China Road

by Rob Gifford

  It then turns into a rather extraordinary evening. One after another, the reps stand up, introduce themselves, and tell what they used to do and how it was only when they found Amway that they discovered their real purpose in life; now they take home a thousand dollars a month.

  As the first woman speaks, people in the audience shout out “Dui! Dui! [Yes! Yes!]”—pronounced Dway—like worshipers shouting “Amen.”

  Then Ren Wei stands up to speak. In his earnest manner, he thanks Teacher Hu first of all and thanks everyone else for coming, and then, before beginning his speech, he turns toward me and thanks Mr. Smith. I do one of those movie double takes in which I turn around to see if there is another foreigner called Mr. Smith behind me, but it’s soon clear that I am Mr. Smith. From that point onward, every speaker who stands up thanks Teacher Hu, thanks everyone else, and then nods to me and thanks me, Mr. Smith, Our Foreign Friend, for coming. Perhaps they think that all foreigners are called Mr. Smith. Or perhaps, even here in the Gobi Desert, people are confusing me with Brad Pitt.

  “My grandchildren will remember my name,” says Ren, getting into his oratorical stride, appearing to mean every word, “because I am going to change our family’s fortunes. And I intend not just to make money for myself, but as I am more successful with Amway, I intend to give back to the society. Perhaps I will start a school for disadvantaged children. Because we must all put back into society, right? Dui bu dui?”

  “Dui! Dui!” say the audience. “Yes! Yes! Amen!”

  Finally, Teacher Hu himself stands up, whereupon Ren Wei starts a clapping pattern (with numbers) as though he were at a baseball game. “One, two…one, two, three…one, two, three, four…clap clap.”

  “You can’t choose where you were born, but you can choose your future,” booms Teacher Hu, to murmurs of “Dui, dui, dui” from the congregation.

  “Don’t settle for chabuduo,” he says. “Don’t settle for ‘more or less.’ It’s not good enough for you.”

  And so about twenty Chinese people in a run-down office building in a small Gobi Desert town sit and listen to a middle-aged former teacher’s exposition of the Chinese Dream.

  “You too can do it. You too can succeed. You too can be empowered. You too can have the car, the apartment, the respect.”

  The audience is listening, and remembering, and they will get up the next morning and go out to work in order to realize what they have heard. For those who seize the opportunity, this is part of the seismic shift that is going on. The possibility now exists to dream dreams that might actually be fulfilled. It is starting to change China, one person at a time, and create a new nation. A nation of slowly empowered individuals.

  At the end, everyone applauds one another. Teacher Hu thanks the group for coming and says that now we will divide into groups of five, introduce ourselves, and discuss the meeting. “It’s time to share,” he says.

  Two and a half thousand years of Confucianism and sixty years of Communist Party rule mean that Chinese people are not used to “sharing” in a way that seems normal in an American context. The Chinese in this respect are more like the British, if not somewhat worse, generally reluctant to open up about their emotions at all. That may be the reason that so many Brits stay so long in China. They are just relieved to find another group of people as emotionally dysfunctional as themselves.

  Four small groups of five (plus the rather incredulous Mr. Smith) retreat to different corners of the room, huddle together, and share.

  A woman with long black hair and large glasses says it’s her first time here, and she’s very interested. Another nervous-looking woman is too shy to say much. One man says he sees more clearly now his own failings, and in a very un-Chinese monologue admits that he needs to reach out and seize life for himself. I give a brief few words about what I am doing and say I hope they don’t mind if I write about them in my book. They seem excited at the prospect, and I thank them all for their hospitality.

  When the meeting ends, Ren Wei and Li Caijin escort me down the stairs to the front door. “No need to see me out,” I say, but in true, supremely polite Chinese fashion, they insist.

  “It’s amazing what you’re doing,” I tell them. I have absorbed the earnestness of the evening. I mean it completely.

  “You see,” says Li, taking me by the arm a little too firmly as we descend the echoey stairs, “we want to live. Right now we are just shengcun. We are just surviving. We want to shenghuo. We want to live! You know? We want to really live!”

  Those words have stayed with me, like almost no others on my whole trip across China. There could hardly be a better summary of everything that this crazy twenty-first-century Chinese revolution is about.

  “Okay, I’ll see you in New York then, or Paris, or London!” I smile as we shake hands. They smile back, and we part at the main entrance of the building. I wander back to my hotel in the warm evening air, asking myself why on earth I am leaving this wonderful country and pondering the Chinese Dream, and the American Dream, and wondering whether one is taking over from the other.

  16. Respect

  Somehow it feels wrong to be clean-shaven in the Gobi Desert. So the next morning I leave the razor in my wash bag, draw back the curtains, and cast an unshaven glance across the courtyard outside.

  Just below my second-floor window is a Western woman with bright orange nail polish on her fingers. I am able to appreciate this because she is doing taiji, the slow-moving Chinese form of exercise (often spelled tai chi in the West), in the courtyard just below my window. I have no idea who she is—probably the only other foreigner in Zhangye—but very slowly she is moving her arms and body in time with some centuries-old rhythm that she has apparently tapped into, here at the Zhangye Hotel.

  In the city’s massive central square, not far from the hotel, several dozen middle-aged and elderly Chinese women appear to be heading in the opposite direction spiritually, or aerobically at least. They are looking up at a giant TV screen, which looms over the square, and all are trying to follow the exercise lesson being shown on it. The screen is filled with five impossibly buff Chinese women doing a lively workout in time with some throbbing Western music. The leader is barking out commands. The cohort of somewhat less buff Gobi Desert grannies are trying to get their bodies in touch with the twenty-first century.

  For me, it’s another wonderful clear-blue-sky day, another gray Gobi Desert bus station, and another bus ride along the Mother Road. For some reason, all the ticket collectors at Zhangye’s small bus station, in control of every bus’s movement in and out of the town, are women. All are dressed in dull gray uniforms. More strikingly, they are all wearing the brightest red lipstick imaginable. It makes a rather arresting sight, as though they have decided to make a collective statement against the tedium of their jobs, the grayness of their uniforms, or the colorless expanse of the Gobi Desert. Or perhaps they all just like red lipstick.

  The buses they are directing are almost all full, mostly with construction workers heading west to find work. The camels have long since ceded their role as ships of the desert to the long-distance buses that ply Route 312, and traffic has increased enormously. The cargo has also changed. It is still about trade, of course, but it is also now about construction and communications.

  A massive project is under way, almost unnoticed by the world outside. China is busy constructing its western regions, just as the United States opened up its own West more than a hundred years ago. Beijing is trying to hook up its undeveloped west with the rest of the country, and as was the case for the United States, there are problems taming both the wild landscape and the local peoples.

  The project is called the xi bu da kai fa, which literally means “Great Opening Up and Development of the Western Regions.” (Some critics say the verb kai fa translates more correctly, and appropriately, not as “development” but as “exploitation.” In English it is often referred to simply as the “Go West” Campaign.) It was officially launched in 1999, but the cam
paign is the formalization of a policy of central government investment in the western regions that had begun earlier in the 1990s. Beijing says its aim is to raise the standard of living of people who live there, especially the ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, Tibet, and other remote provinces. That is no doubt true. What Beijing does not mention is the political advantage of buying off the local ethnic minorities in order to decrease the possibility of unrest. The gleaming tarmac surface of Route 312 is very much a part of that effort.

  The Silk Road has somehow permeated the Western consciousness, with its exotic images of camels lolloping along, laden down with spices, porcelain, and of course reams of raw silk in exquisite colors. The reality—grimy towns, poverty, bandits, filthy inns, endless barren desert—was rather less exotic. But many things have improved since Marco Polo came through nearly eight hundred years ago, and much of that change is due to Route 312. Better infrastructure and communications have been crucial in bringing development to China’s far-flung provinces. Today, the larger oasis towns on the route are bustling with life, but in between, many of the smaller settlements are still grimy desert towns, which offer little and expect less.

  Sitting beside me on the bus is a Muslim, a member of the Hui minority group, the descendants of Persian and Arab traders who settled in western China centuries ago. He says his name is Zhang Guoqing, but he adds proudly that his Islamic name is Mohamed Ismael, and that he speaks Arabic fluently. He has rolled up his long pants to keep cool, revealing a pair of almost transparent white socks, and black shoes with heels a little too high for any man not actively involved in some sort of Latin dancing. He in turn glances at my grubby cargo shorts, and especially at my hairy legs and filthy, sunburned feet, trapped in their favorite sandals. No self-respecting Chinese man would ever wear sandals without socks.

  Zhang is a merchant of the New Silk Road. He is a thirty-four-year-old cell-phone salesman who travels across the desert with a bag stuffed full of cellular phones. He stops at each oasis town, makes deals with the department stores or whoever else wants to do business, then moves on. Zhang has been traveling up and down Route 312 for seven years now. He says the new Route 312 has made a huge difference to his work. Traveling the old road on the old buses took forever, he says. Now the next town can be reached in just hours.

  “Over the last few years, everyone has wanted to own a cell phone,” he says. “It’s a status symbol. But now there are too many salesmen, and there is too much competition, so business is not as good as it used to be.”

  Zhang’s own phone is one of the latest Nokia models, much fancier than my own, which he looks at with a glance of satisfaction, as though the superiority of his phone has somehow avenged the Opium Wars.

  It can be embarrassing these days in China for the not so technically adept or the not so fashionably inclined Westerner. I win prizes in both categories. Chinese people are obsessed with new technology and are constantly looking over the shoulders of foreigners on planes and on buses, to check out what we’re doing, what we’re wearing, and how advanced our technology is. I have been castigated by a Chinese businessman for having an outdated laptop (it was about a year old), by a Beijing taxi driver for how shabby my car is (not a Mercedes or Audi, just a battered old Jeep Cherokee), and by any number of digital enthusiasts for my insistence on using a camera that needs film.

  So here is another live rail heading west: the unseen information superhighway that sizzles along the Hexi Corridor into northwest China. Salesman Zhang and his cell phones, the wired hotels and the Internet bars, they are all having a transformational effect on Chinese society, even this far west. In North America and Europe, cell phones and the Internet have changed society, but in many ways they have just made things that were already available more convenient. The impact in China has been far, far greater. At the start of 2007, there were already 137 million people in China on the Internet accessing information that was never accessible to them before. The cell phone too has transformed communications. At the start of 2007, China had more than 450 million cell-phone subscribers, with the total increasing by about 5 million every month. In some areas where there are not even land phones yet, people have leapfrogged directly to cell phones. All the way along the New Silk Road, there is perfect cell-phone coverage.

  Diagonally in front of me are two men who appear to be colleagues, one in his twenties, the other probably in his fifties. I start chatting with them, and they turn out to be seed salesmen, traveling to Jiuquan on business. Jiuquan (pronounced Jeo-chwen) is where I’m headed too.

  Sitting behind me is an older couple who used to work in the oil industry here in Gansu but have now retired back east to the coast. They’ve struck up a conversation with an oil worker sitting next to them, which I join in.

  “How were the roads back then, when you lived here?” I ask the couple.

  “There were almost no roads in the 1960s,” says the man, a youthful-looking sixty-year-old. “We didn’t need them, because we never needed to go anywhere. If we did, we would go by rail.”

  “This road,” says his wife, “the old Route 312 was not even paved.” She is tall and rather elegant, in spite of being cramped into the back row of the crowded bus, which is packed full of about thirty or forty people.

  The new Route 312 is straight and fast, a symbol of modernity that looks almost too modern for the harsh, barren environment of the Hexi Corridor. The new Route 312 has quickened the pulse of this part of China, a new artery that has improved access to the small towns here, in a way that the railroad could not. The road gives flexibility to the traveling salesmen to reach the smaller villages and towns, to bring the economic revolution even there.

  A slim pipeline is just visible a long way out in the desert to the right of the bus, pouring oil from the northwest in through the neck of China to feed the hungry east.

  “That’s for oil from the Tarim basin, going to be refined at Lanzhou,” says the oil guy, in his deep bass voice. The Tarim basin is one of China’s biggest oil fields. “They’re building another one into China from Uzbekistan.”

  All the different strands—the new Route 312 and the old one, the railroad and the information superhighway—make a huge difference to the people who live here. But I think perhaps the pipeline is more important even than the tracks and tarmac it runs beside. So much in China now depends upon oil. Its importance resonates silently down through every stratum of society. The Communist Party must keep the economy growing; otherwise the unemployed and underemployed could cause social unrest. To keep the economy growing, the Party must build new factories and create new jobs. (Some economists have calculated that 24 million new jobs must be created every year in order to do this.) To fuel the factories and the construction, China must have more oil. And to achieve that goal it is searching for oil within its own borders and going out into the world, making deals in Africa, and Central Asia, and Southeast Asia.

  “Has China got enough oil?” I ask the oil guy.

  “Not yet,” he says, staring out into the desert.

  Everyone retreats into their own thoughts, gazing out the bus’s windows, the unending yellow scrubland saying something different, no doubt, to each pair of eyes. The snow-covered Qilian Mountains still rise up to the south of the road; the desert extends beyond the horizon to the north. This is the final stretch of the Hexi Corridor, which ends at the “mouth of China,” the fort at Jiayuguan. We’re still some six hundred miles from Urumqi, and nearly a thousand miles from the end of the road.

  The bus rolls on, passing other, larger buses, and then being passed by blue East Wind trucks and the occasional black VW sedan. Flimsy curtains are drawn to block out the fierce desert sun.

  A wire fence separates the road from the open scrubland of the desert, and beyond the fence are small groups of people, walking around looking at the ground, and occasionally stooping to pick clumps of greenery from the dry desert earth.

  “What are they doing?” I ask.

  “They’re pi
cking facai,” shouts the younger seed salesman above the noise of the warm wind rushing in through the open windows. “It’s a type of edible grass. They sell it to Hong Kong.”

  “Is it tasty?”

  “Not really. But the name of the plant sounds like the words for ‘get rich’ in Cantonese, so the Hong Kongers like to eat it. They are very superstitious.”

  The ticket collector comes back to collect fares. Her nails are painted with intricate twirly patterns, her face is beautifully made up, and she looks far too glamorous to be a conductor on a long-distance bus across the Gobi Desert. In a different life, she could have been in Hollywood. A younger woman with a baby sitting in the row diagonally in front of me is staring over her shoulder from her seat, and she smiles shyly when I catch her looking at me.

  “Your baby is very fat,” I tell her.

  She beams back at me with pride.

  “What do you think about China?” the older seed salesman suddenly asks me. He’s a balding man, with a kind face, who says his name is Zhou (pronounced Joe).

  “Wo hen xihuan.” I smile inanely. “I like it.”

  “What do most people in the West think about China?” asks his young colleague. I tell him that people in the West are a little confused about China because it’s a country that seems very capitalist but is run by a Communist Party.

  “We’re all confused about China,” says Mr. Zhou with a smile. “It’s a confusing time for many people. There is so much change.”

  There’s a brief pause. I’m tired of asking the same questions, so I try to think of something new. “What do you want most from the West?” I ask Mr. Zhou.

  He doesn’t hesitate. “What we want most is respect,” he blurts out, as though he has waited all his life for a foreigner on a bus to ask him this question. “Yes, we want respect more than anything. I want to go abroad, like you people when you come here. You come to China, and we respect you because you are wealthy and civilized. That’s what I want too. I want to go to your country, and be respected, and get a good job there and not be looked down on.”