Progress

Connected to my handlebar bag is a square sleeve designed to protect road maps from the elements. Two years of heavy use have left it in tatters. Once transparent, the sleeve now shrouds the maps I use in a yellow haze—the same kind of dirty yellow that hides much of eastern China from view should you bother to look at it from an airplane window. When it rains the paper soaks up the water through small holes around the grommets. A few hours of this and the web of red and yellow lines is as drenched as the road beneath my wheels.

A couple of days ago I rode off the edge of the map section that lay before me—always a happy occasion. I stopped, opened the velcro strip at the bottom of the sleeve, removed the map and turned it over. Something in the upper right-hand corner immediately caught my eye: a bold B, doubly underlined. There was no need to spread out the map. I knew what it was. B for Beijing. The finish line.

The Yellow River as it sludges its way through Lanzhou

I stared at it. There was no excitement, no rush of anticipation. In fact, as I got back on the bike, I started to feel annoyed. 'Three months,' I grumbled. 'I've spent three months of my life cycling from one end of this country to the other, and what have I seen? Sand in the west, soot in the east.' And it's true. Northern China is cut in half by a barrier that separates two very different types of landscape. This barrier is the Yellow River. West of it lies the lifeless wasteland that is Xinjiang and western Gansu, east a mind-boggling jumble of villages, towns, cities and metropoles. The transition was merciless. Shrubs and grit suddenly made way for fields and farms; the horizon disappeared behind dusty trees; and everywhere I looked: people. People standing in the doorway of low houses, people picking juniper berries, people carrying toddlers with a slit in the seat of their pants, people huddling around a group of mahjong players, people transporting fresh produce in motorised tricycles, people chatting with other people. The fertile soil sprouted more than wheat and corn alone. It sprouted people.

At first I thought things would ease up, that I would soon reach the kind of China that people come to China for. Not that I expected having to dodge stray pandas all of a sudden, but a bit of the China we know from scroll paintings and NatGeo documentaries would have been nice. You know: a riot of rice paddies, spiky peaks that rise up from steaming forests, the silhouette of a villager pushing a flat boat across a lake of liquid moonlight... My guidebook tells me these places exist, and so did a handful of backpackers I met in Xi'an. And I'm sure they do—in a few enchanted pockets in the deep south.

What do you mean 'pollution'?

But the reality is that China doesn't have time for empty romanticism. So what if cities are soulless collections of concrete boxes laid out along severe grid plans and the spaces in between these cities get smaller and smaller? So what if arable land is actually put to use? So what if factories and trucks and open-pit mines mire entire provinces in a blanket of dust? In less than a generation the Chinese have managed to lift themselves from abject poverty. They work, they consume and, on the whole, seem reasonably happy. A cynic will argue that they have traded the shackles of one system for those of another, that a life spent toiling in communes has been replaced by a life spent toiling to pay the bills. The ever-optimistic Chinese see it differently. They are reaping the benefits of social and economic change, and no one will stop them from moving on, from getting ahead in life.

I've made my peace with modern China. What it lacks in picture-postcard prettiness, it makes up for in energy and ambition. Even the stifling air pollution is something I've grown used to. When I look in the mirror after a day on the road, it's not soot I see on my face. It's the pollen of progress.