China Road

by Rob Gifford

  The inside of the church is simple. Some pictures of Jesus on the walls and just bare, low benches for pews. An altar at the front has the large Chinese character ai, meaning “love,” written on it in bright red. The character is the focus of the little church, like a simple manger in a Renaissance painting, radiating light out to a stable and to the world. The character attracts my attention, partly perhaps because it is written in a striking red, which jumps out from the browns and grays and greens of the rural church. But the character also seems to clang loudly against everything around it in the countryside. Chairman Mao, like Confucius before him, offered many things to the Chinese people, but love was not one of them. Perhaps that is why the churches are now full.

  There are about forty people in the congregation, young and old, mostly local farmers, many looking as though they have walked in straight from the fields. They are fascinated by the white man in their midst. One of the Three Grannies, eighty-three years old, says she has never seen a Westerner before.

  They do not have a pastor of their own and are waiting for the itinerant preacher to arrive. He preaches at several churches every Sunday, and one male member of the church, who wears very thick glasses and turns out to be the organist, says proudly that the pastor has been to seminary. Many of China’s rural pastors barely have a high school education, let alone seminary training, so it is a source of great pride to this congregation that their pastor is well educated. I ask them questions about their church and about themselves, and I hear familiar tales of persecution because of their faith in the 1950s and ’60s, and then a resurrection of the church in the 1980s and after. Christ is providing them with something other than Route 312 in which to place their hope.

  Before the Communist Party came to power, in 1949, there were roughly 3 million Catholics and 750,000 Protestants in China. When the Communists kicked out Western missionaries after 1949, Chinese Christians became almost immediate targets of persecution. Western Christians feared for the survival of the Chinese church.

  A few official churches were allowed by the Party in the 1950s, to give the illusion of religious freedom, but most Christians were forced either to renounce their faith in favor of the Communist Caesar or be sent to jail or labor camp. Tens of thousands of Christians spent decades in horrific conditions as a result. Then when Mao died, in 1976, social controls were loosened a little, many Christians were released from jail, and more churches were allowed. Many still refused to join the “official” churches, believing the ministers installed in such churches were stooges of the government. They insisted on meeting in their homes, in so-called house churches. The Communist Party would often persecute house-church Christians and try to close down their congregations, sometimes simply by demolishing their homes.

  As with early Christianity in Rome, persecution led to the growth, not the death, of the Chinese church. Now, even conservative estimates put the total number of Christians at around 75 million (about 15 million Catholics and about 60 million Protestants). That is only about 6 percent of the population, but still more than the 70 million members of the Chinese Communist Party.

  Since the 1980s, the church has gone through several decades of astonishing growth, filling the spiritual vacuum left by the demise of Communism. The Party has now quietly accepted that it will not be able to get rid of religion. In fact, amazingly, Chinese officials will admit off the record that Chinese people need something to believe in. But the growth in numbers does not mean that all Christians are treated well, this again being a choice that comes down to local officials. If they don’t like Christianity, they can make life difficult for believers, as they can for anyone. If they don’t mind Christianity, then life is smoother, as it seems to be here in Shuangzhao. I have visited villages in eastern China where the local officials even encourage Christianity. The Christians there are the only ones obeying the law, and paying their taxes, they say.

  Half an hour after the service is due to start, a young man with a friendly face approaches and says it looks as if the pastor is not coming. Everyone looks around rather disconsolately. Granny Two mutters something under her breath. Then the younger man has an epiphany.

  “The yang ren, the Ocean Person, can preach the sermon!”

  Everyone’s eyes turn to me, and there’s a very slight pause as the idea sinks in, to them and to me. I protest that I’m not used to preaching sermons, and certainly not in Chinese. The man is insistent, his eyes shining at the brilliance of his suggestion. Unfortunately, the whole church is soon also converted to the idea. Everyone gathers around me, yakking away in heavily accented Mandarin that I barely understand, saying yes, I would be the one to preach. God had led me here, they say, and so I must preach. No one has even asked me if I am a Christian.

  “You can’t leave here until you’ve preached us a sermon!” Granny Three says, grabbing my arm.

  “But I’m not qualified to preach sermons. I haven’t been to seminary.”

  There is no escaping. The smiles broaden, and the imploring becomes more insistent. I feel I can’t just leave them in the lurch, so finally I agree. I grab a Chinese Bible, and remembering my conversation with the hermit just days before, I stand up and preach on John 14:6. “Jesus said, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father except through me.”

  Heads nod politely as I preach hesitantly at the front. The Three Grannies squint through their glasses at the strange sight. A child sitting at the front whispers something inaudible in his mother’s ear. When the sermon is over, I suggest we say a prayer, and I say one myself out loud, in Chinese. The congregation then starts praying out loud, one person after another, overlooking the rather poor sermon I have just preached and thanking God for this Ocean Person who has delivered the message, praying that God will bless him and them, and then saying simply, “Thank you, God, for your love.”

  There is a purity and an intensity to Christian believers in China, and it overflows in their prayers. Mention Christianity to ordinary Chinese people, and they are not burdened by visions of crusading soldiers, fornicating popes, or right-wing politicians. They have heard about this belief relatively late in the faith’s long and winding history, and for them it is a matter of the heart. This is perhaps how it was supposed to be, I think to myself, as the final “Amen” rises from the congregation.

  They all open their eyes and look up from their prayers. A few of them seem surprised to see I’m still standing there. I suggest we sing a hymn, and the man with thick glasses sitting behind the ludicrously decrepit old organ cranks out the tune of the final hymn, which everyone joins in. The singing over, I wish them many blessings and thank them for their hospitality. The Three Grannies rise slowly in unison and ask me to stay for lunch. I explain that I must reach Pingliang by evening.

  “Pingliang?” repeats Granny One, as though it’s the end of the earth. “He’s going to Pingliang,” she explains loudly to Granny Two, who has taken hold of my hand and is showing no sign of letting go.

  “Pingliang?” asks Granny Two. “Well, if you’ve got to be in Pingliang by sundown, you’d better get on the road.” She looks deeply into my eyes and smiles a toothless smile, and we all move toward the door and walk out to the road together.

  Elvis and his wife have been sitting patiently in the car all this time, unaware of the spiritual drama that has been unfolding inside the church. But they don’t seem too annoyed by the wait. They’re off on an expenses-paid trip to Lanzhou, so stopping for a couple of hours is no problem, although they seem bemused by my interest in the intricacies of rural life.

  It’s lunchtime by the time we drive away from the church, so not far down the road, Elvis pulls over at a row of rather grubby restaurants for something to eat. We choose one of the larger ones and step inside. An attractive woman emerges from behind a curtain at the back of the room. She’s wearing a ridiculously fancy dress and heavy makeup, and she looks at me as though I might be wanting more than just a bowl of noodles. The door behind the
curtain is ajar, and I can see a bed in it. This is clearly a one-stop shop, where truck drivers, or anyone on the road, can stop to fulfill all their bodily needs. And over it all, a picture of Chairman Mao looks down from the dirty, peeling wall. Welcome to modern China, Chairman. It’s all coming around full circle.

  I don’t know what the woman in the flowery dress was serving up behind the curtain, but the food she cooked was delicious. We’re gradually leaving Rice Territory now, and entering Noodle Territory. The influence of the Muslim northwest seeps eastward into the food, the smells, the looks of the people and the music. Along with a steaming bowl of thick beef noodles, the lunch table heaves with a plate of lamb kebabs, some spicy chicken, plus a few dishes I don’t even recognize. One of the great things about traveling in China is that the food is so good. You can be in the middle of nowhere, show up at some little shack like this one, and be served a delicious stir-fried meal. KFC and McDonald’s may be making inroads into people’s taste buds in the cities, but for the majority of Chinese people, traditional Chinese food—so different region by region—provides some welcome continuity in an era of upheaval. And people have meat now, not once a month, not once a week, but every day.

  The most barren parts of Shaanxi, including the former Communist stronghold of Yan’an, are farther north, out of reach of Route 312, but even here the black road winds its way through an increasingly yellow landscape. It’s known as the loess plateau, a phrase rarely used in the West outside loamy geological circles but used all the time by English-speaking Chinese people. In Chinese, as usual, the word is much more logical: huang tu gao yuan, literally “yellow earth high plain.” The loess plateau stretches between the North China Plain, where Beijing is located in the east, and the Gobi Desert in the west. Much of the land here is over four thousand feet in altitude, with the Great Wall forming the plateau’s boundary to the north. The yellow earth has always been difficult to cultivate and is prone to water erosion. It rarely rains here, but when it does, it can reshape the landscape. A heavy rainfall can cause great chunks of the land to drop away, and the whole region is riven with ravines and loess cliffs, where the soil has collapsed like a great melting yellow iceberg.

  Though not fertile on the surface, underground this region has some of the nation’s richest deposits of coal, and not far to the northeast of Route 312 is a whole belt of coal-mining towns. China produces around 35 percent of the world’s coal, and mining provides many people in the hopeless small towns of Shaanxi with their only possibility of employment. It also reports around 80 percent of global deaths in mining accidents each year. More than five thousand miners die in an average year in China’s inefficient, chronically unsafe coal mines (and those are just the ones who are reported). That is more than one hundred times the number killed in American mines.

  It is one of modern China’s most brutal economic food chains. The government needs coal to fuel the factories to keep the economy growing to prevent social discontent. Unscrupulous mine owners know they can make a lot of money selling coal to the hungry Chinese economic machine, so they maximize production, at the expense of safety. Poverty-stricken miners, with little hope beyond their next paycheck, go down the mine shafts, even though they know they are unsafe. Their lives are a commodity seemingly more expendable than the coal that they produce. The government launches occasional crackdowns on illegal mining and tries to implement safety standards, but as everywhere in China, such crackdowns are at odds with the general need to keep the economy growing, so the local snakes of regional officialdom rarely listen to the supposedly strong dragon in Beijing.

  Mr. and Mrs. Elvis wait patiently for me as I get out of the car every five or ten miles to talk to farmers in the field. We pull up outside some caves set just back from the road and talk to the families who live in them. The caves have proper wooden doors and windows at the front, and interiors that disappear deep into the cliffs. The farmers say they are very warm in winter and very cool in summer, and they invite me inside. We chat about the struggle to make ends meet on the edge of the loess plateau. The people are poor but hospitable, and we sit and talk and laugh together, and I wonder at their ability to endure such hardships and still welcome a stranger like a long-lost son. All of the families have children in the cities. Some have traveled to Xi’an, some westward to Lanzhou and even Urumqi, cities along Route 312 that I will be visiting. None of them relies solely on farming anymore.

  There are two major problems for people living in this poverty-stricken corner of China, which expose the ecological and social fragility of China lurking not far below the supposed superpower exterior. Each issue is causing tears in the fabric of Chinese society and could come to have major implications for the country.

  First of all, there is no water in northern China. The rivers have all dried up, the people say, and they have to trek a couple of miles to collect drinking water from a standpipe in the nearest town. This is a huge problem. The Yellow River, which flows from the Tibetan Plateau through the yellow earth of Shaanxi and should empty into the East China Sea, is so overexploited that in eighteen of the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century there were periods when it failed to reach the sea. In one year, 1997, it failed to reach the sea for 226 days, and for much of that year it didn’t even reach Shandong, the last province it is supposed to pass through before it reaches the ocean. This is an extraordinary situation for what is the world’s fourth-longest river. The government has now launched a plan called Nan Shui Bei Diao, the “South-to-North Water Diversion Project,” a multibillion-dollar scheme to build three canals that will divert water north to the Yellow River from the Yangtze.

  Much of the water that is available is dangerously polluted, with local officials unprepared to treat sewage or factory outflow or close down polluting factories, for fear of slowing down economic growth. If growth slows here, as everywhere in China, social unrest is likely to increase.

  The water table in north China is dropping by an average of seven feet per year, as city officials drain underground aquifers for the water their cities desperately need.

  The situation has reached crisis point.

  The other big problem in this poor, poor region is that few of the sons of the farmers can find a wife. Many women aborted female fetuses in the early 1980s, when the one-child policy was introduced, because if they could have only one child, they wanted it to be a son. Now that generation of men has come to marrying age, and there are too few women available. Again, the problem is the same all over China. The government says China will be short 30 million brides by the year 2020. One of the mothers I meet says the only hope is that her twenty-three-year-old son will go to the city and meet a migrant girl there. “He will never find a wife here,” she says. “And even if he does, the bride-price will be too high.” The market economy is working, even in mate selection.

  I had the previous year met a group of North Koreans who had escaped into China and fled inland to Ningxia, quite near to where I am now. They had said there were many North Korean women there who had been sold by middlemen as wives to the local Chinese peasants. Soon after I finished my trip, the Chinese press reported the detention of sixty-nine women from Burma who had been smuggled into Henan province, through which I’d just passed, and sold for about twenty-five hundred dollars each to Chinese farmers desperate for wives. The official gender ratio in 2005 was 118 boys born for every 100 girls, but in some villages, the ratio is as much as 140 to 100.

  Across rural China, there are millions of stories like these. Lack of water, lack of women, lack of opportunities, despite the new mobility brought by the roads and the rail network. Rural China is changing, and some farmers’ lives are being transformed. Many of the rhythms of rural life have been broken. The mind-set of farmers is changing too. But it’s not an easy transition, and they’re coming from a level of subsistence that is very low indeed. In urban China, you can see the pursuit of happiness emerging. In rural China, it is still the pursuit of survival. Think
about the rural characters in the novels of a writer like George Eliot. Think Thomas Hardy. Think the end of The Mayor of Casterbridge: “Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain.” That is where China’s farmers are coming from, the place from which some 750 million people are trying to escape. Now, some opportunities are there, as they never have been before, and slowly a road is being made by many, out of the centuries-old poverty of the countryside. But it is a long road, and a difficult one.

  Finally, as the shadows lengthen in the evening sun, Elvis, Mrs. Elvis, and I reach the city of Pingliang. The new expressway, with its more direct route to Lanzhou, has taken a lot of traffic away from Pingliang, but even here, there are construction sites all around. As usual, there is one big hotel in town, and I check in. It costs about twenty dollars for a reasonable room and bathroom. As usual there are many large SUVs parked outside, most of them with official license plates. Right outside the entrance is a karaoke bar. Close your eyes and you could be in a small city anywhere along Route 312. The architecture, the construction, the karaoke bars, the feeling of modest improvement in lifestyle, the absence of any signs of abject poverty, but the feeling that it is going to take a long, long while to reach anything beyond “moderate prosperity.”

  It’s been a long day’s driving. After a quick meal together, we say good night and turn in early, the distant wails from the karaoke bar echoing into the warm summer evening.

  The next morning, I’m up bright and breezy and ready to hit the road. I head through to the hotel dining room, knowing that, since this is a completely Chinese hotel, there will be almost nothing I want to eat. Considering the universal deliciousness of Chinese cuisine, it has always been a mystery to me how Chinese breakfasts could be so bad. You would think after five thousand years of continuous civilization they could come up with something a little better than pickled vegetables and rice gruel. I consider berating the staff on this point but realize I don’t know how to say “Rice Krispies” in Chinese, so I grab a couple of sweetened bread rolls and sit down in the corner of the dining room with a pot of Chinese tea.