China Road

by Rob Gifford

  The old couple seem slightly surprised by both the passion and the eloquence of Zhou’s response, but they are nodding their heads. So is everyone else.

  There is another pause. The desert moves on outside. The quality of the new road, here as elsewhere along my route, has already subliminally created in me something of the respect that Zhou craves.

  “And we want peace,” he adds.

  “You Americans like to make money through war, don’t you?” the older lady says suddenly.

  I try to explain that most people in the West don’t want to make money through war, that they make money through hard work. What the government wants to do by going to war is a different thing altogether, not really anything to do with the people, who also want peace. Many people in America and Europe were opposed to the Iraq War, I tell her.

  She looks at me long and hard, no doubt the pictures of wounded Iraqi civilians that fill Chinese government news programs lingering in her mind.

  The younger seed salesman turns around and smiles at me. “We Chinese invented gunpowder, but you Westerners invented the gun with which you came here to kill us. We Chinese invented the compass, but you Westerners used it to sail out east and occupy our land.”

  People smile again. There is no animosity in his voice, or their nods. It is history. It cannot be changed.

  “Do you think China is slowly getting respect?” I ask Mr. Zhou.

  “Yes,” he replies, “but it will take a lot longer.”

  “How long?”

  “At least twenty years,” he replies.

  Heads nod silently again.

  “Chinese people are quite patient, aren’t they?” I suggest.

  “Yes, they are,” he replies.

  There are few things that exemplify the Chinese desire for respect as much as the Jiuquan Space Center. After all, only two countries had put a man in space before China did in October 2003, and they were the two superpowers of the Cold War, the United States and the USSR. If you are looking for signs that China wants to be the next superpower, at a time when 100 million of its people are still living on less than a dollar a day and the rest of the world is cutting back its space programs, launching a man into space seems pretty symbolic.

  After about four hours, Route 312 arrives at Jiuquan. The town’s name means “Spring of Wine,” which seems strange for a desert town on the edge of largely Muslim Central Asia. It was a major stop on the Old Silk Road and is clearly an increasingly important stop on the new one. Like all the Gobi oases, it is a town transformed in recent years. People are passing through, of course, but now they are settling here as well, taking advantage of the new opportunities, some no doubt linked to the huge space center in the desert a hundred miles outside the town. Moderate prosperity is a goal here too. The outskirts of Jiuquan are a jungle of construction cranes and new apartment buildings. Its department stores are full of the cell phones sold by salesmen such as my new friend Zhang. There are Internet bars. Everyone is talking to everyone else.

  Part of the reason for China’s space program is undoubtedly concern about the so-called weaponization of space. The old paranoias, learned during the Opium Wars, about being prepared militarily are still there.

  But equally important is the program’s prestige value. It’s as though the Chinese are saying, “You Westerners can put men in space, can you? Well, we are the world’s oldest civilization. We invented the compass and gunpowder and the printing press, and we can put a man in space too. We can compete with you at your own game.” It helps to stir up patriotic pride in the nation, and by extension the Party, at a time when its ideological legitimacy has disappeared.

  Not everyone in China is convinced of the necessity of a space program, though. In fact, many people do not even know about this landmark achievement. When the first manned Chinese spacecraft, named Shenzhou 5, was launched, in 2003, I did the obligatory interviews with the painfully proud young Chinese patriots at the universities in Beijing, who told me how much it showed about China’s development and future. But then I drove fifty miles outside Beijing and asked some farmers who were husking a pile of bright yellow corncobs what they thought of the launch of Shenzhou 5.

  “What’s Shenzhou 5?” asked several of the women.

  I was telling this story to a fellow journalist in Beijing, and he laughed and said, “That’s nothing.” He had driven a hundred miles outside Beijing and found a farmer couple whom he had asked about China’s flight into outer space. The old man had looked at him and asked, “What’s outer space?”

  I stop a taxi and ask the driver if he can take me to the space center, but he says you need a special permit from the police to show at the checkpoints along the road, and the permit takes a while to process. He suggests it might not be that easy for foreigners to get a permit. So, reluctantly, I decide to head straight to Jiayuguan (pronounced Jah-you-gwan), which is Jiuquan’s twin, just forty minutes’ drive across the desert.

  In fact, with all the construction on the edges of each city, it probably won’t be long before the desert between them is squeezed out and the twins become joined into one giant megalopolis. It’s easier for officials to expand their cities here. They don’t have to steal some peasant’s land.

  I check into the sprawling Jiayuguan Hotel and head out for a run. It’s late afternoon, but the sun is still high. The desert heat, combined with a slothful week without training, make it hard going. ADOPT A SCIENTIFIC DEVELOPMENT OUTLOOK, says the billboard on the edge of town. BUILD A HARMONIOUS SOCIALIST SOCIETY.

  I like Jiayuguan. It has an open feel. Although there are huge factories on its outskirts, pumping acrid smoke into the permanently blue sky, they are far enough away not to impinge directly on the town. I like the wide roads, the low buildings, the big sky. It isn’t hemmed in, like so many other Chinese towns. Like most of Gansu province, it has space to breathe. But most of all, I like it because it is home to Jiayuguan Fort, the most westerly point of the Great Wall. It is a spectacular edifice, a massive square fortress that looks as though it has been dropped into the desert from outer space. First constructed under the Ming dynasty, around 1372, it was enlarged in 1539 and has been fully restored over the last twenty years. Its walls are over sixty feet tall, and the whole fort must be at least a mile in circumference.

  In times gone by, this was the very end of civilization. A Chinese person would stand on Jiayuguan Fort back in the fifteenth or seventeenth century and look out, rather like a Roman standing on the west bank of the Rhine, knowing that outside, beyond, over there, were the barbarians.

  17. The End of the Wall

  In the summer of 1926, three respectable, middle-aged English ladies arrived at Jiayuguan, riding on a donkey-drawn cart. They were Mildred Cable, and Francesca and Eva French, who were sisters. The three were missionaries with the China Inland Mission, and during nearly two decades working here together, they had come to be known collectively as the Trio.

  The Trio had gained quite a reputation for their journeys along the Silk Road. Three feisty girls from nice English homes, they had all been converted to Christianity as young women and felt the call to China. Eva had gone first, as a twenty-one-year-old, and had narrowly escaped death during the antiforeign Boxer Rebellion of 1900. She was joined by Mildred a few years later, and then Francesca made up the team. They had been based in Shanxi province for twenty years when they decided to move westward to minister to the people of the Gobi Desert. Many times over the next thirteen years, between 1923 and 1936, the three women visited the oasis towns and villages in Gansu province that lay outside the Great Wall, preaching the gospel and administering basic medical care. There was no Route 312 in those days, or even a paved road of any sort, and they traveled everywhere by mule cart pulled by their faithful donkey, Molly.

  Mildred and Francesca wrote several books that are full of beautiful observations about the desert, its people, its flora and fauna, its difficulties and its joys. In her book The Gobi Desert, Mildred Cable describes
reaching Jiayuguan and seeing the majesty of the fort.

  Were this a clumsy, grotesque structure it would be a blot on northwest China, but its beauty and dignity redeem it from criticism, and since, in her unique way, China has ordained that her great western outlet should be controlled by a single door, she has made of that door such a striking portal as to be one of the impressive sights of the East.

  Despite the fact that China claimed to control Chinese Turkestan to the northwest, Jiayuguan was still in most Chinese people’s minds the edge of civilization, partly because of the Islamic “barbarians” who lived beyond it, but also because of the ferocious desert and fear of the demons believed to live there. Zipping up and down Route 312 in long-distance buses between the oasis towns today, it’s easy to forget how forbidding this region was, within living memory. There was a proverb quoted for centuries, until recent years, that “no man would send his worst enemy across the Gobi in midwinter or at midsummer.” And here I am now, hopping on buses, jumping into taxis, admiring the new apartment blocks and the four-lane highway, choosing from an array of soft drinks in refrigerated cabinets as though I’m traveling around New Jersey.

  So forbidding was it, even in the 1920s, writes Mildred Cable, that if you were not actually setting off into the desert, you would never go out of the West Gate of the fort. But that was the whole aim of the Trio’s mission, to preach the gospel to all the villages in Gansu beyond the Great Wall. So, as they were preparing to leave Jiayuguan heading westward, Mildred decided to go out of the West Gate to take a look. “I wished to prepare myself for the great adventure,” she writes. She was accompanied by a man from the fort.

  “Demons,” he said to her. “They are the ones who inhabit the Gobi. This place is full of them, and many have heard their voices calling…. You do not yet know, Lady, the terrors of that journey. Must you go out into the Gobi? You have come from Suchow [present-day Jiuquan]. That is a good place with many people and plenty to eat, but out yonder…Must you go?”

  Yes, replied Mildred, she had to go, because she had come to seek the lost, and, as she puts it, “some of them are out there,” a remark that the man took a little too literally, as though he might need to arrange a search party.

  The Chinese were not completely unfamiliar with what was beyond Jiayuguan, because in imperial times it was used as a place of exile to punish officials or others who displeased the emperor. One Chinese official who knew the full implications of going beyond here was a man named Lin Zexu. At the foot of the majestic Jiayuguan Fort, apparently unnoticed by the Chinese tourists, is a small memorial garden with a statue in it and a poem inscribed on the stone wall beside it. The garden is a memorial to Lin, who was, says a plaque beneath the statue, “the first open-minded politician of the modern age.”

  Lin Zexu (pronounced Lin Dzuh-shu) was the man who was sent by the emperor in the late 1830s to deal with the Ocean People on China’s southern coast, the foreigners who were importing opium to pay for tea and silk and porcelain.

  As we have seen, the Chinese elite were very slow to realize the full significance of the Ocean People’s arrival. All the threats to China in the past had come on land, from the horsemen of the north, from the Central Asian steppe beyond where I’m now standing. Confronted with foreign refusal to cease their importing of opium, Lin in 1839 wrote a letter to Queen Victoria, requesting that she personally put a stop to the trade and asking her whether she would permit opium to be brought into Britain this way. The tone of the letter reveals that the Chinese view of themselves and the world had not changed much since Lord Macartney’s failed mission in 1793, nearly fifty years before.

  Magnificently our great Emperor soothes and pacifies China and the foreign countries, regarding all with the same kindness. If there is profit, then he shares it with the peoples of the world; if there is harm, then he removes it on behalf of the world. This is because he takes the mind of heaven and earth as his mind. The kings of your honorable country by a tradition handed down from generation to generation have always been noted for their politeness and submissiveness…. The fact is that the wicked barbarians beguile the Chinese people into a death trap. May you, O Monarch, check your wicked, and sift your wicked people before they come to China, in order to guarantee the peace of your nation, to show further the sincerity of your politeness and submissiveness, and to let the two countries enjoy together the blessings of peace.

  Lin mentioned how benevolent China was in its own exports, and included perhaps the first and only use in history of rhubarb as a tool of international diplomacy. He appealed to the British to consider the impact upon their bowel movements if Chinese exports of rhubarb, with all its famous laxative effects, were withdrawn.

  Is there a single article from China which has done any harm to foreign countries? Take tea and rhubarb, for example; the foreign countries cannot get along for a single day without them. If China cuts off these benefits with no sympathy for those who are to suffer, then what can the barbarians rely upon to keep themselves alive?

  With the British merchants (and their bowels) holding firm in spite of such threats, Lin took a fateful step; in May 1839, he commanded the seizure of two hundred cases of opium and ordered it dumped into the sea.

  His hard-line stance was just the excuse the British were waiting for. When they retaliated by ravaging large parts of south China and launching the First Opium War, the emperor, who had personally approved Lin’s tough policies, dismissed him. Lin Zexu became the scapegoat for China’s defeat and suffered the fate of many before him. He was cast out into the barbarian darkness of exile beyond Jiayuguan, to the Yili Valley, the place that is, in fact, my final destination, where Route 312 hits the Chinese border with Kazakhstan.

  The memorial garden to Lin Zexu is now empty, except for me. There is not a single Chinese person here, paying tribute to a man who tried to save China by standing up to the foreigners. Just one Ocean Person, from the land that caused Lin’s humiliation, looking up at his statue with a measured balance of respect and shame, reading the philosophical and mildly defiant poem he wrote as he passed through here, and wondering what he would think of the cement factories and petrochemical plants surrounding Jiayuguan now, or the high-speed Internet and cell phones connecting Chinese people to one another and to the world.

  Certainly Lin’s revenge has been slow, and has come at a huge human cost. It has taken China nearly two hundred years to start to avenge the humiliations visited upon it by the West. And still that vengeance is not complete. But Lin’s revenge is emerging at last: a strong China, a country where the borders are sealed firm, where the northern tribes do not threaten every year, and where the Ocean People do not import drugs or steal land. Lin’s successors had to break with the Confucian ways he knew in order to achieve modernity, and they had to destroy many things he held dear, but the changes are happening even here.

  Now Jiayuguan is a major tourist destination. From Lin’s garden, you can brave the tourist stalls and wander through the huge open gate at the entrance to the fort itself. A guide is showing a group of Chinese tourists around the old courtyard, right in the heart of the fort. They are all clutching expensive digital cameras and wearing matching yellow hats. This is where the general in charge of the garrison lived, in a separate complex, complete with wife and servants. The names of all the generals who had been posted there since 1516 are listed on a board outside the courtyard.

  “In feudal times…,” the guide begins her tour. As I look over, heads are nodding, glad perhaps to be liberated from feudal times.

  In my pocket I have the telephone number of a student who lives in Jiayuguan, and I am about to call him to see if he is free for dinner tonight. The contact was given to me by Princess Pinky, the cosmetics saleswoman I had met on the road to the Tibetan town of Xiahe. When she heard I was heading west, she said she had a friend in Jiayuguan whom I should call. As usual, I had assumed I would call him. Perhaps he would be the one who would give me that telling insight into life
in a frontier town. Perhaps he would be the one who would introduce me to the amazing character who would make everything clear to me. But now that I’m here, I decide not to. Somehow, I just know what a student from Jiayuguan will say. “China’s future is bright. Life is improving. Let’s all be friends.”

  There are so many grounds for optimism in China, but today I’ve had enough of the optimists. Some days you’re really up on China, and some days you’re really down. And today, I’m just tired of the buses, the heat, the traveling, and the optimists, too. Have these people never been to the AIDS villages of southern Henan? (Answer: No.) Have they never been arrested and detained without charge or trial for years on end? (No, again, for most people.) Have they never had to sell their bodies to pay for food for their families? (Maybe not.) I don’t want to ask any more questions or have people asking me questions about myself. I’m just craving something that you rarely find in China, and that is solitude. And silence.

  So I find myself searching for the farthest, most deserted corner of the fort, a watchtower where the tour groups don’t go.

  I stand for a long time, looking out at the wide-open Gobi and the still-snowcapped mountains beyond. I bet there weren’t any optimists around here when Genghis and his pals swept down from the steppe.

  “Hello. Where are you from?”

  Somehow a smiley, English-speaking youth has found me. We go through the usual routine. He tells me how he has just been accepted to a college in Beijing, fourteen hundred miles away, and how excited he is to be going as a freshman in a few weeks. He says how much he loves his country.