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Asia Buzz: Highway to Robbery
Road rage on China's highways
By TERRY McCARTHY
July
19, 2000
Web posted at 12:30 p.m. Hong Kong time, 12:30 a.m. EDT
On a recent long car journey in China's southwest between the town of Dali to the provincial capital Kunming, we finally tired of the splendid mountain scenery and started talking to the driver, Chen, a married man in his late 30s with one child. We ended up with a Jack Kerouac-style monologue about life on the road in China.
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The conversation began with an idle observation I made about how deforested some of the hillsides looked. Chen immediately volunteered the information that he had once worked for the local logging firm that had cut trees mercilessly around Dali. "Yes, we knew we were cutting too much, but what could we do? The company was owned by the government, they just wanted more wood."
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The logging had to stop, Chen told us, when they realized they were creating horrendous erosion problems. And so all the loggers were thrown out of work. Welcome to China's economic reforms. Chen had a wife and a child to support, so with his small savings he bought a truck, and began hauling goods long distance to bring in the daily rice.
He mostly did the Yunnan-Guangdong route -- took foodstuffs down to the coast, brought various manufactured products back up to Yunnan et cetera -- and spent days at a time on the road, on his own for much of the time until it became common in the mid-'90s to travel with two drivers, alternating at the wheel.
Life on the highways outside China's main towns and cities is quite different from what you might expect. Lawlessness, bandits and crooked cops are a way of life -- particularly in Guangdong. Once, Chen was hijacked by villagers who threw a bicycle in front of his truck, and when he slowed down to try to avoid it, they jumped on his running board and forced him to stop and get out. Four burly men pushed him off the road into a field, and demanded an outrageous 2,000 renminbi ($250, and about three months' wage for Chen at the time) for the bicycle. They were preparing to beat Chen up when another truck driver whom he knew happened to pass by, saw what was going on, and came down into the field armed with a knife. Apparently this second driver had done time in jail, and was quick to exert his authority on the villagers, who scattered.
According to Chen, incidents like this happened all the time on the more deserted stretches of highway -- there were some roads in particular in Guangdong that truck drivers would refuse to use unless they traveled in convoy.
The police weren't much better: Chen remembers one incident when a policeman stopped him and accused him of driving badly -- a 200 renminbi fine ($25). The policeman then said the truck looked overloaded -- a further 200 renminbi. When Chen protested, the policeman hit him across the face with his license, and said the fine was now 600 renminbi. And if he didn't pay he would never get his license back. There was no recourse, of course, and Chen ended up handing over almost an entire month's earnings to the corrupt cop, returning empty-handed two days later to his wife and young son.
The rigors of truck driving finally got too much for Chen, who sold
his truck. Now he drives a taxi and does some other work on the
side. You learn a lot on the road in China, Chen pointed out. But
not all of it good.
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