SHE WOULD BE 30 now, this little girl. I took her picture in 1984 while covering the Wyoming Seminary soccer team for the Wilkes-Barre TimesLeader. She was peering at us from an apartment window above the bustle of a free market, peering at us as you would an oddity.
I liked the photo then for the same symbolic
reason I do now. Looking through those bars, she seemed to represent an emerging
China at its best and worst.
Untapped potential. Stifling
restriction.
Twenty-four years later, that much hasn't changed.
The rest, I am told, will be hardly recognizable when the Olympics begin there in August.
There were 53 cars registered in Beijing in 1984, or so I was told. Clearly the number was not much more. On the way to our hotel from the airport, I remember seeing an inordinate number of people with patches and bandages on their arms, or heads, or legs. My immediate assumption was that some type of skin problem existed, but clarity came in the form of rush hour. Commuters on bikes, often traveling at speeds of more that 20 miles an hour and five or six to a side, clogged the main thoroughfares. One bump, one bad lateral shift, meant an incredible pileup of
humans and handlebars.
That, in essence, was the health problem.
Now it is pollution. Pollution in the air. Pollution in the rivers. No nation is developing faster than China. No nation has done a better job of lifting its people from poverty. In 1984, billboards were appearing for the first time, and cranes hovered over dozens of half-built buildings throughout Beijing. Sending my stories back to the United States sometimes took all night, and sometimes
required dictation, so poor were the telecommunications. Refrigeration was scarce. Technology, too. You were in a time warp, and you felt it everywhere.
This time I will be sending my stories back home via the Internet. Since that visit, China's economy has grown by an average of 9 percent annually and its rivers and skies have felt the weight of that growth. In the first 5 months of this year alone, 4.3 million automobiles were sold, a 17 percent increase from the previous year.
That has cut down on skin problems but increased lung problems.
Ditou, an industrial city just 60 miles east of Beijing, has a cancer incidence 30 times higher than the national average. And the national average is higher than most developed nations with environmental regulations already in place. Wary of its mid-summer skies making athletes sick, the Chinese government
