Pausing to catch her breath, Yi Feng let the two nylon bags stuffed with fresh-picked tea leaves settle to the ground. She took off her straw hat and used it to fan away the perspiration dripping down her weather-lined face.

“The Olympic Games?” she asked, apparently perplexed that anyone would bring up such a subject at harvest time on these prime tea-growing slopes in coastal Zhejiang province. “With all I have to do these days, how could I pay attention to the Olympic Games?”

Yi, 54, has always spent her days in Fan Shen, part of a timeless China dominated by the seasons of the year, the rhythms of farm life and the joys and sorrows of raising a family. For her, and for many of her generation in the vast Chinese countryside, the Olympics have proved a distant echo, another propaganda theme from the Government that has little to do with getting in the crops on a hot August day.

About two-thirds of China’s 1.3 billion people have remained tied to farming villages, despite the economic boom of the last 30 years. Focused on their land and their crops, many of them have felt little in common with the glitter of the Olympics, the $40 billion makeover of Beijing and the nationalist pride of their countrymen as China strides onto the international stage and take its place as a world power.

Most foreigners in China, particularly those participating in or attending the Olympics, have come into contact with a recently emerged modern nation of skyscrapers, traffic-clogged streets and increasingly outward-looking people with money to spend. But most Chinese have yet to enter that world. Theirs still revolves around the land, leaving, as Yi said, little time for Olympics festivities promoted by the Communist Party.

... contd.