Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory (6 page)

Nowadays, foreigners still wanted Chinese goods, but they didn’t have to go all the way to Slaughter the Hu to find them. And once again the demands of the outside world had changed this remote place. The Great Wall still ran through the middle of town, which had high garrison walls, and ruined towers rose throughout the valley. It was the most fortified part of the north that I had visited thus far, and it was also the quietest. The main street was little more than a truck stop—a sleepy row of cheap restaurants and auto repair shops that served people going somewhere else. That was all that remained of the local economy; the lure of southern factory jobs had defeated this place in a way the nomads never had. Slaughter the Hu was dying—I didn’t see a single young person out on its dusty streets.

DRIVING SOUTH AND WEST
, I followed a long line of signal towers that paralleled the Cangtou River. Ever since I had left Hebei, the land had been getting steadily poorer, and now I reached the highlands of north-central China. The people here live atop loess—thin, dry soil that was originally blown south from the Gobi and other deserts of the northwest. Over millennia, wind redeposited layers in this part of China, where the yellow earth can be as deep as six hundred feet. The soil is fragile but fertile, and at one time the region was forested, but centuries of overpopulation stripped it bare. After the trees were gone, people began carving the hills into terraces, until the landscape acquired the look of a desperate human construction: a layered cake of dust. Rainfall is rare—around ten inches annually—but even such small amounts of water can tear through the brittle soil. Creekbeds disappear into gullies; sometimes a tiny stream burrows its way hundreds of feet below the surrounding hillsides. Most peasants live in
yaodong
, simple cave homes that have been dug out of the loess. The caves are cool in summer, warm in winter, and disastrous in an earthquake. Ming dynasty
texts report that a major tremor in 1556 killed hundreds of thousands of people.

The Great Wall wasn’t a primary reason for the environmental degradation, but undoubtedly it contributed. Everywhere the wall went, it swallowed resources, and the Ming administrators documented the costs of construction. In recent years, an American historian named David Spindler has analyzed the figures for one wall-building project, estimating that for each brick that was fired and set in the wall, soldiers had to burn sixteen and a half pounds of wood. Even in areas where they built the structure out of tamped earth or unquarried stones, they needed wood for cooking fires, and garrison income depended heavily on logging. Spindler’s research shows that during the Ming, only 60 to 70 percent of the wall’s operating budget came from the state, and the rest was made up for by soldiers, often through logging. Some officials complained that this was counterproductive—by stripping the land bare, they only made it easier for horseback raiders.

Four centuries later, the tamped-earth structures seem like the only permanent features on this fluid landscape. I drove past hillsides that had collapsed into ravines, and crop terraces that seemed likely to crumble away tomorrow—but the signal towers still looked ready for war. Their square forms were visible for miles, riding the tops of the terraced hills. Beside the road, one tower had been decorated with a single character:
. The word was twenty feet tall, painted in white, and it means “Earth.” Not long after that, I saw another:
, “Water.” If the signal towers were sending a message, I wasn’t getting it, so I parked the City Special. Scanning the horizon, I realized that four consecutive towers had been inscribed with characters. Together they created a single sentence that spanned a mile, leaping across rivers and valleys and broken hillsides:

PROTECT WATER, SOLIDIFY EARTH

The line of inscribed towers ended at a huge Ming fort atop a mountain. I followed a side road up to the fort, where the view was stunning. It overlooked a half-dozen valleys, and most hillsides had been
pockmarked with thousands of holes that had been dug in order to plant trees. Each pit was two feet across and a few inches deep; depending on the angle of the hillside, they had been carved into squares or crescents. The pits were empty, and they continued as far as the eye could see—a galaxy of holes waiting for new saplings. Another message had been whitewashed across the walls of the Ming fort:

USE THE WORLD BANK’S OPPORTUNITY WISELY HELP THE MOUNTAINOUS AREA ESCAPE FROM POVERTY

Having been constructed to keep the barbarians out, the Great Wall was now welcoming the World Bank. I contacted the local government, to see if somebody could give an introduction to the project, and a cadre agreed to meet me. He was the director of the Youyu County tax bureau, and he told me that over the past two years the local government had received nearly three million dollars in loans from the World Bank. It was one of many projects that the organization sponsored on the loess plateau. Over the years, World Bank loans had funded the construction of mini-dams that conserved water, and their tree-planting campaigns had successfully reduced erosion in many areas. Here in Youyu, they intended to plant pines—all told, the county’s project would cover an area of two hundred and seventy square miles. The director escorted me to a village where earlier antierosion campaigns had been successful. The local Communist Party Secretary told me that now almost every family could afford a tractor; we met a villager who had just purchased a motorized cart to use for trade. Nearby, two observation stations had been specially built on hilltops to provide clear views of the project.

Everywhere we were chauffeured in a black Volkswagen Santana. After weeks of driving, it felt strange to sit passively in a car, but the routine of the official tour was familiar from my work as a journalist. In the provinces, the government cars were always black, with heavily tinted windows, and there was always a driver. If an area was wealthier, you rode in an Audi; poorer regions had Santanas and Jettas. At every stop you were served tea and statistics. Here in Youyu County, the government was proud of their World Bank project, and figures piled up in
my notebook. They intended to plant 1,400 hectares of trees around the Ming fort; currently Youyu County had successfully controlled erosion in 28 percent of their target region; their final goal was 53 percent. The Chinese government is amazing with numbers, and it always has been. Even in the days of empire, the bureaucracy churned out statistics—during the Ming, wall-building projects were sometimes measured and documented down to the inch. Since the Reform years began, this age-old tradition has helped make China an ideal client for the World Bank. The government can mobilize labor; it can produce statistics; and it can pay loans back.

It’s also good at banquets, which was how my tour ended. We ate in a private room at a local restaurant, and the courses appeared, one after another: pork, chicken, fish, Shanxi-style noodles. A half dozen officials accompanied me, and they drank
baijiu
, clear grain alcohol. One by one, they raised their glasses.

“I’m sorry, but I have to drink tea today,” I said. “I’m driving this afternoon, so I can’t drink
baijiu
.”

“How about beer?”

That was actually the subject of a trick question on the driver’s exam:

• a) drink a little alcohol.
  
• b) not drink alcohol.
  
• c) drink beer but not other types of alcohol.
  

“I can’t drink beer, either,” I said. “I can’t drink any alcohol if I’m driving.”

“Certainly you can drink a little bit!”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“Sure you can—just a glass or two!”

The cadres weren’t nearly as persistent as others I met on my journey. When it came to drinking-and-driving peer pressure, weddings were the worst occasions, followed closely by funerals. That was another challenge of being on the road—if I attended any kind of banquet during the day,
I had to find a way to be polite but firm, and accepting one drink only opened the floodgates. In America it’s enough to say, “I’m driving”—after that, the subject is closed. In China, though, that statement simply opens new avenues of logic, some of which are hard to refute. On my journey, the first reason to drink was usually the fait accompli. “You have to drink it now,” people said, holding up a full glass. “It’s already been poured. You can’t turn it down.” The second reason was that I had come so far and must be tired. The third reason was that after the banquet I could drive very slowly. They also pointed out that Americans use the right side of the road, so Chinese driving is natural; a couple of drinks won’t matter. Anyway—reason number five—the glass had already been poured. Sometimes people said the police would be so shocked to see a foreigner behind the wheel that they’d never think of arresting me for driving while intoxicated. Once, a banquet host asked, “When did you first learn how to drive?”

“About twenty years ago.”

“See? Most people here have only been driving for a year or two. With so much experience, of course you can drink something!”

His logic made sense: I couldn’t imagine how much I’d have to drink before feeling inspired to go backward down the on-ramp of an expressway. In Youyu, though, the cadres were on their best behavior, and I was able to fend off the
baijiu
and beer. After the banquet I thanked them for the tour and drove out of town. Two miles later, I turned around, skirted the city center, and headed back toward the line of signal towers. I was curious to see if villagers said the same things when I arrived in a City Special instead of a chauffeured Santana. Near the Ming fort, I saw a group of people high on a mountainside, working with shovels, and I followed a dirt track to the site.

There were ten men and women digging crescent-shaped holes into the loess. All of them wore surplus army jackets, and they gathered around my Jeep. They lived in a nearby village called Dingjia; like most settlements in this area, it was composed of cave homes. When I said that I was a journalist, they gathered closer.

“They’ve been doing this kind of thing since I was young,” one man said. “In the past it wasn’t the World Bank, but there have been
other campaigns. You see all of these holes? They’re empty. For two or three generations people have been digging these holes, and you still don’t see any trees here. Why not? Because our labor is free, but they’d have to pay money for the trees. It doesn’t cost anything to have us dig. They do it so that when the leaders come past, they see the holes and they believe that trees are being planted. The local officials embezzle the money instead.”

He was only twenty-eight years old, but the others in the group seem to defer to him as a spokesman. In the countryside, I sometimes met ranters—people who couldn’t stop complaining angrily about government corruption. But this man was soft-spoken; he chose his words carefully, and there was a certain sadness in his eyes. He wore an especially big military jacket—another member of rural China’s great castoff army. I asked how much they were paid for the digging.

“We get five bowls of instant noodles every day,” he said.

I couldn’t believe that I’d heard correctly, so I asked him to repeat it. “Five bowls,” he said. “If you stick around, you’ll see them deliver it.”

“Why do you do the work?”

“Otherwise we don’t get government relief,” he said. “We’ve had a drought, and this year it was too dry for corn. We didn’t even plant it. All we have this autumn are potatoes. The government gives us corn for relief, but they won’t give it unless we do the digging.” He continued: “Most people in our village are opposed to this project, because we’ve lost three-fourths of our land. We’d like to graze animals in places like this, but the government says they need to protect it. Protect, protect, protect—that’s all we hear, a bunch of slogans.”

The others murmured in agreement. “You know the saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” the young farmer said. “The country’s leaders are sitting in a high place, and they have no idea what’s really going on. And the people don’t know what the country’s leaders really say. Local leaders are the biggest problem—the county officials are the ones who embezzle everything.” He pointed at the Ming fort, with its World Bank slogan. “We see the World Bank officials in their cars, when they have inspections, but we can’t talk to them. The county leaders don’t let us. Actually, I don’t even know what
‘World Bank’ means. All I know is that it has something to do with investment. They come by in their cars, and we’ve tried to get them to stop, but they never do. They just tell us slogans: Protect the Land, Turn the Land into Forest.”