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Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory Hardcover – February 9, 2010

by Peter Hessler (Author)

214 customer reviews

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“Hessler has a marvelous sense of the intonations and gestures that give life to the moment.” —The New York Times Book Review

From Peter Hessler, the New York Times bestselling author of Oracle Bones and River Town, comes Country Driving, the third and final book in his award-winning China trilogy. Country Driving addresses the human side of the economic revolution in China, focusing on economics and development, and shows how the auto boom helps China shift from rural to urban, from farming to business.

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, February 2010: There is, as everyone knows, no place in the world changing as fast, and at such scale, as China. Accounts of the upheaval can be breathless and even alarming, but Peter Hessler is the calmest and most companionable of correspondents. In his reporting for the New Yorker and in his books River Town, Oracle Bones, and now the superb Country Driving, he's observed the past 15 years of change with the patience and perspective--and necessary good humor--of an outsider who expects to be there for a while. In Country Driving, Hessler takes to the roads, as so many Chinese are doing now for the first time, driving on dirt tracks to the desert edges of the ancient empire and on brand-new highways to the mushrooming factory towns of the globalized boom. He's modest but intrepid--having taken to heart the national philosophy that it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission--and an utterly enjoyable guide, with a humane and empathetic eye for the ambitions, the failures, and the comedy of a country in which everybody, it seems, is on the move, and no one is quite sure of the rules. --Tom Nissley

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In his latest feat of penetrating social reportage, New Yorker writer Hessler (Oracle Bones) again proves himself America's keenest observer of the New China. Hessler investigates the country's lurch into modernity through three engrossing narratives. In an epic road trip following the Great Wall across northern China, he surveys dilapidated frontier outposts from the imperial past while barely surviving the advent of the nation's uniquely terrifying car culture. He probes the transformation of village life through the saga of a family of peasants trying to remake themselves as middle-class entrepreneurs. Finally, he explores China's frantic industrialization, embodied by the managers and workers at a fly-by-night bra-parts factory in a Special Economic Zone. Hessler has a sharp eye for contradictions, from the absurdities of Chinese drivers' education courses—low-speed obstacle courses are mandatory, while seat belts and turn signals are deemed optional—to the leveling of an entire mountain to make way for the Renli Environmental Protection Company. Better yet, he has a knack for finding the human-scale stories that make China's vast upheavals both comprehensible and moving. The result is a fascinating portrait of a society tearing off into the future with only the sketchiest of maps. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product details

Hardcover: 448 pages
Publisher: Harper; 1 edition (February 9, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0061804096
ISBN-13: 978-0061804090
Product Dimensions: 6 x 1.4 x 9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
Average Customer Review: 214 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #310,617 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #146 in Books > Travel > Asia > China > General
- #302 in Books > Travel > Food, Lodging & Transportation > Road Travel
- #1216 in Books > Travel > Travel Writing

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E. Sander

Better than Oracle Bones, but too long-winding at times

July 15, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

I read River Town when I was in China and liked it so much I immediately purchased Hessler's other two books, Oracle Bones and Country Driving. When I was travelling through China I actually started reading Country Driving but I never got round finishing it. More recently I bought a few audio books and have been listening to the two books in recent weeks.

I was quite disappointed by Oracle Bones, which I found to be too drawn out, often boring and had Hessler writing to much as a know-it-all. In cCuntry Driving he regained some of his balance and I'm happy to say it's more like River Town than Oracle Bones. The book consists of three parts. The first part deals with Hessler getting his driving license (including samples of the hilarious test questions) and driving along the Great Wall. I consider this the best part of the book with many funny stories and good humour and some information about Chinese regions you don't often come across.
I had expected the whole book to be like a travelogue, not unlike Rob Gifford's more serious China Road, but this (unfortunately) did not prove to be the case. The second and third part of the book find Hessler grounded in the small village of Sancha, north of Beijing, and a facotry for bra rings in Zhejiang. As such, the title of the book is a bit misleading.

The second part of the book, about the village on Sancha is my least favourite. The story mostly deals with one family and thereby the book shifts from the wide perspective of a roadtrip in the first part to the microcosm of a Chinese rural family. That's all fine but it does so in too much detail and I found myself getting impatient with the continuous story about a handful of people. I also found Hessler's writing to be walking a thin line between humorous admirating and derision at times.

The third part, about the Zhejiang factory, is more interesting again. Besides the workings of a factory in all it's facets - including having to deal with workers, government officials and competition - it also gives a glimpse of what China's economic development was like after the turn of the century. This makes for more interesting reading than the life of one rural family as far as I'm concerned.

All in all this is a step back in the right direction for Hessler after the disappointing Oracle Bones.

A note on the audio book: like Oracle Bones this audio book is narrated by Peter Berkrot, who I didn't like much in Oracle Bones because of his dreadful pronounciation of Chinese and silly voices whenever he read out dialogue by a Chinese person. Berkrot has improved is pronounciation somewhat for this book and his silly voices are a bit less exreme, though not fully absent in his rendition of Country Driving.

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Jimmy Zhang

One of my favorite books

December 25, 2015

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

My relationship with China is not straightforward. There’s great pride latent in my parents’ attitude towards their home country - their zuguo - and some of it has trickled down. While I recognize the validity, I tend take criticism of the Chinese - government policies, human rights violations, behavior of tourist groups - somewhat personally. Rather, I would prefer to assume a deaf ear.

Country Driving by Peter Hessler does not lack these criticisms. It’s an account of Hessler's experiences driving a rental car through the country, first following the Great Wall to the desolate Gansu province, then to a rural village north of Beijing, and finally, to the Zhejiang in south, the land of emerging factories. At each leg of his journey, Hessler integrates into some facet of the local community, putting him in a position to explore the effects of rapid development at a very personal level.

The criticisms that Hessler includes stem from an American accustomed to different conditions, and to be fair, they aren’t really presented as criticisms. Hessler describes insane driving conditions or guanxi, the Chinese form of networking, where business men and political officials lavish gifts in exchange for leniency, and his subtle sense of humor pries the ridiculousness out. It’s effective - some of the scenes made me cringe, touching on my sensitivity.

But any book full of criticisms, no matter how skillfully presented, is not much of a read. Country Driving is much more. For one, Hessler is a brilliant writer. His sentences are fluid, and he is a master at the thought provoking sentence to end a chapter. Combined with his eye (and ear) for important details, he packs insights to the Chinese way of life into memorable scenes: a peasant family venturing into Beijing to care for their sick child, a young girl celebrating her sixteenth birthday after a full day - 10 hours - of factory work. I could tell how much of China Hessler absorbed during his stay there, and I’m grateful that he translated his experiences from spoken Chinese all the way to beautifully written English.

I suspect that much of my affinity for this book comes from my ability to relate. I visited China every summer with my family from 2004 to 2008, which overlaps with the period that Hessler spent there. As I was younger, I was less tolerant to certain aspects: the trash, the rampant pollution, the suffocating heat, the sheer overpopulation. But reading this book made me want to visit China again, to be in that land of inescapable heritage and unprecedented change.

Hessler now lives in the Middle East as a correspondent. I hope he writes about his experiences there as well. I won’t be able to pronounce the names as effortlessly as I can with his books about China, but I already know I will read everything he writes.

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