"Country Driving" [.]

[fiefoe]

Other observations from the road:

• In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.
• A block of streets had been cordoned off expressly for the purpose of testing new drivers... I had never seen such a peaceful street in Beijing, and in the years that followed I sometimes wished I had had time to savor it.
• (The driver's exam:) the trick is to study the wrong answers. They describe common traffic maneuvers with such vividness that you can practically see the faces behind the wheel.
• There's the afterthought honk - the one that rookie drivers make if they were too slow to hit the button before a situation resolved itself.
• You know it's bad weather when Chinese construction crews stop working.
• If you were looking for something that would go out of date quickly, the Chinese City Real Estate Map was a good bet.
• A xiaojie running to catch a cab. It's like the mating dance of a peacock: plumage everywhere, a stunning profligacy of flash and color, so much movement combined with so little obvious purpose.
• Edgar Snow's history is a cautionary tale to any Missouri native who writes about China.. the American came to swallow much of their propaganda whole. During the Great Leap Forward.. Snow toured the nation and reported that rumors of a famine were untrue.
• The Chinese can be passive about many things, but food is not one of them; I suppose this is one reason they've ended up with a first-rate cuisine and a long history of political disasters.

Law & disorder:

• "It doesn't matter," he said. "They had an accident, but they didn't have their chop, so they used somebody else's. Then they brought this page to replace it. Now you can write your report on their page, and next time bring a piece of paper with your chop, so the next person can use it. Understand?"
• (The travelling troupe:)That was another reason they kept moving: the performance was illegal in a half dozen ways. They hadn't registered with the Cultural Affairs Bureau; their customized truck had not been approved; they didn't have a single driver's license among the eleven members. They performed a strip show, which is strictly banned in China.
• In the hierarchy of the Red Star Acrobatic and Artistic Troupe, that was the lowest position: the wife of the most distant cousin.
• If a Zhejiang cop contributed 6000 dollars to an expressway speed trap, he collected 7.5 percent of the proceeds from each ticket. Investors were limited to four per camera, and rookie cops weren't allowed to purchase a share until they had accumulated a certain amount of seniority... There was a lottery system that determined which cops got which locations on the expressway. This industry even had a corps of private moneylenders... These were the rules of hierarchy and profit, not law and order.

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