Country Driving: A Chinese Road Trip

In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, obtained his Chinese driver's license. Over the next seven years, he traveled throughout China to document how automobiles and improved roads were transforming the country. The book begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile journey across northern China, following the Great Wall from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. He examines a historically significant rural region being depopulated as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. He then spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, observing its dramatic changes after the local road is paved and Beijing's auto boom brings tourism. Finally, he studies urban development over more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials plan to use a new government-built expressway to convert farmland into an industrial center. Through these three sections, Hessler writes about the average people—farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs—who have reshaped China during a critical period in its modern history.