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Sancha woman to join the Party, and the inspiration for her daughter’s rise. The funeral lasted three days. On the first day, I happened to walk past while the Party Secretary was mourning. She wore funeral white, and she had fallen onto her knees before the coffin. She was keening—her high-pitched wails echoed off the stony walls of the valley. In the past I had only seen her brusqueness, the sense of control that she carried around the village, and I had never entirely trusted her. But the sight of the funeral made me feel something different, and I realized that part of me was relieved that Wei Ziqi had lost the election. Cao Chunmei was right: he already had enough to worry about. In the countryside there are many ways to be humbled, and a man is lucky if a brush with politics turns out to be his worst moment.

The Shitkicker’s new house remained empty. The unfinished brick walls still dominated the upper village, and piles of cement lay abandoned along the walk. He never found a buyer, and he never made another attempt at a local coup. But in other respects his status grew. Half a century after pouring tea for the local clairvoyant, he seemed to draw more of the old man’s power. The Shitkicker was gaining clarity—he could see the unseen; he could speak the unspoken. He felt the wrists and he described the visions, the spirits of snakes and rabbits and foxes, and soon more villagers sought wisdom in the shadow of the empty house.

BOOK III

THE FACTORY

I

IN THE CITY OF WENZHOU THEY RENTED OUT CARS WITH an empty tank. The first time I went there and picked up a Volkswagen Santana, in July of 2005, that was my welcome: I paid my deposit, put the key in the ignition, and the low-fuel warning light flashed on. There was barely enough in the tank to make it to a gas station. In the past, when I’d rented from Beijing’s Capital Motors, I complained about inconsistent fuel levels, but the folks at the Wenzhou Prosperous Automobile Rental Company had solved that problem in their own entrepreneurial way. If I returned the Santana with so much as a gallon left in the tank, it would be siphoned out and sold.

Before that year, I had never rented a car in the south, and I hadn’t spent much time driving in Chinese cities. Almost all of my journeys had been in the countryside of the north, where I became accustomed to rural rhythms: the busy mornings of spring planting, the road-threshing of autumn. In winter I spent quiet days in villages where most young people were already gone. But there had never been any mystery about where they were going, or how they were getting there. They followed the new roads south, and each year there were more migrants, more ways to leave. In 2003, the central government embarked on a major two-year road-building campaign in the countryside, and after that was finished they turned their attention to the cities. These places were being transformed by the auto boom: in the four years since I acquired my driver’s license, the number of passenger vehicles in China had more than doubled. In January of 2005, officials announced plans to construct another thirty thousand miles of high-speed expressways. Eventually this network would connect every city with a population of over two hundred thousand people, stretching all the way from the factory towns of the eastern coast to the far western border with Kyrgyzstan. China may have come late to the world of high-speed transport—the nation’s first expressway wasn’t completed until 1988—but by 2020 they intended to have more highway miles than the United States.

When the government announced the expansion, they specifically mentioned the States as a source of inspiration. Zhang Chunxian, the Minister of Communications, hosted a press conference in Beijing, and he responded to one question with a story about Condoleezza Rice. Recently she had visited China, where apparently she told an official that they should follow the example of America in the 1950s and build more roads. “She said when she was young, she took a lot of trips with her family across