By Peter Hessler
“Hessler has a fabulous feel of the intonations and gestures that supply lifestyles to the moment.” —The ny occasions e-book Review
From Peter Hessler, the New York Times bestselling writer of Oracle Bones and River Town, comes Country Driving, the 3rd and ultimate e-book in his award-winning China trilogy. Country Driving addresses the human facet of the industrial revolution in China, concentrating on economics and improvement, and exhibits how the car growth is helping China shift from rural to city, from farming to company.
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Extra info for Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory
Sample text
A thin red line on my Sinomap might represent a brand-new asphalt road, but it could also be a dirt track or even a dry creekbed. Quite often the routes were in the process of being improved. Beginning in 1998, the government had invested heavily in rural roads, partly as a response to the Asian financial crisis, and this project was still under way when I took my journey. In modern China, road building has often been a strategy for dealing with poverty or crisis. The first major construction campaign of motor roads began in 1920, when a drought resulted in a terrible famine across the north.
It was valid for six years, and to protect against counterfeiters, the document featured a hologram of a man standing atop an ancient horse-drawn carriage. The figure was dressed in flowing robes, like portraits of the Daoist philosopher Lao Tzu, with an upraised arm pointing into the distance. Later that year I set out to drive across China. WHEN I BEGAN PLANNING my trip, a Beijing driver recommended The Chinese Automobile Driver’s Book of Maps. A company called Sinomaps published the book, which divided the nation into 158 separate diagrams.
I took the foreigner’s test on a gray, muggy morning, the sky draped low over the city like a shroud of wet silk. The examiner was in his forties, and he wore white cotton driving gloves, the fingers stained by Red Pagoda Mountain cigarettes. He lit one up as soon as I entered the automobile. It was a Volkswagen Santana, the nation’s most popular passenger vehicle. When I touched the steering wheel my hands felt slick with sweat. “Start the car,” the examiner said, and I turned the key. ” A block of streets had been cordoned off expressly for the purpose of testing new drivers.