Sic Semper Tyrannis

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


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In this book NPR correspondent Rob Gifford offers a fascinating view of China’s past, present, and potential future. A twenty-year resident of the country, Gifford weaves together an enjoyably readable book that is equal parts travel journal, (the narrative thrust of the book recounts his two-month journey of Highway 312, China’s three-thousand mile equivalent to America’s Route 66) and political, economic, and spiritual history book.

Along the road, Gifford meets all kinds of interesting people, each one voicing their own hopes and struggles. As an interesting hybrid of “foreigner who speaks the language” the author deftly exposes these individual’s lives as demonstrative of the larger life of China as a whole-- an impossible, multi-cultural whole. Gifford’s China is hard to pin down, hard to define: at times too Western in its greed and environmentally- damaging technological progress and at times not Western enough, (see the country’s treatment of the ethnic minorities in Tibet and Muslim northwest.)

But it’s the people that are most fascinating. One of the more heart-rending passages about a karaoke bar prostitute:

“[…}there is a dangerous tendency for everything in modern China to be given an economic impetus, as though financial pressure is the only reason anyone ever does anything. We often fail to see that Chinese people are living, breathing, loving, hating individuals, who do things for complex psychological reasons, just like Westerners. And as Wu Yan sits talking about her life, her story doesn’t have that standard tone, which says, “I must do this or I won’t be able to eat.” She is slightly laconic, and cynical and angry.
“So why are you working here?” I eventually ask her.
There is a long pause.
“There was a boy…” She pauses again for a long time, rattling the dice in the cheap plastic cup. “Wo ting xihuan de…who I liked a lot.” She is looking at the floor.
“But he liked another girl.” She stops shaking the dice, then looks up at me with large, hurt eyes. There is a long silence as I try to compute what she is saying.
“So…you’re…doing this to punish him?...Or to punish…yourself?”
She doesn’t answer but reaches out her arm to me, the palm of her hand facing up. There are two jagged scars on her lower arm, as though her wrist had been cut. She looks angrily into my eyes.
“It’s difficult being a person isn’t it?” she says finally.
I look at her and nod slowly. She shakes the cup with the dice inside and slams it down on the glass table.

Coming to this book knowing pretty much nothing about the country, the author kept me in it the whole time. Great read!

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posted by Mike @ 1:03 PM