‘China road’
Dalene Hawthorne
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Rob Gifford is a National Public Radio correspondent who decided to take a trip across China on Route 312 before leaving his post in Beijing to return to his home in London.
Route 312 runs across China from Shanghai in the southeast to Kazakhstan in the northwest, through the Gobi desert and the Great Wall, and along part of the famous old Silk Road. The reporter hitchhiked and rode taxis and buses for almost 3,000 miles across this huge and quickly changing country.
Gifford speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese and obviously loves the country. In a way, his love of China actually makes his concerns about its future even more worrisome.
While traveling across the huge expanse of China, Gifford interviews taxi drivers, prostitutes, Amway salesmen, truck drivers, a Tibetan teacher, café owners, Uighur ethnic Muslims, a Hooters waitress and a Cisco Systems manager.
Gifford’s account of how a group of little old ladies strong-arm him into giving a sermon in Chinese is hilarious. Most of his interviews are touching in some way, while some are tragic.
Along the way, he tries to figure out where China is headed. The current economic expansion is changing everything for many Chinese, although the rural poor who haven’t migrated to factory jobs in the cities are just as desperately poor as they ever were. These economic changes have allowed people more choice than they have ever had, but many Chinese are feeling adrift.
Gifford interviews two young Communist Party members who refer to themselves as the “Me Generation.” This younger generation of Chinese no longer has a moral framework such as Confucianism or Communism on which to base decisions. Gifford speaks to a radio talk show host who describes the Chinese people, especially young people, as being “mishi le”, or lost.
The country itself seems a little lost. There is lots of building and economic expansion, which is causing huge environmental problems, and there are some real losers in the economic reform process.
The rural peasants could again rise up and overturn the government. Gifford fears that the government will not be willing or able to change the political system enough to incorporate checks and balances that might lead to a more stable form of government and democratic reform.
He says “the weight of two thousand years of imperial history is stacked against the possibility of democratic reform,” and that the old ways of holding the country together by force are incompatible with allowing it to change.
However, he believes that there is hope amid all the problems and that the Chinese people “are starting in a very small way to be in charge of their destiny.”
This book helped me understand a little better the changes that are taking place in China and the often poignant and sometimes funny interviews make it an easy-to-read exploration of the great country of China.