At 5 a.m. on a gray morning, at a nondescript service station off the highway in Anhui province, Li Zhanwei is going through his exercise routine: some tai chi, a few stretches, push ups, and then, with surprising energy, a handstand up against his truck for a finishing touch.“I exercise every time I stop,” the 48-year-old driver explains between movements. “You have to, otherwise your body will collapse, and you can’t make money if your body doesn’t work.” Once he is done stretching, Li climbs back into the cabin of his Jiefang model truck and hits the road again, piloting the 50-ton behemoth loaded with paper to a printing factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu province.Li has been on the move since 7 the evening before, stopping for just one hour-long nap at midnight. He’ll arrive at his destination sometime after midday, unload, and then look for a new consignment of goods that will take him back to his hometown of Luohe, Henan province, where he will rest at home for a day before doing it all again.“Do I like this job?” Li repeats the question back to himself with a sigh. “I don’t have any good feelings toward it, but I need it to survive…it’s a good choice for survival.”Li is one of China’s estimated 30 million truck drivers who together deliver over 40 billion tons of goods around the country each year. As Chinese manufacturing soared, incomes rose, and internet commerce boomed into a 2-trillion-dollar industry, the demand for logistics and goods delivery has rocketed.China’s first highway, a 20-kilometer stretch between Shanghai and the satellite town Jiading, opened in 1998, but by 2018, the country had 142,500 kilometers of high-speed roads, giving it the largest highway network in the world. Around 75 percent of freight is transported by road, with 84 million tons traveling on the nation’s highways every day, making truck drivers like Li the lifeblood of China’s economy.
Falling freight rates make it difficult for truckers to hire a second driver or stop for longer rests (Photo by Tina Xu)But few envy truckers’ unglamorous yet vital work. According to a 2018 report by Tsinghua University and the Transfar Foundation, over 50 percent of truck drivers earn annual salaries of less than 100,000 RMB. Around 32 percent of drivers show signs of spinal injuries, and they see their families just once every 20 days on average.Rising competition, fuel costs and toll fees, the introduction of new mobile apps, the dangerous nature of the job, and the unpredictability of fines and penalties are squeezing drivers and freight-dependent businesses, and changing the nature of the industry.These factors are part of the reason why Li, who has been driving for over 20 years, no longer owns his truck. When Li drove his own truck, he made around 3,000 RMB a month; now he earns a base salary of 4,000 RMB per month, and around 600 RMB for each round-trip between Luohe and Jiangsu, with fuel and toll fees covered by his employer.Those who own their vehicles have to cover the cost of fuel, tolls, maintenance, and loan repayments themselves, and are also responsible for finding goods to transport. Fuel prices have risen in recent years and China’s toll fees are some of the most expensive in the world, accounting for 10 to 20 percent of expenses of Chinese trucks, 15 times higher than in the US.Song Yantao, from Shandong province, began driving trucks when he was 18 years old. Now 35, he too works for a logistics company rather than owning his vehicle. “The market competition, the low price for freight transport, pressure of mortgage payments—in the end I gave up being my own boss,” he says. “In a company...our only task is to drive the truck safely to its destination.” Song now earns around 10,000 RMB a month driving 3,200-kilometer round trips from Xuzhou, Jiangsu, to Dongguan in Guangdong province.In the past, truck owner-operators could make a bigger profit, but they often did so by cutting regulatory corners. “Back then we had a saying, ‘If you don’t overload, you don’t make money,’” claims Sun Hao, a 40-year old from Nanjing who drove his own truck from 2008 to 2012.“We would also modify our trucks. For example, to allow us to drive for long distances we would build an extra gasoline barrel,” says Sun. “It was like turning the truck into a bomb.”
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