by Rob Gifford
Elvis and his wife struggle down bleary-eyed about ten minutes later, and soon we are back on Route 312, heading northwest.
They seem very lovey-dovey this morning for a couple who have been married for so long. She starts peeling him some apples and popping the segments into his mouth with a smile as he drives. Perhaps love is not dead in China.
We have not gone far down the road, though, before the car swerves slightly, and Elvis jolts himself upright. It’s only nine in the morning, and he is falling asleep at the wheel. Chinese roads are dangerous enough without a sleepy driver weaving all over the place.
“He stayed up watching television,” explains Mrs. Elvis, pushing him slightly with her elbow, as if to urge him to pull himself together.
“Right,” I murmur.
And then I realize: Mr. and Mrs. Elvis are not married at all. She is his lover, and they are off on a little lovers’ jaunt to Lanzhou at my expense. He hasn’t been up watching television. They have been up all night getting better acquainted.
“Watching television, eh?” I ask. “What was on?”
Photo Insert
Photo 1
The Communist Party flag flutters over the very un-Communist scene of Shanghai’s main thoroughfare, called the Bund, which runs along the bank of the Huangpu River. This is the view from the terrace of New Heights restaurant.
Photo 2
Communism is now submerged in a blaze of neon, as the market economy has taken hold across China. This is Shanghai’s legendary shopping street, Nanjing Road.
Photo 3
Two young Communist Party members, Emily and Lucy, go shopping for shoes at one of Shanghai’s large department stores. Joining the Party is still the ticket to a better job, but it’s now the smartest young people, and not the most ideological, who are encouraged to join.
Photo 4
Hooters has opened its first branch in Shanghai, and diners are encouraged to participate in the evening’s entertainment.
Photo 5
A migrant laborer works below the maze of elevated expressways that overshadow the start of Route 312 in the western suburbs of Shanghai.
Photo 6
All over Shanghai, and in most other Chinese cities, old buildings are being torn down to make way for the new.
Photo 7
China is the workshop of the world. Millions of migrant workers have flocked to the coastal cities to work in factories like this one in Shanghai. Many earn just $150 per month, but that is more than they used to earn in a year farming in the countryside.
Photo 8
Members of the Shanghai Off-Roader Jeep Club heading out on Route 312 for a day’s exploring—from left, Camel, Old Zhang, Tintin, and Little Liu.
Photo 9
Photo 10
Life in rural China has not changed in centuries. What has changed is that there is now an exit, along Route 312 and other roads, to the jobs available in the cities.
Photo 11
Most rural people are unable to afford cars, and travel by more basic means. Even a minitractor with a trailer attached can cost about two years’ earnings.
Photo 12
In every town in China there are Internet bars, which are always full of people connecting with one another and with the world outside.
Photo 13
China’s jobs-for-life socialist system has collapsed, and many uneducated women find that the only way to make money now is to become a “hostess” at one of the many karaoke bars that line the streets of every town.
Photo 14
A power station pumps out pollution in front of Hua Shan, one of China’s holy Daoist mountains.
Photo 15
The Hermit of Hua Shan, standing in front of one of the mountain’s sheer white rock faces.
Photo 16
The Terracotta Army at Xi’an. There are more than eight thousand figures in all, each with an individual facial expression. The soldiers were made in the third century B.C., to guard the tomb of the First Emperor of China, Qin Shihuang.
Photo 17
Bus stations in China, like this one in the western city of Lanzhou, are always a hive of activity, with people and goods flowing east and west.
Photo 18
Route 312 crosses the Yellow River in the heart of Lanzhou, one of the world’s most polluted cities.
Photo 19
New interstate highways have taken some of the traffic off Route 312 as it passes through the central provinces of Anhui and Henan, but many trucks, buses, and cars still travel along the road.
Photo 20
A rural bride, dressed in traditional red for her wedding, prepares to drive to her new husband’s home. The truck in the background is loaded with the gifts of her dowry.
Photo 21
The author is asked to preach a sermon at a small Protestant church in Shaanxi province.
Photo 22
A monk talks on his cell phone on a hill overlooking Labrang Monastery in the town of Xiahe. Thousands of monks are now back studying at the monastery, on the edge of the Tibetan plateau, after decades of persecution.
Photo 23
Tibetan monks from Labrang Monastery surf the Internet and play online video games in a Xiahe Internet café.
Photo 24
Young monks gather outside Labrang Monastery.
Photo 25
Li Caijin proudly shows off some of his Amway products. He gave up his government job to become a representative of the American direct-selling company in the Gobi Desert town of Zhangye.
Photo 26
The fort at Jiayuguan, the westernmost point of the Great Wall. Known traditionally as “the Mouth of China,” the fort was built in the late fourteenth century to help keep out the “barbarians” to the northwest.
Photo 27
Tourists seeking an authentic Silk Road experience can ride a camel across the Singing Sands at Dunhuang, one of western China’s most famous oasis towns.
Photo 28
Another favorite pastime at Dunhuang is sand surfing. Visitors can sit on small trays and propel themselves down the dunes.
Photo 29
Chinese characters jostle with the Arabic script of the Uighur language as Route 312 heads further into the northwest.
Photo 30
Route 312 intersects with a small, broken section of the Great Wall in northwestern Gansu province.
Photo 31
The stunning Lake of Heaven lies nestled in the mountains that rise out of the desert, sixty miles northeast of Urumqi.
Photo 32
Long-distance buses ply Route 312 heading east and west. Their bunks are narrow but comfortable, and you can travel cheaply; a sixteen-hour journey usually costs no more than about fifteen dollars.
Photo 33
Many of the sights and smells of the northwest region of Xinjiang are the sights and smells of Central Asia. Here, a group of Uighur musicians perform informally on a street in Urumqi.
Photo 34
The end of the road. The author stands in front of the border crossing into Kazakhstan, at the small town of Korgaz.
Photo 35
The end of Route 312 at Korgaz. Trucks carrying Chinese goods wait to cross the border into Kazakhstan. The sign says “4825 kilometers” (2998 miles), the distance from the start of the road in Shanghai.
“Oh, you know, just a good movie.” Elvis tries to continue the game.
“It must have been really good for you to stay up so late.” I raise my eyebrows really high, and he glances in his rearview mirror to see me looking straight at him with a faint smile on my face.
“Yes, it was,” he says, realizing that he’s been found out.
There’s an awkward silence for a moment, but then everyone settles into the new reality. Without anything direct having been said, we have reached a quiet understanding, which is what Elvis and his “wife” were expecting in the first place. China is the ultimate don’t ask, don’t tell country. “Mind your own business” might have been
the first commandment of Confucianism (and then Communism too).
We stop three more times for Elvis to get out and stretch. Mrs. Elvis is trying everything possible to keep him awake. She prods him constantly and dabs him occasionally with her wet facecloth. We stop for a restroom break, and she massages and pummels his back and shoulders. She even tries to get him to jump and dance beside the road just to wake him up. I suggest that perhaps I should drive, but he insists he is wide awake.
We weave our way across the border into Gansu province, wild, wide-open Gansu, the gateway to northwest China, where the yellow earth will soon dissolve into the desert proper. The slow wiggle that the two-lane Route 312 has become suddenly hooks up with the four-lane expressway that has shot straight out from Xi’an to Lanzhou. We pass a man whose job is to pick up tiny pieces of litter on the shoulder of the new highway, and I ask Elvis to pull over for the last time before we reach Lanzhou. I walk back to ask the man about his job, and what the new road has done to his life. He simply says he has to pick up litter along the road, and he gets paid two dollars a day to do so. More he doesn’t know.
I turn away from him and back toward the taxi, sitting alone on the new black tarmac. Its red paint is the only fleck of color in an otherwise yellow landscape. Mrs. Elvis is leading her lover in a tango on the hard shoulder of the road.
12. The Last Great Empire
What is China? And who are the Chinese?
Such questions might seem superfluous when the answer stares out from any map or atlas you pick up. China is a country with borders like any other, and the people who live within those borders are Chinese. Right?
Well, not exactly. For a thousand miles, driving along Route 312 from Shanghai to the frontier town of Lanzhou, “What is China?” has been a relatively easy question to answer. You can define it culturally, ethnically, geographically, or any way you like; there may be thousands of local dialects, differing almost from county to county, but any way you choose to define it up to Lanzhou, it is clearly Confucian-based China, inhabited by ethnic Chinese (or Han) people.
But out here, as I approach the west of China, definitions become hazy.
The author Peter Fleming (whose brother Ian wrote the James Bond 007 novels) was a young correspondent with The Times of London when he attained a degree of fame in the 1930s by traveling across a disintegrated China from Peking to Kashgar, in the far west of China, and on to British Kashmir. In his wonderful book, News from Tartary, published in 1936, Fleming describes the joy of arriving in Lanzhou after an eight-day journey of “jolting, irksome squalor” from Xi’an.
There is a bazaar much nearer in atmosphere to the bazaars of Central Asia than to the markets of Peking. It is all very different from the China you see from the Treaty Ports; you have the feeling that you are on the frontiers of another land, that you have come almost to the edge of China. As indeed you have.
Lanzhou was, and is, the end of homogenous, ethnic Chinese China. It is where the tectonic plates of Han China start to grate up against those of Central Asia. I still have at least another fifteen hundred miles to travel on my journey along Route 312 to the Kazakh border. By distance, Lanzhou (pronounced Lan-joe) is not even halfway across the country. But the areas I am about to cross are populated by many different peoples who are not ethnically Chinese. They live within the borders of the People’s Republic of China, but many of them feel no affiliation with China or Chinese culture. Their religion, their history, their language, every reference point you care to mention is different from those of the Han Chinese, yet Beijing says they are Chinese. Most of the so-called minority peoples live peacefully within the Chinese state. But many Tibetans and members of the Uighur ethnic group (pronounced Wee-gur), who inhabit the west, believe the regions where they live should not be part of China, and there are movements inside and outside China to resist rule from Beijing.
The reasons for this resistance have their roots in the very nature of the Chinese state, and the complete transformation it has undergone in the last 150 years.
For centuries (millennia, in fact) China was defined not so much by the territory it covered but by its culture, similar to how the concept of Christendom defined Europe before the advent of the nation-state in the seventeenth century. What made you Chinese in the past was not so much where you lived (though of course that was part of it) but whether you accepted the teachings of the ancient Confucian texts, the bureaucratic system of government, and Chinese imperial authority. Barbarians on the fringe of the empire could become Chinese by adopting Chinese ways, and some did, just as barbarians in ancient Europe could become Roman by adopting Roman ways, and then, during the Dark and Middle Ages, infidels could become part of “Christendom” by accepting Christianity.
For China, though, there was also a sort of twilight zone of people who were on the fringes, who did not adopt Chinese ways but whom the emperor and mandarins in Beijing considered part of the empire, part of the broader imperial family. This was especially true after the conquests of the eighteenth century when the Chinese Empire invaded and incorporated Chinese Turkestan (now called Xinjiang) and Tibet. The Uighurs, Tibetans, and others would send tribute to Beijing, often just to keep the emperor off their backs. Rulers in Beijing were happy to keep a loosey-goosey relationship with the border peoples too, not forcing them to adopt Chinese ways as long as they sent tribute and kowtowed to the emperor when they were supposed to.
That all changed in the nineteenth century, with the coming of the Ocean People. China’s elite gradually realized that the West was playing by completely different rules. Here were people from beyond the Chinese world who did not accept either the traditional Chinese worldview or the superiority of Chinese culture. The Ocean People were not interested in a tributary relationship with Beijing. They came from a continent of equal nation-states, all vying for supremacy, and they had no time for the pretense of Chinese superiority. More important, they knew their own weapons were infinitely better. As the Ocean People began to carve up China, it eventually became clear to China’s rulers that the Chinese way of ordering the world culturally could not continue, and that if they wanted China as an entity to survive, the Chinese would have to take on the West at its own game. After much resistance and deep, deep soul-searching, many of them concluded that, to save themselves as a nation-state, they would have to destroy themselves as a culture.
So the Chinese began to ditch their culture, and their cultural way of defining who they were, and they started to think more in terms of the nation-states of Europe. The Confucian classics and thousands of years of Chinese history said that China was the center of the world and the Chinese were the world’s superior people. The military defeats and humiliating treaties forced upon them in the nineteenth century told them they were not. Europe was superior because it used modern technology and weaponry, so China would have to learn something of that if it was to avoid being carved up completely. In 1905 the Chinese abolished the all-important Confucian examination system, which had given the emperor and his mandarins their legitimacy for two thousand years, and then, in 1912, the whole imperial system itself was overthrown.
Now, if you are defining for the first time the line on the map to show where your nation-state begins and ends, you have to decide what to do with those peoples with whom you have always held an ambiguous relationship. Are they in or out? And of course, for any ruler in Beijing, they had to be in. There could be no more fudging of who was Chinese and was not. Chinese control of Tibet and Turkestan from the eighteenth century to 1912 was in many places only nominal, and after 1912, as we have seen, China collapsed and could not enforce its control over the west at all. But soon after the Communists conquered eastern China, in 1949, they set about moving troops to Tibet and the Muslim northwest in order to draw their borders, Western-style, where it was felt they had existed under the last Qing dynasty (pronounced Ching), which ruled from 1644 to 1912. This was the ultimate sign of China’s transformation from world unto itself to one n
ation-state among many. But the transformation has not been smooth, and the legacy for today’s China is an uneasy mix of old empire and modern nation-state. It’s a dilemma best summed up by the MIT political scientist and all-around China genius Lucian Pye, who wrote that “China is a civilization pretending to be a state.”