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China Road
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China Road (2007) (edit title/settings)

A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power

by Rob Gifford (Author) (edit contributors)

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Description edit see section history

Route 312 is the Chinese Route 66. It flows three thousand miles from east to west, passing through the factory towns of the coastal areas, through the rural heart of China, then up into the Gobi Desert, where it merges with the Old Silk Road. The highway witnesses every part of the social and... read more

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  • “P.8: After dinner, I wander slowly back down the Bund, avoiding the legion of beggars loitering at the door of the restaurant, heading across the road to the walkway on the waterfront where I had tried to job earlier in the evening. You can keep Fifth Avenue, and Piccadilly, and the Champs-Élysées. This is my favourite urban walk in all the world. There is nothing quite like it, especially on a hot summer evening. The energy, the atmosphere, the hope, the possibilities, the past, the future, it is all here. Downtown Shanghai makes you feel that finally, after centuries of trying, China may be on the edge of greatness once again.”
  • “P.52: It's early morning. The rising sun embraces Nanjing in its heat and light, looking for all the world as though it belongs to China and not to its mortal enemy across the sea to the east. Morning is the best time in China, before all the layers of impossibility have piled themselves upon each other. Everything seems possible as a hot summer sun rises on a modern Chinese city.”
  • “P.119: There is moss on Hua Shan. Moss is one of my favourite things in all the world. Deep, dank, dark green moss. Northern China has little of it, because it never rains. Hua Shan has plenty, clinging to rocks, and to trees, and to whatever roots and bark it can find. I stop occasionally just to touch it.”
  • “P.257: The wind creeps again into our little dell, but it is a soft, welcome wind. Soon I hear Murat breathing more heavily, asleep on his rug a few feet away from me. I lie there for a while, happier than I have been at any other time on my journey. Perhaps the Chinese monk Xuan Zang slept here in the seventh century, the Buddhist scriptures he had brought back from India tucked under his saddlebag. Perhaps Aurel Stein slept here too, having pillaged the same Buddhist scriptures from the library cave at Dunhuang. Perhaps there is too much romance written into this crazy Silk Road. And with that, I fall asleep on the shifting sands of the desert, under a Uighur moon.”
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  • “You see, in the West,” he says, “people have a moral standard that is inside them. It is built into them. Chinese people do not have that moral standard within them. If there is nothing external stopping them, they just do whatever they want for themselves, regardless of right and wrong.”
    Highlighted by 84 Kindle customers
  • China now has the highest rate of female suicide in the world, and suicide is the number one cause of death among women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four.
    Highlighted by 62 Kindle customers
  • Actually, to understand China today, the best comparison by far is Roman Europe two thousand years ago: lots of people with different languages and dialects, different customs, different artistic styles, even different cuisines, all with a shared heritage but ultimately held together by force.
    Highlighted by 60 Kindle customers
  • In destroying its traditional ways of thinking, it has done away with any ethical restraints on a headlong pursuit of wealth and development.
    Highlighted by 57 Kindle customers
  • There are nine cities in the United States with more than one million inhabitants. In China there are forty-nine.
    Highlighted by 52 Kindle customers
  • The Dao in Daoism, the Way itself, is by its nature unknowable. The first line of the classic Daoist text, the Dao De Jing, lays this out very clearly: “The way that can be walked is not the True Way, the name that can be named is not the True Name.”
    Highlighted by 49 Kindle customers
  • The government wants advanced education without encouraging people to think.” There couldn’t be a better summary of the Chinese dilemma today: the tension between the need to enforce orthodoxy in order to retain unity and the need to allow freedom in order to encourage creativity.
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  • The other big problem in this poor, poor region is that few of the sons of the farmers can find a wife. Many women aborted female fetuses in the early 1980s, when the one-child policy was introduced, because if they could have only one child, they wanted it to be a son. Now that generation of men has come to marrying age, and there are too few women available. Again, the problem is the same all over China. The government says China will be short 30 million brides by the year 2020.
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  • In 1905 the Chinese abolished the all-important Confucian examination system, which had given the emperor and his mandarins their legitimacy for two thousand years, and then, in 1912, the whole imperial system itself was overthrown.
    Highlighted by 38 Kindle customers
  • The Communist Party now gives almost nothing to the people it claims to represent. The Party only takes. From each according to his ability, to each…nothing. In terms of social welfare, it is fair to say that Chinese society today is less socialist than Europe.
    Highlighted by 36 Kindle customers
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Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Rob Gifford (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Random House
Country: Add the country of publication.
Publication Date: 2007
ISBN: 1400064678
Page Count: 352

Classification edit see section history

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