China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power

I have been reading quite a few books on China, as I am fascinated with and intruiged by the country's amazing economic transformation, and the potential consequences elsewhere in the world, including here in the US. (Among the better ones are China Shakes the World by James Kygny as well as The Elephant and the Dragon by Robyn Meredith). If you listen regularly to NPR Morning Edition and All Things Considered, Rob Gifford will be a familiar voice.

In "China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power" (344 pages), Gifford, who has had a lifelong fascination with China and speaks Mandarin fluently, takes us on a journey across China on Road 312, the Chinese equivalent of our Route 66. Starting in Shanghai and working his way west, Gifford meets ordinary and not-so-ordinary Chinese and simply lets them do the talking. It makes for compelling reading. Talking to a well-known radio talk-show host in Shanghai, the host remarks that "morality--a sense of what's right and wrong--doesn't matter anymore".

At some point in his journey Gifford runs into a man holding a big sign that reads ANTICORRUPTION JOURNEY ACROSS CHINA. The man tells Gifford that "You see, in the West, people have a moral standard that is inside them. It is built into them. Chinese people do not have that moral standard within them. If there is nothing external stopping them, they just do whatever they want for themselves, regardless of right and wrong".

When Gifford runs into an Indian national, he hopes to have a discussion about how things are evolving in India versus in China, but the man is not interested in having the discussion. Gifford then dryly writes "So in the end, I have the conversation with myself over dinner and I conclude that I don't want to be a Chinese peasant OR an Indian peasant. But if I have to take a side, despite all the massive problems of rural China, I'll go for the sweet and sour pork over the chicken biryani any day of the week". Gifford spends a fair amount of time giving thought whether China can ever become a real democracy. Looking back at the 13th century, Gifford writes "There are many ways in which China was far head of Europe, in terms of technological development and prosperity. But for some reason, their system never developed any real checks on state power, and since in the West these checks did emerge, it has become a real contention between the two sides".

I could go on giving more quotes from the book, but suffice it to say that Gifford brings story upon story, and observation upon observation about China the culture, the people, the country, just superb. I was in China earlier this year and happen to be in a number of the cities that Gifford talks about in the book, in particular Shanghai, Suzhou, Nanjing and Xi'an, and this book brought back some great memories. This book is not just a "travelogue", but instead a wonderful mix of facts and observations. Highly recommended for anyone interested in China!

Following the "silk road" is an adventure in itself, and one covered extremely well in other travel books, but here Rob Gifford is cutting across China with one underlying question: Where is China heading? The answers are a little bit scary. As we travel with Gifford (what a great travel partner he'd make!) we meet many people who show by turn resilience, entrepreneurship but also something a lot more desperate: an element that has been described elsewhere not so much as 'dog eat dog' but 'man eat man'.

The writing here is attractive, and often very entertaining, but the picture that Gifford reports isn't always a pretty one. With the world's biggest economy ballooning as it is, there's still a burgeoning, clambering desperation among the poor to get onto the ladder before the opportunities elude them. In some of the poorer, more remote areas, this fact - one can readily see, is already causing sad social consequences. There's a tone of fascinating regret here: a question about whether the price of progress is always worth it. Well recommended.

I am very glad that I read China Road before the recent earthquake because the background that the book gave me on Chinese culture and politics has helped me better understand the news coverage of the disaster. This is the mark of a book that is truly worth reading, in that it helps the reader deduce meaning from world events.

The premise and structure of the book are appealing. The author, Rob Gifford, an American journalist, hitchhikes across China on Route 312, China's equivalent of the US's Route 66, and writes about the places he visits and the people he meets. Along the way, he muses about China's history, its current building boom, its social structures and traditions, its problems related to its emergence as a global economy and its likely future as a world power. This makes for fascinating reading and, certainly for me, an entertaining way of getting to know a nation and a people who are increasingly affecting the lives of everyone on Earth.

As soon as I heard about the collapse of school buildings in the poorer provinces of China during last month's earthquake, I realized that many parents would have just lost their only child due to China's one-child policy. This, it seemed to me, would be one of the things more likely to create the kind of anger and dissatisfaction that the government will be unable to buy off by putting more consumer goods into the hands of China's growing middle-class. Sure enough. The news continues to be full of stories about the anger and resentment felt by many lower middle class parents whose children died in poorly constructed schools while the children of the wealthy survived because they attended well-built schools that did not fall during the quake. Some of the devastated schools stood right next to others that were barely scratched. That is exactly the type of situation that Gifford warns about in China Road -- an event that exposes the corruption of local governments, the results of which are so heinous that the people refuse to be appeased by more stuff.

Through reading China Road, I also came to better understand the conflict surrounding what is called Greater Tibet, some of which is actually a part of traditional China, and now see that the situation there is not quite as black and white as I once thought.

By the time Gifford reached the end of his tale of Route 312, I felt as though I had received a solid tutorial on a country that I had once only the most rudimentary knowledge about, and I was sorry to see the end of the road. Highly recommended.

First of all, this is a very interesting book. I was born in late 70s, after the cultural revolution. So, after I was born, the country was making a U-turn from communism to capitalism. Frankly speaking I have not appreciated very much about the Chinese tradition and cultural legacy until I read this book. It actually occurs to every culture and country. The Argentines may prefer Hollywood to Argentine Tango, the Indians found nothing sexy about Yoga, however, internationally, they are big hits and symbols of their culture. It is not that I know nothing about Chinese tradition and cultural legacy, I observed and experienced them all my life in the past 30 some years. However, the author gave a totally new perspective on all this issues. It is very much like a bystander's view of China and this actually make me understand myself and my country much more. So I would first recommend this book to Chinese people. I recommend this book to internationals (non-Chinese) too but I am afraid you are not going to understand China objectively by reading it. The reason I say that is that the route the author took is just a slice of china. The US counterpart of this route is like from NYC to Oregon. If a Chinese author wrote a book about the USA by only taking this route, what would the reader's impression about USA? You get the idea.

Second, in this book, you can see that how Chinese people welcome the foreign people, which I can not understand myself. Anywhere in China, Rob the author can hitchhike and there will be people approaching him automatically. Sometimes he get free lunches and free tour guides. This will never happen to me because I am Chinese. I think generally Chinese people think that "to give" and "be generous" will make friends. The mindset is that you come all the way to China so that you should give you good treatment for your effort. Both Han and the ethnic people in northwest want to know how Foreigners think about China. Because I am Chinese, other Chinese will not treat me special. The western mentality is different, nobody in the US ever approached me because I am Chinese and I come a long way to get here. The most common question I get in the US is that: "Will you go back to China after you graduate?" Nobody want to know how I think about the US.

Third, this book is not about China as a whole. This is just one slice of it. Like US have a highway system of 10 east-west bound 10 north-south bound interstates, China has a similar system. If you take a different route, things will be very different. This book give an impression to reader that once you across Nanjing, which is 4 hours ride from Shanghai, you enter the rural China for the rest of the trip. This is totally not true. Route 312 covers the most poor provinces in China. If you go south or north, it is all very industrial. I guess the author choose Route 312 because it enhance the difference between poor and rich, Han and ethnic Chinese, etc. Contrast will sell.

Finally, one obvious mistake with prejudice from the author. On Page 239, The author said: " Until the eighteenth century, the Chinese character "hui" was used in imperial edict to describe the Muslims of northwest China. Once of the constituent radicals of the character was the "dog" radical...." the author went on saying in the Chinese mindset, Chinese think foreigner and domestic Muslims are no better than dogs. This is false argument. The character "hui" does not have a "dog" radical, either in traditional writing or simplified writing. The author must confused this Chinese character with something else. "hui" means "come back" in Chinese, it is the Mongols names Chinese Muslims "hui hui", which might be a translation from Mongolian language. Chinese people always treat foreigners well, Marco Polo was well treated in Ancient China. The author get lots of voluntary help in China. If we think the foreigners are dogs, we would not have done that.

My suggestion to people want to know about China. Go to China and be open-minded. China is safe place to go, much safer than US inner cities. Hope you all enjoy your trip in China!!!

China Road
By Rob Gifford, Published 2007

Rob Gifford has written an interesting and worthwhile reading book. I read the book, from cover to cover, very carefully, so careful that at times I would re-read a passage several times making sure that I did not misinterpret his ideas and intention. Yes, his intention which I analyzed with great caution and observed the body-language of his language used throughout the book that revealed a great deal what he had in his mind that he did not want to come right out stating his thoughts that he might not even aware of.

Spent about two decades of his Youngman hood in China did help him to be familiar with the history of China but his view of China, along with her history, is always shadowed with his, I regret to say, his very colored perspective or just plain bias.

The kind of initial love for China is quite common among many Westerners after reading the books by Pearl Buck a daughter of a Presbyterian missionary family in the 1890s in the then small city Zhenjiang a short distance east of Nanjing. Rob Gifford was also deeply inspired by an English missionary James Hudson Taylor who had been in China some forty years earlier before Pearl Buck, also did his missionary work in Zhenjiang area. Taylor, at the early age of twenty-two, felt a sense of divine calling to China and devoted about 50 or so years in his work there with a style mingling with the people there refusing to be separated from the locals in more comfortable houses for the Westerners. All of these deeply touched Rob and, reading between his lines we can see that Rob went to China with similar zest to ¡°save¡± Chinese with his Western vision, richly wrapped into Western religion, Christianity, but he was not allowed to be a missionary in China today and this is where his body-language seeps through all throughout the his book.

Rob¡¯s mental makeup is so deeply soaked in his Christianity background that this is principally his yardstick to measure so much in contact with him in China. His frequent, often quite lengthy, analysis and criticism about Chinese tradition, culture, history, political system, wither current or historical, are all based on his personal background in England as a young man, almost about the same age as Taylor 160 years ago. But it is amusing that he gathered very little about how most of the educated Chinese are rather resentful of foreign religious missionary and this is not something existing only China today since 1949. It is important for the average Westerners to understand that not being religious, such as being a Christian, is a sign of ¡°backward¡± but such is not the case with the much better educated Westerners and slowly more better educated Westerners realize that Chinese were very fortunate not being so culturally dominated by any religion, Muslim or Christianity such as what we see the terrible struggle between the Fundamentalists and the more Secular directed Americans in the U.S. today. With his contract with NPR, an American organization, as a correspondence, he would frequently speaks as though he were an American, or perhaps he thinks the two are really just one.

His arguments against current Chinese political system very much as an extension of the very ancient political and cultural systems are surely quite upsetting to many Chinese but I think the Chinese have nothing to lose if the arguments are taken as something to ponder over with open mind whether they agree or not.

Rob¡¯s many encounters with the Chinese ethnic minorities almost always with some hidden with to stirrup troubles and he seems disappointed if the Chinese ethnic minority he met did not blast all the Han Chinese. But he did report that one Tibetan school teacher who teaches Chinese language to other Tibetan students and saying that the Tibetans are doing better today under the current government than staying as the traditional nomads as in the past. As one born in China and deeply concern and sympathetic to all the ethnics around the world I was uplifted by the forward looking Tibetan young teacher Rob had encountered in Gansu Province. The story Rob has told about this Tibetan teacher echo my wish for the Navajos in Arizona where I have had some wonderful contact with since the 90s and I tried hard to convince my Navajo friends to strive for the best to complete a solid education while also trying to preserve their traditional culture.

In a fleeting passage Rob briefly mentioned that Zhao Zi-Yang was attempting to initiating even before the 1989 Tian-An-Meng protest and the policy released was fully approved and supported by Deng Xiao-Ping. It is a profound regrettable event that the students in Beijing were very impatient with the progress made in political reform and the demonstration turned out to be one of the greatest political set back in modern China. Despite of the fact that Deng was the paramount leader he had to deal with the still very powerful old CCP members from the way back in their 80s or 90s and Deng still, of course, remember the two political purges and what he was put through by the wild students Red Guards during the so-called Cultural Revolution, the fear is very real for one at his age he gave in to the hardliners headed by Li Peng (ÀîÅô) to crash down the protest with Liberation Army. Rob is one of the few Westerners mentioned this factor but filed to provide any degree of evaluation of Deng¡¯s role and only his endorsement of economical development.

The expressions Ocean People and the Old Hundred Name are used very frequently in the book but both terms are very important to the Chinese than to the Westerners and the loss of the Chinese flavor here is a real substantial missing elements. Rob should have explained at the beginning and use Yang Ren for Ocean People and Lao Bai Xien (ÀÏ°ÙÐÕ) for the Old Hundred Name because the term is used to denote the common folks, not really the surnames much like when we say that we are the taxpayers in this country because we are so heavily taxed and barely able to get by unlike the top 1% particularly under George W. Bush government. .

Rob¡¯s final chapter is an extensive analysis that I wish he had save for himself for perhaps another 30 years then he would be able to make some revision. But I would not be telling the truth to say that I did not enjoy reading this book. I did, and very much so.