The decor represented a study in contradictions: the pig fetus floated a few feet away from the Buddhist shrine; the Denver skyline faced a People’s Liberation Army tank. There were two bottles of Johnnie Walker, along with the two Ming-dynasty signal cannons that Wei Ziqi had foraged from the Great Wall. A calendar was dedicated to Huairou infrastructure. Sometimes, when we sat down for dinner at the family table, I looked around and thought: How could anybody hope to make sense of this world?
Location 4221, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
The world that Peter Hessler is describing in this excerpt is a microcosm of the world that is being described in Country Driving. And by the end of the book, he manages to answer the question that he poses in such rhetorical fashion here: he does end up making sense of it. Resoundingly, satisfyingly so.
I love to begin classes in introductory macro classes by asking three questions:
- What does the world look like?
- Why does it look the way it does?
- And what can we do to make it better?
The reason I bring up these three questions in today’s blog post is because this framework helps us understand why you should read Country Driving today, in 2024.
It is a book published in 2010, and it is a book about China from the late 1990’s, through until around 2006. Not, in other words, an “up to date” book about China. There’s only the occasional mention of the Beijing Olympics, for God’s sake, leave alone all else that has so memorably followed.
Up to date books may well do a much better job of telling you what China looks like today. But if you are looking for an answer to the second question – why does China today look the way it does?… then you couldn’t do much better than read Country Driving.
There is another reason to read it today, but we’ll get to that reason at the very end.
There are three sections to the book. The first section talks about Peter Hessler’s madcap trips across Northern China. The second talks about his experiences living next to a family in Sancha (a remote village in close proximity to Beijing), while the third is about China’s booming manufacturing sector. My first impression when I read the book a while ago was that these sections correspond to China’s past, present and future. But after having read it a second time, maybe a better way to think about it would be to think about the three sections as representing China’s experiences with agriculture, services and manufacturing.
But both of these are poor pegs on which to hang our understanding of the book. This book is, above all else, a book about China’s people. There are statistics, lots of ’em. There is incisive analysis about China’s policies. But the book is, first and foremost, about ordinary lives in extraordinary times. It is a reflection of how Chinese folks have adjusted to a period of tremendous social and economic upheaval, and how they’ve had to grow up and get used to new and alien ways of life. Not always have these process of adjustments worked well for everybody, but as with people in such situations the world over, so also with regular ol’ Chinese folks. They’ve shrugged their shoulders, and gotten on with it.
Mei banfa, they say, and they move on.
The words might be unfamiliar to us here in India, but the fatalism isn’t. Mei banfa is simply the Chinese way of expressing a sentiment that surely has an equivalent phrase in every Indian language.
Mei banfa means “nothing can be done”. Kuch nahi ho sakta.
In the first section of the book, Peter Hessler talks about a couple of really long drives that he undertook in the Northern and Western parts of the country. Remember, this is from about twenty-five years ago, back from before China embarked upon their second highway development program. The first was all the way back in the 1930’s of course, but then history took over, and didn’t let go for sixty long years.
It wasn’t just roads that didn’t develop during those sixty years. A lot of related things didn’t, and when they started to develop, the pace of development was difficult to keep up with, metaphorically and literally. Here’s an example of the literal kind, from the first section:
It all started with a few trucks whose fuel lines had frozen. The trucks stalled, and then other vehicles began to pass them on the two-lane road. While passing, they occasionally encountered an oncoming car whose driver didn’t want to budge. People faced off, honking angrily while more vehicles backed up; eventually it became impossible to move in any direction. Potential escape routes along the shoulder were quickly jammed by curbsneaking drivers. A couple of motorists with Jeep Cherokees had taken advantage of their rear-wheel drive by embarking off-road; usually they made it about fifty yards before getting stuck. Men in loafers slipped in the snow, trying to dig out City Specials with their bare hands. The wind was so cold it hurt just to stand there. Meanwhile, truckers had crawled beneath their rigs, where they lit road flares and held them up to frozen fuel lines. The tableau had a certain beauty: the stark snowcovered steppes, the endless line of black Santanas, the orange fires dancing beneath blue Liberation trucks. “You should go up there and get a picture of those truckers,” Goettig said. “You should get a picture,” I said. “I’m not going anywhere near those guys.”
Location 1336, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
And from the same section, an example of the metaphorical struggle to keep pace with the demands of the 21st century:
Throughout the city, in hopes of managing the new traffic in the way that scarecrows manage birds, the government had erected fiberglass statues of police officers. These figures were located at major intersections and roundabouts, where they stood at attention atop pedestals. They portrayed officers in full uniform, complete with necktie, visored cap, and white gloves. Each statue even wore an ID tag with a number. In Baotou I never saw a live cop.
Location 1381, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
These are only two examples – the joy of reading Country Driving is that every other page has an anecdote that is likely to elicit a hearty chuckle. I am yet to read other books by the same author, but one reason I’m looking forward to the exercise is that Peter Hessler manages to imbue his books with an enviable mixture of dry, sardonic wit for the situations he comes up against, and a very human warmth and regard for the people he is writing about. It makes for an irresistible combination.
The first section conveys loneliness. The landscape is lonely, most of the people we meet (including Peter himself, in his car) are lonely, and we also learn about how (and why) China chose to be lonely and aloof from the rest of the world. We learn about the series of walls that make up what we refer to as the Great Wall today, and we learn about the people in the Northern and Western parts of China who either yet have to migrate to China’s South-East, or won’t. These, back then, were villages waiting to die, for lack of young, able-bodied people:
THE FARTHER I DROVE across northern China, the more I wondered what would become of all of the villages. The cities were easy to predict, at least in terms of growth—their trajectory was already laid out in tracks of cement and steel. In the countryside, though, it was impossible to imagine who would be living here in a generation. Often I stopped in a village and saw only the very old, the disabled, and the very young, because migrants left their children behind to be raised by grandparents. Workers still didn’t feel settled in the cities, although inevitably that was bound to change; it seemed likely that in the future they’d find some way to have their families closer to work
Location 1609, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
It is one thing to write a paragraph like this. To convey the same thing through a sentence like this one, though, fills me with envy: “He wore the slightly dazed expression that you find among people who have lived through war and revolution and famine and now, in their twilight years, have been assigned the task of raising young children.”
If the first section is about loneliness, the second section is about love and relationships. It is about familial love and it is about the universal love that we all feel for children. But it is also about the need to build relationships in a rapidly growing, and therefore rapidly urbanizing economy. When old familial and social structures break down, what replaces them? We meet nurses that won’t let fathers stay near their children in hospitals but we also meet the custom of villagers stopping by the home of a family that needs to visit hospital – with cash “gifts”. You see the rise of the impersonal bureaucracy that is modern life, but you also see the rise of customs that have adopted to the harsh realities of modern life. Peter Hessler uses the phrase in another context in this section, but it is a phrase that applies to both this section and Chinese cities back then: “a city of villagers”.
By the way, the fact that reciprocity underpins human societies is alive and well in China. In the context of the villages stopping by with gifts of cash, note that “recovery always means that the grateful family hosts a banquet”.
But back to relationships. As Peter Hessler puts it, it is rare to have any sort of link in China’s villages that was “purely economic”. But with rapid urbanization, and the breaking down of the earlier social structures, such “purely economic” structures become all too necessary. And there is (of course) a word for it: guanxi. Wikipedia describes it as the Chinese equivalent of an “old boy’s network”, and while that is a fairly good description, keep in mind that it is much more elaborate and hierarchical.
And if you think I’m exaggerating, here, take a look for yourself:
For a Chinese male, nothing captures the texture of guanxi better than cigarettes. They’re a kind of semaphore—in a world where much is left unsaid, every gesture with a cigarette means something. You offer a smoke at certain moments, and you receive them at others; the give-and-take establishes a level of communication. And sometimes the absence of an exchange marks boundaries. A city person has little to say to a peasant and naturally he will not accept his cigarettes. Even between two businessmen, one person might refuse a smoke as a way of establishing superiority, especially if he carries a better brand. All told there are more than four hundred different types of Chinese cigarettes, each with a distinct identity and meaning. Around Beijing, peasants smoke Red Plum Blossom whites. Red Pagoda Mountain can be found in the pockets of average city folk. Middle-class entrepreneurs like Zhongnanhai Lights. Businessmen with a flair for the foreign sport State Express 555. A nouveau riche tosses out Chunghwa like it’s rice. Pandas are the rarest beast of all. That was Deng Xiaoping’s favorite brand, and government quotas make them hard to find; a single pack costs more than twelve dollars. If you carry Panda, you’re probably just being pretentious.
Location 4078, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
But these guanxi relationships aren’t the real thing, now are they. These are not ties built on years and decades of living next to each other in close proximity and shared experiences. This is a transactional, and therefore superficial relationship.
And so while the second section has more people and more proximity, it only serves, paradoxically, to make the loneliness even more acute:
In China, rapid change has left many people with a hollow feeling: they no longer believe in the Communist ideology of old, and the forces of migration and urbanization have radically transformed society. The new pursuit of wealth can seem empty and exhausting; many people wish for a more meaningful connection with others. Some of them turn to religion not necessarily because they desire a personal relationship with God, but because they want to share something with neighbors and friends. This is one reason why the crackdown on Falun Gong was largely successful—after the community was broken, most people saw no reason to believe in that particular faith. A half century of Communism had taught them patience; they knew that something else would eventually appear
Location 3575, Location 4078, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
The third section was my least favorite section, but that isn’t me criticizing Peter Hessler. It is just that I much preferred learning about Chinese life in the first two sections. Reading about the birth, growth and mutation of Chinese manufacturing is in my case an occupational hazard, and this was a section I hd therefore hurried through when I first read the book.
But on my second read, I took the time to dip in rather more extensively, and my little fishing expedition was quite rewarding. I learnt much more about the sociology of Chinese manufacturing, along with some fascinating details and trivia about China’s headlong rush into manufacturing:
Whenever Highway 330 led me to a place of decent size, I pulled over and asked a bystander, “What do people make here?” Usually they could answer the question in a sentence; sometimes they didn’t need to say a word. In the town of Wuyi, a man responded by reaching into his pocket and pulling out a handful of playing cards. I subsequently learned that Wuyi manufactures one billion decks a year: half of China’s domestic market. Fifty miles away, Yiwu makes one quarter of the world’s plastic drinking straws. A place called Yongkang produces 95 percent of Chinese scales. In another part of Zhejiang, Songxia turns out 350 million umbrellas every year. Fenshui specializes in pens; Shangguan manufactures table tennis paddles. Datang produces one-third of the socks on earth. Forty percent of the world’s neckties are made in a place called Shengzhou.
Location 4942, Location 4078, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
And if you’re wondering what I meant by sociology:
A few years ago, a Wenzhou newspaper called Fortune Weekly ran a special Valentine’s Day supplement that included a survey of local male millionaires. The newspaper asked the men where they liked to have romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, and it listed the gifts they purchased for their wives and girlfriends. One question called upon respondents to recall “the time in your life when you felt the deepest emotion.” The two most common responses were “When I started my business” and “When I got divorced.” Another question asked: “If forced to choose between your business and your family, which would it be?” Of the respondents, 60 percent chose business, and 20 percent chose family. The other 20 percent couldn’t make up their minds
Location 5090, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
And:
It wasn’t simply a matter of a different age, a different culture—the fundamental motivation for settling a new city was also different. And there was a distinct narrowness to the groups of pioneers who showed up in a Chinese boomtown. Back when many American towns had been founded, the first wave of residents typically included lawyers, along with traders and bankers. A local newspaper often began printing while people still lived in tents. The first permanent buildings were generally the courthouse and the church. It was certainly a tough world, but at least there was some early sense of community and law. In a Chinese boomtown, though, it’s all business: factories and construction supplies and cell phone shops. The free market shapes all early stages of growth, which is why entertainment options appear instantly but social organizations are rare. No private newspapers, no independent labor unions—such things are banned by the Communist Party. Religion might flourish at the individual level, but institutions are weak; in Lishui’s development zone nobody built a church or temple. There weren’t any law firms or nonprofit organizations. Police and government cadres were almost as rare—they showed up only when there was some opportunity for profiteering.
Location 6219, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
Country Driving is a book that deserves to be read because it is a book that transports you across space and time and into a different society. You learn more about China (always a good thing), you learn more about why China was the way it was and therefore is the way it is (also a good thing), and above all, you get to read a wonderfully entertaining book.
The fact that this book is written by somebody as wryly funny as Peter Hessler is the (very welcome) cherry on top.And that, for me, is the best reason to read this book – it helps you learn while being enormously entertaining.
An all too rare combination, that.
EconForEverybody 