China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power » (Unabridged)

Rob Gifford first went to China in 1987 as a twenty-year-old language student. He has spent much of the last twenty years studying and reporting there. From 1999 to 2005, he was the Beijing correspondent of National Public Radio, and he traveled all over China and the rest of Asia reporting for Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He is now NPR’s London bureau chief.

National Public Radio's Beijing correspondent Rob Gifford recounts his travels along Route 312, the Chinese Mother Road, the longest route in the world's most populous nation. Based on his successful NPR radio series, China Road draws on Gifford's twenty years of observing first-hand this rapidly transforming country, as he travels east to west, from Shanghai to China's border with Kazakhstan. As he takes the reader on this journey, he will also take us through China's past and present while he tries to make sense of this complex nation's potential future.

The Washington Post - Susan L. Shirk

Gifford's book is an account of a two-month trip he took along Route 312, which spans the country from east to west like an oriental Route 66. He draws on the extensive knowledge he acquired during six years of reporting from Beijing for National Public Radio. Although not as adventurous a traveler or as vivid an observer as Colin Thubron (whose Shadow of the Silk Road covers some of the same route), Gifford weaves into his travelogue a crash course in Chinese history, geography, economy and society. To him, China is a land of contrasts, and "for every fact that is true…the opposite is almost always true as well, somewhere in the country."

Introduction: The Mother Road     xiii
The Promised Land     3
Dislocation     14
Things Flow     28
The Unfinished Revolution     41
"A Single Spark Can Light a Prairie Fire"     51
Silicon Valley     64
"Women Hold Up Half the Sky"     76
"Put the People First"     86
Power     97
The Hermit of Hua Shan     112
Elvis Lives     125
The Last Great Empire     140
Monks and Nomads     153
No Longer Relying on Heaven     165
"We Want to Live!"     177
Respect     194
The End of the Wall     205
The Caves of a Thousand Buddhas     215
Endurance     227
The Great Wall of the Mind     236
"China Is a Colonial Power"     248
From Sea to Shining Sea     259
A Road Is Made     273
Acknowledgments     297
Select Bibliography     301
Index     305