The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2007

wheat with little machinery and sup- plement their diets with private plots along the rails. It’s a labor- intensive landscape, with the multi- tudes bobbing up and down in an ocean of grain, hoeing alongside ancestral burial sites with white stone crowns. Out the train window after harvest one can see thousands of people cleaning the fields and burning brush but, again, few machines of any kind. During the autumn, miniature har- vesters can be seen working the fields and commuting along two-lane roads to their next job, but they’re the only farm machinery of note, apart from the odd tractor. (They are even used to harvest the winter wheat.) Other- wise, the nation seems to be fed by hand. In the fall the harvested corn is dried on the roads and rooftops of every village, turning central and northern China into “Big Yellow” in- stead of “Big Red.” It is also a land- scape of rows, be it corn or trees: con- formity rules the land. Every hundred miles or so, the train passes through a teeming city with one gleaming skyscraper and a huge coal-fired electric plant beside the tracks. The vast majority of apartment buildings in these sprawl- ing cities are somewhere between First and Third World as far as living conditions go, but there are brand- new apartment blocks under con- struction for the burgeoning middle class, along with the occasional new superhighway soaring over the tracks as well. The interior is not, however, the architecturally dynam- ic China of Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou, but a more decrepit and impoverished land, often covered by a thick haze of pollution. The Final Leg Although Americans surveyed the northern train route from Wuhan (Hankow) to Bejing in 1896 and 1897, they failed in their bid to build the track: the Chinese government awarded the concession to the Bel- gians. Strong British protests at los- ing this concession to Brussels won them the contract to build the Kowloon-Guangzhou (Canton) sec- tor in the south. The British had built an 80-mile J U LY- A U G U S T 2 0 0 7 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 65 It’s a labor-intensive landscape, with the multitudes bobbing up and down in an ocean of grain.