Country Driving [34]
In the T-11, we reached a roundabout that was still under construction. To John Dinkel, it looked a lot like a skid pad. He accelerated to forty miles an hour, and we flew past a pile of dirt, a half-dozen bags of cement, and a stack of bamboo that would someday be used to scaffold another building project. Dinkel held the turn, tires squealing; we spun around again and again. Construction materials flashed by: dirt, cement, bamboo; dirt, cement, bamboo. In the back of the T-11, the three Chinese engineers were thrown against the side of the car. They still weren’t wearing seat belts.
The one in the middle was named Qi Haibo. He was twenty-two years old, and he could have fit into the driver’s seat of a Mazda Cosmo, along with a sack of groceries. He’d grown up just beyond the Great Wall in Inner Mongolia, in the Ordos Desert; his home was the region where the government was trying to plant willow trees in an attempt to support local herdsmen. Qi Haibo was ethnic Chinese and he told me that his grandfather had originally moved to the Ordos from Shaanxi Province. (“Probably because of famine or war.”) In the desert, the grandfather had scraped by as a farmer raising wheat, sunflowers, and corn. Qi’s father attended school for only five years; his mother had even less education, giving up after the first grade. In the 1980s the family tried to grow watermelons, but they never moved beyond a state of subsistence farming. Qi could still remember the day they first got electricity. But his parents encouraged him to focus on his studies, and at the local school he became the top pupil. He always knew that someday he’d head south, across the Great Wall, and he didn’t plan on coming back.
After high school he tested into Wuhan Polytechnic University, a good institution in Hubei Province. He had never had any particular interest in engineering, but like John Dinkel he happened to come of age at a time when his nation was at a critical moment. “I wanted to go to a good university,” Qi said, “and I heard that computers and electronics were the best subjects for careers nowadays. So I chose those specialties when I took the entrance examination.” At university, he was assigned to an engineering department that focused on transport vehicles, because that’s the fastest-growing market in China. As a senior he attended a job fair and met some Chery recruiters. “They offered me a job, and people at the school said it was a new company, a company that was developing fast. So the next day I signed a contract. I figured that a young person could learn a lot there.”
By Chery standards, Qi wasn’t particularly young—the average age of a company employee was twenty-four. Qi worked six days a week, for a salary of less than two hundred dollars per month, and he lived in a factory dormitory. There were four engineers in his room; they shared a bathroom with dozens of others who lived along the hallway. Qi would have preferred his own space, but the dorm conditions were a lot better than anything he’d known in the Ordos. He hoped for a long-term future at Chery. “I also like the fact that it’s not a joint venture,” he said. “It’s China’s own auto company.”
After the test-drive, I asked Qi Haibo what he had learned from John Dinkel. Qi said the T-11 had a slight problem with driveshaft length, which meant that the outside wheel slipped on tight turns. The rear end of the B-14 floated a bit at high speeds. In particular Qi admired Dinkel’s skills behind the wheel. The Chinese engineer, whose job involved quality control and test-driving, had received his license only one month earlier.
DRIVING IN CHINA OFTEN made me feel old. So much of the nation’s energy comes from the very young, the recent migrants and the fresh-faced college grads, and new companies like Chery constantly shift the economic landscape. On the road, most people are in their thirties or forties—anybody much older encounters legal restrictions. By law, an applicant for a truck or bus driver’s license