A person has to be a bit crazy to decide to ride almost 7,000 kilometers through China – on an e-bike in five months. One is a cycle tour operator, the other is “just” a writer – and not particularly fit. Neither of them are very young anymore.
It’s fortunate that Volker Häring and Christian Y. Schmidt don’t tend to be too sensible – that’s why the entire journey is now available to read: “The Long Bicycle March” (Ullstein) is a pleasure for people of all levels of education. The Long March of the Red Army (1934/35) is well known as the founding myth of the Communist Party. Mao was still hanging in many teenagers’ rooms, at least in the 70s and 80s, but here you learn a lot of bizarre details and there are always interesting encounters along the way.
The two are often not allowed to stay in hotels because they are foreigners, and even more often friendly people help with technical problems and other things. “Mr. Worstcase” Schmidt curses himself at least a hundred times for embarking on the adventure – his passages are a little funnier than Häring’s, which is to be expected from a former “Titanic” editor. Schmidt lived in China for a long time and has not given up hope that he can straighten out the image that many Germans have. They may have somewhat alleviated the conflicts they had with each other during this strenuous journey; they are not whitewashing things when it comes to China.
The first tour of your life – and probably the last
The book was team work in two senses – cycling and writing together: Is that harder than carrying out a project alone?
There is no way I would have done the tour itself without Volker Häring. Not only does he speak Chinese much better than me, but he can also write and read characters. That’s a completely different story. Volker was able to work out the route in detail and also make the hotel bookings on the Chinese apps. That would have been extremely difficult for me. He also has decades of experience with bike tours. For me it was the first tour in my life – and probably, hehe, last.
Writing the book was much more strenuous with two people. The ideas about what belongs in the book and what doesn’t, and how to formulate it, differed greatly. It was a hard struggle to create a common book from the different approaches. I had previously thought it would take half as long if the writing was divided between the two of us. I can assure you: the opposite is the case. Nevertheless: I have already heard from many first-time readers that the book is very entertaining and can be read in one sitting. That means the fight for the text was probably worth it.
They weren’t completely honest after all
Have you agreed beforehand who will write what? And that you report honestly about the conflicts between you, for example?
We have divided the book into stages. That means we have decided: You, Volker, write about the route from city A to village B, and I, Christian Y., then take over the section from village B to small town C. And so on, always alternating. The only topic that I reserved for myself was the story of the Bavarian professional revolutionary Otto Braun, whose footsteps we follow, among other things. A truly incredibly dazzling figure. I have been dealing with this for more than ten years. In Volker’s chapters there are more detailed conversations with really very unusual people that we met along the way. Among other things, he chats for a long time with a Uyghur cyclist who gave up his well-paid job as a security guard at Urumqi airport to cycle all over China.
But if I’m being completely honest: we haven’t been completely honest about the arguments between us. The actual conflicts were more numerous and often more violent. But it is in the nature of things that it is difficult to agree on a common version, similar to a relationship or marital dispute.
Was one of the aim of the book also to correct the image that we largely have of China here? Or have you already given up?
Did Don Quixote ever give up his fight against the windmill blades? ChatGPT says: No. And I think the AI is right. Correcting the distorted image of China spread in our media is more necessary than ever. Especially at a time when global conflicts are increasing, it is important that people in this country learn again and again that there are no mindless combat robots scurrying around back in China that do what they are told, but rather very individual, thoroughly critical people with different wishes and opinions. Perhaps this will lead to two more people believing that we need cooperation between states rather than more confrontation.
More cooperation rather than more confrontation
When you were writing, how much did you think about whether some passages could harm you if you wanted to travel to China again later?
Of course, that comes to mind from time to time, but in the 17 years that I lived in China, I have never made a secret of what I don’t like about China. That’s how we do it in this book too. I believe that the very fact that we emphasize the role that the German Otto Braun played in the Long March and in doing so repeatedly contradict the official Chinese historiography is a small sacrilege. We also describe the – albeit few – rude police checks along the way, without holding back in any way. Even a Yan’an city government employee we meet at the end of the tour doesn’t fare quite as well as he might have liked, even though he invited us to dinner.
However, I am quite confident that these passages will not harm us on our next trip to China. If it were the current USA, I wouldn’t be so sure.