Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory is the third of Peter Hessler's books about China, following River Town and Oracle Bones, and it uses the country's sudden embrace of the automobile as a lens on its breakneck transformation in the 2000s. Hessler, a longtime correspondent who lived in China for more than a decade, obtained a Chinese driver's license in 2001, at a moment when new drivers and new roads were multiplying at astonishing speed, and the book chronicles roughly seven years of travel and reporting.
It is divided into three parts. In the first, Hessler drives thousands of miles in rented cars along the route of the Great Wall, from the coast to the edge of the Tibetan Plateau, encountering hollowed-out villages, ambitious local officials, and a road culture still being invented on the fly. In the second, he settles into Sancha, a small village in the hills north of Beijing, and follows the family of his neighbor Wei Ziqi as tourism and new roads pull the household into the market economy and Wei becomes a restaurateur and Party member. In the third, he goes to Lishui in Zhejiang province to watch a factory town rise from nothing, following the entrepreneurs and young migrant workers of a plant that manufactures the small rings used in bra straps. Hessler writes with humor, patience, and deep affection for his subjects, avoiding grand pronouncements about China's rise in favor of close observation of how ordinary people navigate upheaval, which makes the book an unusually human portrait of a society reinventing itself.