China Road

Last week, I went back to The Bookworm for another book talk. This time I listened to a lecture by Rob Gifford who wrote China Road, a book based upon his radio series for NPR that took him on a 4800 km hitchhiking trip across the country. He started in Shanghai and went all the way to China’s border with Kazakhstan. Along the way he interviewed and documented his encounters with Chinese farmers, Taoist monks, Uigyhr separatists, etc,… Rob mentioned that writing the book was not too difficult because there is so much happening in China that Woody Allen’s saying; “showing up is 80% of the work” rang true. I feel the same about my blog sometimes: no shortage of ideas to write about and even if I leave out any stories about all my adventures in the office. Rob started his trip as an optimist but claimed to have returned as a pessimist because of the fact that in rural China you are getting confronted with the 800 million people who still live in poverty, with the rampant corruption, with the huge environmental problems, with the widening gap between the poor and wealthy, etc,.. Did you know that there are more millionaires in China than in the US? However, he also acknowledges that over the last few decades the government had lifted 400 million people out of poverty and into the middle class. When asked to compare China with India, he agreed that he still would rather be farmer in China than in India. We all know that China is facing some huge challenges but I tend to believe that China will pull this off. The people (total Chinese population is more than 1.2 billion) are very optimistic, very entrepreneurial, very motivated, very hungry for knowledge, very driven to pursue a better life, very hard working, etc… many things I wished to see more at home in the US or Europe. We could learn from them as much as they are learning from us, but we better do it fast.