I sat down with Hessler to discuss his new book and his thoughts on China -- its problems, its future, its people. How have things changed? How have the people responded? What is the impact of rule of law in China? Is China the overwhelming power that the West currently makes it out to be? Below is an excerpt of my interview with Hessler.
To listen to the audio of this interview in its entirety, click here. To read the transcript of the full interview, click here. Photos by Robert Burnett************************************************************************************EL: The first part of Country Driving, you describe your drive along the Great Wall and you go through a lot of these villages that are, that seem like they are just closing down and they are mostly poor, you talk about them being depopulated; barren, no longer farm-able, and you even talk about some of the aid work there that is subject to a lot of corruption, in your mind, what do you think is the future for these villages? If you go back 10 years from now, will they exist? What do you see for these villages?
PH: It was very striking because China has been in the midst of this incredible migration. Most of the figures now are 130 million, 140 million people have left the countryside - mostly young people looking for jobs in the cities. When I was traveling, it's amazing how this is the other side of migration; you've been to the factory towns or the cities where you see all these people, but where are they coming from? You go to these villages, and I'd drive through, and you talk to people and they would usually say the population is decreased by half, roughly. That was generally the number I would get from talking to people. I never met anybody in a place who said, oh we haven't lost population. It was every single town.
Often it's really striking that you just do not see people in their late teens and twenties in these towns, and thirties. They're either older people, elderly, or you see disabled people or you see small children because children are still being raised by their grandparents often in these villages. So, it was something as I drove....In a way they are quite poor, they've always been poor, but they're also incredibly open and friendly. I never had a single bad experience in these little towns and people were incredibly generous - they would invite me in, they were totally trusting. So it did make me sad to think about that, that these places are really changing. And I don't know who is going to be there in a generation. It's hard to envision who, why would someone stay basically, and people often told me that. Along the way I was picking up hitchhikers, which is mostly because I had an empty car and I found that it was interesting, and most of those hitchhikers were young people migrating, and you talk to them and they say 'there's no way I am going back, there's nothing there for me.'
So I don't know what happens. I think maybe eventually if China reforms some of the land use laws perhaps people would consolidate farms and there would be some farmers who could make a better living because they have bigger holdings. That's what should logically happen. In some ways it's not a bad thing, because a country....When they started the reforms they had like 900 million farmers or something in '78. You don't really need 900 million farmers in a country. It's inevitable that this is going to happen. And we've been through it, Europe went through it. If you look at 19thcentury literature, there are all these poems, English poems, about villages that are dying and don't exist anymore. So this is an old story in that sense. I think eventually you will see this consolidation and there will be some who remain as farmers but for this particular moment it is very hard to see the future. 
EL: In terms of the law, you brought up some reforms to land use laws. And in certain parts of Country Driving I know you mention, just in passing, the Chinese law and the legal system. Your neighbor in Sancha, Wei Ziqi, he holds onto contracts dating back to the Qing dynasty, showing that he should have title to certain lands. You describe how the law doesn't protect the countryside and allows cities to buy farmland at cheap prices and then just flip it at a higher price. And you also discuss the petitioning system. When you bring up these interactions with the law, it seems like the law itself doesn't really offer solutions for the people that you write about. Do you think this is changing at all? Do you see the law or the legal system developing in a way to protect these people? In the field I am in, we hope that the legal system is changing to better protect a lot of these people, but on the ground do you feel that is really happening?
PH: You know, like so many things in China, there are so many levels to this issue. I think there is a huge amount of vitality and energy in the legal field right now in China and if you go to Qinghua University, at the upper end it's quite vibrant. There are a lot of people thinking very hard about these issues, working very hard on them, there is a lot of life to it. So I do think in that sense it's clear that there are people that are interested in making this a better system, no doubt. And I think eventually, it will happen.
For this book, really my focus was much more on working class people. A lot of these people were farmers. Basically, most of the people I am writing about are people who are from the countryside but are making this transition in one way or another to urban life or to being entrepreneurs; in the last section, people who are becoming factory workers or managers and so on. So I am sort of seeing their perspective which is going to be very different from a legal scholar.
But it's interesting, when even in these places, the people have a deep faith in law really and quite an interest. You mention Wei Ziqi, this is someone who had just about eight years of formal schooling but he's very bright and when he was older and had been farming for a while, he took a correspondent course in law for example. And he kept all of these books that he got from that course that taught him how to draw up contracts for example. So when I rented a house there, he wrote up a very formal contract and had me and the person I was renting with sign it. And it had all these clauses - one of the clauses was that you can't store explosives in the house - very detailed stuff. It really had no legal status; you couldn't take that contract to court but he believed....To him it was important and it showed sort of an interest in it and a respect for the law. So you do sort of see that a lot.
I think....One of my general conclusions on how people interact with the law in places like this and in the factory towns is that it is certainly not a fair system and it's not a system that we would see as certainly as being anything close to finished, but it's pretty functional to be honest.
You mention the land use issues, which are really unfair to people in the countryside, but it allows development to proceed in the way that it has. In some ways they are at a stage now, it's a weird stage in that there are huge problems clearly with the legal system. But it works and the corruption even is sort of manageable - it's almost like there are rules to it and people know how it works. So their level of comfort is a lot higher than what you would expect. As an outsider you think, this is just a bad system, these things are wrong and people shouldn't tolerate it. But from their perspective it's different; it's probably better, it is better than it was 20 years ago. They also know basically how it works. They find ways to make things work in their favor. What they do is not what we would expect.
For example, in the factory town, where I spent a lot of time, there was really very little sense of the law there, in the sense I never met a lawyer there, I never got any sense of anybody doing any kind of NGO work, there's no unions that I ever encountered. The government had an official union and they would show movies on the street to factory workers - that was the only contact I had with them. But it doesn't mean that people were powerless. It just meant that they didn't find recourse in the law specifically. If a worker had a problem, he didn't talk to a union, he didn't call a lawyer. But he found other ways to do it.
I write for example about a family that works in a factory. I've watched them over a period of years. For example, when they started working in the factory they sent their youngest daughter with the older daughter's ID. The youngest one is 15, barely 15, and she isn't legal to work. But because she has the fake ID she gets a job and then she brings her sister in. Soon enough, the whole family is there. And they end up with quite a bit of power because they have a network of six workers or so who were a huge part of the labor force and they could negotiate as a group. So it's a place where people have agency, the type of agency they have is not traditional, it's not necessarily legally based. So as an outsider, it's very hard to understand, but at the same time, you kind of respect it. When I watch that family, the Tao family, when I watch them negotiate, I didn't feel sorry for them. They were really good at what they did. I would not want to negotiate with them, I wouldn't want to be the boss. I almost felt more sorry for the boss sometimes because they were just really tough people. So you sort of admire them, but again you realize that it is not a finished system. But it's functional.
So, I think that is kind of the stage that they're at. They do have some huge questions that remain to be answered and it is very hard to tell, especially that land use issue which is that people in the countryside can't buy and sell their own land. That has been a huge problem over the years and it continues to be. There have been lots of signs and lots of discussions over reform but that hasn't happened yet.
EL: When you traveling through the countryside and the factory towns, you see a lot of people on the move and you do see these inequities, but amongst the people themselves, what was their biggest gripe? I think a lot of foreign NGOs that are in China, a lot of the work I do, there is a focus on the inequities in society or the environmental damage, things like that. But do you feel that people that are in the countryside and in the factory towns, what do you think is their biggest issue?
PH: It's very localized and if you ask people, it tends to be corruption and what they mean is corruption of local officials. That doesn't mean that the top levels aren't corrupt, they just don't see it. So often they continue to have a faith that the top levels of governments are better run and the people are more honest but the locals, because they know the locals, they see what is happening, they are very cynical about that. It is incredibly localized. One of the years, the year that I wrote about where I was following a dam project in this book, they reported something like 87,000 public disturbances, protests in China that year. And you should see these figures. Every year it's a figure like that, close to 100,000 and you think my God, the country is about to explode. But when you do sort of encounter one of these instances and look at it, it tends to be so incredibly localized and it's not connected to larger issues.
So you meet someone in the countryside and you ask them what's wrong and they won't tell you the land or the Constitution just isn't fair in terms of land use laws. It's hard to have that kind of vision, they're not seeing these sort of huge issues. What they would tell you is my piece of land, I didn't get the market value for that piece of land, and that's really all that they are going to care about, about their own situation. So you don't see people making these connections. You see some of the outsiders and the NGOs, folks like that are in different positions. But the people that are in the villages, the factory workers, that's not their issue.
To be honest, it's such a demanding society, everybody is coping with so much change I often feel like they just don't have the energy to go after those big issues. You can't blame them; they've got a lot of stuff to take care of. Wei Ziqi, he's trying to shift from being a farmer to being a businessman, he's trying to join the Party in the local village, he's trying to get a solid political position in his village. He has all of these things to worry about, the last thing he's going to worry about is trying to reform the Constitution. He has no way to do that and it's just not going to be his natural response.
EL: In terms of those issues, in noting that there is some basic stability and even though there are these complaints, they are very localized and they're not becoming a big issue. But if every rural area is having similar complaints, even though they are not unified, do you think that perhaps maybe China is not as powerful as the West right now currently views it? Do you see...Even though it is a stable system, there is a lot of I guess tension on the local level, do you see this as problematic and do you think the Chinese national government is going to deal with it in the future? I guess what do you see for the future?
PH: It's always a bad game to predict China's future basically but I think basically, I suppose it's en vogue to talk, we hear about how overwhelmingly powerful China is. I tend to sort of temper that. I don't see China as on the verge of collapse, I've never felt that at all. But I also don't see it as this place that is an unbelievable juggernaut, that they are doing everything better than everybody else is doing. There are a lot of problems with the system, there are a lot of flaws. But there are still a lot of safety valves as well.
One of the things I write about in this books is what happens to people who could potentially be dangerous maybe to the government, who could cause a lot of trouble. You go to the villages, and the really bright people, the ones who would probably be the most angry about injustices and also the most capable of fighting something or resisting something, they leave, they become migrants because they've got opportunities. So it's like a pressure valve. So you don't see the really bright young person staying in the village and stirring up trouble. That person is trying to find his way in a factory world. So they have a whole other series of challenges to go. They're outside of their home community, they don't have their networks anymore, so politically, they're not in a position to do a lot.
In the village that I wrote about, the person I knew, Wei Ziqi, he's one of the very few really bright people who stayed. And what happens to him? Well he has some power struggles with local authorities but he ends up becoming a Party member; he sort of becomes to some degree part of the local power structure. This also happens - people get recruited. So I think there are a lot of different pressure valves basically that sort of take some of the talented people out of the position where they would potentially cause trouble.
It's sort of a hard thing because it can be very depressing in a way, like when I was in that dam community and I met a lot of folks there who were angry, petitioning, and bitter about it. I noticed that they generally tended to be the lesser educated and they had the fewest financial resources, and this is partly because they were the ones who have been treated the worst, but they also were, I have to admit, also some of the least capable of really doing something basically. And the people I met who were capable had either left or they were finding other ways to make their way. There was one guy in that dam community that was really sharp. When he talked to me he wanted to know what my journalist accreditation was, he had all kinds of questions about what kind of writing I do, he was the first one I met who was really sharp like that and really knew a lot of the issues and his vision was much broader in the sense that he's like 'they are moving people from these towns, there is nothing for them to do in these towns, they're just building these towns and there's no farming, there's no business, there's no factories.' But he was well dressed, he had a cell phone so I asked 'well what do you do, how do you get your money?' and he's like 'well I sell building materials in the towns that they're building.' So he's profiting in a way, he's found a way, he's kind of hedged his bets basically. I just think there is still a level of opportunity that makes it hard for people to justify really, really devoting themselves to protesting.
I think eventually that changes. But you have to reach a point in my opinion, where sort of the middle class, the upper class, the educated people, the ones with a lot of drive, when those people feel like they're getting limited, because they have the tools. Right now it's like the people at the bottom I feel like are the ones that really get hammered. And it's a very sad situation but it's very natural in the sense that those are also the people who are the least capable of affecting massive political change. I think something will change with that but I think it is going to have to be when this other group starts to see it as being in their interest to be a little less self-oriented and a little more aware of ways in which the system can be improved. Like I say, you have more and more energy going in this direction, but I think it is going to take time. I never felt that we were going to see a political change in the next five years or something, a major political change. I never had that feeling in China.
*************************************************************************************Photo Credits: Robert Burnett of Robert Burnett Photography
To read the full transcript of this interview, please click here.
To listen to the interview, please click here.