The Pulse Of China

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A hilltop near the town gives a full view of the Sandouping construction site for the new dam. Looking down on the empty expanse between the mountains on either side, one can hardly conceive of a mass of concrete 600 ft. high, stretching 1 1/4 miles across the river valley, to be finished by 2003. Nor is it easy to picture the 360-mile-long reservoir that will back up behind the planned dam, flooding more than 150,000 acres of land and forcing 1.3 million people to relocate to higher ground. The cranes on the site are hundreds of feet high, but they look like matchstick models until they are compared with the minute scale of the boats passing by on the river. This, then, is the size of China's dreams for the future--bigger and more ambitious than outsiders can imagine. Even within China, the dam has its opponents. But no one leaves Sandouping--resounding with trucks in low gear, clanking machinery and the occasional detonation of explosives--without being overawed by the size of the biggest construction site on earth.

The river slows down as it emerges from the Three Gorges onto the plains, but the impatience for wealth and success only increases. Wuhan, China's fifth largest city, is the transfer point for cargo from oceangoing ships to smaller boats heading further upriver, and has long been a center of commerce. Here are department stores with imported brands, stock-trading houses, U.S. fast-food chains--and "Balls," a newly opened NBA theme bar run by a former car salesman from Taiwan. Not so slick as Shanghai, Wuhan still has its pretensions, enough to attract people such as "Johnny" Wang Liang, a hairdresser who left fashion-conscious Guangzhou "because it was already full of people like me." Wang finds Wuhan fairly tame and doesn't like the food, but he is making good money dyeing orange the hair of the local youth at $25 a treatment, to create that Hong Kong fashion look. "It is all about money in China these days, isn't it?" he says with a grin.

Li Mucheng thinks about little else. A "retired" (laid-off) accountant in his 50s, he spends most of his mornings in the hall of the Shengyin Wanguo Securities company in Wuhan's downtown, watching share prices move on the Shanghai Stock Exchange. Li has been lucky recently, usually buying and selling in the same day, "but sometimes I hold shares for longer, even up to two weeks." Li keeps his eyes on the big electronic screen as he talks. "America? A great country, because the President changes every four years. And rich, because it has been developing for 200 years. China has been developing only since Deng Xiaoping. Before that, Chinese were busy fighting each other."

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