This is China! BLOG

Book Reveiw: Cracks Along the China Road

It’s always fun meeting the writers behind books you enjoy. Earlier this month at Suzhou’s Bookworm was no exception. Bookworm is a café cum bookstore newly opened in Suzhou, with locations in Chengdu and Beijing. I had gone to check out the talk by Rob Gifford, author of the highly readable China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power. Rob is the bureau chief for the London office of National Public Radio (NPR). Before that, he was Beijing correspondent for NPR from 1999 to 2005. He first came to China in 1987 as a Chinese language student.

China Road is Rob’s road trip up Highway 312, an exploration of what he called at the talk the “fault lines” running through Chinese society. He starts the trek in Shanghai, the jewel in the Communist Party’s crown that expresses the rapid economic progress the country has made, as well as the degree of internationalization of the city itself. He hitch-hikes, hires taxis, and does a fair amount of walking along the highway through the industrially prosperous Jiangsu province and the poorer Anhui Province. He makes side trips through an AIDS-infected town in Henan, takes endless bus trips through the Gobi desert, surfs sand dunes in Xinjiang and finishes the trip at the Chinese border with Kazhakstan.

At the book reading Rob emphasized the theme of the book as observing the delicate balance China walks between Hope and Despair. He read two passages from the book that seemed to him to illustrate that tension best: a spirited Amway distributor meeting in the Gobi Desert town of Zhang Ye, in which a gathering of hopeful Chinese entrepreneurs express their desire to Live!, not just to survive; and, within two days of the sales meeting, a cook at a roadside oasis who despairs of the local government corruption that has sealed up the town’s well so the officials can make money from sales of water to businesses and residences.

Some of the more illuminating points Rob made as a result of the trip was what he called the “fragility of the countryside.” The level of poverty and hopelessness in many of China’s regions is at or near a breaking point he believes the Central authorities may not be aware of. The “fault lines” have as much to do with the tension between the haves and have-nots as the royal way in which the local governments ignore and even exacerbate dire conditions through corruption and ham-fisted control tactics.

One of the gaffes in the book was the complete absence of my hometown, Suzhou, which lies right on route 312 (in fact, I can see it from one of the windows of my high rise apartment). Shanghai and Kunshan were in the book; but not Suzhou. Rob explained without prompting that his agent felt in writing about so many of the places Rob had visited along the highway Rob was “a tour guide with attention deficit.” The publisher elected to cut some 35,000 words from the project before publication. Rob said nothing really important happened in Suzhou during his trip, anyway.

During the Question & Answer period with the audience, I asked the question about his thoughts on AIDS in China and the government’s response to the disease – and all potential pandemics, like SARS. Most recently, I explained, the government had shut down an informational website for AIDS and Hepatitis carriers. The website supported more than 300,000 visits per day.

Rob offered that one of the most challenging issues facing China – and perhaps the world – was the Chinese governments historic, reflexive response to bad news; that is, they cover it up. He explained that he was recently in Hong Kong, speaking with epidemiologists who were waiting for “The Big One.” “The Big One” is what Americans call the earthquake along California’s San Andreas Fault that would theoretically see cities like Los Angeles slide into the ocean. Hong Kong’s epidemiological Big One involves a disease that crosses over from animals to people, either through close proximity or through people eating the animals. The Chinese government’s response could well be to try to cover it up, as they had tried with SARS, only to exacerbate the seriousness of the situation.

Ultimately, Rob felt the greatest challenge to Chinese society was its breaking out of the historic cycle of governance in which a strong center disintegrates, inviting chaos and foreign powers – whether Mongols, Manchurians or Frenchmen – in to exploit the pieces. Though cautiously optimistic, China has some very difficult tests ahead, he felt.

(See Rob’s book in my Recommended China Reading List on this blog).