Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (5 page)

In fact, the use of headlights was banned in Beijing until the late 1970s, when the nation’s leaders began going overseas in increasing numbers. During the early Reform years, these trips were encouraged by governments in Europe and the United States, who hoped that glimpses of democracy would convince Chinese officials to rethink their policies. In 1983 Chen Xitong, the mayor of Beijing, made one such visit to New York. On the way to and from his meetings with Mayor Ed Koch and other dignitaries, Chen made a crucial road observation: Manhattan drivers turn on their lights at night. When Chen returned to China, he decreed that Beijing motorists do the same. It’s unclear what conclusions he drew from his encounters with American democracy (eventually he ended up in prison for corruption), but at least he did his part for traffic safety.

Nevertheless, Chinese drivers haven’t grasped the subtleties of headlight use. Most people keep their lights off until it’s pitch-dark, and then they flip on the brights. Almost nobody uses headlights in rain, fog, snow, or twilight conditions—in fact, this is one of the few acts guaranteed to annoy a Chinese driver. They don’t mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right, or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. But if you switch on your lights during a rainstorm, approaching drivers will invariably flash their brights in annoyance.

For the most part, though, they’re unflappable, and it’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly. On the open road it feels like everybody has just been unleashed from a
hutong
—there’s a sudden rush of speed and competition, and the greatest thrill comes from passing other motorists. People pass on hills; they pass on turns; they pass in tunnels. If they get passed themselves, they immediately try to pass the other vehicle back, as if it were a game. From what I can tell, that’s the only question on the written driver’s exam with three correct answers:

• a) on the left.
  
• b) on the right.
  
• c) wherever, depending on the situation.
  

On the exam, questions are taken directly from government-published study materials, and the Public Safety License Bureau provided me with a booklet that contained 429 multiple-choice questions and 256 true-false queries. Often these questions capture the spirit of the road (“True/False: In a taxi, it’s fine to carry a small amount of explosive material”), but it’s less obvious how they prepare people for driving in China. In fact the trick is to study the wrong answers. They describe common traffic maneuvers with such vividness that you can practically see the faces behind the wheel:

• a) wait until there is a safe distance between the two vehicles, make a right-turn signal, and return to the original lane.
  
• b) cut in front of the other car as quickly as possible.
  
• c) cut in front of the other car and then slow down.
  

• a) slow down and stop if there are pedestrians.
  
• b) accelerate in order to catch up with the car directly in front of you, and then cross closely behind him.
  
• c) drive straight through, because pedestrians should give vehicles the right of way.
  

• a) pass on the right.
  
• b) not pass.
  
• c) honk, accelerate, and pass on the left.
  

Lots of answers involve honking. In a Chinese automobile, the horn is essentially neurological—it channels the driver’s reflexes. People honk constantly, and at first all horns sound the same, but over time you learn to interpret them. In this sense it’s as complicated as the language. Spoken Chinese is tonal, which means that a single sound like
ma
has different meanings depending on whether it’s flat, rising, falling and rising, or falling sharply. A single Chinese horn, on the other hand, can mean at least ten distinct things. A solid
hooooonnnnkkkkk
is intended to attract attention. A double sound—
hooooonnnnkkkkk, hooooonnnnkkkkk—
indicates irritation. There’s a particularly long
hooooooooonnnnnnnnnkkkkkk
that means that the driver is stuck in bad traffic, has exhausted curb-sneaking options, and would like everybody else on the road to disappear. A responding
hooooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnkkkkkkkkkkkk
proves they aren’t going anywhere. There’s a stuttering, staggering
honk honk hnk hnk hnk hnk hnk hnk
that represents pure panic. There’s the afterthought
honk
—the one that rookie drivers make if they were too slow to hit the button before a situation resolved itself. And there’s a short basic
honk
that simply says: My hands are still on the wheel, and this horn continues to serve as an extension of my nervous system. Other honks appear on the exam:

• a) slow down and make sure you pass safely.
  
• b) continue at the same speed.
  
• c) honk the horn to tell them to watch out.
  

• a) honk and accelerate.
  
• b) slow down and turn on your lights.
  
• c) honk and maintain speed.
  

• a) honk like normal.
  
• b) honk more than normal, in order to alert residents.
  
• c) avoid honking, in order to avoid disturbing residents.
  

I PICKED UP MY
first hitchhiker on the way to Smash the Hu. At sunrise I had taken down my tent, and after studying the map I decided to try a route that paralleled the north side of the Ming wall. This turned out to be the worst road thus far—it began as a dirt track, high on the mountain, and then it descended steeply. Water runoff had badly rutted the surface; the City Special lurched and groaned. To my left, the Great Wall perched neatly atop a ridgeline—it seemed to float effortlessly while I banged down the broken road. Halfway to the valley floor, a young woman stood beside the dirt track, waving madly. I rolled down the window.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Smash the Hu, then Slaughter the Hu,” I said. In Chinese those village names really roll off the tongue.

“Can I get a ride to Smash the Hu?”

“No problem,” I said, pushing open the door. The woman carried a sack of fresh pork, the fatty meat glistening white and pink against the plastic. She set it on the floor and hesitated before entering.

“How much is it?” she said.

“How much is what?” For a moment I thought she was talking about the pork.

“To Smash the Hu,” she said. “How much?”

Good question—how can anybody put a price on destroying indeterminate nomadic tribes? “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’m going there anyway.”

Her name was Gao Linfeng, and she was twenty-seven years old. She told me that she had grown up in Smash the Hu but now she worked in a factory in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia. She was traveling home in order to see her grandmother—the pork was a gift. In these parts, transport was rare; she had caught a ride on the Ninglu bus, which only took her as far as the pass. From there she had planned to continue on foot until a ride came along. She wore a new gray business suit and fresh makeup, and her hair was neatly styled. How was it possible to look so good on a dirt road in Inner Mongolia? I was dressed in an old
gray T-shirt and dirty trousers; it had been two days since somebody last washed my hair.

Like many rural Chinese, Gao had left home to find work in the city. In 1978, at the beginning of Reform and Opening, approximately 80 percent of the population lived in the countryside. As the economy boomed, it created an increasing demand for construction workers and factory staff, most of whom came from rural regions. Chinese farms had always been overpopulated, and young people were glad to leave; by 2001, an estimated ninety million had already left home. To drive across China was to find yourself in the middle of the largest migration in human history—nearly one-tenth of the population was on the road, finding new lives away from home.

Most migrants went to coastal regions, but there were also opportunities in provincial cities like Hohhot. Gao told me that she had started on the assembly line but worked her way up, and now she was in management. Her factory produced wool sweaters for export. She had a three-year-old son in Hohhot, and they rarely returned to Smash the Hu. “It’s so poor here,” she said. “Farming is hard, because of the elevation and the dryness. Look at that corn.” She pointed outside, where a field of dusty green stalks bordered the road. “In most places it’s already been harvested, but everything happens so late here, because it’s so high.”

After we chatted for a while, she said, politely, “You’re not from our China, are you?”

“No.”

“Which country are you from?”

It was tempting to say that I was Hu, but I told the truth.

“My factory exports sweaters to your country!” she said happily.

Like many young people in the factory towns, she had studied some English on her own, although she was too shy to practice it with me. She was curious about life in America—she asked how many people were in my family, and if farmers lived in my hometown. “Do you drive on the same side of the road as in China?” she asked. I said yes, although at the moment it was irrelevant, because our route had deteriorated to a single pair of tire ruts. And if there was any irony in having a friendly
conversation with a foreigner just beyond the Great Wall, on the way to Smash the Hu, Gao Linfeng didn’t show it. I dropped her off at the town’s massive entrance gate, which had been built by the Ming; she thanked me and waved as I headed off toward Slaughter the Hu.

The towns along this road were heavily fortified, and they were also emptying fast. Everywhere I stopped, residents told me that most young people were already gone. Life here had never been easy—there was a long history of instability, and for centuries these remote areas had been shaped by the impersonal and sometimes violent demands of the outside world. In the old days, these were the borderlands: places like Smash the Hu could engage in Chinese-style agriculture, sometimes marginally, but north of here the land was suitable only for grazing. Herdsmen naturally developed a high degree of mobility, whereas the Chinese were rooted to their farms. They made for good targets, and the clash of cultures was often vicious. “They come like hurricanes and disappear like lightning,” a Chinese minister wrote during the second century BC, describing the nomads. “Moving with no constant settlement is their way of life, which makes it difficult to control them.” One emperor said that fighting the herdsmen “is like attacking a shadow.” Another official described them as “covetous for grain, human-faced but animal-hearted.”

Most nomads weren’t invaders—generally they had no interest in occupying land. They wanted Chinese goods, not Chinese culture; and this perplexed emperor after emperor, dynasty after dynasty. It wasn’t like that in the south, where the empire spread largely through cultural impact rather than military force. The American historian Arthur Waldron has written a book called
The Great Wall of China
, in which he describes some of the clashes in the north during the Ming dynasty. He told me that it’s critical to understand the Chinese perspective. “To them, it wasn’t Chinese civilization,” he said. “It
was
civilization. It would naturally appeal to anybody, regardless of their ethnicity, in the same way that dentistry with Novocain would appeal to anybody. And by and large that was the case. As the empire expanded to the south, it wasn’t that Chinese people moved in, but that locals changed their customs. They cooked up phony family trees, they built shrines—they did the same thing that anybody does when they’re trying to enter a new
culture. To this day, this is the strength of the Chinese. It’s not force. It’s not that they’ve got spies or secret police. It’s that there is something about being a part of this Chinese world that is appealing to the people around it.”

“The horse nomads are the first people to whom this has no appeal at all,” Waldron continued. “And this baffles the Chinese, because they’ve always banked on any outsider getting hooked on the culture. But the horse nomads don’t do it. They just come in and they rape and they pillage and burn. It posed the same problem for the Chinese as Americans have with al Qaeda, with the people who just hate us. Americans often feel like they just need to know us better. Give them a good old American barbecue, show them what life here is like; they’re bound to like it! But it just doesn’t work. There was a similar fault line in Chinese culture. There was a fault line between a tremendous confidence in the strength of the culture and an awareness that force may have to be invoked.”

Over the centuries, the Chinese response fell on both sides of this line. Sometimes they attacked the nomads, and their methods could be just as brutal as anything done by the “barbarians.” Chinese soldiers searched out camps, and they slaughtered women and children. They engaged in ecological warfare—they set fire to miles of pastureland, to prevent nomads from feeding their horses. And the Chinese prepared defenseworks, building miles of walls across the north. This tactic was especially important to the Ming, who were often too weak to take the offensive.

The problem of the nomads was complex, and so was the Chinese solution. A dynasty like the Ming combined strategies: they tried offensive maneuvers; they built walls for defense; and they also relied on trade and diplomacy. Ming emperors sometimes gave goods and official titles to Mongol leaders, and they sponsored trade fairs at key points along the border. Slaughter the Hu was one such site—during the Ming it became a famous market where people from beyond the wall could exchange goods with the Chinese. But trade was always imbalanced, because nomads had few products that the Chinese wanted, apart from horses. And the government administered such sites closely, in part because they didn’t want Mongols to trade for metal that could be used to make weapons. In the end, the cultural divide was insurmountable.
The Chinese were good at producing grain and goods, and they controlled the trade fairs; the Mongols didn’t have the administrative capabilities but they were brilliant raiders. Sooner or later, the conjunction of these two very different groups always resulted in violence.