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hardcover $26.95
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More reviews by Kerry Brown
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
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China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power by Rob Gifford
A few years back, when I was working in the British Embassy in Beijing, I remember that we had to put together a briefing for one of the endless stream of visitors from the UK coming over, to expose them to, and educate them about, China. At this particular briefing, one of the participating speakers, a representative of a British company in Beijing who had been based there many years, said, "You have to remember that as you travel from the east coast westwards across China, you travel back in time about three, four decades." A few months later, I had the chance to appreciate this, in the depths of winter, when I wondered around Qinghai and Gansu, two quintessentially "backward" Chinese provinces.
Radio journalist ROB GIFFORD's idea, in CHINA ROAD: A JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE OF A RISING POWER is a simple one -- to plot the changes of the new emerging superpower, China, by travelling along Route 312, which passes from Shanghai, through central China, over to the North West, ending at the border with Kazakhstan. He starts in the dazzling fleshpots of Shanghai, and ends, after a journey of taxiing, hitch-hiking, bussing and, at one point, camel-riding, the four-thousand-plus kilometres of the route, taking in Xian, Lanzhou, Zhenzhou and Hefei along the way. On his journey, he encounters the various characters from the great drama that is contemporary China -- the party officials, singing the praises of the new country, with the barest twinkle of irony in their eyes; the hard-pressed lorry drivers, who, on behalf of what is left of the proletariat in modern market socialist China, imagine a thousand and one ways to outwit the police, and make a few yuan out of their long, laborious inland trips; the farmers, groaning year after year under the burden of taxes and corrupt officialdom.
Gifford is a chatty traveller. He talks to Uighurs and Tibetans about their desire for a separate state, and their knowledge, in their heart, that this gets less likely as the years go on. He quizzes a man cleaning up rubbish by the side of the road, and, most surreal of all, a "hermit" who ends their encounter by cheerfully giving him their mobile phone number. Guided by a journalistic imperative to seek out the true story wherever he is, he even, with clearly marked distaste, hunts out the "karaoke floor" on one of the hotels he is briefly billeted in, in order to question one of the young girls working there about how they had come to end up in a place like this, where every punter is also a potential customer for sexual services. The girl he chances upon startles him by revealing that it was not poverty that had brought her to this life, but the more unsettling motive of hate for an ex-boyfriend. A warning to all those that wander in China -- never assume anything about the people you meet, just from the work they do or the position they are in.
Gifford is inspired by one of the early missionaries who remained in China for several decades in the 19th century. It is true that these people did amazing things. Attending a church service deep in the hinterland of China, along Route 312, he is asked to deliver a sermon in Chinese, which he does, evidently touched by the devotion of the audience. He admits to being infected by the disease of all those who have spent any length of time in China, and seen a decent amount of the country -- a complete ambiguity about the country, swaying between love and admiration for its people and their energy and openness, and disgust and anger at the government. This boils up most in the two most shocking portions of the book -- one a side visit to one of the areas affected by the HIV virus scandal in the 1990s, where peasants gave blood plasma only to be infected with AIDS when the blood was put back in their bodies, and a second meeting with a "family planning" official on a bus, in which, with disarming openness, she admits that part of her job is forcibly aborting births, and that she has done this on some children who had almost been born. But the admiration for missionaries, and Gifford's evident religious convictions, however lightly expressed, gives the book the ever-so-gentle air of somehow hoping that China will one day be saved from itself and that it is its own worst enemy.
The final section of the book is, as Gifford admits, a shot at futurology insisted on by his editor. His initial judgment at the start of the book had been welcomely sobering -- China is riddled with problems, and we outsiders are far too relaxed about the whole great project tidily proceeding without mishap. He is, I think, right in his insistence, several times, that China is not a country with a unified culture and sense of nationhood so much as an "empire" -- a political entity holding together wildly disparate elements, many of which he sees in his progress along the road. This disparity lies at the heart of so many of China's problems today. He captures this most neatly in the perfectly valid statement that talking about "Chinese food" as we do so frequently, makes about as much sense as talking about European food. Europe and China have fascinating parallels in terms of structure and disunified unity. But his final drift is towards qualified optimism. If the economy doesn't go to badly wrong, if there isn't too much internal instability, and if the rest of the world works well with China, it might, for the first time in the modern period, just be able to do it, and make the transition to what it aspires to be -- a moderately well off country, but a country, because of its size and importance, which even if only moderately well off, will overshadow the rest of the world.
Kerry Brown
25/09/2007
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