Peter Hessler, whom The Wall Street Journal calls 'one of the Western world's most thoughtful writers on modern China', deftly illuminates the vast, shifting landscape of a traditionally rural nation that, having once built walls against foreigners, is now building roads and factory towns that look to the outside world. If China’s first urban planners had persevered, Peter Hessler’s road trip from east of Beijing to the Gobi Desert would have taken place on top of the Great Wall instead of alongside it. Next, Hessler spends six years in Sancha, a small farming village in the mountains north of Beijing, which changes dramatically after the local road is paved and the capital's auto boom brings new tourism.įinally, he turns his attention to urban China, researching development over a period of more than two years in Lishui, a small southeastern city where officials hope that a new government-built expressway will transform a farm region into a major industrial center. He investigates a historically important rural region being abandoned, as young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. The City of Bridgewater is located in Somerset County in the State of New Jersey. Hessler writes movingly of the average people - farmers, migrant workers, entrepreneurs - who have reshaped the nation during one of the most critical periods in its modern history.Ĭountry Driving begins with Hessler's 7,000-mile trip across northern China, following the Great Wall, from the East China Sea to the Tibetan plateau. For the next seven years, he traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and improved roads were transforming China. In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his Chinese driver's license.

From the best-selling author of Oracle Bones and River Town comes the final book in his award-winning trilogy, on the human side of the economic revolution in China. Country Driving, by Peter Hessler China is the first 'It' country of the 21st century.

Country driving by peter hessler