“Life here is good,” said a man walking down the road.

Perhaps most important to the future of Fan Shen, the new road has meant children can easily take the bus down to the secondary school in a neighbouring town, opening vistas for village children that their parents never imagined.

Among this younger generation, the call of the Beijing Olympics has been heard.

Xiu Lifen, 20, said the Communist Party, working through county, village and education officials, organised Olympics-related activities at local schools, including sports tournaments pitting the children of one village against those from another. As a result he has taken an interest in the Games, particularly basketball, and has been watching matches regularly on television.

“We are peasants, and we don’t have enough money for that,” he said. So far, he said, he has made himself useful around the house while his parents tend the family tea plantation up the hillside. But the horizon of what might lie beyond Fan Shen has begun to beckon. For millions of young Chinese from villages like this one, it is a future in the assembly factories of the Pearl River Delta.