Chinese farmers whose land was expropriated by highway developers are making the best of the situation… by blocking lanes and drying corn on the hot asphalt.
From a distance, portions of the newly constructed Kexue Main Road near Zhengzhou City appear to be paved in gold. A closer look reveals a more prosaic explanation: local farmers have blocked off up to 2/3 of the six-lane highway over a 5km (over 3 miles) stretch, taking advantage of the hot asphalt to quickly and evenly dry their annual corn harvest.
The farmers set up protective barriers of branches, empty beer bottles, sandbags, reflective orange road cones and anything else they can find to ensure vehicular traffic doesn’t run over their precious golden kernels and cobs.
As each farming household conducts their guerrilla crop-spreading on an individual, ad hoc basis, the highway ends up being blockaded in a most haphazard way. There’s a method to their “madness”, however, in that drivers have to slow down to a crawl in order to avoid what is in essence an unorganized and unpredictable obstacle course.
