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On the Road in China: Talking Politics with a Trucker

By Rob Gifford
Published August 9, 2004 at 12:00 AM EDT
NPR's Rob Gifford hitches a ride with a truck driver across the Gobi Desert.
Liang Yan, for NPR
NPR's Rob Gifford hitches a ride with a truck driver across the Gobi Desert.
NPR's Rob Gifford hitches a ride with a truck driver across the Gobi Desert.
Liang Yan, for NPR /
NPR's Rob Gifford hitches a ride with a truck driver across the Gobi Desert.

Chinese people have never had a say in the way their country is governed. But that doesn't mean they don't have strong views about the way it should be.

In the sixth of his seven-part series about his 3,000-mile journey across China, NPR's Rob Gifford gets an earful from a truck driver during a 12-hour drive across the Gobi Desert. The 30-year-old trucker is torn between a love of his country and anger at the corruption that plagues it.

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Rob Gifford
Rob Gifford is the NPR foreign correspondent based in Shanghai.

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