"Hi everyone, my name's Jim. I've been an Orientalist since 2005. ["Hi Jim."] I guess it all started about two days after I got to Beijing, when I took my first bicycle hutong tour. I had some pretty deep insights about ancient culture juxtaposed with 21^st century technology. It only got worse from there; soon I was holding court at bars, telling anyone who would listen what was wrong with China and how to fix it..."

As of yet, there are no formal chapters of Orientalists Anonymous, but there ought to be. The noise of expat socio-political analysis is louder in China's major cities than the construction and traffic combined. The din grows louder with each new arrival. Each one is able to find evidence for anything he wants to believe about China. Anything, that is, except one deplorably common misconception, used to power many a ham-handed argument - that Chinese people are homogenous.

That's why China-curious and Sinologist alike will be rewarded by Rob Gifford's China Road: A Journey Into the Future of a Rising Power. Gifford takes China's version of Route 66, the 312, from Shanghai to the Kazakhstan border. Backpacking by hook or crook through hinterland where most expats don't deign to tread, he opens a new dimension of perspective to those of us who pass judgment on China while gazing through a Starbuck's window. Even more gratifyingly, Gifford is a journalist of the old school, constructing a big-picture mosaic with thousands of high-res images. These images evoke an epiphany, that all one point how-many-ever billion Chinese souls are first and foremost individuals, as complex and unpredictable as their western counterparts.

The images also make for an immensely enjoyable read, deftly interwoven as they are with pithy historic background and balanced commentary.

Gifford begins on the Shanghai end of the 312 highway. A paean to China's rising fortunes gives the misleading first impression that Gifford has undertaken to blow smoke - far from it. Up-close encounters with a talk-show host, jingoistic Communist Party members, and an SUV-driving yuppie give a sobering taste of the vacuum emptying Chinese spirits faster than Prada bags can fill them. Rapid fire doses of local history enrich rather than drag, and lead to sparkling observances such as the one Gifford makes on the Bund:

"The Westerners are doing what Westerners always do in Shanghai, trying to re-create the past as they snap photos of the old colonial buildings. The Chinese are also doing what Chinese people always do, trying to escape the past as they snap their photos in the opposite direction, gazing out across the river toward the dazzling ziggurats of Pudong."

Nonetheless, the initial Shanghai chapter does little to assuage the de rigueur fear of China as a massive economic Godzilla, comprised of over a billion yellow scales, crushing all in its path. But Gifford soon reduces the juggernaut to a much more identifiable animal, through use of history through Chinese eyes. At the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, he asks a Beijing businessman if China might ever use its burgeoning power to invade, as Japan did:

"Bu keneng," says Wu softly, echoing the words of every Chinese person I've ever talked to on this issue. "That is not possible. Chinese people could never do this. The Chinese character is completely different from the Japanese character. They are warriors, samurai. We love ren. We love compassion. We love peace. And besides, we know what it is like to be occupied and killed."

Don't worry; Gifford dispenses no soft soap. He goes straight on to chide such a big new behemoth of a country for still having such a chip on its shoulder and wallowing in victim mentality.

Thereafter we are off to the heartland, where the bleak contrast to China's PR-ready coast obliges Gifford to wrestle with a whole band of 800-pound gorillas, out of their corners and up in the face of anyone making a life in China's enigmatic interior. Not that Gifford is tacky enough to get up on a soapbox. There are plenty of Chinese characters doing it for him. On the 312 he comes across a businessman on a bicycle with a banner reading ANTICORRUPTION JOURNEY ACROSS CHINA. Official skullduggery parted him from a life-savings investment, but he still has hope in man, western man:

"You see, in the West, people have a moral standard that is inside them. It is built into them. Chinese people do not have that moral standard within them. If there is nothing external stopping them, they just do whatever they want for themselves, regardless of right and wrong."

Bicycling on through China and on to the West just might give the crusader a different opinion. But the low opinion of corrupt local officials is the chief one ventured by those Gifford buttonholes, be it a tax-strapped old farmer or hushed-up HIV sufferer in Henan's AIDS villages. Even so, the KTV girls and drivers with er nais Gifford portrays remind us that China would have problems enough were all officials banished henceforth, as would any country.

Yet China Road is pure adventure by dint of having no agenda other than taking in each city as it comes. Somehow though, Gifford still manages to divide his chapters not only by locale but by theme, displaying a bone-deep feel for China's past and present. A chapter titled "Power" compares the nature of authority in a country that had a Qin Shihuang but no Runnymede. A visit to a Xiahe Buddhist monastery segues into a remarkably thoughtful recapitulation of the Tibet issue. He treats Xinjiang with the same mature depth, leavening grim conclusions with personal feelings that fail to muddy his reasoning.

The characters, always the characters. As pundit-friendly as his analysis is, Gifford never presumes on his insight to keep the reader flipping pages. Daoist hermits with cellphones, Amway evangelicals in lonely Dunhuang, and a menagerie of quirky drivers override all vain efforts at comprehension and drive home the vital theme - you can never know, but you can empathize. As Gifford himself admits, in the midst of an admirably nuanced summation of where China is and where it might be going:

"But how can I not care when a fifth of humanity is being convulsed before my eyes, and thousands are making millions, and millions are being crushed? And if I seem a little confused about China, it's because I am. And if you're not confused, then you simply haven't been paying attention."

Beautiful, that. If there were an OA and Gifford had ever been an Orientalist, he'd be whole flights past the twelfth step. As for China Road, it might just be the sponsor the rest of us need.