Country Driving [98]
The boom came from all directions, as if every factor had been coordinated with precise timing: infrastructure projects, manufacturing strategies, consumer decisions, even mystery viruses. Beginning in 2003, the government embarked on a major two-year construction campaign in the countryside, paving 119,000 miles of rural roads. During that two-year span, the People’s Republic built more country roads of asphalt and cement than it had during the previous half century. Meanwhile, urban consumer patterns were changing, sometimes for unexpected reasons. In the spring of 2003, panic over the SARS virus swept across the nation, and for weeks the residents of major cities avoided crowds and public transport. Subways and buses were empty; taxis became suspect. In the end, the risk of the disease turned out to have been greatly exaggerated, but it had a lingering effect on the mindset of the middle class. People were newly inspired to learn to drive—in 2003, nearly half a million Beijing residents acquired their driver’s licenses, an average of over 1,300 people every day.
At the same time, the market for cars was changing. By 2003, Toyota, Nissan, and Hyundai had started production in China, and these Asian companies made an immediate impact. Meanwhile, Chinese automakers were becoming formidable competitors. In June of 2003, Chery, the company where I witnessed a test-drive, unveiled a new subcompact called the QQ. It was even smaller than a Mini Cooper—the QQ was less than twelve feet long, and it had a 0.8-liter engine. It looked almost exactly like the Chevy Spark, a vehicle that General Motors planned to unveil in China later that year. In fact, the cars were so similar that even the doors could be swapped. In China, it’s common for companies to knock off foreign products, but this was a new twist: Chery had found a way to produce something exactly like the Spark before the original even made it to market. There was speculation that Chery had somehow acquired the blueprints, probably through industrial espionage, but nobody was ever able to prove anything. (A lawsuit by GM was eventually settled out of court.) In the end, the price was all that mattered. A new QQ sold for around six thousand dollars, 25 percent less than the GM car, and for most consumers it was an easy choice. That year, Chery doubled the number of units sold from 2002. Along with other small manufacturers, they revolutionized the market, and automakers were forced to drop prices. Beginning in April of 2003, over a period of twelve months, the average price for which cars were sold to dealers dropped by 8.8 percent. In 2003, China’s passenger-car sales leaped by 80 percent. In Beijing alone, 339,344 new automobiles hit the road.
Inevitably, some of them found their way to the top of the dead-end road. Weekends in Sancha became busy with visitors, and city investors began to notice. One Beijing businessman paved the lower reaches of the old footpath to Huanghua Zhen, and he opened a restaurant and guesthouse near the Sancha reservoir. It was the first real restaurant in the village: they had a dozen tables, an outdoor grill, and a big pond stocked with rainbow trout. The surroundings were stunning—high rock walls, the placid water of the reservoir—and Beijing people loved it; you could see the stress vanish from their faces the moment they cruised into the village. If they had continued on foot past the reservoir for another half hour, they would have arrived at the home of MaYufa, the hermit of Sancha, still living alone with his ticking clock. But there were rumors that investors wanted to develop that area, too. For years the village had been dying, isolated from Beijing, but now the tentacles of city life had begun to creep into the high valleys.
Wei Ziqi and Cao Chunmei kept busy all summer. The new restaurant in the lower village didn’t affect them much, because there were always nostalgic city customers who preferred a traditional rural meal, served in a real peasant home. At least that’s what they said—they