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4.5
Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip (P.S.)This is the final portion of Peter Hessler's China trilogy, and clearly my most favorite volume and the assigning of a 5-Star rating is totally superfluous. I am speaking with thorough enthusiasm because, as a Chinese knocking on the 5th quarter of a century I must admit that I was actually learning things about parts of China and some Chinese people from this very observing American journalist at times. As in his earlier two volumes he often pounding on a situation with annoying resentment of what he sees or confronting with to the point a Chinese may read about the story feeling unfairly criticized, but Peter Hessler rarely failed to offer a more objective explanation or a comparison with a similar situation in America which is sometime worse than what he sees in China.What is very relevant here is the common denominators are often quite the same and they are only differ in time when the same situation had happened 80 years ago in America and China is now duplicating the same "mistakes" today. The key point here is the natural or unavoidable phenomenon must occur as in the economical development. There is a strong similarity here in economical-social development as in biological development of various animals or plants in their growing process.Decades before Peter Hessler was born we had experienced numerous highways of very poor quality, even in California, but beginning in the late 50s we saw improvement when Interstate Freeways were constructed throughout America and even that the old U.S. highways, such as Highway 99 in California we had to stop on traffic lights including once I drove through a red-light on Highway 99 near Fresno during the 1961 winter split-pea soup fog. It is now reconstructed to the Interstate Freeway quality without traffic lights. Peter was often complaining about the road quality without seeing the time-lag in the development. No doubt, there will be cases like this but what I was disappointed by Peter's oversight is his failure stating the long term effects when so much precious farm lands are converted to economic development zones in Zhejiang Province (as well as many other places in other provinces), not to mention miles of farmlands are converted to highway constructions.During the early days in prior to the Interstate Freeway construction it was frequent to see highway often follow the topographical shape and slope like the hills or rivers but gradually we see Freeways simply paved over a hill despite of the steepness since cars are more powerful year after year. I remember commenting the unwillingness to compromise with natural topographical terrain in building the Interstate freeways as "typical American big ax unrelenting approach" to a problem.Now, similar things are seen in China, and at times, in my view, far worse. There is an old Chinese saying that mountains and rivers are easy to change but not human personality indicating the profound difficulty in changing a person's habit or character but not that the Chinese in ancient time ever removed a mountain or a hill and that is why there are plenty the terraces rice fields on the sides of mountains and hills. When Peter visited one of the economic development zones in south east Zhejiang Province (which is to the south of Shanghai a few hundred miles) he was told by the person in charge who had been in the PLA tank division with a 5-year experience driving tanks, that they are simply removing the mountains and hills by brutal force with modern powerful machinery and dynamites blowing away all the hills! I did not believe in what I read but Peter returned to this topic later in the book saying that they are removing even more hills and mountains to provide spaces for economic development zones. They removed some dozens of hills! I couldn't help thinking if the powerful men in the government can now modify their personality and may be even a little bit of their political conviction?Repeatedly, Peter mentioned the superhighway constructions in Zhejiang Province and the leveling of the terrains of the crop land converting them to economical development zones but failed to elaborate the tremendous size of the land conversion which is a serious loss to agricultural ability to provide basic food stuff to feed the 1.4 billion people and the reality of changing China from a grain exporting nation of some 8 million tons of grains to a net grain importing nation of 16 million tons in a short span of only couple years during the 1990s. .Prior to Peter's coming to southeaster China he had ventured into inner Mongolia more or less parallel to the Great Walls and this is an area I had never seen with my own eyes. His description is an opener for me both about the terrain and the poor condition of life and the simple and gentle peasant life he encountered but there are always the banquet loving Communist cadets in the midst of nice common folks. I wish Peter had taken more effort telling people the eastward moving desert wind taking more and more of the historically low quality farmland year after year. All of this will have very serious negative impact to China's effort to feed the billion plus people of the country.His moving into peasant territory north of Beijing was a delightful experience I can only admire from far away. How he was able to penetrate into the lives of the common peasant people community is truly interesting experience and the story was told in such a way that you feel you were there personally.This is a book telling the economical development in China from very close distance at people level but unfortunately it failed to bring forward the tremendous demand what the country must eventually confront in not too distant future and the demand for automobiles and Western style of life and the growing obesity problem will exert enormous pressure on the government, but ultimately, on the people themselves. Peter, however, never failed to alert us that the Chinese males are endlessly smoking cigarettes.
