Behind The Bamboo Curtain

ByABC News
June 3, 2008, 3:28 PM

June 4, 2008— -- BEIJING — We leave the capital on Highway 108 early in the morning, ahead of the sludge of commuter traffic, which grows by a thousand new cars a day. The blacktop beneath the green Jeep knocks us around; we're taking the back road west, ignoring the modern, smooth expressways.

More than 2,500 kilometers separate us from our destination: Chengdu, the dominant city in China's Wild, Wild West. A driver, interpreter and I are setting out to look at a sprawling, complex country through the prism of the 2008 Olympics. In front of us is a week of white-knuckle mountain roads, countless oxen, a Rolls-Royce, homes made of mud, skyscrapers made of steel, a dreary coal-town wedding, a forest of smokestacks, a quilt of rice paddies, hundreds of villages and cities filled with people, each with a story to tell about the hopes and dreams of the real China and what, if anything, the Summer Games can do to make those dreams come true.

Behind us lies Beijing. With just a year until the opening ceremony — and all the metaphors of rebirth that go along with it — the construction in the city is breathtaking. New roads keep up with all those new cars, enough that lifelong Beijingers often get lost, sometimes finding themselves at the end of an uncompleted freeway. Entire ancient neighborhoods are bulldozed by day. At night, sparks rain down the sides of buildings, welders working around the clock, replacing the old with the new. Everywhere you look, there are bundles of steel and towers of wood and stacks of bricks, stretching to the horizon like soldiers, raising the obvious question: Where does all of this stuff come from?

The nerve center for the Games is a marble-floored skyscraper not far from the two main Olympic stadiums, and not far from the start of Highway 108. The sunlight makes the Beijing Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games headquarters glow, as though it's generating its own energy, which, in a way, it is. It's drawing a road map for places like Chengdu, and all the villages and boomtowns in between. It's saying: This is what the new China should look like.

"We are building a harmonious society," BOCOG spokesman Weide Sun says. "You have only seen half the story in Beijing. But when you travel to the western part of China, you're going to see there are many, many areas that have difficulty even finding clean water. There are still lots of challenges for China. The goal is to build a well-to-do society, and the Olympic Games will be a milestone event for that."

Those are the stakes, as defined by the government itself. The Olympics are clearly more than a sporting event, and next August will be a historic moment for China, symbolizing the strides of the past decade and pointing the way for a century to come. But will the Games help bridge this growing gap between the new and the old, using sports to give people common ground? Or will the growth represented by the Olympics split the country in two, haves on one side, have-nots on the other? The answers to these questions will determine the future of the world's fastest-growing economic superpower, and they lie in front of us, covered in soot, growing in emerald green fields. That's where China's Olympic spirit lives, beyond Beijing's sea of merchandise stands and the jungle of cranes.

It's out along Highway 108.

Road Diary, entry 1: FOLLOWING THE SIGNSDriving between Beijing and San Lou

A few hours down the road, I see a sign painted in blue and white on a long brick wall. It's one of the more popular propaganda slogans that fill rural China. The fears of government officials are writ large out in the sticks — the more worried they are about something, the more frequently it shows up on signs.

This one reads: "New Socialist Countryside."

With China growing so fast, with the images beamed down to television sets filled with sudden wealth and modern conveniences, the government is trying to assure the 900 million subsistence peasants in China's interior that they haven't been forgotten. Not everyone is buying. Again, check the signs. In one small town our first day on the road, graffiti covers a wall in the middle of a village. On it, we see the first whispers of anger over the development initiated by the 2008 Games.

"It's not worth it," one writes.

"The wrong people benefited," says another. "Ten thousand people suffered."

It's not the signs we see that are most telling, though; it's the ones we don't, namely, not a single official sign for the Olympics in rural China along 108 so far. Indeed, in the next week, we will see exactly one sign for the Games that is not in a city. But the cities, they are full of signs, thousands of them, each one connected to an advertisement. The Olympics, it seems, are mostly about selling things, about a consumer revolution. The peasants don't have the money to buy these trappings of modern life.

We drive through the mountains. Around a corner, there's one final sign of the day.

It reads: "STOP."

Two hours wait, we're told. They are actually building a new portion of Highway 108 in front of us. Traffic idles until the blacktop cools.

While we watch them build our road, a young peasant named Sun Bin approaches us. He's 16 years old, with a round belly and face. We're taking a picture and, amidst the babble of Mandarin, he says, "Go," in English. I turn around.

He grins and invites us to his village.

San Lou village, 439 kilometers from Beijing

A football field long and a few blocks wide, San Lou squats alongside Highway 108, the town's only real street. Small homes dot the roadside, thin ribbons of smoke float from chimneys. Supper's on. Night's falling. Mountains rise behind the villagers, throwing shadows across the narrow lanes.

Sun walks through the town, soon arriving at his house. It's made of mud, and he shares it with his grandparents. The two-room hut is dark. Against one wall is the large, wood-heated kang — a traditional bed made of bricks or clay. They all sleep here. Nearby, a calendar lets them know that today is not a good day to bury the dead. It's not a good day for much of anything.

Sun says the village has no natural resources to sell to the cities, nothing that can make it a part of the new China, not even as a place to be exploited and then forgotten. The village lives in a different century. The average family makes less than $200 a year. Folks are more concerned with water than the GNP.

"There used to be a big river and we'd swim in the river," Sun says. "Now there's no river anymore."

The mountain stream that fed the village dried up, too. The faucets sit parched and rusted. The villagers can't afford a pump to run water from the local well to each house. Sun and his grandparents have a tiny television; every night they see so many things they cannot afford. Simple things. Things like pork.

"We feel sorry for ourselves," he says. "We see wealthy people eating fish and meat, but we only have corn and potatoes. Of course we feel bad and feel jealous."

The television also brings breathless accounts of the coming Olympic Games. Sun had never heard of the Olympics until Beijing's bid was successful. Now, he has a vague notion of what will actually happen in a year's time. He is certain of one thing: It will not benefit him. Like so many things in a country he recognizes less each day, the Olympics live in the city. Meat, fish, games — these are things for people with money.

"This is a very poor village and if people get by, that's a good day," he says. "Nobody cares about the Olympics."

The peasants only eat what they grow. Sun's grandparents, in their 70s, still work in the fields. His grandmother is a short woman, with white hair and a sturdy frame. She has lived her entire life in this tiny place. When things seem hopeless, she remembers when the Japanese occupied the area in the 1930s and '40s. That was worse.

"When I was young," she says, "I had to go to other villages to beg for food. Some rich people would have extra food and throw it into the plate for dogs, and we'd pick it up."

People still go to other, wealthier places looking for a way to live. Life can't be sustained much longer in rural towns like San Lou.

"If people have money," Sun says, "they will move to the city. People without money, they stay."