Connecting Xing An
In the fall of 1928, three units of men took on the tall order of carrying out a tunken project in the Xing An region. Despite its geopolitical importance at the juncture between Soviet and Japanese claims, Xing An lay outside infrastructure networks connecting the region to larger populations centers and the interior provinces of China. Lacking even the roads, the successful development of the region required enormous capital and resource investments at a time when growing Japanese encroachment in the Northeast made large scale infrastructural projects nearly impossible to fund.
In order to ensure the military goals of occupation, survey teams for the settlement district prioritized points of military importance: transportation hubs, roads, and existing villages. The troops gamely attempted to start construction on a railroad.
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