Country Driving [53]
The trucker was named Li Changjie, and he was a southerner, a native of a village in Jiangsu Province. His wife still farmed, but he had left the land to do business. He was short, gaunt, and quick-eyed—he had the hungry look that you often saw among former peasants who had succeeded in the new economy. Li first started trucking in 1993, when he bought a secondhand vehicle with loans from relatives; over time he had steadily improved his rigs. Last year he had purchased the All-Powerful King for thirty-two thousand dollars. In China, that’s a huge amount of money, and Li was furious about the oil pump.
“I checked and nobody has it stocked in this entire province,” he said. “I have to go all the way back to Xuzhou to get a replacement. I can’t find a reliable way to get one sent here fast, so I have to go myself. It’s a two-day train trip to Xuzhou, and then two days back. You’re a writer—you know what you should write about? You should write about Liberation trucks and how hard it is to get parts for them. It’s ridiculous. Something else you should write about is the low quality of Chinese products. Everything made in this country breaks.”
I always liked talking to Chinese truckers, who are among the purest entrepreneurs in the country. They generally own their rigs, often in partnership; usually they travel in pairs, so one can drive while the other sleeps. Of all the professional drivers in China, they’re the most skilled. Cabbies are too aggressive, because stakes are low: city traffic moves slowly and nobody cares much about dents. And long-distance bus drivers are the worst. They never own the buses, and their pay depends on a percentage of ticket sales. This gives them incentive to speed, especially in a country where the highway patrol consists of signs and statues. Whenever I read about a terrible accident, it usually involves a long-distance bus.
But truckers rarely make me nervous. Most are too overloaded to drive fast, and they don’t take risks, because they own their vehicles. They tend to follow set routes where they know the roads, and they’re smart about adjusting for bad weather. They’re interesting to talk to. I once spent a night at a truck stop in Shandong Province, on the east coast, asking drivers about what they carried. Two men had a truck full of bamboo whisk brooms; they had just dropped off a shipment of nonferrous metal. Another pair had unloaded color televisions and picked up processed wheat. Others had gone from chemical materials to radiators, from tennis shoes to dynamos. They were the alchemists of the new economy, at the center of every mysterious exchange that occurs along the Chinese road system. One truck had just dropped off computerized mah-jongg sets and picked up elementary school textbooks; somebody else had carried leather loafers one way and recycled plastic the other.
During that same trip, on an expressway near the city of Tianjin, I drove in the wake of a truck that just had come unlatched. It carried foreign paper imported to China for recycling, and after the door opened the printed materials were strewn across the highway. Hundreds of pamphlets flapped low to the road like dying birds; I pulled over and caught one. It was in English: a fourteen-page mortgage application from a financial services company called Woolwich, which was located in Dartford, Kent. When I contacted Woolwich, they didn’t have the faintest idea how a flock of mortgage forms ended up on a Tianjin highway. But that’s true for almost any product you buy in the developed world: it’s probably already spent time on a Chinese road, and someday it may return there to be recycled.
In Gansu Province, Driver Li’s All-Powerful King had failed while carrying raw cotton. His standard route ran from Xinjiang to Jiangsu, a distance of over two thousand miles. In the northwest he followed the route known as the Silk Road, passing through the Hexi Corridor of Gansu and the oasis towns of central Xinjiang. Usually he carried cotton east, dropped it off in a factory