Review: Book shows China has a fragile side, too
— -- China today often seems like an economics seminar masquerading as a country.
For students of global commerce, the Asian giant offers pointed lessons on the good (double-digit annual growth rates), the bad (distorted currency policies) and the ugly (a disturbing number of potentially hazardous products).
It would, therefore, be easy to lose sight of the astonishing human drama unfolding as China regains its place at the center of world events. In China Road, a thoughtful portrayal of a country that is exercising an ever larger impact upon Americans' lives, National Public Radio's Rob Gifford rightly keeps his focus on the people.
The book is the story of Gifford's extraordinary road trip along China's Route 312, which links glittering Shanghai in the east with the dusty Kazakh border more than 3,000 miles to the west. Unfortunately, China Road, which grew from a seven-part NPR series, suffers from a slow start. Like a traveler circling his neighborhood before hitting the open road, Gifford dawdles over an introduction to China that has an obligatory and unexceptional feel.
But once he begins recounting his adventures — whether jostling on inter-city buses or being chauffeured by a taxi driver and his amorous friend — the tale accelerates. Along the way, Gifford is pressed into service as a preacher in an unofficial Christian church, befriends a pair of Chinese Amway peddlers and spends a night in the desert with a Muslim who is wrestling with his Chinese identity.
But this is more than just an intrepid traveler's account of his journey. Gifford has some hard-earned wisdom to impart about China, and his qualifications entitle him to a hearing. Six years as NPR's Beijing correspondent capped a two-decade-long fascination with China that began with language studies there in 1987. Gifford's resulting fluency affords him intimate access to the laobaixing or "Old Hundred Names," the Chinese equivalent of the average man, throughout his reporting.
With China's economy seemingly destined to expand indefinitely, Gifford's pessimism about the future is striking. He sees in China's history an unbroken 2,000-year record of the state crushing independent thinking, regarding it as a mortal challenge to unified rule over a multi-ethnic, continent-sized country.
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