E-mail a friendRob Gifford
airdate July 26, 2007
Rob Gifford first went to China as a 20-year-old language student and has spent much of the last 20 years studying and reporting there. He previously served as NPR's China correspondent and is now its London bureau chief. Born and raised in the U.K., Gifford received his undergrad degree in Chinese studies and worked for the BBC World Service as a producer and program host before moving to the U.S. His book, China Road, recounts his travels along Route 312—China's equivalent of America's Route 66.
Rob Gifford
Tavis: Prior to his current post as NPR's London bureau chief, Rob Gifford spent nearly 20 years in China, first as a student, then as NPR's Beijing-based correspondent. His new book is based on his extensive travels throughout China. It's called "China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power." Rob, nice to have you on the program.
Rob Gifford: Good to be here,
Tavis: Let me start with how you wound up in China to begin with. I said you were a student at one point, but why China, and how'd you end up there?
Gifford: Well, I spent part of my childhood in Asia. I went to school there, I grew up in the UK, got sent off to boarding school, and then studied languages in high school and just got bored of studying Voltaire and Brecht, really, and I wanted to branch out and decided I wanted to major in Chinese. So I spent my sophomore year in college there, and once you go and spend some time there - I spent time as a young man there - and it just got into my bloodstream, really, and I couldn't stay away. And that's how - and then I went into journalism, and then NPR posted me to Beijing.
Tavis: What is it about the country that gets, as you say, into your bloodstream? What is it about China that pulled you in?
Gifford: I think part of it is, of course, how different it is. It's completely different to the western world in so many ways. The Chinese civilization is completely different from western civilization. But also really the stage that it's at in its development. In some areas, it's like at the stage of the industrial revolution in the western world in the 19th century.
But then alongside it you've got happening this technological revolution, as well. And just - it's emerging from Communism, it's in transformation, it's being convulsed by change. So it's just an interesting place to live. You just walk down the street and you see stuff that just blows your mind every day.
Tavis: I want to talk in a moment, Rob, about some of that transformation and about what you label in the book as contradictions in China - we'll come to that in a second. Let me start, though, by asking about what you refer to in the text as the soullessness of the Chinese people. Not altogether a compliment, to say that a people is soulless.
Gifford: Right. It's probably a slightly dangerous term to use, because I don't mean - of course, it's hard to generalize about 1.3 billion people. But I think part of what I meant by that is that there's been such a destruction of old China - Chairman Mao came in and he thought China's weakness was very much because of all the things about old China.
The old belief systems - Confucianism and Daoism - and he just tried to wipe them out, and he was very, very successful at that. And so China has emerged from Maoism, and now, amazingly, Communism is bankrupt. No one believes in it. So what Mao replaced these old belief systems with - that is Communism, Marxism - is also now bankrupt.
So you have this sort of spiritual vacuum, if you like, where people don't really know what to believe. They know they can earn a lot of money. They know that society is changing. But at the same time, there's something missing, I think, in the jigsaw of modern China.
Tavis: Is there a particular example or examples of what you mean when you suggest, then, that there is a soullessness to the people in a contemporary sense?
Gifford: I think just the sheer materialism of it. I'm not sure that we in the west - this is why -
Tavis: Yeah, I was about to jump in and say I know a whole bunch of Americans who could qualify for being soulless if it's about the chase of material goods.
Gifford: Well, that is part of it. And of course, we have to be careful in pointing the finger, and I think we can't begrudge Chinese people the ability to raise their standard of living to a level that we've enjoyed for decades. But I suppose it's just the emerging from this sort of Maoist cocoon and trying to work out what it's all about and what China's going to be. And a lot of what the government is now saying to them is just saying, get rich quick. That's what it's all about. And that, you see in the cities everywhere.
Tavis: Let me go back to what I said earlier I wanted to get to and that is some of - let me just pick two or three, if I might - some of the contradictions that you talk about in the text with regard to this country, China. In no particular order, religion. Talk about the contradiction - since you're on that now - the contradiction of faith and religion in China.
Gifford: Yes, that does tap in a little bit to what we were talking about, and I had some amazing instances on the road trip - I was two months on the road, traveling, and the churches, because of this kind of spiritual vacuum, the churches, well, of every religion are really booming but especially the Christian church.
And I was in one small town in the middle of nowhere interviewing some Christians just before their church service on one Sunday morning, and the preacher - the pastor didn't show up. He was an itinerant pastor. And so one of the elders of the church came up and asked if I would preach the sermon. And so I had to stand up (laughs) and preach in Chinese to this rural church in the middle of China.
And in some ways, that's sort of very symbolic of the hospitality of the Chinese people - obviously, they think that all westerners are Christians - but also just the whole sort of reemergence of religion. The flip side of what I was talking about, this emergent materialism, is the emergence of a desire to sort of find out different types of religious belief.
And Christianity especially, all over China, is absolutely booming. There are more Christians in China now - 75 million or so - than there are members of the Communist party.
Tavis: Wow. Just because I'm curious - and what topic for your sermon did the Reverend Rob Gifford choose?
Gifford: (Laughs) Well, I'd just been up a mountain, actually, with a hermit - a Daoist hermit - and we'd been talking about the knowability of God. In Daoism, you can't know God, and it's a very sort of mystical religion. I was saying, well, that's interesting, because in Christianity and Judaism and obviously Islam, God is very knowable.
So I had to think pretty fast, but I came up with John 14:6, "Jesus said, 'I am the way, the truth, and the light,'" exactly
Tavis: "- truth, and the light." Not a bad sermon (unintelligible) if you're going to take one.
Gifford: Yeah, well, I figured if you're going to take a verse from the bible, you might as well take that one.
Tavis: When you put out the way, the truth, and the light, that's about all you need, quite frankly. The second contradiction, technology, which you also hit on earlier. But I get the sense from reading the text that the government says it wants technology advances and yet?
Gifford: That's right, and yet it's obviously very difficult to - you've got a country the size of the United States, a lot of the area is very, very, poor, very, very backward. You do see, of course, in the cities people are on broadband. There's 450 million cell phone users. There's 150 million people on the Internet - it's growing by millions every week.
But you just have the challenge of this massive country. And on the flipside of this growing middle class - you've got three or 400 million new middle class people, but on the flip side you've still got 900 million peasants, and they are not on the Internet, they do not have cell phones. And it's raising the standard of living of those people that's really the big challenge for the future.
Tavis: Let me shift gears dramatically right quick. Everybody wants to - not everybody, but certainly many people want to democratize this place called China. Can democracy work in China?
Gifford: Well, that's the million-dollar question. I am very upbeat about Chinese economic progress. I feel it can go on for some time now, and it needs to go on. But I fear that there could be another crunch coming in the next kind of 10 years, 10 to 15 years, because there are a lot of people - after Tiananmen Square in 1989, it all went quiet and people just focused on the economy.
But now there are a lot of angry people emerging. The contradictions of modern China, the convulsions, are creating a lot of people who are losers in the whole process, and they are pushing for political reform. I'm not completely convinced that it can make that transition. I'm worried that if they start down that road, even, like Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the thing could unravel pretty fast.
Tavis:: Finally, then, fair to say that as I read your work, you are more concerned about China imploding than you are about this behemoth of an economy that we can't control, handle, or trade with?
Gifford: This is the great contradiction and the tension in the mind, I think, of every westerner who's covering China. It is becoming this great behemoth. It is becoming a country that has to be reckoned with. But as I say, I think there's going to come a point where there is going to be a crunch, because this behemoth is still a one-party state.
I'm not convinced that it can go on for centuries being a one-party state. It is starting to challenge the West in some ways - some people say threaten the West. But there comes a point, I think, where the 1950s political system has to change, and that is going to present a massive, massive challenge to the Communist party.
Tavis: He now runs the London bureau for NPR, formerly in Beijing. His name is Rob Gifford, the book is called "China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power." Rob, nice to have you on the program.
Gifford: Thank you, Tavis.
Tavis: Good to see you.
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