[sustran] nytimes article on cars in china

[Craig Johnson]

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 of seats in the front.

Though Zhou, the lawyer, spoke little English, I very much enjoyed his
company. He was witty and sophisticated and, after a drink, warm and
outgoing; every time he opened his mouth, it seemed, he made Li Lu
break into laughter.

Zhu, on the other hand, was a challenge. Along with being his
passenger, I was his roommate, a difficult proposition. He smoked
heavily, whether while sitting naked after a shower, braying into the
phone at his wife or watching TV in bed, his head propped up by
pillows. Often I knew he was awake in the morning by the click of his
lighter and the smoke wafting over my bed. He snored raucously. He
didn't believe in lifting the toilet seat. And always he fell asleep
with the television on. This wasn't such a bad thing: usually I just
reached over to the night table and clicked it off with the remote.

But that night in Hongping, there was a snag. When I came back from
the cultural show, Zhu was lying in bed on top of his sheets, watching
a famous black-and-white movie from 1956, "Railroad Guerrilla," about
Chinese peasant fighters throwing off the yoke of their Japanese
imperialist occupiers. The guerrillas were just entering the imperial
administrator's quarters when I came out of the bathroom: an extended
storm of hacking machetes ensued, the Japanese falling left and right.
Zhu murmured appreciatively and soon drifted off. I watched Japanese
get cut down until I couldn't believe any could be left alive on the
planet and then, over Zhu's rising snores, looked for the remote. It
was nowhere to be found. The television itself had no on-off button,
and its plug was hidden behind a heavy dresser; I needed to find the
remote itself. Finally I spotted it, poking out from underneath Zhu's
butt. I turned him over and extracted it, put in my earplugs and went
to sleep.




The next morning, Li Lu sympathized with my desire to switch
roommates. Zhou the lawyer had said he would happily share with me.
But she declared it was an impossibility: Zhu would lose face if I
abandoned him. "And there is nothing worse for a man like him than
losing face," she said.

The next morning we hiked through the misty, craggy hills of
Shennongjia. The area, known as "the Roof of Central China," is a
Unesco biosphere reserve of 272 square miles, with six peaks measuring
up to 10,190 feet above sea level. It was equally famous, among our
group, as the home of China's Bigfoot. This creature, in the local
lore, lumbered through the mists with a big-bosomed mate; an artist's
rendition of the hairy couple appeared in the corner of a park
billboard. But though the trails were beautiful and mysterious and we
could imagine an ape-man happy there, none were spotted.

The police were directing traffic at the park entrance, and as we
left, one officer noticed me in Zhu's passenger seat and waved us
over. Foreigners are not permitted to travel in the direction we were
headed, he declared, pointing to a sign. Zhu pulled over and summoned
Zhao on the radio. Our entire group stopped, and major discussion
ensued, which resulted, some 20 minutes later, in the policeman
consenting to my passage. Zhao could be very persuasive.

"What was that all about?" I asked Li Lu.

"There are army bases in the mountains ahead," she said. "It is
thought there are missiles there, to protect the Three Gorges Dam. You
can't see them from the road, but the army is afraid of spies."

"But times are changing, right?" I asked. She looked uncertain, and I
wasn't sure the answer was yes.

We drove for more than an hour, stopping for lunch in another little
mountain town, Muyu. Halfway through the meal, a policeman looked in
the room where we were eating. Uh-oh, I thought. As we left, a
different policeman spotted me and uttered something grave. Zhao was
summoned again. Other policemen arrived. My passport was requested, a
phone call was made. Word came down: I had to go back. The old China
was still around.

Zhao took me aside reassuringly and pressed a roll of yuan bills into
my hand. Li Lu and I were to take a taxi back to Hongping, he said,
while he figured out an alternate plan. We would call his cellphone
from there.

The solution, we gathered, looked arduous: take a taxi, train and
taxi, meeting up with the group the next night, or take a single long
and expensive taxi, meeting up with them the next afternoon, but
missing the Wudang Mountains and their monasteries famous for martial
arts. As we waited for a driver, a call came in from the group up
ahead: the cops in Muyu went home at dusk, they had heard. After dark,
we should be able to blow through without any trouble. We consulted
with some locals, and they concurred. And so it was decided.

We zoomed through Muyu without a hitch and, around midnight, passed as
well through a couple of halfhearted traffic-boom-across-the-road
checkpoints staffed by soldiers. I entered my hotel room in Wudang
around 2 a.m. Naked on his bed, Zhu was sawing loudly, the television
was blaring and the lights were all on. It was good to be back.




The next day we took a cable car to a cloud-shrouded monastery atop
the Wudang Mountains. A particular temple there is said to be a place
where cash offerings can influence your destiny. After conferring a
moment with the attending monk, Jia Lin, the reporter, made a largish
donation: 100 yuan, over $12. Li Lu explained to me that Jia really
wanted to find a husband and hoped to effect that result. Jia's
search, in fact, was the reason she came on this trip, which she
imagined to be the kind of exciting adventure where you might meet a
man. So far, however, things weren't panning out.

So belief in prayer was alive in China. What was less clear to me,
after my brush with the police in the mountains, was how many in the
urban, affluent world of self-driving tourers still believed in
government authority.

My test question was speeding. National highways were typically posted
with limits of 50 miles per hour, and expressways up to 75 miles per
hour, and the orientation brochure that each driver had received from
the Beijing Target Auto Club insisted that we adhere to those limits.
("This is only self-driving, not car racing!" the brochure read.
"Speeding is not necessary.") Yet all the drivers, including Zhao,
paid the rules no attention whatsoever, often driving 100 m.p.h. or
more. Police cars were seldom seen; when drivers spotted them, to my
surprise, they paid no attention at all. The cops rarely used radar,
it turned out, and they almost never tried to pull you over.

What did concern Zhu and the others, though, were the speed cameras
mounted unobtrusively on poles in the median. If you went too fast
past a camera, it snapped your picture, and the ticket arrived in the
mail. Simple as that. Zhu knew the location of most of the cameras
along his normal routes around Beijing, but whenever he headed afield,
the bills really piled up — sometimes $70 or $80 a month.

His solution was friends in the police department. They had given him
a special red license plate that was affixed beneath his regular one;
he believed this stopped a lot of the tickets in their tracks. But Zhu
— like many others on the trip — was also intrigued by a device in the
Nissan S.U.V. of Li Xingjie, 42, the leader of the Fangshan
businessmen's group. The short, bald man was widely envied among
members of the tour for his radar detector, reputed to detect not only
radar but also cameras. I joined him one afternoon, and he proudly
demonstrated: the rumors were true, and the device also gave advance
notice of tollbooths and service areas. Made in Taiwan, the detector
cost Li $350 and, as it stated in English on its bottom, detected "all
speed equipment on mainland!" He used to pay about $1,250 annually in
fines, but no longer did.

"But isn't this kind of seditious?" I asked via Li Lu. "Isn't this
Taiwan helping to undermine the laws of the mainland?"

On the contrary, Li said, "this detector helps me obey the law. You
have to obey laws. We have to obey the government!"

I wasn't sure whether he was sincere. As we blew by an aging police
cruiser at over 100 (the cruiser, by my reckoning, was traveling
closer to 50), I asked him to help me unravel more mysteries of
Chinese highway law enforcement. "Why isn't anybody worried about
those police? Why don't they chase anybody and give out tickets?"

That's just not how it's done here, Li said. Occasionally you were hit
with an expressway fine when you stopped at the next tollbooth, but
ordinarily, unless there had been an accident or some other
irregularity, cops wouldn't chase you; tickets just arrived in the
mail. Police cars were slow, but the mails were reliable.

He portrayed himself as very straight: "Twenty years ago, I was
driving a tractor — I was a model peasant! There were almost no cars
in China. I didn't learn to drive until 1988.

"Under Deng Xiaoping, I got lucky because I was uneducated. Educated
people think in traditional ways, but Deng said we should take
chances." He did, and now he owns the Beijing Fangshan Banbidian
Cement Factory, which he started when he was 28. Li Xingjie was
mild-mannered and unassuming, but when I later showed Li Lu his
business card, she was in awe: "This cellphone prefix means he has had
the phone a long time — since they were really expensive. He is very,
very rich!"

I considered this as the group reconvened for the last time, just on
the other side of a glitzy new toll plaza, its lines limned in neon
that had been illuminated as the sun started down. All of the cars in
our group — and the majority of cars you see in China, period — were
recent models. Almost all the wealth of the drivers was
first-generation. The digital cameras, the shiny wristwatches, all of
it where I come from said nouveau riche. But the pejorative back home
is the normative here: practically every wealthy person is nouveau
riche, so the idea is meaningless.

The more instructive comparison, as we stood on this fancy bit of
highway surrounded by rice fields and, here and there, people at work
in them, was with the rural poor, the peasantry, the hundreds of
millions of Chinese who do not yet (and, you imagine, will not in
their lifetimes) share this prosperity. Many villages still are not
connected to roads at all. When an expressway just south of here was
completed last year, I was told sotto voce in Beijing, a series of
demonstrations by peasants at a toll plaza delayed its opening. They
were angry because the road had taken their land, and this, we are now
seeing, is the story all over China: the government itself counted
nearly 80,000 mass protests in 2005 alone. The country's economic
growth is fantastic, the urban atmosphere heady. . .but then you see
through the glass the peasants just in from the countryside, burlap
bags at their feet, looking utterly from another planet,
representatives of hundreds of millions of others, almost standing
still while Zhu and Li zoom on by.




We spent our last night in a four-star high-rise hotel in Luoyang. By
the time I made it to our room with my suitcase, Zhu had already
welcomed two sleek female "massage therapists" to our quarters; they
were perched glamorously on the edge of my bed — legs crossed, lips
glossed, high heels dangling — and beckoned me to join them. Zhu
chortled with glee at my reticence, and I wondered which part of car
travel he enjoyed most: the hours behind the wheel or the hours just
after? Certainly, he seemed to take full advantage of all of them.

The end was anticlimactic: everyone was heading back on the same
expressway, and Beijing was less than a tank of gas away, so there was
no further need to stick together. Chatter on the CB dropped off
slowly until the radio was utterly quiet, and in terms of its group
dimension anyway, the trip was over.

Li Lu seemed pleased as Zhu's Hyundai eased into the perpetual traffic
jam that is Beijing. She confessed that her friends were amazed she
had gone on a trip like this: "I'm just a Beijing girl, a taxi girl!"
— not a sporting, auto-club type. But Zhu seemed a bit disappointed to
be off the open road. He wanted to treat us to dinner at a favorite
noodle restaurant near the city center, but first we had to get there.

Creeping along on the highway, we talked about how the Beijing
government was trying to control the huge new popularity of cars: one
solution to the growing chaos of the streets has been to severely
restrict motorcycle use in the city. Zhu thought that was better than
Shanghai's fix: trying to cut down on car ownership by setting a high
price (presently almost $5,000) on car registration. Trying to ease
traffic and cut down on accidents, Shanghai had even banned bicycles
from many main streets, news that still amazes me.

A policeman friend of Zhu's met us at the restaurant and, in fact,
even picked up the tab. (Zhu's rapport with the department was quite
impressive.) I asked him about the street racing I had heard was
becoming a problem in the city. Yes, he said, he had heard of it but
had not seen it himself, yet. Zhu looked a bit too interested in the
subject.

In the coming days, Zhu would entertain me and others at the
restaurant-hotel he ran as a hobby on the outskirts of Beijing;
likewise, Zhou the lawyer would treat a group of us, including the
Wangs of the Citroën, to a fabulous dinner on trendy Houhai Lake.
Clearly, nobody wanted the trip to end. ("Was it really that
relaxing?" I had asked several of them, many times, after 12-hour days
at the wheel; all had sworn that it was.)

An ebullient atmosphere surrounds the automobile in China. You can see
the excitement continuing, even growing, as more people buy cars:
China now has fewer than seven of them for every thousand people,
roughly the same level as the United States had in 1915. Everyone
expects the ownership rate to keep growing, which means there could be
130 million vehicles on China's roads by 2020. By 2030, according to
one estimate, there could be as many as in the United States.

It is reminiscent of a fading romance in American life, this crush on
the automobile, the thrill of car ownership, and it is fun to see. But
in this area, American culture seems more mature than Chinese culture,
and with the benefit of hindsight and statistics, it is not hard to
spot a multicar pileup in the making. While I was in Beijing, the
journal Nature reported that the city's air pollution was much worse
than previously thought. Concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have
increased 50 percent over the past 10 years, and the buildup is
accelerating. According to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing's
sulfur-dioxide levels in 2004 were more than double New York's, and
airborne-particulate levels more than six times as high. Last year
China enacted its first comprehensive emissions law, but it is
expected to have little effect on the transport sector's copious
carbon-dioxide emissions, which by 2030 are expected to exceed those
of the United States, the world's largest producer. The nation's
growing demands for gasoline make it increasingly our competitor for
the finite global supply; by 2030, according to the International
Energy Agency, China may be importing as much oil as we do.

On the snail-paced drive back into Beijing, Zhu had passed through a
zone on the edge of town that had been bulldozed and was being rebuilt
as upper-income, car-friendly suburbs. In fact, this was happening
around cities all over China: new gated communities, new themed
enclaves, all for the car-owning class. What was conspicuously missing
was a corresponding investment in mass transit, in public spaces and
public access. And, in heavy traffic at the end of a tiring trip, it
was easy to worry that the Chinese, rather than charting an
innovative, alternate route into the automotive era, were on their way
down a road that looks a little too familiar.

Ted Conover, a distinguished writer in residence at New York
University, is at work on a book about roads.


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