Country Driving [25]
Foreigners in Beijing often said to me, I can’t believe you’re driving in this country. To which I responded: I can’t believe you get into cabs and buses driven by graduates of Chinese driving courses. Out on the road, everybody was lost—une génération perdue—but it felt a little better to be the one behind the wheel.
IN NORTHWESTERN SHANXI PROVINCE, sections of Great Wall run alongside the Yellow River, and for nearly one hundred miles I followed the high loess banks. The driving here was easy, because the government infrastructure campaign had recently improved local roads. Propaganda signs celebrated the construction: “A Smooth Road Brings Prosperity and Drives Away Poverty” “To Protect the Road Brings Prosperity, To Destroy the Road Brings Shame.” In rural China there was still so little traffic that private advertisers had yet to sponsor billboards, which meant that a driver wasn’t bombarded with images of things to eat or drink or buy. Instead there were government slogans, whose language had distinctive qualities: simple but forceful, direct but strangely obscure. “People Embrace Soldiers”—a sign like that on an empty road gave my imagination somewhere to roam. In rural Shanxi I passed a billboard that simply said: “Self-Reliance, Struggle, Persistence, Unreserved Devotion.” There were no further details—and in the end, what more could you ask for? In Inner Mongolia, a local power plant slogan was so charged with wordplay that I had to pull over to figure it out: “Everybody Use Electricity; Use Electricity Well; Electricity Is Good to Use.” (My delayed response: “Yes!”) Often I passed billboards dedicated to the planned-birth policy, whose catchphrases ranged from tautology (“Daughters Also Count as Descendants”) to unsolicited advice (“Marry Late and Have Children Late”) to outright lies (“Having a Son or a Daughter Is Exactly the Same”). As I drove west, the messages became bigger, until barren hillsides were covered with slogans, as if words had swelled to fill the empty steppes. “Everybody Work to Make the Green Mountain Greener”—this in forty-foot-tall characters across an Inner Mongolian mountain that was neither green nor the site of a single working person. Across another particularly desolate stretch of wasteland, a poem had been spelled out in painted rocks:
Plant grass and trees here in the mountains,
Build flourishing agriculture,
Build homes, raise sheep,
Create a beautiful land of mountains and rivers.
Above the Yellow River, signs warned farmers not to thresh crops in the road. For a while I wondered if this local campaign had been effective: the City Special hadn’t smashed a pile of grain since entering western Shanxi. But then I visited Sigou, a village high atop the eastern bank, where locals told me that they hadn’t harvested any grain crops at all this year because of drought. They were surviving on potatoes and government grain. While I was talking to a farmer in his cave home, the village chief stopped by with a sheaf of relief applications. The forms were entitled “The Two Lacks and the One Without.” The village chief explained the phrase: the people in Sigou lacked money and food, and they were without the ability to support themselves. Of all the slogans I had seen, that was the most brutally honest, and it marked a grim end to the north-central farmland—the last gasp of the loess plateau.
Across the river lay the Ordos Desert and the beginning of western China. In ancient times, the Ordos represented one of the most troubling regions for the empire, and there is no other part of the steppes that played such a major role in the inspiration of the Great Wall. The Ordos is expansive—roughly the size of New England—and it’s defined by the great northern loop of the Yellow River. Within