Frank Langfitt's The Shanghai Free Taxi explores one journalist's strategy for finding out what common people were thinking in China circa 2011-2016, when he worked as correspondent for NPR.
To talk to ordinary Chinese, to have them reveal their inner lives, he calls up earlier experience as a taxi driver and with magnetic signs on his Toyota Camry offers rides plus conversation for free. This was the only way foreigner Langfitt could drive a taxi in Shanghai. The young professional Chinese he meets know free to be a good price and once inside the confines of a car will often let down their guard and talk freely.
This was Langfitt's second posting in China. From 1997 to 2002, he was Beijing correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Given that China's robust economy continued between his two postings, Langfitt can't help but notice that though poverty is a thing of the past, the high cost of living has become the present reality for many.
Langfitt's free taxi fares are anything but one-way or one-offs. They become relationships, continuing stories. He gives a psychologist rides around Shanghai to her appointments with clients; he gives a young lawyer a ride to the latter's family in rural China for a New Year's reunion. He even meets up with his dozen plus characters and their stories who have left for such far-flung places as Chicago (for graduate study), Southern California (for religious reasons), or Paris (for MBA study).
A key angle to Langfitt "customer" stories is, How do these individuals balance material comforts from a vibrant economy with costs of a government that can be intrusive?
A few don't and must leave China for elsewhere. Certainly the couple who went to California for religious reasons. Still investment banker Ashley who left China only to land in Trump's America decides to return to China and her family roots.
Following up with the many taxi passengers, Langfitt assembles a composite of modern China and how they accept their lives in a seemingly rigid, Confucian social order. As Ashley says, democracy is anything but perfect when voters decide complex questions simply beyond their understanding. Langfitt agrees and cites the example of "trust the people's voice" when British Prime Minister David Cameron put the Brexit question to a simple up or down vote, placing too much faith in the votes of the blind and the ignorant.
Read The Shanghai Free Taxi for fresh insights into what ordinary Chinese are thinking amid their new-found and well-earned prosperity.
The Shanghai Free Taxi by Frank Langfitt, Public Affairs, New York. 2019. 302 pp. ISBN 978-1-61039-814-5.
Image credit: npr.org
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