Wayfinding China

My name is Peter Heisler and I am the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker. This book tells the story of my driving experience in mainland China.

In the summer of 2001, I obtained a Chinese driver's license. In the following seven years, I drove around the countryside and cities in China. These seven years are also the period of rapid development of China's auto industry. In Beijing alone, more than a thousand newcomers apply for driver's licenses every day. For several years, the annual growth rate of passenger car sales exceeded 100%. fifty. In just over two years, the Chinese government has built more mileage of roads in rural areas than in the previous half century.

The book "Wayfinding China" has several different threads. It first narrates my journey from the coast of the East China Sea along the Great Wall all the way to the west, across northern China; the other clue focuses on a village that has undergone tremendous changes due to the rapid development of China's automobile industry. Here, I feature a close-up The experience of a peasant family's transformation from agriculture to business; finally, the urban life scene of an industrial town in southeastern China. The development described in the book, from agriculture to industry to commerce, and from countryside to city, is the most important change that has taken place in China since the reforms in 1978.

"Looking for China" is the finale of my China Documentary Trilogy. It explores the economy, traces the sources of development, and explores individual responses to change. Like the previous two books, it studies central issues in China, but it does not do so by interpreting famous political or cultural figures, nor does it do macro and unwarranted analysis. It believes in showing the essence of China's transformation by narrating the experiences of ordinary Chinese people. I often stay in one place for months, or even years, tracking changes. I don't just listen to the protagonists tell themselves, I keep my eyes open and watch their stories unfold in front of me.

These three books span my ten years in China, from 1996 to 2007. We can see that this turn-of-the-century decade was one of the most critical periods in Chinese history. It was during this decade that China's economy took off and China's influence on the outside world began to increase. More importantly, this is the first decade since Deng Xiaoping's death. During this decade, the face of Chinese history began to change, and large-scale political events and powerful leaders began to retreat from it. Instead, the agents of China's upheaval have been ordinary people—farmers moving to cities, entrepreneurs learning by doing, whose energy and determination have been the defining factors of the past decade. From "River City" to "Oracle Bone Inscriptions" to "Looking for China", all I tell are their stories.