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From the bestselling 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.
HarperCollins
February 2010
On Sale: December 23, 2009
448 pages ISBN: 0061804096 EAN: 9780061804090 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In the summer of 2001, Peter Hessler, the longtime Beijing
correspondent for The New Yorker, acquired his
Chinese driver's license. For the next seven years, he
traveled the country, tracking how the automobile and
improved roads were transforming China. 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.
Country 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. He investigates a
historically important rural region being abandoned, as
young people migrate to jobs in the southeast. 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. Finally, 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. 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.
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