Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler

the willow branches, and the trees were also intended to halt the desert’s expansion. In some ways this worked: the township’s agricultural territory was holding steady at 10 percent of the total land, and locals had been able to expand their herds. I visited the home of one Mongolian family that cared for two hundred head of sheep. “Everything is better now,” the patriarch told me. “It’s easier to get food, easier to get clothes.” He spoke halting Mandarin, and he told me that he had grown up in a traditional Mongol ger , or tent. Now he lived in a brick home, where the walls were decorated with one poster of a Ferrari Mondial and another of a Harley Davidson motorcycle. There was also a map of China, two portraits of Genghis Khan, and a shrine dedicated to Mao Zedong. When I asked about the shrine, the man said, “Mao was a liberator, a great leader, and a good man.” He added that all true Mongols keep portraits of Genghis Khan. On another wall hung a framed government prize that the man had received for paying his taxes on March 20, 1997. In rural homes I often saw prizes like this—sometimes people got awards for keeping their houses clean.
    In Wushenqi, though, it seemed that any benefits of willow planting would be short-lived. A Chinese-born geographer named Jiang Hong was conducting research in the region, and she told me that the groundwater was dropping. The desert simply couldn’t support any additional agriculture, not even the willow trees. But Jiang Hong had also noticed that locals remained supportive of the planting project, despite the factthat they knew about the dwindling groundwater. This was different from the past, when there had always been resistance to heavy-handed government campaigns. Back then, projects tended to be abstract and collective: Mao would declare that China’s productivity needed to surpass that of Great Britain or the United States, and a herdsman in a place like Wushenqi was reluctant to destroy his environment for such goals. But ever since Deng Xiaoping, the economy had been driven primarily by individual motivation, and rewards were suddenly tangible. And the new mobility meant that many people had caught a glimpse of a better life.
    “They see more of the outside world now,” Jiang Hong said. “They can visit the cities, and they see things on television. They want to have more of the material benefits that they see.” In a sense, people had become more worldly, but this contact with the outside was disorienting. The frame of reference no longer consisted of the limited resources available in Wushenqi, but rather the infinite products available in the city. By learning more about other places, residents had lost touch with their immediate environment.
    And decades of political instability had warped people’s mindsets. “When things change so quickly, people don’t have time to gain information about their environment,” Jiang Hong said. “If you look back at Chinese history from 1949, policies have changed so often. When the reforms took hold in the 1980s, people saw that as an opportunity—and you have to take the opportunity now because it won’t last. People tend to have a short-term view of development.”
    For this generation, the economic landscape had become as unstable as the Ordos sands. Everything shifted: the rules, the business practices, the challenges of daily life. There was always some new situation to figure out, and it was hard for people to get their bearings. Often the ones who reacted quickly without thinking were the most successful. Sustainability was a luxury that few could afford to worry about, especially in places where young people were likely to leave anyway. Long-term planning made no sense: the goal was gain some profit today before you found yourself overwhelmed by the next wave of change.
     
    AFTER LEAVING WUSHENQI, I returned across the Great Wall and headed south back to Yulin. I wasn’t sure how much longer I