I’d like to introduce the book Country Driving, and its subtitle is a journey through China from farm to factory. Its Chinese translation is尋路中國 長城 鄉村 工廠 一段見證與觀察的紀錄.

The author Peter Hessler was a staff writer at The New Yorker.  He served as the Beijing correspondent from 2000 to 2007. He also was a contributing writer for National Geographic.  His major was English writing at Princeton University, and got master degree at University of Oxford in UK. Since he was able to speak fluent Mandarin, he talked to various walks of life in China including students, farmers, factory workers, entrepreneurs, government officials, etc. He could read Chinese as well, so in his books he consulted lots of published materials in China, including government statistics, local newspaper, books and researches.  During his around 10-year stay in China, he contacted all kinds of Chinese people, so he had tons of first-hand information to reveal a real picture of modern China.

From its title, we know he introduced The Great Wall, the farm and the factory. The reason why he presented China this way was he wanted to show China’s past and future.  In 2000, he rented a house at Sancha, a small village in the mountains north of Beijing. He spent 6 years there.  During his first 2 years at the village, he experienced a farm life and enjoyed the slow-moving lifestyle very much. But such cozy and quiet atmosphere gradually changed after the new road was paved and automobile boom brought new tourism. The Beijing downtown citizens came to here to relax on weekends.  He realized the change was definitely coming and at a very fast speed, so he turned to the future.  In China, a new expressway would transform a farm region into a major industrial center or tourism area.  So, he followed the highway construction plans to explore the future to record how factory owners set up their business.  With the help from his students, he chose Lishui City, 30 kilometers west of Wenzhou City, Zhejiang Province to witness such transformation from farm to factory or from past to future.

The Great Wall section was so impressive to me that I just realized I had little knowledge of it.  Two dynasties became especially famous for wall building: Qin and Ming dynasty. If we counted its age from Qin, the Great Wall was over 2200 years. If we counted it from Ming, it was above 600 years. However, the walls of Qin dynasty survived majorly in the popular imagination.  The walls which were built in Ming dynasty had lasted because of its solid materials. And its defense system was a network rather than a single structure, and some regions had as many as four distinct barriers.  In order to follow the Great Wall, he drove 7 thousand miles from its East end, East China Sea, to its West end, Zhangyi City, Gansu Province. He drove west, passing Hebei, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Ningxia, and Inner Mongolia. He walked and climbed it, camped on it, and even carelessly drove on it at Baotou City.  At tourist area, the walls were well repaired for tourists to go hiking because they paid the admission already.  At some remote area, the walls were broken and overgrown because they deteriorated naturally or because the local residents stole the bricks and stones to build their own houses.  And the worst thing happened at Xiakou, outskirts of Zhangyi City, Gansu Province, the residents dug their outhouses straight into the barrier because they did not have running water.  No wonder, the author sighed, “So much for the glorious idea of the Great Wall: at Xiakou it smelled like shit.”

The Great Wall’s meaning was chameleon-like, and interpretations had a way of shifting across time and perspective.  Below are some examples.

Sun Yat-sen: the greatest engineering feat in Chinese history

Mao Zedong: a forerunner of modern national defense

Lu Xun: a wonder and a curse which well represents everything bad about Chinese culture

Some historians: a defensive failure / useless militarily even when it was first built

However, the author believed the comments from David Spindler were to the point most.  David was a scholar famous for his research on the Great Wall. Here was his interpretation:

People say, “Was the Great Wall worth it?”  But I don’t think that’s how Qin or Ming dynasty thought at the time. You don’t get a nation saying, “We are going to give this terrain” or “We are going to sacrifice some number of citizens and soldiers.”  That’s not a calculus they used.  An empire is always going to try to protect itself.

Below are some interesting plots in this book.

Hair style - crew cut or flattop

He had the kind of crew cut that often means trouble in China. That’s the official haircut of the Chinese bully; my heart sank a little at the sight of a flattop.

Discrimination or preference of factory owners in Zhejiang

Some owners did not hire workers from Guizhou Province because they were notorious for loving fighting.  Owners there preferred tall workers, not below 158 centimeters, and good-looking girl workers.

Radar camera on expressway

Police officers invested in radar camera as private stockholders. If a Zhejiang cop contributed six thousand dollars to an expressway speed trap, he collected 7.5 percent of the proceeds from each ticket.  Investors were limited to 4 cameras, and rookie cops were not allowed to purchase a share until they accumulated a certain amount of seniority. Such industry even had lots of private moneylenders because they knew it was safe to loan money to a cop who was buying into a speed trap.

Genghis Khan

In China, people often spoke of Genghis Khan as if he were Chinese, at least in the cultural sense. In fact, during the twentieth century, Mongolia became a Soviet satellite and then an independent nation, but Inner Mongolia remained under Chinese rule.  

If you are interested in his books, here are his other works.

River Town: 2 years on the Yangtze消失中的江城

Oracle Bones: a journey between China’s past and present    甲骨文 一次占卜當代中國的旅程

Strange Stones: dispatches from East to West    奇石 從城市到荒野的另類紀實