Country Driving. Peter Hessler
drink a little bit!”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“Sure you can—just a glass or two!”
The cadres weren’t nearly as persistent as others I met on my journey. When it came to drinking-and-driving peer pressure, weddings were the worst occasions, followed closely by funerals. That was another challenge of being on the road—if I attended any kind of banquet during the day, I had to find a way to be polite but firm, and accepting one drink only opened the floodgates. In America it’s enough to say, “I’m driving”—after that, the subject is closed. In China, though, that statement simply opens new avenues of logic, some of which are hard to refute. On my journey, the first reason to drink was usually the fait accompli. “You have to drink it now,” people said, holding up a full glass. “It’s already been poured. You can’t turn it down.” The second reason was that I had come so far and must be tired. The third reason was that after the banquet I could drive very slowly. They also pointed out that Americans use the right side of the road, so Chinese driving is natural; a couple of drinks won’t matter. Anyway—reason number five—the glass had already been poured. Sometimes people said the police would be so shocked to see a foreigner behind the wheel that they’d never think of arresting me for driving while intoxicated. Once, a banquet host asked, “When did you first learn how to drive?”
“About twenty years ago.”
“See? Most people here have only been driving for a year or two. With so much experience, of course you can drink something!”
His logic made sense: I couldn’t imagine how much I’d have to drink before feeling inspired to go backward down the on-ramp of an expressway. In Youyu, though, the cadres were on their best behavior, and I was able to fend off the baijiu and beer. After the banquet I thanked them for the tour and drove out of town. Two miles later, I turned around, skirted the city center, and headed back toward the line of signal towers. I was curious to see if villagers said the same things when I arrived in a City Special instead of a chauffeured Santana. Near the Ming fort, I saw a group of people high on a mountainside, working with shovels, and I followed a dirt track to the site.
There were ten men and women digging crescent-shaped holes into the loess. All of them wore surplus army jackets, and they gathered around my Jeep. They lived in a nearby village called Dingjia; like most settlements in this area, it was composed of cave homes. When I said that I was a journalist, they gathered closer.
“They’ve been doing this kind of thing since I was young,” one man said. “In the past it wasn’t the World Bank, but there have been other campaigns. You see all of these holes? They’re empty. For two or three generations people have been digging these holes, and you still don’t see any trees here. Why not? Because our labor is free, but they’d have to pay money for the trees. It doesn’t cost anything to have us dig. They do it so that when the leaders come past, they see the holes and they believe that trees are being planted. The local officials embezzle the money instead.”
He was only twenty-eight years old, but the others in the group seem to defer to him as a spokesman. In the countryside, I sometimes met ranters—people who couldn’t stop complaining angrily about government corruption. But this man was soft-spoken; he chose his words carefully, and there was a certain sadness in his eyes. He wore an especially big military jacket—another member of rural China’s great castoff army. I asked how much they were paid for the digging.
“We get five bowls of instant noodles every day,” he said.
I couldn’t believe that I’d heard correctly, so I asked him to repeat it.
“Five bowls,” he said. “If you stick around, you’ll see them deliver it.”
“Why do you do the work?”
“Otherwise we don’t get government relief,” he said. “We’ve had a drought, and this year it was too dry for corn. We didn’t even plant it. All we have this autumn are potatoes. The government gives us corn for relief, but they won’t give it unless we do the digging.” He continued: “Most people in our village are opposed to this project, because we’ve lost three-fourths of our land. We’d like to graze animals in places like this, but the government says they need to protect it. Protect, protect, protect—that’s all we hear, a bunch of slogans.”
The others murmured in agreement. “You know the saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” the young farmer said. “The country’s leaders are sitting in a high place, and they have no idea what’s really going on. And the people don’t know what the country’s leaders really say. Local leaders are the biggest problem—the county officials are the ones who embezzle everything.” He pointed at the Ming fort, with its World Bank slogan. “We see the World Bank officials in their cars, when they have inspections, but we can’t talk to them. The county leaders don’t let us. Actually, I don’t even know what ‘World Bank’ means. All I know is that it has something to do with investment. They come by in their cars, and we’ve tried to get them to stop, but they never do. They just tell us slogans: Protect the Land, Turn the Land into Forest.”
The phrase he used—Shan gao huangdi yuan, The mountains are high, the emperor far away—is common in rural China. People invariably believe that problems are local, and that higher-ranked leaders are honest and decent; it’s rare to meet somebody who is cynical about the system to its core. And it’s hard for them to grasp the inevitability of bad geography. For a village like Dingjia, the mountains are high and the factories far away—there was no way they could compete with the coastal economy, and even the best-run tree-planting campaign would have a limited impact on a place like this. The man told me that when he was a child, Dingjia had a population of two hundred; now there were only eighty people left. I’d heard the same thing at all the stops along my drive—every village had a declining population. “I should go out to look for work, too,” the farmer said. “But I have a small child and both my parents are still in the village. I’ll probably go eventually, but I’d rather be able to stay a little longer.”
I told him that I’d been escorted to other villages where people praised the World Bank project.
“Maybe there are some places where they get the money and they plant the trees and things improve,” he said. “But not around here. Look at this hillside—nothing good is going to grow here, because they already removed most of the topsoil. They put it in places near the road, so they can plant things there and it will look good. It’s just for show.”
While we were talking, a two-stroke engine echoed from down in the valley. The puttering grew louder, and then a tiny blue tractor appeared on the road. It looked like a cartoon vehicle hacking and coughing its way up the steep hillside. When it finally gasped to a stop I saw that the back was loaded with bags of instant noodles. Silently the driver distributed five packages to every worker. In China, people often eat instant noodles dry, as a snack, and the workers tore open their packages. The brand name said “Islamic Beef Noodles.”
“Are you Islamic?” I asked.
“No,” the young farmer said, laughing. “But these are the cheapest brand—no pork. A nickel each!”
He opened a bag and handed it to me. That was even worse than the poured drink: the last thing I wanted to do on this hillside was eat dry halal instant noodles that represented one-fifth of a laborer’s day wage. After some polite arguing, I convinced him to keep it, along with a pack of Oreos from my stash in the City Special. Later, when I contacted a World Bank official, he insisted that the farmers were wrong, and he noted that the bank’s projects on the loess plateau had already benefited over one million people. But it was just another statistic: the only thing I knew for certain was that those million beneficiaries did not include the individuals I had spoken with. And I had always been wary of development work that was administered from the capital, with little local contact. The mountains are high, the NGOs far away—that was how you ended up with people digging holes in exchange for Islamic Beef Noodles. It also seemed like a bad idea to paint World Bank slogans onto Ming dynasty ruins. But the Great Wall had already survived countless invasions, and undoubtedly