In China, guanxi (pronounced ‘gwan-shee’) referrals help identify potential business partners. Through guanxi networks, businesses can establish favorable and mutually beneficial relationships vital to business success. Guanxi also carries assumed knowledge of trust and facilitates business references. It is the construct of ‘face’ which underpins this trust, helping to lend an air of the underworld business network, a black market, or even mafia-esque character to this corner of the modern Chinese economy.  Contrasting sharply, author Peter Hessler in his memoir Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip notes, are the rolling countryside sites where the Chinese government, in concert with the World Trade Organization, has undertaken massive public works projects including dams for water conservation and tree-planting projects to foster rural economies using traditional policies.  This half-command, half-capitalist economic situation found in China is just one of several metaphors that Hessler uses to introduce his readers to a modern Chinese people, ordinary Chinese citizens still seeped in neo-Confucian traditions and that continue to experience the transformative social and economic changes following China’s rapid-fire burst onto the world stage.

What do the narratives of Chinese citizens today tell us about 21st century China’s role in the international community of world superpowers, and therefore, its stewardship human rights and the planet?  Of course, there are no definitive answers to such a question, but Hessler’s sweet introduction to citizens across a broad swath of Chinese society serves up a clear picture of a progressive, hypermodern, and conscientious people eager to help shape an agile and vibrant global community in the decades to come.

In Book I of Country Driving, we meet Mr. Wang, who rents Hessler the Jeep Cherokee that he will use to crisscross China on his epic road trip.  Affectionately referred to as City Special by the author, the Jeep, and Mr. Wang, are key figures in the three-part memoire, and Mr. Wang’s shop, Capital Motors, serves as a casual reminder to the reader that average, everyday businesses, such as car rental shops, flourish in the city centers of China because of the influence of globalism and capitalist features on a previously insular, socialist country.  Later, in Part II, Hessler reveals his humble home north of Beijing, a small village home where neighbors initially wary of his presence become beloved friends over time and lend insight into daily lives of Chinese villagers where the yearly average income is $250USD and farming still defines the lifeways today.  Wei Jei, a young neighbor that became like a surrogate son to Hessler and his partner Mimi, is often ill and, with help from the author and his partner, must avail himself of high-end medical care, resulting in a narrative fusing modern medicine, traditional family life, and the historical impact of socialism in modern government institutions in China. 

Hessler completes his memoire with Book III, a recounting of his experiences in Wenzhou, further south in China where industry and the “peasant-entrepreneur…have made the transition from countryside to city, from farming to business," leveraging guanxi, competing for loans, and crafting just the right niche product.  Cities are known not just by their proper names but also for the goods produced therein; Shifan (dam restoration town), Rui’an (auto accessories), etc.  Hessler introduces the reader to Boss Wang, the prototypical ‘peasant-entrepreneur’, whose factory is custom-designed to produce just the right size and tensile-strength specified for metal bra hoops.  His brazen and frank narrative brings the reader full circle, from the rejuvenation of rural areas affected by a modernized global government, to rural families struggling to survive in a new market economy, with Boss Wang as a metaphor, of sorts, for a fusion of capitalism and traditional economic structures, supported by the government, replacing traditional rural areas, and competing on the global economic stage.

In his first trip across the vast interior of inner-China, tracing the route of the Great Wall from east to west, Hessler happens upon the tree-farming project – mentioned earlier – initiated to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and otherwise generate fresh air in a polluted country.  Writ across watch towers along the mountain expanse circling the project are the words, in single characters

PROTECT WATER, SOLIDIFY EARTH

However, after meeting and learning about some local workers on the project, Hessler discovers that they work for very meager salaries and that, surprisingly, they have only been digging potholes, and not planting trees, claiming that local officials instead embezzled money from the World Bank. The otherwise positive memoire reveals some uncomfortable truths that undergird the burgeoning government efforts to create and maintain economically productive cities and industry, and the exclusive and semi-corrupt nature of the similarly burgeoning capitalist entrepreneurship infected with quanxi.  Nevertheless, the intimate portrayal of Chinese citizens across Hessler’s travels reveals an optimistic, adaptable and humanistic society willing and able to overcome adversity in their collective effort to be a progressive agent of change on the world stage. This may be Hessler’s point, as he constructs a memoire that evokes vivid images of the Great Wall, the countryside and rolling mountains, industrious city-centers like Beijing, and a modernizing factory economy emerging and evolving in the south of China and also deeply personalizes the average citizen, friend, or casual acquaintance, who all seem deeply engaged in the modernization of China and participating in a modern life with a progressive worldview befitting the national character of a great, ancient nation that stands today as one of the world’s great superpowers.

 Prologue – My Thoughts on China’s Rapid Modernization

For me, characters in Book III like Boss Wang really clarified an image that I have in my mind of the stereotypical Chinese manufacturer working and building a business in the ever-expanding business-friendly atmosphere that the Chinese government has been fostering in recent decades.  I think most Americans, myself included perhaps, tend to stereotype people like the image that ‘Chinese peasant-entrepreneur’ my invoke in the Western mind, but in fact a person like Boss Wang, while certainly not entirely on the up-and-up, so-to-speak, is just an average guy trying to get ahead in the world.  Like many of us, he had been presented with a unique opportunity to make a good living for himself and his family in the newly emerging industrial economy of Southern China and carefully navigating the near-criminal system of loans and business interests that dominate these industrial cities like Wenzhou.

Another thing that I like about Country Driving is its modernity.  I watched American Experience: The Great War on PBS last week, a 3-night, 6-hour documentary told almost exclusively from the point of view of black soldiers, contemporary women, foreign soldiers, and average American citizens, and like Country Driving, this modern approach to presenting history from the views of traditionally marginalized people is incredibly illuminating and so much richer than the bland one-sided history that I grew up learning in the 1980’s.  Hessler captures the spirit of a people faced with some adversity that are also keen to overcome and be progressive, positive contributors on the world stage, and as a reader I get to learn how contemporary Chinese people, some of them not unlike myself, feel about their own changing world as well as the rest of humankind.  Like the textbook for the course, lectures, and e-reserve materials, Country Driving was an absolute delight for its insight and innovative, modern approach to documenting history.

References

Chan, Ben. "Demystifying Chinese Guanxi Networks: Cultivating and Sharing of Knowledge for Business Benefit." Business Information Review. Vol. 25, no. 3. 2008

Hessler, Peter. "Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip". First Harper Perennial ed., New York. Harper Perennial. 2011.