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Friends who planned to visit China for the first time asked me to recommend a book about modern China, and this is it. It's about ten years out-of-date now, but former NPR correspondent Rob Gifford takes us along on a fascinating journey across China, showing us the best and the worst of what modernity has brought. He brings China to life by telling stories of individual Chinese people, showing us the country from the inside in a way only a journalist fluent in Chinese could. If you read through to the end, you'll get his very fair assessment of China today - from a western journalist's perspective.
Gifford crosses the country in buses and rented taxis along Route 312, China's version of US Route 66, from Shanghai all the way to the border with Kazakhstan. In the western half of the country, Route 312 roughly follows along the old Silk Road trail. The author frequently digresses onto issues and problems concerning contemporary China whenever he seems to run out of things to say on the immediate environs and its history. Much of this is critical; the terms "Communism" and "Communist" come up eighty-four times in the book. Yet he also strives for journalistic balance and objectivity in the customary praising-and-spanking manner, along with the usual splitting of China into two adversarial camps - the rich and privileged at the top and the rest of the country that is locked out. Then there is the exemplary Chinese urban underdog figure Western writers have long identified with and which Gifford latches onto as well, the taxi driver (formerly the rickshaw driver). It is a curious master-slave relationship, as no other Chinese personage are foreign travelers more dependent on for their most basic daily activity, namely getting around. Gifford meets a lot of taxi drivers, whom he pays to take him across the country when he is not on buses, along with many other folk as well, typically those with grievances against the Party (e.g. Henan Province AIDS victims, Christians). His concluding point after talking to a prostitute: "We often fail to see that Chinese people are living, breathing, loving, hating individuals, who do things for complex psychological reasons, just like Westerners." Can he really mean to say something so platitudinous, or worse, racist - the assumption that the Chinese aren't quite human, at least not as much as the rest of us are (even as he tries to correct this assumption)? Readers looking for a slick and often entertaining introduction to China may find this book useful; the more discerning may want to give it a pass.
I read only a few books over many years, but this caught my attention to immediately read from front to back because it is a relatively small paperback and contained a subject of great interest, China, as I visited that enticing country in the early eighties, just when tourism was beginning (Nixon's first visit was in 1973) to gain momentum for groups (no individual visits yet). It is written by a former member of the PBS staff, who journeyed the "China Road," as he calls it, from the outskirts of Shanghai to the outer northwest limits of China close to Tibet. Probably,t he road has not reached that province. The writing is so well done, the stories about his journey so interesting, the history so well researched of the areas through which the road runs, the people he met so well delineated, and his opinions about the future of the road and of China so compelling that this is your one book to engage Chine in your life.
I read a lot of travel memoirs and this one is truly one of the best. The authors takes lots of risks which the average travel wouldn’t because he knows so much about how China with its culture and behemoth bureaucracy works. You get to understand how modern China works and how it affects the average citizen while learning about so many places. Author is gifted. Don’t hesitate.
I was captivated by this story. This was a combination of a travel adventure and the musings of a newsman well versed in the nuances of Chinese language and politics. I felt like I was there and he asked the questions I would have liked to ask. He pulled together historic threads and the opinions of the man in the fields, the woman on the bus, and scheduled interviews. We visited factory cities, ancient temples, and the western autonomous areas. One day he would love China in all its hope, and the next day he would hate it for its lack of it. The publisher asked him to make some "conclusions" at the end, and I was glad that he still stayed on the fence, looking at China from all angles.
I cried "Pulitzer" once before for Sarah Chayes' book on Afghanistan - that didn't happen, but I would be remiss if I did not say that this book also deserves one.
British onetime NPR reporter, Rob Gifford, spent many years in China, speaks fluent Mandarin, and has a strong love/frustration relationship with the enigma which is China, it's people, it's traditions, and it's encouraging/maddening rapid transition from a sleeping dragon to a monster - the capacity and character of which cannot yet be determined.
Gifford starts the book as a sandaled, bearded, Kerouac-type hippy traveler busing and hitching along China's backbone route 312, talking to everyone who will talk, from CEO's to Chinese yuppies, to truck drivers, to impoverished farmers, starting in Shanghai and ending up some 3000 miles later at the far west border - having crossed the Gobi Desert on the way.
He ends the book, however, not as the hippy philosopher, Kerouac, but as an astute political scientist and prognosticator of the various possible futures for China, based on her present course. I have read several books on China - of those, this is the best. I would say required reading for anyone who cares about the future, especially college age Americans, whose future will be in many ways entwined with that of China.
Besides all that, it is colorfully well written, and a fascinating read.
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This item: China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power
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