[sustran] Re: nytimes article on cars in china

[Lee Schipper]

Interestingly, my colleague Wei-shuien Ng and I talked to the author after he heard our paper on cars in china (see www.embarq.wri.org and scroll down to the first piece on China).. - that 120 million cars in china just don't fit, period. He capture a lot of what I have been saying, then apologized at the last minute that it had all been cut (he phoned me in Turkey two weeks ago to get some sound bites).  In the end the last few paragraphs sort of capture that kind of wall the Chinese are heading for.
In short, what good is the thrill of owning a car when all you can do is crash into the driver in front of you?
 
Lee
 
>>> johnson.craig at gmail.com 07/04/06 8:41 PM >>>
here is a very interesting though lengthy article about car ownership
in China that appeared in the NY times on Sunday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/magazine/02china.html 

particularly vexing to me while reading the article is the importance
of "status" that has surrounded and aided the automobile boom in
china.

It seems to me that practicality and convenience are not necessarily
the main draw of owning a car, instead it is the status of owning and
driving a car.


Craig Johnson

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

July 2, 2006
Capitalist Roaders
By TED CONOVER
Zhu Jihong cannot wait to get started on his holiday road trip. At 6
a.m. on Saturday, the first day of the October National Day week (one
of three annual Golden Weeks in China, intended to promote internal
tourism and ensure that workers take some time off), Zhu has parked
his brand-new Hyundai Tucson S.U.V., with its limited-edition package
of extras like walnut trim and chrome step-bar, in front of my hotel
in downtown Beijing. He is half an hour early, but he is in a hurry.
He cannot believe I'm not ready.

Li Lu, a friend who is coming along as my interpreter, has found me in
the hotel restaurant. She was rousted even earlier than I, at her
apartment a couple of miles away, and calculates that Zhu, to make it
into Beijing from his home on the city's outskirts, must have gotten
up at 4. She adds that she's a bit concerned: she helped me book a
spot on this car trip and had assumed that the driver whose car we
shared would be a person of, well, culture. But Zhu, she says, is "not
educated."

"What do you mean?" I ask as we leave the hotel's revolving glass
doors and come upon Zhu.

Zhu is nicely dressed, in the dark slacks, leather loafers and knit
shirt of many Chinese businessmen. Cigarette in one hand, hair
recently cut and wavy on top, Zhu, in his 40's, has a somewhat
dashing, youthful air. Before Li Lu and I are out the revolving door,
he is at the back of the Hyundai, making room for my knapsack and
pointing me in the direction of the leather passenger seat. He stops
to shake my hand only after I pause and offer mine. Li Lu is our
intermediary and tries to effect the introduction I'm after, but Zhu
is not one for formalities; he gives a tiny nod, then circles the car,
hawks noisily and spits by his door, climbs in and turns the key. Li
Lu, from the back seat, gives me a look that says: See? What did I
tell you?

But as the car fills with smoke from his cigarette and the CB radio
battles for supremacy with operatic Red Army tunes on the CD player, I
don't much mind Zhu's manners (which, Li Lu explains, reflect the
factory owner's peasant background) because we're off on an adventure
and Zhu's excitement is infectious. Our trip is a seven-day excursion
from Beijing to Hubei Province in Central China, including stops at
the Three Gorges Dam and a mountainous forest preserve called
Shennongjia, fabled home to a race of giant hairy ape-men. And though
the trendy enterprise we are part of is known as a "self-driving
tour," we are not going alone: a dozen carfuls of other people have
signed on with the tour, organized by the Beijing Target Auto Club,
one of the for-profit driving clubs that are sprouting all over China.

Zhu is ready for a long day at the wheel our destination, Nanyang,
is more than 500 miles away but it's going to be even longer than he
thinks. Our rendezvous with the other cars at the Zhuozhou rest stop,
normally an hour away, will be delayed four hours, as thick fog closes
the expressway. Heavy rain will fall, and our early start will count
for little by midday as the highways swell with holiday traffic. There
will be wrecks, like the fatal one-car rollover we'll pass on a bridge
around midnight, an upside-down Beijing-plated Mitsubishi. The hotel's
dinner will be waiting for us at 1 a.m., and we'll all be happy to see
our rooms. But right now Zhu is pouring himself tea from a thermos and
telling Li Lu how rich he is and how lucky we are to be in his car.

"He says he is an excellent driver and we will go very fast," she
reports wearily.




The figures behind China's car boom are stunning. Total miles of
highway in the country: at least 23,000, more than double what existed
in 2001, and second now only to the United States. Number of passenger
cars on the road: about 6 million in 2000 and about 20 million today.
Car sales are up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006,
compared with the same period a year ago; every day, 1,000 new cars
(and 500 used ones) are sold in Beijing. The astronomic growth of
China's car-manufacturing industry will soon hit home for Americans
and Europeans as dirt-cheap Chinese automobiles start showing up for
sale here over the next two or three years. (Think basic passenger car
for $10,000, luxury S.U.V. for $19,000.)

But of course the story is not only about construction and production;
car culture is taking root in China, and in many ways it looks like
ours. City drivers, stuck in ever-growing jams, listen to traffic
radio. They buy auto magazines with titles like The King of Cars,
AutoStyle, China Auto Pictorial, Friends of Cars, Whaam ("The Car 
The Street The Travel The Racing"). Two dozen titles now compete
for space in kiosks. The McDonald's Corporation said last month that
it expects half of its new outlets in China to be drive-throughs.
Whole zones of major cities, like the Asian Games Village area in
Beijing, have been given over to car lots and showrooms.

In other ways, though, the Chinese are still figuring cars out and
doing things their way. Take the phrase used to describe our
expedition: "self-driving trip." It is called self-driving to contrast
it with the more customary idea of driving in China: that someone else
drives you. Until recently, everyone important enough to own a car was
also important enough to have his or her own driver. Traditions grew
up around this, like the chauffeur joining his boss at the table for
meals while on duty something still commonly seen.

But those practices are growing fusty. What are new and explosively
popular are car clubs some organized around the idea of travel, like
the Beijing Target Auto Club, and others organized around the idea of.
. .well, simply fun. The Beijing VW Polo Club, for example, has an
active Web site and hundreds of youthful members. (The Polo is a VW
model popular in Europe and Latin America and now manufactured in
China as well.) Club members meet regularly to learn about
maintenance, deliver toys to orphans and take weekend pleasure drives
reminiscent of America in the 30's and 40's. To celebrate the 2008
Beijing Olympics, four-dozen members recently turned up in a giant
parking lot to form the Olympic logo with their compact, candy-colored
cars, each circle a different hue. Single members have found mates in
the club, and at least one of their weddings featured an all-Polo
procession through the streets of Beijing.

In the West, cars can still excite, but the family car soon becomes
part of the furniture. In China, however, it's nothing of the sort. Li
Anding, author of two books on the car in China and the country's
leading automotive journalist, told me why when he invited me to join
some of his industry pals for dinner in Beijing. "The desire for cars
here is as strong as in America, but here the desire was repressed for
half a century," he began. All private cars were confiscated shortly
after the Communists came into power in 1949, supposedly because they
were symbols of the capitalist lifestyle. Having a car became the
exclusive privilege of party officials.

Across the table, Li Anding's colleague Li Tiezheng explained that
"people my age loved Russian movies. They gave us the idea we should
all own a car, and we all wondered why we couldn't." Li Tiezheng
bought his first car a Polish-made Fiat when private ownership was
finally permitted in the mid-1990's. But the stigma against ownership
was still huge. "The pressure was so great, I couldn't tell anyone. I
lied that I had borrowed it."

That didn't last long. By 2000, enough regulations had been removed,
and enough people were making money, that car ownership became a
reality for many Chinese for the first time. Li Anding, born in 1949,
the year the Communists came to power, said he was still astonished at
the change: "When I started writing about cars, I never expected to
see private cars in China in my generation, much less some of the
world's fanciest cars, being driven every day."

As the men around the table listened to Li's history and added to it,
there was a palpable sense of pride. This wasn't simply progress on
the level of a convenience analogous, say, to your neighborhood
moving from dial-up to high-speed Internet. To them it was China
finally entering the world stage and participating fully in human
progress. It had the additional meaning of something long denied that
could finally be acquired, like a wrong being rectified. Over and over
again, the group described car ownership with a term I would never
have thought to use:

"Once China opened up and Chinese people could see the other side of
the world and know how people lived there, you could no longer limit
the right to buy cars."

"This right is something that has been ours all along."

"Driving is our right."




When Li Lu noticed the sign for the Zhuozhou Service Area of the
Jingshi Expressway, Zhu Jihong was on one of his favorite subjects:
destinations. He had done self-driving to Mongolia and Manchuria, he
said, to Xinjiang and to Xi'an and the Silk Road. He made a round trip
to Tibet fantastic! and was considering one to Hong Kong. The main
problem with our current itinerary, in his opinion, was that it was
too short: "A week isn't long enough to really feel like you've been
away." His wife was less and less interested in these odysseys,
preferring, lately, to stay home and mind the hotel and restaurant he
had bought near his hometown outside Beijing. And his son, oddly
enough, wasn't interested in driving at all.

Li Lu interrupted Zhu and made sure he noticed this was where we
were to pull off and finally meet the group. Though it was early
afternoon now and Zhu had been driving for hours, he barely looked
tired. I thought to peek at the odometer of his two-month-old Hyundai
as he slowed; it showed 7,700 kilometers, or nearly 4,800 miles. That
was an annual rate of nearly 30,000 miles, and most of them would be
pleasure driving.

Though the parking lot was the first time most members of the trip had
seen one another, they had been talking for hours: each driver, before
today, had stopped by the Beijing Target Auto Club office to pick up a
CB radio and rooftop antenna. The rendezvous was on one side of the
lot, and in the middle of the group was a vehicle with the biggest
antenna of all, a thickly bumpered, sticker-plastered, red-flagged
Chinese-made four-by-four belonging to the president of the Target
club, Zhao Xiangjie.

Zhao and his truck were decked out for safari: he was wearing a khaki
utility vest with many zippers, busily meeting members of the group as
they arrived. Across the lot, a self-driving group from Guangzhou was
similarly mustered, easy to spot by the big stickers with numbers on
everyone's side doors and rear windows. And this, it turned out, was
Zhao's next duty, to adorn each vehicle with its numbers. My driver,
Zhu, accepted his with great ceremony, cleaning his doors first to
ensure good adhesion, making sure the number decals were straight and
even. If one theme here was safari, another was road rally, the decals
suggesting that everyone was part of a speedy team.

Though most are organized around the idea of trips, Chinese car clubs
come in many flavors. Some are run by dealers (like a Honda dealership
in Guangzhou), and others (like the VW Polo Club in Beijing) are
nonprofit and organized around a particular model. At least one is the
offshoot of an outdoor-recreational-gear manufacturer. Many are just
for four-wheel-drive vehicles and aim to go to the back of beyond.
Travel agencies sponsor some; others are run for and by motorcyclists.

One of Zhao Xiangjie's advantages, at the Beijing Target Auto Club, is
good connections in officialdom. He has worked as a composer,
filmmaker and official celebration organizer; he knows important
people and has succeeded in getting them to steer big commissions his
way. His auto-club offices are in the government-run Olympics Center.
In a speech he gave to the 2005 Auto Clubs and Fans C.E.O. Forum, I
heard him assert that more government involvement was needed if
automobile-related industries like the clubs were to develop in an
optimal fashion. I sensed that he wouldn't mind being China's first
under secretary of car clubs.

But an alternate strategy may have more momentum. Back in Beijing, a
young man named Chen Ming helps run what appears to be the largest
self-driving organization in China: the auto-club arm of Beijing
traffic radio FM 103.9. His employees, around 100 of them, occupy a
floor and a half of a midsize office building. Chen Ming has high
volume and a rapidly growing business. Linking an auto club to traffic
radio seems inspired. Members pay $27 a year and receive benefits that
include group insurance rates, gasoline rebates, "auto rescue" within
Beijing's Fifth Ring Road, free rental cars if a repair takes more
than three days, et cetera. Chen got his start in the business as
Zhao's protégé he was assistant manager of the Beijing Target Auto
Club and when I spoke with him in Beijing, he shared his belief that
Zhao's approach, his eagerness to stay involved with the government,
is outdated.

Maybe half of the vehicles in our group were S.U.V.'s and the rest
were passenger cars, almost all with foreign labels Toyota,
Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Citroën not the cheaper Chinese models that
made up the majority of cars on the road, the Fotons, Geelys, Cherys,
JAC's. (More than 40 local brands are currently manufactured in
China.) One of the foreign cars caught my eye: a flashy white Volvo
S80, driven by a man who was also a distinctive dresser. With his
white leather loafers, tight jeans, white belt with a big silver
buckle and white shirt ("Verdace," read the logo), Fan Li, a
television producer, cut an intriguing figure. He was accompanied on
this trip by his pretty 24-year-old daughter, Fan Longyin, who was
recently back from film school in France. Longyin was quickly becoming
friends with Jia Lin, a single female reporter for The Beijing Youth
Daily, who was in her 30's. Jia wore a tan leather jacket with a
winged glossy-lip logo on the back that said "Flying Kiss." Like me,
Jia came without a car, but it looked as if she would start riding
with the Fans.

And then there was the attractive young family in the white Volkswagen
Passat, the Chens: Xiaohong (who uses the name Peter with English
speakers), the personable information-technology executive; his wife,
Yin Aiqin, an electric power consultant; and their 4-year-old
daughter, Yen Yi Yi, whom, I would soon learn, was already taking
voice lessons at home from a member of the Beijing Opera.

More nerdy but genial were the bespectacled Wangs, in their Citroën
Xsara: she ran part of the back office of Air China; he worked for an
international freight firm. They, too, had an unattached passenger who
shared the driving and expenses. He was the urbane Zhou Yan, a partner
in China's third-largest law firm.

And then there were the businessmen. Organized by a cement-plant
owner, Li Xingjie, these 10 or 11 guys from the same Beijing suburb,
Fangshan, rode in S.U.V.'s and tended to stick to themselves. Some of
them owned coal-processing plants, which meant they were rich.

Soon all 11 cars were bedecked with numbers and the club logo. Pit
stops and snack purchases were completed; the service area looked a
bit like one on an American toll road, though there was no
landscaping, the simple restaurant was not a fast-food franchise and
the convenience store was not as elaborately stocked as in the States.
The gas station state-run Sinopec filled Zhu's Hyundai for about
$1.85 a gallon, and I paid in cash, gas and tolls being my
contribution to expenses. (Sinopec stations only recently began
accepting credit cards.) Everyone piled back in their cars, and we hit
the road. We would reconvene for dinner.




China's first modern expressway, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway,
was built in the early 1990's by the Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Y.S. Wu.
Wu studied civil engineering at Princeton in the mid-50's, when
construction was beginning on the U.S. Interstate Highway System. At
the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike was being widened from four
lanes to many lanes, and Wu has said it inspired him. (His powerful
firm, Hopewell Holdings, is named after a town near Princeton.) Though
Wu ran short of money and the ambitious project had to be rescued by
the Chinese government, the toll-road model of highway development
caught on.

Wu's Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway was the beginning of an
infrastructure binge that seems to be only picking up steam: the
government recently announced a target of 53,000 freeway miles by
2035. (The U.S. Interstate Highway System, 50 years old last week,
presently comprises about 46,000 miles of roads.) Some new roads,
especially in the less-developed western parts of the nation, are
nearly empty: China is encouraging road construction ahead of
industrial development and population settlement, assuming those will
follow.

The goal, of course, is not simply to replicate the boom of coastal
areas, where the majority of the country's population now lives.
China's larger aim is to consolidate the nation. Its version of
Manifest Destiny the "great development of the West" or "Go West"
policy begun in January 2000 envisions far-western territories, like
Tibet and the fuel-rich province Xinjiang (the name translates as "New
Frontier"), fully integrated, ethnically and economically, with the
rest of the country. It seems quite likely that, similar to the case
with American history, local indigenous cultures stand to lose along
the way. What the United States gained (and lost) with the Pony
Express, covered wagons and steam trains, China may achieve with roads
and automobiles.

If highways in China's west are so far awaiting traffic, easterners
have the opposite concern. As we headed south from Shijiazhuang toward
Zhengzhou, the roads packed with vacationers and truck traffic, Zhu
jostled for position with all the other people who were late getting
where they were going. His style of driving helped me understand
better why China, with 2.6 percent of the world's vehicles, had 21
percent of its road fatalities (in 2002, the most recent year for
which figures are available).

Of course, there must be many reasons. The large number of new drivers
is one; few of today's Chinese drivers grew up driving, and
road-safety awareness seems low. Many roads are probably dangerous 
though not, I would venture to say, the beautiful new expressway we
were on. It was like an American Interstate, only sleeker: the
guardrails were angular and attractive, not fat and ugly, and in the
divider strip there was typically a well-pruned hedge, high enough to
protect drivers from the glare of beams from opposing traffic at
night. Beyond the guardrails, grassy embankments sloped down to buffer
areas carefully planted with a single species of tree, often poplar.
The road surface was perfectly smooth, transitions even, signage
sparse but clear. Periodically we saw orange-suited workers
hand-pruning the center hedge or sweeping the wide shoulder with old
handmade brooms. There was never a maintenance truck nearby; wherever
they came from, they apparently walked.

It was the sweepers I worried about. Officially, there were two lanes
of travel in each direction. But each side also had a shoulder, and on
this expressway, at least, the shoulder was exactly as wide as the
travel lanes. Thus Zhu and others (despite signs asserting that it was
forbidden) used the shoulder as the passing lane. Occasionally, of
course, a sweeper would loom, or a disabled vehicle, and Zhu would
slam on the brakes and veer into the truck lane. Once past the
obstacle, he would floor it and swerve back out, brake once again,
swerve, honk it was almost like being in a video game, except that
video games end or you can walk away. We, on the other hand, had a
long way to go.

"Li Lu, does Mr. Zhu know that more Chinese die on the road every day
than died here during the entire SARS epidemic?" I asked her. She
translated. Zhu looked at me and laughed. "I think he didn't
understand," she said. We consulted, and soon Li Lu announced from the
back seat that we both really wished he would slow down a bit. Zhu
looked at me sidelong and then, if anything, speeded up.

he next morning Zhu was tired, finally, and asked if I wanted to
drive. I hesitated for a moment. I had researched the issue and was
fairly certain that foreign tourists were forbidden to drive between
cities in China. Most Chinese, however, seem never to have considered
the possibility of foreigners behind the wheel, and from the
beginning, Zhao asked whether I would be willing to help with the
driving. Far be it from me to shirk this responsibility. So I said
sure and climbed into the driver's seat.

This day's driving was different from the previous day's. As we moved
farther from the coast and its expressways, we spent more time on
national highways, which generally are two-lane and pass through a lot
of towns. Everyone in the club stuck pretty close together, and there
was a lot of chatting over the radio. Our leader, Zhao, began by
apologizing for yesterday's overlong drive. Even if there hadn't been
a highway closure due to fog, slowness due to rain and holiday
congestion, it was too long a drive for the first day, and he was
sorry. But he was also upbeat and sounded excited about getting to
Three Gorges Dam that afternoon. He moderated the CB chat that
followed, prompting each car's occupants to take turns introducing
themselves. Some told a joke, some sang a song. Fan, in the white
Volvo, put on an Elvis Presley CD and held his mike to the speaker,
playing "Love Me Tender" in honor of me, Elvis's countryman. As we
passed through one village an hour past breakfast, a clamor rose for a
pit stop.

The men had little trouble finding places to relieve themselves near
the edge of town, but women were in more of a bind. China's car
culture not to mention consumer culture has not yet reached the
countryside, and there was no restaurant nearby, no fast-food joint,
no gas station/convenience store. Chen Yin Aiqin, her daughter at her
side, knocked tentatively on the door of a farmhouse and was soon
welcomed inside and ushered to the latrine out back. Afterward, before
their car pulled away, she dashed back to the farmer's door with a
small box of chocolate from Beijing.

The lack of infrastructure for touring drivers is one reason that
these organized self-driving tours are so popular. Besides having
planned in advance (through arrangements with local travel agents)
where we would stop to eat and sleep every day, Zhao had an expert
mechanic in his four-by-four: repair garages were few and far between,
and one of the Beijingers' main fears was breaking down far from home,
with nobody trustworthy nearby to help.

The national roads, while more interesting to drive than the
expressways, were also more nerve-racking. There were considerable
numbers of people on bicycles, on foot and on small tractors; there
were crossroads; and least expected by me, there were many places
where I had to swerve toward the middle of the road because of farmers
having appropriated a strip of pavement along the edge for drying
their grain, usually corn. Sometimes the grain was laid out on blue
tarps; other times the drying zone was outlined by rocks or boards;
more than once, traffic slowed because of it. I had heard of Chinese
farmers sometimes laying their wheat across the road so that passing
vehicles would thresh it for them. But there was something aggressive
about this appropriation of the highway.

The suggestion of rural hostility toward traffic and the number of
people using the road for walking put me in mind of the famous "BMW
Case," which received a lot of media attention two years before. A
rich woman in a BMW, probably traveling on a road like this, was
bumped by a farmer transporting his onion cart to market. Enraged, she
struck the farmer and then revved her car and drove into the crowd.
The peasant's wife was killed, but despite widespread outrage, China's
Lizzie Grubman received only a suspended sentence.

BMW's seemed to be a sort of class-divide lightning rod. Recently, the
number of kidnappings for ransom has shot up in China the government
reported 3,863 abductions in 2004, higher than the 3,000 a year
reported on average in Colombia, the previous world leader. "In one
case," according to The China Daily, "police searching the apartment
of kidnappers in Guangdong Province found a list of all BMW owners in
the city that appeared to have come from state vehicle registration
rolls."

I was hoping to needle Zhu a bit, and so I asked him, if he was so
rich, why didn't he have a BMW?

"Bad value," he said, explaining that while many foreign carmakers had
plants in China and produced high-quality cars at a reasonable price,
BMW's were all imported, with huge taxes added on. And indeed, this is
true: tariffs and taxes add about 50 percent to the price of imported
cars, making them high-status items. If you want to be really
ostentatious, you do what rich guys like coal-mine operators from
Shaanxi Province increasingly do and come into the city to buy a
Hummer those cost upward of $200,000. But Zhu thought that was
ridiculous. The Volkswagen Passat he kept at home for his wife to
drive was made in China, he said, as were growing numbers of other
excellent foreign-designed cars, all of them produced under joint
ventures with Chinese companies (some state-owned or -controlled), an
arrangement the government hoped would encourage the growth of a
domestic car industry. "Like my Hyundai," Zhu said proudly, putting
his cigarette in his mouth so he could pat the dashboard. "Made in
Beijing."




Not long after lunch, we started seeing signs for the Three Gorges Dam
and accessed the site through tunnels along an expensively built
mountainside road. Security was tight, with numerous guard posts,
cameras and warning signs, and I was happy to swap seats with Zhu as
we pulled into a roadside waiting area just before an official came
by to collect every driver's license. A guide boarded our leader's car
and, over the radio, began a running commentary. I asked Zhu, between
her remarks, what he thought of my driving.

"He says you are a good driver, but he has some advice," Li Lu
reported. "He says to improve, you must be more brave!"

Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest construction projects in history,
seemed a fitting first attraction for our trip, evoking superlatives
in this land of superlatives. It has cost an estimated $75 billion so
far (including corruption and relocation costs); it will require more
than a million people to be relocated; it would generate more
hydroelectric power than any dam ever had; and it spans the Yangtze,
the third-longest river in the world. The reservoir began filling up
in 2003 and has six years left to go; it presents a huge military
target.

Like so much in China, the scale is almost too large to fathom. The
30-odd people in our group parked and then boarded buses that took us
up to a visitor center above the dam; we peeked at a model dam indoors
and then, like scores of others, scrambled around the viewpoint,
taking lots of pictures. Fan turned out to have a serious interest in
photography: his daughter posed, posed and posed again as her father
assumed an exaggerated wide stance with his heavy Nikon digital
camera. Others focused on the astonishing dam, proudly making sure I
got a good look, witnesses to a great change who were, themselves,
harbingers of a change.




Zhu was back at the wheel the next day as we drove from the Three
Gorges area to Hongping, a town deep in Hubei Province and the
jumping-off point for visits to Shennongjia, the forest reserve where
everyone hoped to see a yeti.

His Hyundai had a six-CD changer in the dash, and among the titles in
it were "The Relax Music of Automobiles," which turned out to be
instrumental versions of the love songs of Deng Lijun, the Taiwanese
pop singer of the 1970's. What Zhu really loved, however, was the
old-time music on "The Red Sun: A Collection of Military Songs, Volume
II." He played the CD again and again. The soaring, triumphalist music
evoked bygone days, and I expressed surprise that a modern business
guy like him loved the old socialist music so much. Zhu responded that
it was the music he grew up with. He had worked on a farm, he
confirmed. His grandfather became rich, but the Communists took it all
away.

"Don't you dislike Mao for that?" I asked. He looked at me full on
when Li Lu translated the question and then, at 60 miles per hour,
turned sideways in his seat to show me the pin on his left lapel. It
was a dime-size brass relief bust of the Great Helmsman himself.
Steering with his knees, he put his chin to his chest, unpinned it and
handed it to me as a gift.

"Many people still admire Mao very much," Li Lu explained. "They know
he made mistakes, but they also think he did much good. He got rid of
the Kuomintang. He brought China together. He is still a very big
hero, like a god to some."

Fan, the television producer, I had noticed, was also in the
worshipful camp. He had the leader's portrait, in Lucite, affixed to
the top of the dashboard of his Volvo so that he could not see
anything through the windshield without Mao appearing in his
peripheral vision. After I asked about that and complimented him on
the DVD screens built into the back of the front seats (for rear-seat
passengers), Fan invited me into the Volvo for the better part of a
morning's drive. Longyin, his daughter, took a seat in the back, along
with Jia Lin, the reporter, and offered some background on her father.
"My parents both suffered a lot in the Cultural Revolution," she
began. Fan interrupted impatiently.

"Oh!" Longyin said. "My father is saying: 'There is no such thing as a
perfect person. Everybody makes mistakes. Mao saved many people, but
to do it he had to sacrifice his son, his wife, his whole family 
everything. Now he's gone, but I want to go back to that time, when
people shared everything."'

But do you really want to share everything? I asked Fan. Wouldn't
sharing equally mean that a privileged few wouldn't be able to own new
Volvos?

"I think now is a necessary period," Fan said, as his daughter
translated. "We have to advance."

"Capitalism is something we've been waiting to try for a long time,"
Longyin said, quickly adding: "Personally, I hate the whole Mao thing.
I think it's weird. I don't miss the sound of those old days at all."
She did miss France, however, and her French boyfriend. She said she
hoped to play a part in the growth of the Chinese film industry,
perhaps by becoming an actors' agent. And some time in the next two or
three months, she hoped to get a driver's license.

was pleased to get to Hongping. The mountain hamlet was shrouded in
mist, and the air was cool. Steep hillsides covered with deciduous
trees rose on either side, and a creek ran through town, reminiscent
of Vermont. We arrived at our hotel early in the afternoon, a nice
change. It was three stars, clean, basic, but without a restaurant,
elevator or easy parking, and soon we were checking out. "Beijingers
are very picky," Li Lu told me. They didn't like it, and so Zhao had
to find another. The new place seemed only incrementally better to me,
but others were satisfied by the change. At dinner, Zhao was back to
apologizing profusely for his poor judgment. But the men, anyway, were
more interested in getting soused, and the error was soon forgiven.

When everyone rolled out of the restaurant, vendors were on the
sidewalk, and Fan made us and them laugh with his uncanny shrill
imitation of an older woman who had been hawking a melon. Zhou and
others had heard there was a "cultural promotion" a show featuring
local ethnic talent on the edge of town and proposed we attend en
masse. Zhu demurred, asserting that a strip club would be more fun, if
only one could be found. We walked there without him, arriving early
and securing a row 


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