We are spoilt rotten here in Nanjing and Jiangsu. Amongst everything else that makes us kings and queens of the big China castle is our road network. The highway asphalt that has been laid over the last decade all across the province is the envy of many a developed country. Driving a truck from Nanjing to Lianyungang would be a piece of cake.
On the other site of the country, however, can be found some of the most dangerous roads in the world. One such route, the G213, runs from Lanzhou, capital of Gansu province, to Mohan in Yunnan, a length of some 2,827 kilometres. Along the way, steep cliffs, landslides and parts where the road has been washed clean away.
The latter is the more frequent landscape/reality check for China’s 16 million truck drivers, a life that is physically arduous to say the least. Many share a tiny cab with another man for 30 hour stretches, taking turns at driving, each enduring constant vibration while all along the truck bounces over potholes, and worse.
All this is also assuming nothing goes wrong. The traffic jam that occurred on the G110 and G6 in Hebei and Inner Mongolia in August of 2010 could well be described as something going wrong.
The world’s media called it the world’s longest traffic jam ever.
The culprit? Truck drivers. Or to be more precise, truck drivers just doing their job and fulfilling a need. Feeding Beijing’s endless appetite for coal, and with a lack in railway capacity, increased coal production in Inner Mongolia was transported to Beijing along the route that was already operating 60 percent over its designed capacity. Throw in road construction and maintenance that reduced capacity in places by 50 percent and the result was a traffic backlog lasting for 10 days.
During it all, drivers slept curled up in their truck seats, eating instant noodles and pocket-starch chicken sausages, sold to them at prices a thousand times over the odds by zealous local people seizing the entrepreneurial opportunity. Had it been winter, they no doubt would have been charged an arm and a leg for warm water too.
Even under normal conditions, some journeys are so long they may require three drivers.
At the end of the day, it comes down to two factors; how urgent is delivery of the load, and how much is the operator willing to break the rules.
According to China’s traffic regulations, a driver who works for four consecutive hours without a break of at least 20 minutes is considered to be officially drowsy. That, however, is of little concern in the bigger scheme of things. Sharing a truck means sharing the profit. Many simply choose to undertake the 16 hour drive alone, and uninterrupted.
Yet, this would be to paint a partially inaccurate picture of China’s trucking landscape. As with the rest of the country, the industry is in a state of flux, with the participants often on the receiving end of a life that requires of them to be resilient, hard working and very patient.
The trucker also takes on more than his fair share of emotional toil. His journeys mean he spends more time away from his family than with them, and all the while surrounded by unfamiliar people in unfamiliar places. Some innovative drivers cheer themselves up by working in a groups of friends and taking their families with them; whole communities on the road to deliver essentials for the First World.
Back to us and our castle. Or to be precise, to the pile of parcels on the drawbridge outside the castle gates that have been delivered for employees over the course of the day. How do you think they got there? Sure, there was the “last mile” guy, but prior to him taking over, how did the parcels get to your local distribution centre?
By truck of course.
It is precisely this revolution in online shopping that is simultaneously bolstering and threatening the trucking industry.
The bulk of these small-medium sized truck drivers are affiliated to a logistics company, one that may or may not require them to have their truck decorated in the firm’s colours.
For, like it or not, these little operations are in fierce competition with the container trucking companies for the lucrative deliveries from factory or warehouse to port. Yet, the size and efficiency of the latter forces the former to radically slash its rates.
Some are too tempted by the seeming invincibility of the bigger firms, with their ties to international shipping lines. In such cases, fancy new trucks, owned by the ports themselves, are linked by computer to the port’s warehousing and logistics system. The drivers then know exactly where their load should be delivered so that gantry cranes can load the container into its designated slot on the ship.
Yet, there remains trouble in paradise. The drivers chosen for the task are invariably migrant workers recruited from far away by labour agencies.
The port sets up dormitory accommodation and buses them to and from the docks in purpose built vehicles with an almost clandestine manner.
The Ningbo Port Authority has previously reported that such firms employ temporary migrant workers on account there are many duties that need performing in addition to the actual driving, and that these are often both dirty and dangerous. Thus there is a need for a large pool of workers who are both strong physically and able to endure hardship. They also happen to be much cheaper to employ.
Danger, however, remains the watchword. Zhang Yaofeng is one of the millions who drives the perilous trucking routes of China on a regular basis. Previously, like many, a farmer and a coal miner, he got started in the industry after seeing relatives become rich upon choosing to go down the truck driver road. Following in their footsteps, he is now three trucks down, debt free after paying off the loans to buy said trucks and has built a new house with a courtyard in his village.
Transporting raw materials and parts for Foxconn, the Apple and Samsung supplier, Zhang told Southern People Weekly Magazine, “[The job of a truck driver] is both tedious and dangerous, but without it what else can I do?”
While he seems to have done pretty nicely, Zhang’s summation hits the nail on the head. Yet, there may now be some light at the end of the tunnel. For just as with other sectors, technological advances combined with lenient regulations could bring robotic assistance to drivers such as Zhang sooner than we think. The very same environment that has given birth to the explosion in contactless payments and the realities of drone delivery (in our very own Jiangsu) shall also bring us driverless trucks. Or at least, automation technologies that will reduce cost and accidents, improve overall efficiency for the industry and let men such as Zhang make longer, more profitable journeys that are safer, by way of the technology affording him the prerequisite breaks.
Putting a computer in the driving seat, at least for some of the way, is potentially very big business. With the trucking industry in China worth in the region of ¥2 trillion annually, and driver costs accounting for approximately 40 percent of those incurred, it is little wonder there is great interest in the field, with a number of significant players in the market already emerging.
China’s Internet search giant, Baidu, has teamed up with truck maker Foton with an emphasis on automated driving and other areas of artificial intelligence. The two have even gone so far as to show off a self driving truck at an event held just last month at the Shanghai New International Expo Centre.
Elsewhere, TuSimple is a technology company devoted to the development and application of artificial intelligence and computer vision. In cooperation with a large Chinese truck maker (the company declined to say which one), the firm is collecting data aboard a number of manually driven trucks; relying heavily on computer vision and algorithms, its technology can understand a scene in detail, presumably one day becoming able to safely drive a truck through it. It is certainly impressive stuff; TuSimple’s website includes a fun vehicle recognition feature whereby, in The Nanjinger’s test, the technology had no trouble at all in recognising a major European manufacturer’s emerging markets model, with someone standing in front of it in the picture, and a 2001 Honda Accord. Not bad.
Speaking with the website TechnologyReview.com, the San Diego and Beijing based firm’s Chief Technology Officer, Hou Xiaodi, who developed Spectral Saliency Theory, one of the decade’s most influential works in the field of visual attention, said of their technology, “Everything is done in computer vision with deep learning”, in reference to training data that is fed into a large neural network.
Whether the future features robotic companions for truckers or not, that the Chinese government is investing heavily in improving both infrastructure and regulation to facilitate freight transport, shall, in theory, considerably improve the lot of those working on the front lines of the industry.
Just as well. China’s truckers are going to need all the help they can get, in navigating their way past not only the pot holes and traffic jams, but also those unwittingly making their lives all the more difficult. The next time we open our Taobao delivery, spare them a thought.
This article was first published in The Nanjinger Magazine, December 2016 issue. If you would like to read the whole magazine, please follow this link.
