“Otherwise we don’t get government relief,” he said. “We’ve had a drought, and this year it was too dry for corn. We didn’t even plant it. All we have this autumn are potatoes. The government gives us corn for relief, but they won’t give it unless we do the digging.” He continued: “Most people in our village are opposed to this project, because we’ve lost three-fourths of our land. We’d like to graze animals in places like this, but the government says they need to protect it. Protect, protect, protect—that’s all we hear, a bunch of slogans.”
The others murmured in agreement. “You know the saying: The mountains are high and the emperor is far away,” the young farmer said. “The country’s leaders are sitting in a high place, and they have no idea what’s really going on. And the people don’t know what the country’s leaders really say. Local leaders are the biggest problem—the county officials are the ones who embezzle everything.” He pointed at the Ming fort, with its World Bank slogan. “We see the World Bank officials in their cars, when they have inspections, but we can’t talk to them. The county leaders don’t let us. Actually, I don’t even know what ‘World Bank’ means. All I know is that it has something to do with investment. They come by in their cars, and we’ve tried to get them to stop, but they never do. They just tell us slogans: Protect the Land, Turn the Land into Forest.”
The phrase he used—Shan gao huangdi yuan, The mountains are high, the emperor far away—is common in rural China. People invariably believe that problems are local, and that higher-ranked leaders are honest and decent; it’s rare to meet somebody who is cynical about the system to its core. And it’s hard for them to grasp the inevitability of bad geography. For a village like Dingjia, the mountains are high and the factories far away—there was no way they could compete with the coastal economy, and even the best-run tree-planting campaign would have a limited impact on a place like this. The man told me that when he was a child, Dingjia had a population of two hundred; now there were only eighty people left. I’d heard the same thing at all the stops along my drive—every village had a declining population. “I should go out to look for work, too,” the farmer said. “But I have a small child and both my parents are still in the village. I’ll probably go eventually, but I’d rather be able to stay a little longer.”
I told him that I’d been escorted to other villages where people praised the World Bank project.
“Maybe there are some places where they get the money and they plant the trees and things improve,” he said. “But not around here. Look at this hillside—nothing good is going to grow here, because they already removed most of the topsoil. They put it in places near the road, so they can plant things there and it will look good. It’s just for show.”
While we were talking, a two-stroke engine echoed from down in the valley. The puttering grew louder, and then a tiny blue tractor appeared on the road. It looked like a cartoon vehicle hacking and coughing its way up the steep hillside. When it finally gasped to a stop I saw that the back was loaded with bags of instant noodles. Silently the driver distributed five packages to every worker. In China, people often eat instant noodles dry, as a snack, and the workers tore open their packages. The brand name said “Islamic Beef Noodles.”
“Are you Islamic?” I asked.
“No,” the young farmer said, laughing. “But these are the cheapest brand—no pork. A nickel each!”
He opened a bag and handed it to me. That was even worse than the poured drink: the last thing I wanted to do on this hillside was eat dry halal instant noodles that represented one-fifth of a laborer’s day wage. After some polite arguing, I convinced him to keep it, along with a pack of Oreos from my stash in the City Special. Later, when I contacted a World Bank official, he insisted that the farmers were wrong, and he noted that the bank’s projects on the loess plateau had already benefited over one million people. But it was just another statistic: the only thing I knew for certain was that those million beneficiaries did not include the individuals I had spoken with. And I had always been wary of development work that was administered from the capital, with little local contact. The mountains are high, the NGOs far away—that was how you ended up with people digging holes in exchange for Islamic Beef Noodles. It also seemed like a bad idea to paint World Bank slogans onto Ming dynasty ruins. But the Great Wall had already survived countless invasions, and undoubtedly it would still be there, high on the ridgeline, whenever this latest wave of barbarians disappeared.
FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED miles i followed the border between Shanxi and Inner Mongolia. The Ming wall remained the boundary, and the fortifications were still impressive; but these regions were poor and the roads deteriorated fast. At the village of Shirenwan, I saw a peasant following a camel that had been hitched to a plow. Nothing about that scene looked promising: the animal had stopped dead in its tracks; the peasant was shouting; the soil had the hard yellow color of clay brick. An hour later I stopped for two young women who were hitchhiking. They insisted on sitting together in the backseat, and when I asked questions they responded in voices so quiet that they were almost whispers. After ten minutes they told me that I was the first foreigner they had ever seen.
There were more hitchers now, and picking up passengers became part of my typical routine. Motor traffic was light, but it wasn’t uncommon to see somebody beside the road, making the Chinese hitchhiking gesture: arm extended, palm down, hand bouncing as if petting an invisible dog. To me, this was new—Beijing pedestrians don’t flag down random rides, and nobody had asked me to stop in Hebei. The driver’s exam provides little guidance with regard to passengers, apart from a single question:
356. If you give somebody a ride and realize that he left something in your car, you should
a) keep it for yourself.
b) return it to the person or his place of work as quickly as possible.
c) call him and offer to return it for a reward.
I rarely saw a farmer looking for a ride. Locals typically didn’t travel much, apart from trips to market centers where they knew the regular transport schedule. Most people I picked up were women who looked almost as out of place as I did. They tended to be of a distinct type: small-town sophisticates, girls who had left the village and were on their way to becoming something else. They were well dressed, often in skirts and heels, and their hair was dyed unsubtle shades of red. They wore lots of makeup and cheap perfume. They sat stiffly, backs not touching the seat, as if riding in the City Special were a formal experience. They rarely made eye contact. They were unfailingly polite, and they answered all my questions, but they were reluctant to initiate conversation. Once I picked up three young people, two women and a man, and we chatted for half an hour; during that time they didn’t ask me a single question. Often it took ten minutes before a passenger inquired where I was from. This was strange, because usually it’s the first order of business in a Chinese conversation—people always wanted to know my nationality. But something about the interaction changed when the foreigner sat in the driver’s seat. People tried to be courteous, and they weren’t sure what to make of me. Several asked if I were Chinese, which had never happened anywhere else in the country. A couple of passengers guessed that I was Uighur, a Turkic minority from the west; others thought I might be Hui, a Muslim Chinese. One woman, after watching me battle a rutted road for ten miles, finally said, “Are you Mongolian?”
Invariably they were migrants on a home visit. They worked in factories, in restaurants, in hair salons, and they didn’t say much about these jobs. At first, I couldn’t figure out why there were so many women, because in fact the majority of Chinese migrants are male. But this wasn’t a peak travel season—in China, most migrants go home only once a year, during the Spring Festival, and this is especially true for those who find jobs far away. The people I met generally worked
