Just outside Beijing, our train began to move. We had been standing still for nearly an hour, waiting for other faster trains to pass. Endless rows of new apartment blocks and wide newly-paved streets devoid of cars finally gave way to fields of wheat and corn and the villages spaced regularly apart every mile or so. As the warm glow of late afternoon gave way to dusk, a few fireworks exploded abruptly near the station as we made a stop in the city of Tangshan, where a devastating earthquake had struck back in 1976. As the sky darkened, a show unlike any other I had ever seen began to unfold across the plains of north China, a firework show staged in every village and town across the country. For the next year, I traversed 11,000 miles on the country’s rail system. Along the way I met students, retirees, and countless others from all corners of China; from frigid Harbin in January to steamy southwestern metropolis Chongqing in August, and to the far western Xinjiang region...
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Not only is train travel the best way to see the country as typical citizens do, it’s also the best way to talk to people. As the fireworks began outside our window, my traveling companions including several Americans, played a card game with a 30-year old graphic designer from Beijing returning to his home in Jixi, a town near the Russian border. He was shy but laughed often, and as bedtime approached, ordered us a plate of dumplings (the traditional new year’s food) that the train was serving only tonight.
In an age of incredible economic growth as well as growing inequality, trains are an unusual place of social mixing: students returning home from school, migrant workers returning to their villages from factories in the south, families on holiday. If the story of modern China has revolved around sprawling new cities and migration, it’s the unglamorous conventional trains that ultimately make this dynamic society possible and transport the bulk of migrant workers and the goods they make.
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