Peter Hessler, a modern Marco Polo crossing China in a rented Jeep Cherokee, has witnessed signs and wonders worthy of a Coen brothers film. He's seen a camel hitched to a plow, a hotel lobby with a bowling alley, and miles of empty highway stretching across a barren landscape. These images surface in 'Country Driving,' Hessler's amiable journey through the vanishing villages and booming factory towns of a country where everyone seems in a hurry because everything is changing so fast. 'To drive across China was to find yourself in the middle of the largest migration in human history -- nearly one-tenth of the population was on the road, finding new lives away from home,' says Hessler, a staff writer for the New Yorker magazine. The social upheaval gives Hessler an edge. With so many people on the move and so much in flux, strangers strike up conversations with ease, offering insights into whether the 21st century really does belong to China. Hessler gives rides to small-town sophisticates hitchhiking in fresh makeup on dirt roads. He observes a demolition team flattening an inconvenient mountain. He watches two businessmen design a factory on a piece of crumpled paper. It takes them one hour and four minutes. Their only tools: disposable lighters for their smokes. In a sense, everyone in this capitalist experiment is an outsider; everyone is displaced. Hessler fits in. 'Are you Mongolian?' a hitcher asks as they bang down a rutted road. Hessler comes from Missouri. He arrived in China as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1996, and before long began crisscrossing the land by bus and boat, plane and train. In 2001, he acquired a Chinese driver's license and set out to explore how automobiles and road building were transforming the nation. Part travelogue, part investigation, 'Country Driving' is three books in one. The first describes trips that take him from Beijing to the Tibetan Plateau. With no obvious route across the West shown on his Sinomaps, he follows the crenellated lines marking the Great Wall. His progress is slowed by roads ending in washouts and peasants who use highways to thresh grain. It's illegal yet tolerated, and farmers grow impatient with squeamish drivers. 'Go, go, go!' they shout when Hessler hesitates to roll over food. 'And so I went -- millet, sorghum and wheat cracking beneath me.' Moving with ease across the steppes, Hessler flouts the rules, driving the rented Jeep out of Beijing and not applying for permission to travel around. He takes a tent to avoid small-town hotels, which hand guest lists to the cops, and the authorities hardly hinder him. In one town, he pays a fine of about $12 and drives away. 'In China, much of life involves skirting regulations,' he says, 'and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.' In the second book, Hessler rents a home in a mountain village north of Beijing and records how the arrival of a paved road turns the town into a tourist destination. This story swings to the rhythm of the seasons, as Hessler joins a grave-sweeping ceremony in April and helps harvest walnuts in September. He becomes close enough to one couple to help save their kindergartner from a rare blood disorder -- rushing the boy to a hospital, seeking a diagnosis from doctor friends, paying a stack of cash for a transfusion. That story, like others here, first appeared in the New Yorker. By 2005, Hessler was thinking less about China's past and more about its future. So he heads to southern Zhejiang Province to seek a city destined to bristle with factories once an expressway is built. He finds it in Lishui, where he meets two men setting up a plant to produce the nylon-coated steel rings used in adjusting brassiere straps. Hessler traces their progress, opening a window on migrant workers, technology theft and how cities buy rural land rights out from under farmers and resell them as urban development rights, pocketing massive profits. Though Hessler succeeds in bringing the story to life, a cookie-cutter industrial town lacks the pungency of rural China. So he spices the narrative with sometimes irksome digressions on peripheral characters, including a shabby acrobatic troupe whose act includes two girls -- one fat, one thin -- dancing in bras, panties and white bobby socks. Don't let that deter you. Every so often, I read a book that upends my perceptions about a place. This is one of them. 'Country Driving: A Journey Through China From Farm to Factory' is published by Harper (438 pages, $27.99). James Pressley writes for Bloomberg News. 