"Country Driving"

Transformation at Sancha:

• Because Chinese farmers can't use their land as collateral, they need village backing for any loan application.
• After we had taken the Idiot into the valley, I initially believed that Wei Ziqi simply cared about the money. As time passed, though, I realized that he had also made a political statement: he proved that he could get things done without the support of local cadres.
• In Beijing, the upper classes enjoy going to restaurants that serve "authentic" dishes from various parts of the country: there are Yunnan restaurants, Hakka restaurants, and Guizhou restaurants; and if you take these dishes back to their supposed regions of origin, the natives will be puzzled.
• Huairou: It's a city of gawkers and loiterers; people often appear to be lost. They stare at seven-story buildings;
• The decorating scheme of the Big World is simple in theme but complicated in execution. The theme is: things that shine and things that make noise.
• During the early months of 2003, he found businesspeople he could trust. These were new types of relationships - in the village, it was rare to have any sort of link that was strictly economic.
• For a Chinese male, nothing captures the texture of guanxi better than cigarettes. They're a kind of semaphore - in a world where much is left unsaid, every gesture with a cigarette means something... Sometimes the absense of an exchange marks boundaries.
• The Weis had accumulated more possessions. The decor represented a study in contradictions: the pig fetus floated a few feet away from the Buddhist shrine; the Denver skyline faced a People's Liberation Army tank. There were two bottles of Johnnie Walker, along with the two Ming-dynasty signal cannons that Wei Ziqi had foraged from the Great Wall.
• The child I remembered as wiry and quick had suddenly grown soft and domesticated... "He doesn't look like a peasant anymore," his mother once told me. She said it proudly: from her perspective it was good the Wei Jia had started to resemble a city kid.
• In Sancha, 2006 became the Year of Garbage... the clearest evidence of their prosperity was trash... In those days villagers reused almost everything.
• In the final stages the campaign proceeded to formal dinners.

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