It was the last time to see them. The hills when I saw them. It would be different tomorrow; the concrete pillars higher, the earth more carved, more broken, the road's completion closer.
Soon. Watch. Soon the road that I was on, all cobbled, and ruined, and rubbish for a bicycle, and bad for hands; makes a tingling in them from the juttering that won't go away and won't let you hold chopsticks, soon. Watch. Soon it will be left only for the poor people. The ones from the villages who can't afford the new cars and have to drive the old, tiny trucks that splutter and the scooters that are pushed up hills and aren't allowed on the highways, soon. Watch. It will be only for them.
From this wreck of a road I watched China grow around me. Above me. The towering highways, great engineering feats, bound so little by limitations of human effort or financial resource, forgot the old cobblestones that lay below and speedily carried their traffic forward; from city to city.
I was not alone on these cobbled streets, whose makers could have pronounced their labour no more clearly than they had already in each of the hand-set, small, round stones that stretched for four hundred miles; now upturned and unrepaired, now shiny and smooth with years of use. There were the goats, and the women who walked with their goats, and the bells that rang around the goats' necks. And the bull, and the bull's owner, and the stick with which the owner beat the bull. There were the old ladies, and their woven baskets full of corn, and their backs that bent, tired and old, under the weight of the baskets full of corn. There, on the cobblestones, walked the peasantry of China. The peasantry that feeds China and makes some in China fat.
The Beijing Olympics, in 2008, were the first to be held by a developing country for 20 years. Those flying into the city, however, would surely not have thought themselves at the centre of a nation dubbed as such. Rather, the city makes itself known as a vast, yet well organised metropolis - its six ring roads in perfect squares - its streets wide, yet filled with brand new cars; Buicks, Chryslers, Audis - always, for some reason - for the reason of fashion -black. The architecture in Beijing is big - it is clean and straight and square and expensive. Modernity and wealth are overstated in this city more than anywhere found in Europe.
The story is similar in cities all across China. In Xi'an, Chengdu and Kunming. I didn't visit Shanghai or other cities on the wealthier east coast. You would be forgiven, if you had visited only the cities in China, for considering it a country that has far surpassed the economic development of many countries in the West.
As the country overtakes Japan, however, as the world's second largest economy, I believe it is necessary to follow the goats, and the women, and the man, hitting the bull with the stick, down their cobbled, broken paths. Here there is a different China. A second class China, portraying the greatest disparity between urban wealth and rural poverty I have seen. Here limitations of human effort and financial resource forever make their presence felt. Electricity is inconstant and homes dirty. Running water rare and sewage systems often unheard of. Waste disposal is non-existent and rubbish lies in huge piles as the stench of raw sewage fills the air. Still they work, at the centre of China's vast machine, for others to profit so greatly from their toil. It could, perhaps, be considered, by some, that the conditions prevalent in 21st century China form the perfect pretext for some kind of revolution!
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