• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4094 0

The population is over a million and growing rapidly, mostly because of new money from the central government’s Develop the West campaign. The Party is attempting to counterbalance the growing economies of the coast, but for the most part investment in the west has been a failure: these regions simply don’t have the necessary resources and proximity to foreign trade. Nevertheless, money flows into certain designated cities, and when I drove through Baotou the place was in the midst of an artificial boom. City planners had turned it into a frenzy of detours and road construction, and everything was clogged with automobiles; I had never heard such honking. Throughout the city, in hopes of managing the new traffic in the way that scarecrows manage birds, the government had erected fiberglass statues of police officers. These figures were located at major intersections and roundabouts, where they stood at attention atop pedestals. They portrayed officers in full uniform, complete with necktie, visored cap, and white gloves. Each statue even wore an ID tag with a number. In Baotou I never saw a live cop.

Driving south of the city, I crossed the Yellow River and entered the Ordos Desert once more. The land became flat and desolate, with the washed-out color of a dead creekbed, and periodically a policeman statue loomed beside the road. There was something eerie about these figures: they were wind-swept and dust-covered, and the surrounding desert emphasized their pointlessness. But their posture remained ramrod straight, arms at attention, with a sort of Ozymandian grandeur—terracotta cops. After an hour of driving I came upon the aftermath of the most spectacular tollbooth accident I ever saw in China. A trucker obviously had been moving at a high rate of speed, and his angle also must have been perfect; he’d wedged his vehicle sideways into the tollbooth. It reminded me of those Chinese jade carvings in which a dragon curls within an egg, and you wonder: How did they ever do that?

For most of the journey I had followed small roads, but now I picked up Highway 210 toward the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan. One of the mysteries of traveling through Inner Mongolia is that there are virtually no signs of the greatest empire to ever rule these steppes. There are walls everywhere, but all of them were built against the nomads; the Mongols themselves left virtually nothing. They were never great builders, and their origins could hardly have been more humble. In AD 1162, when Genghis Khan was born, Mongol society was illiterate, nomadic, and structured narrowly around ties to kin and tribe. The great leader rose to power by overcoming these weaknesses; he united tribes, and he created systems. In Genghis Khan’s military, squads were organized in units of ten, and officers gave orders in set rhymes and songs that were easily remembered by illiterate soldiers. The Mongols had no army, no columns, no defensive fortifications. There was no supply train. They were strictly cavalry: on the average, each soldier had five horses. When it came time to advance, they spread out across the steppes to ensure that animals could graze, and they milked their mares along the way. Mostly they moved fast: in the span of twenty-five years, the Mongols conquered more lands and people than the Romans did in four centuries.

In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, the historian Jack Weatherford describes the Mongol strategies and their impact on other cultures. Some Mongol characteristics are surprising—for all their fearsome reputation, they were remarkably squeamish about the sight of blood. They despised hand-to-hand combat; bows and arrows were the preferred weapons. In battle, they liked to keep their distance, and they became so skilled at siege warfare that they essentially rendered walled cities obsolete. Diplomacy was another strong suit. Genghis Khan banned torture and looting, believing them to be counterproductive, and he established the concept of diplomatic immunity. He granted religious freedom to the lands he conquered. His genius