Before coming to China, I had many goals.
With two months to prepare, I planned on re-learning a year of Mandarin that had seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I had four or five guide books to read and tons of shopping to do before I would feel prepared. Needless to say, I did none of these things.
The only relatively China-related thing I did this summer was read "China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power" by NPR Correspondent Rob Gifford.
Like many of you, I had my Kerouac phase (which I may or may not have outgrown) and an extended road trip is definitely on my imagined list of things to do before I die. So when I saw Gifford interviewed on Book TV on CSPAN-2 (just kidding, it was the Daily Show), I knew I had to have it. The book is about a 3,000 mile road trip from Shanghai across the entire country of China along what used to be the famous Silk Road, but is now known as Route 312.
Gifford makes a lot of comparisons between Route 312 and America's Route 66, and there is some validity here. They are both "routes," for one. Route 66 goes from a major city, Chicago, through a desert and ends at the lovely Pacific coast. Route 312 begins in a major city as well, traverses the Gobi desert, and ends up in ... um ... Kazakhstan. Did you know that China bordered Kazakhstan? I sure didn't. I think Gifford's main fault was that he got the road trip thing backwards. You're supposed to start off in the Kazakh wasteland and flee toward civilization, not the other way around. I guess that's what you get when you trust a British guy to take a road trip.
If you're like me, when you get a new nonfiction book you immediately flip to the middle to see if there are any pictures. The first picture I found got me very excited for Shanghai: the new branch of Hooters, with Chinese businessmen and Hooters girls dancing on a table. If you'd previously asked me what would be the American restaurant chain least likely to succeed in China, Hooters would be at the top of my list for various practical and sociological reasons. Gifford was equally intrigued, as Hooters was one of the few restaurants he mentions during his entire stay in Shanghai.
The theme of the book is that China is at a "crossroads;" a little on the corny side for my tastes, but this observation rings true in all of Gifford's studies and interviews. On one hand, China has the potential to become a global power unmatched by any other country in the world, but on the other, children are taught to leave any and all political thoughts to the Communist party officials. On one hand, the country's GDP has been growing at nearly 10 percent for quite some time, but at the same time, the country's inequality has reached nearly unsustainable levels.
This book, however, is no lecture on geopolitics and macroeconomics. It's more of a snapshot of a country that is changing so quickly that the information is probably outdated by now. The road trip makes the story easy to read, but what I appreciated most was Gifford's weaving of narrative and history, giving people like me, who had never studied China in depth before, a complete understanding of the significance of everything else he covers. This book is a great read for anyone remotely interested in international affairs. So, unless you're one of the three or four people at Tufts who aren't, this is something to check out.
Mike Adams is a junior majoring in international relations. He can be reached at michael_j.adams@tufts.edu.
