Country Driving

Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory
Author: Peter Hessler 2010 424 pp
My rating: 4*
Started February 21 2010, Finished February 26 2010.

Essentially a few snapshots depicting how the transformation of Chinese society from rural and agriculturally based to urban and manufacturing based is affecting individual Chinese, Hessler yet again scores big with humor and emotional transparency; five stars for reader enjoyment and insight into another world, but docked a bit for ambition as the book is close to a travelogue. The book has three sections, loosely unified by the driving the author does in each: an account of two drives to the deserts of China's northwest, a description of the village near Beijing where Hessler rents a house and a detailing of the startup of a new factory by a couple of small timers in a new industrial city. Hessler particularly excels at conveying the absurd while both depicting situations from his subjects’ points of view and maintaining a deep sympathy and even affection for those people. Though some of the material is familiar to readers of The New Yorker, reading it in this context does not feel like a rehash since it has often been substantially reworked and because those stories are so seamlessly integrated into the broader narrative. Revelations which particularly struck me were the every man for himself nature of the expansion and the pyramid scheme of infrastructure development funding which is based on appropriating rural land and thus inherently unsustainable.
The book is set during the boom of the 2000s, ending shortly before the crash of ’08; one wonders how the crash affected the nascent society which seemed to be sustained almost entirely by economic growth. The book conveys a sense that the strongly rooted sanctity of family ties are primary factor keeping people grounded in the midst of changes which within a single generations are displacing ways of life that had been in place for centuries and even millennia; one wonders how the primacy of the family unit will endure after a generation or two of vast migration from the countryside to manufacturing centers.

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… it’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving badly. (29)

Over time my learning curve never really flattened out. China is the kind of country where you constantly discover something new, and revelations occur on a daily basis. (47)

I was amazed at the stuff Wei Jia learned -- the most incredible collection of unrelated facts and desystemized knowledge that had ever been crammed into a child … Fifth-graders [in a rural peasant community] had an entire textbook devoted to learning how to use Microsoft FrontPage XP. [219-20]

Parent and children occupied different worlds, and marriages were complicated -- rarely did I know a Chinese couple who seemed happy together. It was all but impossible for people to keep their bearings in a country that changed so fast. [264]

China may have come late to the world of high-speed transport -- the nation’s first expressway wasn’t completed until 1988 -- but by 2020 they intended to have more highway miles than the United States. [282]

If a city hopes to stay solvent, it must continually expand. [344]

When I met somebody like Little Long, his energy and determination reminded me of other places, other times. This was China's version of the Industrial Revolution: rural people were moving to cities, and they had a gift for self-invention that rivaled anything in Dickens. [355]

This was the kind of solution that’s propagated in Chinese self-help book like Square and Round -- if a like works, fine; otherwise just burn the bridges. [361-2]

The fundamental problem [with nurturing a new factory through its teething period] seemed to be a complete lack of system. The factory had no management board, no investment schedule; nobody cared about legal contracts or predefined protocol. The bosses had funded almost entirely with cases, which raised the stakes and created tensions within families. They had sketched the blueprints for their factory in one hour and four minutes. Their most critical machinery had been designed according to the memory of a former peasant with a middle school education. There wasn't the slightest hint of a formal business plan. The future customer base depended upon the hopeful distribution of Wuliangye Baijiu and Chunghwa cigarettes. [363]