the second wave of treaty ports that were forced open by the European powers after the Second Opium War, in 1860. Its name means “Garrison on the River,” and it is still one of the busiest ports on the Yangtze.

  The city had been home to two Ocean People who were crucial in shaping foreigners’ views of China, and especially in bringing the lives of Old Hundred Names, the ordinary Chinese people, to the attention of the Western world. I had read both their writings as a student and they had both drawn me deeper into my fascination with China.

  The first was the American author Pearl Buck, who moved here as a baby in 1892 and grew up in Zhenjiang, the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries. The gray brick house in which she lived with her parents, Absalom and Caroline Sydenstricker, still stands, preserved as a museum by the city government. It has a wonderful view out over the city to the mighty Yangtze. You can almost imagine little Pearl Sydenstricker and her brother playing in the garden, chatting away with their Chinese nanny. Pearl went to boarding school in Shanghai from 1907 to 1909, then returned to the United States to attend college in Virginia, graduating in 1914. She then returned to China and spent most of the next twenty years here.

  Buck’s writing on China brought the country into the Western mind in a way it had not been described before. Chinese writers in the 1920s and ’30s were caught up in the internal politics of the country, trying to stir China to revive itself, and so were not widely read in the West. Many Western writers at that time still had a condescending, colonial tone toward China. Buck’s novel The Good Earth, by contrast, painted a largely sympathetic picture of an ordinary Chinese farmer and his family, and their attachment to the land. Like many people, when I first read it, I was struck by the dignity with which Pearl Buck portrayed the Chinese people, and a realistic tone that I had never before encountered in Western writing about China. Here was an author with a deep love for the Chinese people. The Good Earth is a story about the lives and loves, the hopes and fears of Old Hundred Names, but it is also a universal tale that connected their lives with ordinary Westerners in a new way. The book sold 1.8 million copies in its first year and won Buck the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932. She went on to win the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.

  The other notable Westerner linked to Zhenjiang is James Hudson Taylor, an Englishman who had come to the city as a missionary almost forty years before Pearl Buck’s family. Taylor felt a divine call to China from a very early age. He arrived in Shanghai in 1854, age twenty-two, and went on to spend most of the next fifty years here, founding the China Inland Mission in 1865, with the aim of evangelizing the interior of China. Taylor was a revolutionary figure in the missionary community of the Victorian age. He caused a stir in the 1850s, when he decided not to live in the foreigners’ compounds, as missionaries had done up until that point, but to live among the Chinese people. Taylor was one of the first Western missionaries to adopt Chinese dress, and he insisted that all members of the China Inland Mission do the same. He too cared deeply about Old Hundred Names, and about bringing both their spiritual and their material plight to the notice of the West.

  Though sometimes criticized as being the “spiritual arm” of the imperialists, many of the missionaries were deeply committed to China and had a great love for the country. Their impact was immense, and not just in conversions. They were a progressive force, bringing modern education and medical expertise to China, and emphasizing the need to teach girls, who were largely denied education in traditional China.

  Taylor’s wife, Maria, died in Zhenjiang from cholera in 1870, when she was only thirty-three. Two of his children also died there. But Taylor stayed on in China for most of his life. He died in 1905 in the city of Changsha, and his body was brought by boat downriver to Zhenjiang, to be buried next to his beloved Maria. During the madness of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, when anything foreign was attacked, the small international cemetery in Zhenjiang was desecrated by Red Guards and the tombstones torn down. They lay abandoned until recently, when some local Christians found Taylor’s tombstone, restored it, and placed it in a specially built little mausoleum beside their church.

  Before I leave Zhenjiang, I drop by the beautiful little nineteenth-century church and ask the young pastor if I can see Taylor’s rebuilt tomb. The pastor is gracious and welcoming, and goes to get the key. He tells me that so many people come to church on Sundays that they have to hold several services.

  Once upon a time, long ago and far away, in the first flush of youth and the first flush of faith, I had read Taylor’s biography, and it had affected me deeply. I was already considering whether to enter the ordained ministry, and reading the book made me think perhaps I should be involved in some kind of church work in China. I went to talk to the pastor of my church in England ab
out it. He is still the person outside my family whom I admire more than anyone on the planet, and knowing of my interest in international affairs, he said to me, “I think that sort of canvas might prove a little small for you.” I remember his words exactly. They surprised me, because I had always thought that the human soul was as large a canvas as you could find. In the end, though, for many and varied reasons, my pastor’s perception proved correct, and the flow of my life changed completely. But, like your first love, you never really forget your first hero. Nor do you ever forget the road not taken. I often look back at the fork in the road at which I stood, and the choice I made, and what might have been. And I stand for a very long time that hot summer day, just looking at the tombstone of James Hudson Taylor.

  4. The Unfinished Revolution

  History hangs heavy over China. Like a vapor that used to be sweet but has somehow imperceptibly turned bad, it seeps into every corner and silently makes its way into the mind of every Chinese person. Sometimes you feel the Chinese don’t know quite what to do with their five thousand years of history.

  In the Western world, we love history. A visit to Colonial Williamsburg, or Philadelphia, or St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, or the Colosseum in Rome is a positive experience that fills us with undeniable satisfaction. There are no doubt many reasons, but I think the main one is simply that we won. History for Ocean People led to the two most crucial elements of our societies: democracy and prosperity.

  In China, by contrast, there seems to be a great tension in people’s minds about history. All Chinese people know that their history used to be magnificent. Chinese civilization began its rise to world dominance in the seventh and eighth centuries, and reached its zenith in the twelfth century, while Europe was still in the Dark and Middle Ages. Many people in the West know about the Big Four inventions, which China came up with long before the West: paper, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. But the Chinese were also responsible for a whole treasure trove of other inventions that found their way into Western life: the sternpost rudder, the iron-chain suspension bridge, deep drilling techniques, canal locks, the kite, and the crossbow, to name but a few. At that time, China was vastly more powerful, wealthy, and technologically advanced than Europe or anywhere else. In fact, it was China’s advancement, and the desire this created in Europeans for luxuries they so clearly lacked, that was one of the preconditions for Europe’s rise. When British envoy Lord Macartney arrived in 1793, China was the export superpower; its silk, tea, and porcelain were in demand around the world (especially in Europe). It was the European powers who, though the Industrial Revolution would soon make them strong, were paying for Chinese luxury goods at that time with cash and narcotics such as opium.