Having arrived in China with the Peace Corps in 1996, Peter Hessler quickly established himself as a pre-eminent China observer, publishing River Town and Oracle Bones and becoming the Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker from 2000 to 2007. We spoke with him about his recently published book, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory.

On the cover of Peter Hessler’s new book, a fibreglass traffic cop stands at attention on the side of a highway, a scarecrow whose job is to deter speeding. There are lots of absurd details like this in Country Driving – curios that observant travellers readily collect in China – but Hessler’s work is far more insightful than most travel books. That’s because it isn’t one.

The book is divided into three sections and only the first fits the travel writing mould. In it, Hessler describes two road trips he takes following the Great Wall, or walls, more precisely, deep into China’s interior.

On the road, Hessler follows different sections of the wall, built at different times, and now in different states of decay. In one part of Inner Mongolia, the wall is so eroded that he accidentally parks his “City Special” Jeep on top of it.

In Inner Mongolia he also meets a young woman hitchhiking and offers her a ride. She puts one foot in the Jeep and asks him what he’s doing so far from his home in Beijing. “Wanr,” he says, a phrase “so common that it comes out automatically: for fun. But it’s probably the wrong thing to say on a creekbed in Inner Mongolia.” The girl decides to wait for another ride.

 In a narrative sense, this first section also feels like a drive – there’s plenty to see, but it’s only when Hessler parks up and rents a house in the dead end village of Sancha that the story really arrives. The characters he observes become fuller, no longer cropped at the rubbery limits of car windows, or quickly shrinking out of sight in the rear vision mirror.

Hessler begins renting his “twenty-dollar time-share” in 2002, at the beginning of the Beijing automotive boom, just as Sancha becomes a viable weekend getaway. He catalogues the changes this boom brings to his neighbours, the Wei family.

“The father, Wei Ziqi, becomes a party member,” Hessler says. “He joins the Communist Party because he’s becoming more important in the village. He also starts to smoke because he’s a business man – when he was a farmer he didn’t do that. He begins to drink more because he has to wine and dine people. His wife meanwhile becomes Buddhist. I think she feels an emptiness with all the business and she wants to find something else.

"And the boy who was just a very typical countryside child, very active and wiry, becomes a little bit heavy because now they have a higher living standard and they have cable television and he’s encouraged to spend all his time on his homework and becomes much less active.”

Instead of travelling in search of stories, by staying put and writing about his relationship with the Weis over several years, the insane pace of change in China brings Hessler’s major themes – economic, religious, political, and social – to him.