Sun - The next factory of the world : how Chinese investment is reshaping Africa

I remember the first time I rode in a car. Not many people in America can say that, cars being as prosaic as they are here. But this was in China, where I was born and where I lived until age six. Up to that moment, my conception of the Chinese word qiche consisted entirely of crowded buses onto which I was squeezed by my parents and heavy-duty trucks that children were definitely not allowed in. This car was something very different: there was no one in it I didnt know, and everything was effortlessly clean. The leather of the seats was smooth and cool to the touch and gave off the calming, sterile smell of newness. I was used to having to clutch my parents hands on standing-room-only buses or to wrap my arms around their midsections as they pedaled a bicycle. None of that was necessary here, so I wasnt quite sure what to do with the unexpected freedom of my limbs. I wanted to rub the dark-tinted windows to see if they would get lighter so that I could look outside. But I had been told it was a special occasion to sit in such a qiche , which probably meant I should keep my hands to myself.

Our family did not own the car, of course. It was the early 1990s, and almost no one in China owned a car. We took a spin in it as a treat from a family friend who was a government official. Four linked rings declared the car to be an Audione of the few models that existed in China at that time, and for years afterward the only car brand I could name. China had four carmakers in total, all founded in the 1950s in a fit of central-government-directed investment in heavy industry. The Soviet Union had advised that one of the firms be based in my hometown of Changchun because of its proximity to eastern Russia, the theory being that this nascent car plant could learn from its Soviet counterparts. The resulting firm, FAW, mainly made giant industrial trucks, and over the years, its blue and white logo became ubiquitous around town. But by the time I got to sit in one of its cars, the Chinese government had long ago severed any cooperation, in automobiles or otherwise, with the Soviet Union. In 1990, FAW turned instead to Volkswagen for investment and technical help in a joint venture agreement. FAW continued to make industrial trucks, but it also started making sedans under Volkswagens Audi brand. Thats how it came to be that a year or so later, my familyfather, mother, daughterwas sitting together in a car for the first time.

It bears repeating that this happened just twenty-five years ago. Im only thirty, but I personally witnessed a time when Chinas now car-clogged streets were full of bicycles instead. Such has been the rapidity of Chinas transformation, sparked by the rise of Factory China. In the quarter century since I first sat in that car, China has gone from producing 2 percent of global manufacturing output to 25 percent. But as impressive as these statistics are, to me, the real signs of development are all the small, everyday occurrences that can only delight people who have known life without them. My favorites: Sprite is no longer considered a rare treat, just a mundane soft drink. People now stand in lines at the airport instead of jostling one another relentlessly. Stores now provide toilet paper in their bathrooms. And no one thinks its anything special to ride in a car anymore.

As these changes were unleashed by China becoming the current Factory of the World, I grew up in the United States, and then went to live in another part of the world. After college, I taught eighth- and ninth-graders in a village in Namibia, in southwestern Africa. During a staff meeting, the principal of my school strong-armed me into running the school shop. Having no clue as to what I should be selling there, I asked at the end of one of my classes if any students would like to go with mein my carto the wholesaler an hour away to buy things for the shop. A burst of shouts was accompanied by an eruption of arms into the air. Every single kid wanted to go. More than a few trailed me home, begging me to pick them. I thought it was funnyand familiar. I knew this longing to sit in a car, and the novelty of actually doing so. Carsand Sprite and toilet papermay sound like very materialistic ways of defining development, but people who have these things tend to forget how much they are markers of modernity to those who dont. Americans and Europeans can be casual about sitting in a car, but to my child self in China, and to my students in Namibia, it was a thrill. The appearance of such material goods in a society heralds the possibility that people can adopt new selves, new ways of being in the world: as consumers and producers in the modern global economy.