A new book by a Peter Hessler looks at the state of roads and driving in China.

From Publishers Weekly:

In an epic road trip following the Great Wall across northern China, he surveys dilapidated frontier outposts from the imperial past while barely surviving the advent of the nation’s uniquely terrifying car culture. He probes the transformation of village life through the saga of a family of peasants trying to remake themselves as middle-class entrepreneurs. Finally, he explores China’s frantic industrialization, embodied by the managers and workers at a fly-by-night bra-parts factory in a Special Economic Zone. Hessler has a sharp eye for contradictions, from the absurdities of Chinese drivers’ education courses—low-speed obstacle courses are mandatory, while seat belts and turn signals are deemed optional—to the leveling of an entire mountain to make way for the Renli Environmental Protection Company.

From the New York Times Book Review by Alida Becker:

“It’s hard to imagine another place where people take such joy in driving so badly,” Hessler writes. Beijingers drive the way they used to walk — in packs and without signaling. “They don’t mind if you tailgate, or pass on the right or drive on the sidewalk. You can back down a highway entrance ramp without anybody batting an eyelash. . . . People pass on hills; they pass on turns; they pass in tunnels.” In other words, driving requires improvisation and creative flouting of the law — which is also a pretty apt description of the average citizen’s technique for maneuvering through the warp-speed transitions of Chinese society.

Hessler has been observing these changes since he arrived in Sichuan in 1996 for the Peace Corps stint described in his first book, “River Town.” In his next, “Oracle Bones,” he kept track of some of his students from Fuling Teachers College, intercutting glimpses of their fledgling careers with accounts of a Uighur trader’s emigration to America and a Chinese scholar’s fatal devotion to tradition. Now, in the three long narratives of “Country Driving,” adroitly expanded from his reporting for The New Yorker and National Geographic, he shows the effects China’s ever expanding network of roads exerts on individual lives.

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