Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory

by Peter Hessler

  “They see more of the outside world now,” Jiang Hong said. “They can visit the cities, and they see things on television. They want to have more of the material benefits that they see.” In a sense, people had become more worldly, but this contact with the outside was disorienting. The frame of reference no longer consisted of the limited resources available in Wushenqi, but rather the infinite products available in the city. By learning more about other places, residents had lost touch with their immediate environment.

  And decades of political instability had warped people’s mindsets. “When things change so quickly, people don’t have time to gain information about their environment,” Jiang Hong said. “If you look back at Chinese history from 1949, policies have changed so often. When the reforms took hold in the 1980s, people saw that as an opportunity—and you have to take the opportunity now because it won’t last. People tend to have a short-term view of development.”

  For this generation, the economic landscape had become as unstable as the Ordos sands. Everything shifted: the rules, the business practices, the challenges of daily life. There was always some new situation to figure out, and it was hard for people to get their bearings. Often the ones who reacted quickly without thinking were the most successful. Sustainability was a luxury that few could afford to worry about, especially in places where young people were likely to leave anyway. Long-term planning made no sense: the goal was gain some profit today before you found yourself overwhelmed by the next wave of change.

  AFTER LEAVING WUSHENQI, I returned across the Great Wall and headed south back to Yulin. I wasn’t sure how much longer I wanted to stay on the road; the nights were growing cold and I could feel a fatigue settling in. From the beginning I had planned to divide my journey into two parts, so I could see the countryside in both autumn and spring. In Yulin I intended to rest—I hoped to spend a couple of nights in a bed, eat good meals, and decide how much farther to chase the wall. But in the end the local government made the decision for me.

  It was the first city I had seen in weeks. The population was about one hundred thousand, small by Chinese standards, and the town had a pleasant, sleepy air. An old city wall still surrounded the downtown, where streets were narrow; the auto boom hadn’t yet touched this place. I checked into the best hotel, took a shower, and lay down for a nap. Almost immediately the telephone rang. It was the hotel receptionist, and she told me that there was somebody in the lobby who wanted to see me.

  “He’s from the government,” she said.

  Of all the ways to get woken up, that was one of the worst. I dressed and went downstairs. The man was in his thirties, dressed in a dark suit, and his face wore a tight thin smile that said: Trouble.

  “I understand that you’re a journalist,” he said.

  He asked to see my passport, residence permit, and journalist accreditation, so I handed them over. He studied the documents in silence, jotting notes onto a pad of paper. At last he looked up. “You know, in China we have a law that requires a journalist to apply to a place before he does any reporting,” he said. “You’ve broken this law.”

  “I’m just here to see the Great Wall,” I said. “I don’t need to talk to anybody in the government. I’m not planning to interview anybody here in Yulin.”

  “I’m afraid it doesn’t matter. You still need to apply.”

  I apologized and told him that in the future I’d be sure to apply in advance. “I’ll leave tomorrow if you want,” I said.

  The man’s smile tightened a little more. “I’m afraid you’ll have to leave now,” he said.

  “Can I have lunch?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But you have to go immediately.”

  He waited in the lobby while I packed, and then he followed me all the way to the City Special. He was accompanied by a cop, to make sure I left town. From Yulin I drove south to Yan’an, six hours away; it was a cradle of the Chinese Communist Revolution, where Mao and other leaders had built their base in the late 1930s. Nowadays, Yan’an had become a tourist destination, and I hoped to check into a hotel without attracting attention. But this time the police appeared before I had even finished unpacking. They already knew where I had come from, and what kind of car I was driving; a warning must have been sent out across the province. The Yan’an cops told me to keep moving, and that was when I decided to abandon the Great Wall until spring.

  I took the highway back to Beijing. A new toll expressway had just been built across Shanxi Province, and after weeks of rural roads it felt like flying. The surface was perfect; there was almost no traffic; I flashed past miles of harvested corn. At Capital Motors I returned the City Special with exactly one-eighth of a tank of gas, no new dents, and a backseat full of empty Coke bottles. In the office Mr. Wang was smoking a cigarette beneath the performance ratings sign:

  CUSTOMER SATISFACTION RATING: 90%

  EFFICIENCY RATING: 97%

  APPROPRIATE SERVICE DICTION RATING: 98%

  SERVICE ATTITUDE RATING: 99%

  He studied my rental papers, checking off items and entering them into a computer. When he came to the mileage, he put the cigarette down.

  “Look how far this is!” he said. “Where did you go?”

  I could have claimed that all my driving had been within the Beijing city limits, but it would have been a shameless lie: the City Special had accumulated over 2,200 miles. At first I tried to be vague—I told Mr. Wang that I had driven west.

  “Where exactly?” he said.

  “Hebei, Shanxi,” I said.

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, Shaanxi, too,” I said. “And Inner Mongolia. But not too far in Inner Mongolia. Mostly along the Shanxi border.”

  “Waah!” Mr. Wang exclaimed. “Did you go by yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know that you’re not supposed to leave Beijing?”

  “I thought it would be OK as long as I was careful.”

  “Did you stay on paved roads?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “You’re not supposed to drive off the pavement,” Mr. Wang said.

  “I know,” I said. “But some parts of Inner Mongolia don’t have paved roads. I drove really slowly.”

  Mr. Wang seemed nearly as thrilled as he did whenever I returned a damaged car. “That’s great!” he said, beaming. “All the way to Inner Mongolia!” He called over the other workers and showed them the mileage; everybody laughed and lit cigarettes in celebration. I picked up my deposit and headed to the door. They were still talking about it when I left: “All the way to Inner Mongolia!”

  II

  AFTER THAT FIRST LONG TRIP I NEVER WORRIED ABOUT where I took a car from Capital Motors. I usually rented Jettas or Santanas, and I made weekend jaunts all around the north—to the Eastern Qing tombs, to the old imperial summer resort at Chengde. A couple of times I drove the new expressway to the coast. It took less than two hours to reach the beach resort of Beidaihe, and there wasn’t much traffic. In China, city people were buying automobiles, but they still weren’t taking many long journeys, because tolls were high and drivers were inexperienced. The expressways were empty, and they were beautiful: four lanes, wide shoulders, perfect landscaping.

  You could drive for hours without seeing a cop. It was strange, because police are prominent in other parts of Chinese life, and as a journalist I had been detained a number of times. And like any American from the Midwest, I hit an open road and instinctively kept an eye out for police. But China had yet to develop a functioning highway patrol, and the few cops I saw were simply on their way to some other destination. They always flashed their rack lights, probably because they’d seen it in American movies, but they weren’t patrolling and they weren’t in a hurry. In fact they tended to be among the slowest vehicles on the expressway. At first it felt strange to fly past a policeman flashing his lights, but after a while I learned to ignore them, like everybody else. The only drivers who had to worry were freight truckers. Cops some
times stationed themselves at tollbooths, where they fined and extorted truck drivers who had overloaded their vehicles. But nobody paid any mind to passenger cars—it was the golden age of highway driving in China.

  The only problem consisted of other motorists, but even amid the chaos of Chinese traffic there was a degree of predictability. Certain car models tended to attract certain character types, and on the road I learned to profile accordingly. The highest risks usually clustered at both ends of the spectrum. If somebody had a Mercedes or a top-end Buick, he was probably a businessman in the first flush of success; these people drove recklessly. And I was wary of the cheapest cars, the battered Xialis and Chang’ans whose drivers had nothing to lose. In the countryside, black Santanas with heavily tinted windows were trouble. They were cadre cars, usually from places where the local government was either too poor or too unskilled at embezzlement to afford an Audi. Black Santanas cruised around like small-town bullies: blaring their horns, passing on the right, cutting people off. In a big city like Beijing, corrupt cadres bought black Audi A6s and A8s, and those were also vehicles to avoid, especially if you were on a bike. Subcompacts like the Alto City Baby were scary for a different reason. They usually represented a first car for lower-middle-class people, who combined inexperience with extreme tentativeness. As for the Jeep Cherokee, there wasn’t a stereotype associated with the City Special. This was the problem for American Motors, a brand that never found its niche in the new economy. They were simply the latest example in a long history of missed opportunities for American automakers, who had always found China a complicated place to do business.

  In a sense, foreign trade had been tough ever since the days of the Great Wall. Back then, the Chinese had closest contact with northern nomads, and the experience convinced the empire that outsiders had little to offer. This worldview survived until the nineteenth century, when it was shattered by the opium trade. In southern China, British merchants found a booming market for the drug, and at last the Qing dynasty tried to end the trade by force; the result was the Opium War of 1839–1842. Suddenly the technological superiority of the West became apparent: British warships easily defeated the Qing, who were forced to give up Hong Kong and access to other treaty ports. Over the following decades, the British and other foreigners expanded their presence in China, usually by force. For a civilization that once believed it needed nothing from outsiders, it was a traumatic introduction to the world of modern trade.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Chinese remained deeply suspicious of anything foreign. Initially, the automobile was criticized as yet another tool of the imperialists, but attitudes began to change as people realized the benefits of better transport. The American Red Cross road-building campaigns of the 1920s were enormously successful, and intellectuals were more inclined to welcome brands from America than Britain, whose image remained tainted by the history of opium trade. In 1924, Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China, wrote a letter to Henry Ford, praising his company and inviting him to Asia. “I think you can do similar work in China on a much vaster and more significant scale,” Sun wrote. Ford Motors responded with a form letter—apparently Sun’s note never made it to Henry. Despite this brush-off, and despite the fact that the Chinese drove on the left side of the road, the Ford Company quickly dominated the market. By the early 1930s there were two dozen Ford dealers in China, and the company considered opening an assembly line in Shanghai.

  The Japanese invasion put an end to these plans, but war presented other opportunities. In the early 1940s, when the U.S. Army sent jeeps and trucks to southwestern China in support of the Republic, they suffered an inordinate number of traffic accidents. Vehicles had been designed for the right side of the road, and American drivers had trouble making the adjustment. U.S. Army General Albert C. Wedemeyer proposed a simple solution: the whole nation of China should switch over to the American way of driving. Chiang Kai-shek, who had always depended heavily on U.S. support, agreed. The change finally took place on January 31, 1945, after the Japanese had already surrendered.

  At that time, it seemed like American automakers were well positioned for China, but the Communist Revolution changed everything. Mao was aligned with the Soviets, and the United States imposed a trade embargo after the start of the Korean War. In any case, the Communist planned economy didn’t create private consumers. There was virtually no market for sedans; Chinese factories turned out trucks and buses. When Deng came to power, China’s auto industry faced the same basic challenge that characterized so much of the Reform period: How do people learn to do something completely new? From the government’s perspective, it was critical to learn from foreign automakers, but nobody wanted to relinquish profits and control of the industry to outsiders. As a result, Deng invited foreign manufacturers to set up shop under strict regulations. In order to produce cars in China, a foreign company had to find a state-owned partner, and outside ownership was limited to 50 percent.

  The American Motors Company jumped at the opportunity. In January of 1979, less than a week after President Jimmy Carter formally recognized the government of the People’s Republic, AMC was already sending a delegation to work out a deal. Over the next decade they learned to regret their pioneering status. While other companies such as Toyota stayed out of China, biding their time, AMC forged ahead and got nowhere. The partnership structure was awkward: two sets of management, each with its own culture, goals, and values. The AMC experience became so notorious that it eventually inspired a book called Beijing Jeep by the journalist Jim Mann. It’s a story of one misunderstanding after another; the chapter titles include “Getting Nowhere,” “A Very Long Haul,” and “An Outpouring of Grievances.” Even the index conveys a sort of taut frustration—it begins with “Absenteeism” and continues through “Xenophobia,” an alphabetized testimony to cultural differences of the 1980s:

  Beatrice Companies, Inc., 236–238

  Bechtel Corporation, 65, 105, 299

  Beds in Chinese offices, 127

  Beijing Automotive Industrial Corporation (BAIC), 91, 254, 263

  The Beijing Jeep became a symbol for the problems that beset foreign partnerships in the early Reform years. During that period the Chinese were still figuring out how to do business, and it wasn’t until the 1990s that the economy really took off. American Motors never recovered; their experience was a classic case of being in the right place at the wrong time. And the Jeep Cherokee represented one of their worst miscalculations. They started producing Chinese Cherokees in 1985, which was far too early for a sport-utility vehicle; most customers were still businesses or government bureaus that preferred sedans. When private consumers finally began to appear, AMC tried to target new city buyers by abandoning the Cherokee’s four-wheel-drive feature. They painted a sporty line along the doors, added some purple detailing, and tacked on an urban name: the City Special. This resulted in a cheaper price but a much less useful and distinctive vehicle. Not long after that, China developed a class of moneyed people with outdoor interests, but in their eyes the Cherokee was already outdated and useless. Yuppie adventurers were far more likely to splurge on a Toyota Land Cruiser or a Mitsubishi Pajero. The only reason I drove a City Special was because I had no other option—that was all I could find on the Capital Motors lot.

  Unlike AMC, other foreign companies survived the hard years in China, and by the end of the 1990s some of them began to enjoy major profits. The strict industry rules limited competition, and prices could be kept artificially high. Chinese consumers lagged several generations behind other countries, which allowed automakers to bring in outdated technology from overseas. In the 1990s, Volkswagen took a failed plant from Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, where they had formerly manufactured the VW Fox, and moved the main equipment to northeastern China. The car they produced, the Jetta, eventually surpassed the Santana to become the nation’s best-selling passenger vehicle. Margins were huge: in 2001 and 2002, on a per-car basis, Volkswagen and General Motor
s made more profits in China than anywhere else in the world. When a Buick Regal sold in China, it generated as much as double the profit made on the same car in America. Michael Dunne, an analyst who specializes in the Chinese auto market, told me that during this period he once asked a General Motors executive about profits in China. “We are making more money than God,” said the GM executive.

  But the whole system was ripe for change. If a Chinese company could find a way to use foreign technology without getting saddled with a partnership, they could create a more efficient management structure. And there was enormous opportunity in the low-end market, because the expensive joint-venture products had never targeted the fledgling middle class. At the end of the 1990s, the government of Wuhu, a city in eastern China’s Anhui Province, decided to set up a car company of their own. They hired an engineer named Yin Tongyao, who had previously been a star at Volkswagen. Yin had distinguished himself during the transfer of the VW Fox, when he helped move manufacturing equipment from Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, to northeastern China.

  At his new job in Wuhu, Yin immediately put this international experience to good use. He first went to England, where he bought equipment from an outdated Ford engine factory. Then he traveled to Spain, where he acquired manufacturing blueprints from a struggling Volkswagen subsidiary that formerly made a car called the Toledo. The Toledo shared the same platform—the basic frame and components—as the Jetta. In secret, Yin moved the British Ford engine factory to Wuhu, incorporated the Spanish blueprints, and set up an assembly line. Strict national regulations forbade new auto manufacturers from entering the market, so the officials in Wuhu simply called it an “automotive components” company. The factory produced its first engine in May of 1999. Seven months later it turned out a car. It had a Ford-designed engine, a body that came from Volkswagen via Spanish blueprints, and many authentic Jetta accessories. The folks in Wuhu had simply tracked down Chinese parts suppliers who were supposedly exclusive to Volkswagen, and then they worked out deals on the side. Volkswagen was furious, and so were people in the central government.