China Road

by Rob Gifford

  The light has not yet slipped away completely as the bus pulls out of Urumqi station to start its sixteen-hour journey to the border. A kung-fu movie is already blaring, and an old Uighur man with a wispy beard sits upright with his legs crossed on the bunk behind me, his hands held upward as he intones his evening prayers. The passengers are almost exclusively Uighurs, and when I interact with them I feel slightly embarrassed to force them to speak Chinese. Huge harvests of tomatoes are visible in the evening light, loaded onto trucks beside the road, perhaps bound for the ketchup bottles of America.

  The great American scholar of Central Asia Owen Lattimore—who would in the 1950s be accused by Senator Joseph McCarthy of being the number one Soviet spy in the United States—in 1927 made this same journey with his wife and a Chinese servant named Moses. They were on horseback, heading west, before cutting south through southern Xinjiang into British Kashmir. Lattimore describes in his book of the journey, High Tartary, how as they were riding out from Urumqi, they were passed by the Soviet consul general, driving the only car in Xinjiang.

  Lattimore describes the Wild West towns along the road outside Urumqi in those days: “The numbers of carters, pedlars, cheap-Jacks, cattle-dealers, horse-copers, occasional caravan men, touts, thieves, bullies, and plain vagabonds are swelled by tribesmen, both Mongol and Qazaq, of the kind lured to such a town: the spendthrifts and the drunkards…. The general atmosphere is one of bullying, swaggering, sly tripping, and outrageous imposture.” Survival, concluded Lattimore, required “a ready tongue, a front of brass, and, preferably, a pair of eyes in the back of one’s head.”

  He was one of the last foreigners to travel the old caravan routes by camel or horse. The Times of London correspondent Peter Fleming came through Xinjiang a few years later, but after that, the Japanese invaded China and the war came, and then in 1949 the Communists took power and transformed everything, with their railroads and their roads. The political reforms of Mao and the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping changed China forever, and the four-lane highway that blasts westward out of Urumqi is scarily modern and efficient, even though it is not (yet) humming with traffic. Soon Route 312 will be a four-lane highway all the way to the border.

  What would Owen Lattimore make of this road heading west eighty years later? It took him six days to ride to Xihu, 140 miles to the west of Urumqi. The Soviet consul general in his motorcar made it in two. My sleek blue sleeper bus, with the words VACATION COMFORTABLE written in large English letters along its side, reaches the town of Kuitun, very near Xihu, in four hours along the freeway. It is all so safe and efficient. The Communist Party has tamed many of the deserts and mountains of Xinjiang, even if it has not yet won over the hearts and minds of the region’s people.

  After a few hours, the four lanes narrow to two, small villages hugging the road as it nudges slowly westward in the dark. Behind and between the narrow bands of habitation, there is little but the wide-open desert. All those hundreds of millions of people crammed into the eastern half of China, and this half is almost empty. The darkening sky squeezes out the last glimmers of the day’s resistance as I fall asleep on my bunk for the last time.

  The desert has evaporated by the time I awake, and there is a large green lake beside the road. Route 312 has finally pulled up out of the desert and into a range of beautiful hills, just before the border. It’s not quite like seeing the Pacific Ocean beyond Santa Monica at the end of Route 66, but it’s a welcome change from the desert of the last fifteen hundred miles. The expanse of water is called Sayram Lake, and there is a beautiful backdrop of mountains behind it.

  Just as I’m admiring the view from my bunk, the bus slows and suddenly shudders to a halt. We’ve broken down again, right beside the lake. Big blue East Wind trucks pass our wounded bus, blasting their horns as they go. By now, I just want to get to the border, so while our two drivers confer about the best course of action, I decide to proceed with my usual Plan B, and get out and hitch the last few hours.

  A truck driver picks me up. He’s Han Chinese, almost a carbon copy of Trucker Liu, who had given me a ride from Starry Gorge. His name is Mu, and he has come all the way from Shanghai too. He is the son of Han Chinese immigrants who came with the bingtuan in the 1950s to help develop the west, though he as a truck driver is probably doing more to develop the west than his parents ever did.

  We chat as the road winds steeply down from the hills, hemmed in on one side by a steel barrier to prevent vehicles from disappearing off the edge. Forests of deep green pine trees line the route, surprising the traveler, whose eyes have grown accustomed to the glare of the desert.

  Finally, we reach Korgaz, a forlorn little town with an empty feel, which really exists only for its border crossing into Kazakhstan. It’s still early, and the streets are quiet. I walk with my heavy backpack the mile or so from the bus station to the crossing, past the army garrison, along a street appropriately named Ya Ou Lu: Eurasia Road.

  Beside the road just before the border crossing is a wide-open expanse of land with a sign announcing that something called the Korgaz International Trade Center is about to rise from the rubble. The sign hints at the town’s ambitions.

  The convenient way for Chinese goods

  to successfully enter Central Asia.

  The crossing itself is rather underwhelming: a large old metal gate, painted red and white, in front of a low-rise white-tiled building on which is written in large gold letters the Chinese characters for KORGAZ BORDER CROSSING. Two Chinese men in green uniforms with red epaulets are standing inside the gate, letting through only those who are going to cross the border. There’s a small market to the right of the gate. Traders are selling jewelry and trinkets, swords and furs, Russian foods and Chinese toys. Even here, there is an energy, a hope of improvement that I imagine, perhaps unfairly, might not exist over the border in Kazakhstan.

  When I reach the red and white gate, I turn around and realize…this is it. This is the end of Route 312, and the end of my journey. A white marker stone beside the road reads 4824 kilometers. I’ve traveled almost three thousand miles from Shanghai, and what a long, strange trip it’s been.

  The road has witnessed everything: the poverty of the countryside, the growing wealth of the cities, and of course the people who travel along the road itself. It’s a conveyor of hope and despair, bringing escape and choice to places that have known little of either.

  Route 312 has been transformational for me too, and helped me see so much that I didn’t know. But it’s not the same for me. It’s very different. I’ve come to love Route 312 in all its schizophrenic ways, but I’m an outsider. I can leave. I am leaving. It’s not quite so romantic for the people who have to stay.

  A few Chinese people are taking photos of each other in front of the red and white gate. “Did you come all the way from Shanghai?” I want to ask them. I hand my camera to one of them and ask him to take a photo of me, standing in front of the border crossing. A final memento.

  Somehow I was expecting it to be more dramatic, that some theme music might surge up in the background as the credits rolled. But the only music is the barking of the traders in the market, and the whispered offers of the money-changers: “Huan qian, huan qian, change money, change money.”

  A sudden wave of emotion sweeps over me at having reached the end of the road, and effectively the end of my time in China. I stand there thinking back on my journey and all the people I’ve met, and scarcely believing that it’s over. Perhaps this is what it felt like to travel west in the United States in the 1890s: not knowing what the future held for the great country that you’ve just seen, but feeling just the sheer privilege of having witnessed the churn of history, the transformation of a nation, the emergence of a new power, that takes place only once every three or four generations. And whatever happens to China in the future, if I live long enough to have grandchildren and they ask me, “Were you there, Grandpa? Did you really see China rise?” I’ll tell them, “Yes. I saw it. I was the
re.”

  And then I realize that I don’t want to stay a single minute longer. I want to get out of here, to get on a plane, to go and see my family. I heave my backpack into a waiting taxi, owned by a pushy migrant from Henan province two thousand miles to the east, and he drives me the fifty miles or so to Yining Airport, for the long flight back to the Emerald City of Shanghai.

  23. A Road Is Made

  When you see China from the air, you realize the magnitude of what the government in Beijing is trying to do. It is not building a country, it is building a continent. A billion and a half people live in Europe and North and South America, divided up into more than fifty sovereign states. Nearly a billion and a half Chinese people live in one single sovereign state. To speak about building China the nation in the same breath as building Malaysia the nation or even Mexico the nation is, with all due respect to Malaysians and Mexicans, absurd.

  I see it all laid out below me on the short flight from Yining to Urumqi, and then as the sun sets, on the four-hour flight from Urumqi to Shanghai. Though I’ve become attached to Route 312 as I’ve traveled westward along it, I’m very glad not to be returning to Shanghai by road.

  Finally, I arrive late that night at Shanghai’s smaller, older Hongqiao Airport, so I don’t get to ride the maglev into town again. I do, however, take a high-speed cab ride along the Blade Runner elevated expressway of Yan’an Road as it slices through the city, fifty feet above the ground.

  This time, I stay at the Peace Hotel, on the Bund. The hucksters are still there, past midnight, offering watches, women, and golf clubs. The jazz band has finished playing by the time I check in, and I don’t even have the energy for a late-night walk along the Bund.

  The next day I sleep late, glad not to be taking a bus ride somewhere. I have a lazy Shanghai day, which involves a final daytime run along the Bund and several tall, nonfat lattes. In the evening I go up to New Heights restaurant once again and look out across the Huangpu River, and think about how far from the Gobi Desert this all is.

  The barges transporting coal along the Huangpu River are still plying up and down; the neon signs illuminating the banks of the river appear to have multiplied in just my two months away. Blink and you’ll miss plenty in the new China. An Amway sign flashes out its message, and I think of the salesmen I met weeks before in Zhangye. (Donkey-meat noodles are not yet on the menu at New Heights.) There is movement everywhere, and pursuit of wealth and pursuit of happiness, as Shanghai hurtles through the time tunnel into the future. I write in my notebook, “Shanghai is America,” and just stand there breathing in the bittersweet air.

  It’s impossible to be neutral about China. Some foreigners hate it from the moment they set foot here. Others love it so much they put down roots and never go home. I wonder if other countries divide people so intensely in their emotions. For myself, I have always tried to retain my own unity of opposites, attempting to keep love and hate in balance. But it’s difficult, especially as a journalist. I’m supposed not to care. I’m just supposed to observe. But how can I not care when a fifth of humanity is being convulsed before my eyes, and thousands are making millions, and millions are being crushed? And if I seem a little confused about China, it’s because I am. And if you’re not confused, then you simply haven’t been paying attention.

  But where is it all leading? The once-hated westernized city of Shanghai is now the much-loved national model that every city along Route 312 is trying to emulate. The bastard child has become the patriarch. In many ways, China is transformed. It is gradually reclaiming its position in the world. It has woken up from the Iron House of Confucianism and destroyed itself in order to save itself.

  But what now? What will China become?

  When I arrived in China as a correspondent, I began making time-lines in my head about when China would become a full market economy, and how long it would be before it became a democracy. And then, as every reporter here finds sooner or later, the longer you stay, the less inclined you are to make predictions. Though I’d set off looking for answers, by the time I had finished the journey I was suggesting to my publisher that it might be good to let the readers draw their own conclusions. She pointed out that if you, dear reader, have schlepped with me right across China, the least I owe you is a few suggestions as to how things might develop there in future. So here goes.

  The previous year, when I told NPR’s foreign editor that I might want to leave China sometime soon, he asked me if I would be interested in becoming Jerusalem correspondent. I said I would have to think about it. I would be very interested in learning Arabic and covering the Muslim world at some point. It is, of course, a huge story. But in the end, that did not seem what the Israel job would be about. In Jerusalem you cover Israel and the Palestinians, and that is a story that just goes around in circles. China, I said to my editor when I called him with my decision, is a linear story, on its way to somewhere, no one knows where. Never mind the bloody violence of the Middle East itself, or taking my young family to live in the midst of it, or the fact that I was really weary after six years on the road in China and Asia. I told my editor I wasn’t sure if, intellectually, I wanted just to follow the endless futile cycle of events, a story that never really goes anywhere.

  After that conversation, and as I was traveling across China on Route 312, I began to think about what I had said, and I realized I was wrong, and that China is a cyclical story too. It’s just that the Chinese cycles are so much bigger. They are measured in centuries, decades at the least, not years or months. And it feels as though that cycle is coming around again.

  This for me is really the big question facing China now, at the start of the twenty-first century, and perhaps the one that will decide whether the country goes on to greatness. Will it just follow the same cycle as every dynasty in Chinese history, or will it, can it, break that cycle and take a different path?

  It seems sometimes as though Chinese history has never had any narrative to it—just a succession of dynasties, all walled off from one another. Each dynasty came into power with a new agenda, opposing the corruption of the previous one. It was welcomed; it undertook reforms. It expanded, it ruled, it reveled in its cultural golden age, and then it descended into the same corruption and incompetence as the previous dynasty. Sometimes it took a hundred years, sometimes two or three hundred. China’s history has only ever been about uniting and then collapsing, reuniting and then being invaded, overthrow, collapse, reuniting and collapsing again. Why should the future be any different?

  In some ways, China is the same as it has always been. It is still the same kind of imperial, one-party government that the First Emperor from two thousand years ago would recognize. And that means there are no effective checks and balances, and there is terrible corruption, as there always has been. Confucius was wrong on one point. Human beings are not able to police themselves.

  The fact that there are tens of thousands of cases of rural unrest every year is no doubt ringing some alarm bells in the leadership compound in Beijing, just as it is ringing some alarm bells in the heads of China historians. If it wasn’t foreign invasions, it was peasant rebellions that heralded the demise of every dynasty. Now, in abandoning the farmers, the Communist Party has become every bit as venal and corrupt as the Nationalist Party it rose up to overthrow in the 1930s and ’40s. So far, so cyclical.

  But there are several very important ways in which today’s China is different from the past and which suggest that it may, just may, be able to avoid going the way of former dynasties and, perhaps for the first time, form an ongoing, progressive, linear narrative to Chinese history.

  First of all, the state is much stronger. Route 312 is a part of that. In the 1950s, the Communist Party set about consolidating the roads and railroads that had been built in the late Qing dynasty and the Republican era. In the 1990s and since 2000, construction has expanded at an unbelievable rate. The Qing dynasty, a hundred years ago, never mind any dynasties before that, could not control
all its far-flung regions. The Communist Party can, and this means peasant rebellions are less likely to succeed.

  The second difference is that today’s leaders are Chinese, not Manchu or Mongol or any other ethnic group. They can therefore embody the nationalistic aspirations of the country (and the people) in a way that, for instance, the Manchu Qing dynasty rulers, overthrown in 1912, could not. For all the many problems in modern China, there is a certain amount of pride in the country’s raised status in the world, especially among the urban populace.

  The third reason that the situation is different is economic, and this is probably the most important. There is still massive corruption, the wealth gap is growing, and many people are being crushed, unable to cope with the convulsive economic change. But there is no doubt that the Chinese economy in many areas is booming, and there are many more options available for people with some ambition to succeed.

  Route 312 is a part of this too, and the trickle-down effect is huge. Peasants are taking to the road in large numbers in the belief that somewhere over the Chinese rainbow is a job in a factory that can lift them out of poverty. Many of them have found that those jobs exist: difficult, dangerous jobs in dirty, Dickensian factories, but jobs all the same, which enable farmers to earn more in a month than they did in a whole year of farming. Route 312 and all the other roads in China have become the steam-release valve on the pressure cooker that could previously be released only by rebellion.

  With this economic transformation has come a whole new middle class, a more informed, more mature, more conscious, more rights-aware urban general public that has never before existed on such a scale in Chinese history. They have choices and social space in which to live, where the government doesn’t interfere. It’s not as much space as in the Western world, of course, but people have significant choices and significantly increased freedom nonetheless. They are not just listening to the voice of government, they are listening to one another and listening to themselves. But so far, they have been compliant, co-opted by the state with promises of greater wealth. Whether this alliance continues and whether the government can keep the new middle class happy will be deciding factors in China’s future.